In his 1993 collection Sweetapple Earth (Carcanet), the late John Heath-Stubbs includes a sequence of eleven poems he collectively titles “Botanical Happy Families.” Among them is “Solanaceae,” sometimes under-described as the “potato family” or “nightshade family,” representing some three-thousand toothsome and toxic species. Like the human family, it contains members who sustain us and others less wholesome:
“Falstaff thought potatoes aphrodisiac;
Tomatoes were called love-apples once.
Familiar and chaste enough,
They’re now in every sandwich, every salad.
We also welcome to our tables—
Although a bit exotic still—the aubergine,
The pimento, the chili pepper (Becky Sharp
Found its name misleading, you’ll recall).
“But in the shadows stand
Sinister enchantresses, as belladonna,
Dulcimara, with the screaming mandrake,
Datura, bringing death or visions.
"And there’s a false friend too,
And that’s tobacco.”
Solanaceae merits forty-five pages in George E. Burrows and Ronald J. Tyrl’s 1,342-page Toxic Plants of North America (Iowa State University Press, 2001). They write:
“The medicinal, hallucinogenic, and poisonous properties of Solanaceae have long been known and used by humans. Indeed, almost mystical qualities have been attributed to the family.”
Heath-Stubbs leaves out petunias and henbane but manages to pack ten species into fourteen lines. Shakespeare cites potatoes twice, though Heath-Stubbs mentions only his first usage. In The Merry Wives of Windsor (Act IV, Scene 5), Falstaff, in a passage that contains another botanical allusion (Apiaceae family), says:
“My doe with the black scut! Let the sky rain
potatoes; let it thunder to the tune of Green
Sleeves, hail kissing-comfits and snow eringoes; let
there come a tempest of provocation, I will shelter me here.”
The mention, of course, is anachronistic. Potatoes are a New World plant, unknown to Europeans in the time of Henry IV. The same is true in Shakespeare’s other reference to the tuber, in Troilus and Cressida (Act V, Scene 2), in which Thersites says--
“How the devil Luxury, with his fat rump and
potato-finger, tickles these together! Fry, lechery, fry!”
--suggesting Shakespeare discovered French fries. “Love-apples” comes straight from the French pomme d'amour, also prized for its reputed libido-boosting qualities. “Aubergine” is the fruit of the egg-plant, as well as the deep purple of its skin. In Chapter IV, “The Greek Silk Purse,” of Vanity Fair, Thackeray has Becky Sharp exclaim: “Yes; how could you be so cruel as to make me eat that horrid pepper-dish at dinner, the first day I ever saw you? You are not so good to me as dear Amelia.”
The rest are poison, though not without allure. I remember a poem I’ve seen only in The Poet’s Tongue, a marvelous anthology compiled by W.H. Auden and John Garrett, and published in 1935. The author is identified as Michael East and the poem is said to date from around 1600:
“O metaphysical Tobacco,
Fetched as far as from Morocco,
Thy searching fume,
Exhales the rheum,
O metaphysical Tobacco.”
Friday, September 30, 2011
Thursday, September 29, 2011
`Him Whose Fortunes We Contemplate'
“All joy or sorrow for the happiness or calamities of others is produced by an act of the imagination, that realizes the event however fictitious, or approximates it however remote, by placing us, for a time, in the condition of him whose fortunes we contemplate; so that we feel, while the deception lasts, whatever emotions would be excited by the same good or evil happening to ourselves.”
I’ve kept Dr. Johnson’s Rambler #60 close since learning of my friend Chris Ringwald’s death on Monday. Ostensibly, the essay concerns the writing of biography, a form Johnson mastered and his friend Boswell perfected. But his real subject is deeper and more self-revelatory. Johnson hardly recognized man-made distinctions between himself and others. He was peculiarly gifted with empathy because his failings were plain and beyond denial. His was a living humility. He was a natural-born democrat. Often he reminds me of an old friend who, when I would get worked up over some petty idiocy, would say: “Shit, he’s just a human.”
We congratulate ourselves on our good fortune, as though we deserved it. When, through Johnson’s “act of imagination,” I try to project myself into Chris’ being in those final minutes, I fail. To think otherwise is obscene presumption. None of us is immune to unhappy contingency. Our job is to remember. Johnson writes:
“I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful; for not only every man has, in the mighty mass of the world, great numbers in the same condition with himself, to whom his mistakes and miscarriages, escapes and expedients, would be of immediate and apparent use; but there is such a uniformity in the state of man, considered apart from adventitious and separable decorations and disguises, that there is scarce any possibility of good or ill but is common to human kind.”
Our old newspaper colleague and friend, Mike Huber, writes:
“In the Latin Requiem Mass, the priest says, Vita mutatur, non tollitur. Life has changed; it has not taken away.”
I’ve kept Dr. Johnson’s Rambler #60 close since learning of my friend Chris Ringwald’s death on Monday. Ostensibly, the essay concerns the writing of biography, a form Johnson mastered and his friend Boswell perfected. But his real subject is deeper and more self-revelatory. Johnson hardly recognized man-made distinctions between himself and others. He was peculiarly gifted with empathy because his failings were plain and beyond denial. His was a living humility. He was a natural-born democrat. Often he reminds me of an old friend who, when I would get worked up over some petty idiocy, would say: “Shit, he’s just a human.”
We congratulate ourselves on our good fortune, as though we deserved it. When, through Johnson’s “act of imagination,” I try to project myself into Chris’ being in those final minutes, I fail. To think otherwise is obscene presumption. None of us is immune to unhappy contingency. Our job is to remember. Johnson writes:
“I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful; for not only every man has, in the mighty mass of the world, great numbers in the same condition with himself, to whom his mistakes and miscarriages, escapes and expedients, would be of immediate and apparent use; but there is such a uniformity in the state of man, considered apart from adventitious and separable decorations and disguises, that there is scarce any possibility of good or ill but is common to human kind.”
Our old newspaper colleague and friend, Mike Huber, writes:
“In the Latin Requiem Mass, the priest says, Vita mutatur, non tollitur. Life has changed; it has not taken away.”
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
`Surface Becomes Depth'
For the epigraph to The Art of Botanical Illustration (1951), Wilfrid Blunt chooses an attractive promise John Ruskin makes in Modern Painters (five volumes, 1843-1860):
“If you can paint one leaf you can paint the world.”
I’m not so sure. The line is from a chapter titled “On Leaf Beauty,” in which Ruskin also says, “We cannot learn to paint leaves by painting trees full; nor grass by painting fields full. Learning to paint one leaf rightly is better than constructing a whole forest of leaf definitions.” That makes more sense, especially “rightly.” If Ruskin is endorsing artistic devotion to detail over scale, of letting the particular speak for the general, he’s right. When I think of War and Peace, I remember Prince Andrei lying wounded on the ground during the Battle of Austerlitz, not Napoleon.
Ruskin is a writer I’ve read unsystematically for forty years. He’s best in small portions, as in Praeterita or single letters from Fors Clavigera. I’ve said before, he would have made an exceptional blogger, though today his garrulousness on the page is probably off-putting for readers. Of course, garrulousness is a highly prized virtue in some regions of the blogosphere. Saying you don’t like Ruskin is like saying you don’t like the United States. Both are too vast and various, too heterogeneously cobbled together out of disparate parts, too resistant to glib generalities, to be indiscriminately embraced or repudiated. Love of either must mingle with impatience and disappointment.
I’ve been exchanging emails with the English poet Clive Wilmer, a Ruskin admirer who in 1986 edited Unto This Last and Other Writings for Penguin Classics. After noting my occasional mentions of Ruskin, Wilmer says: “He is, as you have noticed, one of my guiding stars.” He certainly shows up regularly in Wilmer’s poetry. From a three-poem sequence, “The Infinite Variety,” comes “Minerals from the Collection of John Ruskin” (Selected Poems, 1995):
“The boy geologist who clove the rocks
Here on display grew up to be the great
Philosopher of colour into form
And, in the products of just workmanship,
Discerned the paradigm of the just state.
“It was the Lord’s design he made apparent—
These bands, and blocks of azure, umber, gilt,
Set in their flexing contours, solid flow
That has composed itself in its own frame:
Red garnet neighbouring mica, silver white;
A slice of agate like an inland sea…”
“Clove” is shrewd, suitably old-fashioned-sounding, part of Ruskin’s fanciful etymology for the title Fors Clavigera. Wilmer’s poem addresses Ruskin’s uneasy synthesis of aesthetics, science, politics and religion, a potent Victorian brew. “Solid flow” is very nice. In The Art of Botanical Illustration, Blunt quotes Ruskin as saying he was “at war with the botanists.” An amateur proto-scientist, Ruskin ridiculed real scientists, mocked their taste for exactitude and its specialized language. Blunt writes:
“He saw no necessity, for instance, for describing the leaves of Viola epipsila [dwarf marsh violet] (`Heavens knows what: it is Greek, not Latin, and looks as if it meant something between a bishop and a short letter e’) as either pubescent-reticulate-subreniform or lato-cordate-repando-crenate, or its stipules as ovate-acuminate-fimbrio-denticulate. He firmly declined to read about a fruit `dehiscing loculicidally.’”
Wilmer includes among his poems a prose anecdote/meditation, “A Woodland Scene.” This is from the second of its five sections, describing a painting about which little is known:
“Watercolour, overlaid with bodycolour. `Ruskinian,’ a friend calls it. And so it is: in its anxious piety—in the endeavour to speak, crisply, of the transitory variegations of light on bark, or, where a bough has been shorn off, of light on pith; everywhere modified by the intervention of leaves, translucent or shadow-casting. Ruskinian, too, in the implied continuity of the given world with whatever a mesh of boughs and branches, contained within an arbitrary rectangle, can itself contain. Speaking, then, of the world at large, the picture expounds no painter, is devotional.
“Encrusted with light, the leaves lose substance. Fretted with bodycolour, surface becomes depth. It is a sunny day. In our looking, we cool ourselves on the banks of a stream. We are somewhere in the depths of a wood. No people, no birds or beasts, and the world is still.”
This is prose worthy of Ruskin on a good day, almost a pastiche of his best effects. There’s something admirably valiant about a writer championing an important writer of the past who, though not entirely erased from cultural memory, is no longer central and certainly not fashionable. Guy Davenport often encouraged me to read Ruskin, in particular Fors Clavigera. He will never again have a large, devoted following of readers, but I can think of few others so deserving of reclamation. Consider one of his most peculiar volumes (all of his books are peculiar, and their weirdness is beguiling) – Proserpina (1886). To give its full title: Proserpina: Studies of Wayside Flowers while the Air was Yet Pure among the Alps and in the Scotland and England Which My Father Knew. This is how Ruskin closes his introduction, which is dated “Rome, 10th May (my father’s birthday)”:
“I found the loveliest blue asphodel I ever saw in my life, yesterday, in the fields beyond Monte Mario,--a spire two feet high, of more than two hundred stars, the stalks of them all deep blue, as well as the flowers. Heaven send all honest people the gathering of the like, in Elysian fields, some day!”
[Go here to see Ruskin’s exquisite drawing of a snake's-head fritillary stem and flower, and here for his rendering of oak leaves.]
“If you can paint one leaf you can paint the world.”
I’m not so sure. The line is from a chapter titled “On Leaf Beauty,” in which Ruskin also says, “We cannot learn to paint leaves by painting trees full; nor grass by painting fields full. Learning to paint one leaf rightly is better than constructing a whole forest of leaf definitions.” That makes more sense, especially “rightly.” If Ruskin is endorsing artistic devotion to detail over scale, of letting the particular speak for the general, he’s right. When I think of War and Peace, I remember Prince Andrei lying wounded on the ground during the Battle of Austerlitz, not Napoleon.
Ruskin is a writer I’ve read unsystematically for forty years. He’s best in small portions, as in Praeterita or single letters from Fors Clavigera. I’ve said before, he would have made an exceptional blogger, though today his garrulousness on the page is probably off-putting for readers. Of course, garrulousness is a highly prized virtue in some regions of the blogosphere. Saying you don’t like Ruskin is like saying you don’t like the United States. Both are too vast and various, too heterogeneously cobbled together out of disparate parts, too resistant to glib generalities, to be indiscriminately embraced or repudiated. Love of either must mingle with impatience and disappointment.
I’ve been exchanging emails with the English poet Clive Wilmer, a Ruskin admirer who in 1986 edited Unto This Last and Other Writings for Penguin Classics. After noting my occasional mentions of Ruskin, Wilmer says: “He is, as you have noticed, one of my guiding stars.” He certainly shows up regularly in Wilmer’s poetry. From a three-poem sequence, “The Infinite Variety,” comes “Minerals from the Collection of John Ruskin” (Selected Poems, 1995):
“The boy geologist who clove the rocks
Here on display grew up to be the great
Philosopher of colour into form
And, in the products of just workmanship,
Discerned the paradigm of the just state.
“It was the Lord’s design he made apparent—
These bands, and blocks of azure, umber, gilt,
Set in their flexing contours, solid flow
That has composed itself in its own frame:
Red garnet neighbouring mica, silver white;
A slice of agate like an inland sea…”
“Clove” is shrewd, suitably old-fashioned-sounding, part of Ruskin’s fanciful etymology for the title Fors Clavigera. Wilmer’s poem addresses Ruskin’s uneasy synthesis of aesthetics, science, politics and religion, a potent Victorian brew. “Solid flow” is very nice. In The Art of Botanical Illustration, Blunt quotes Ruskin as saying he was “at war with the botanists.” An amateur proto-scientist, Ruskin ridiculed real scientists, mocked their taste for exactitude and its specialized language. Blunt writes:
“He saw no necessity, for instance, for describing the leaves of Viola epipsila [dwarf marsh violet] (`Heavens knows what: it is Greek, not Latin, and looks as if it meant something between a bishop and a short letter e’) as either pubescent-reticulate-subreniform or lato-cordate-repando-crenate, or its stipules as ovate-acuminate-fimbrio-denticulate. He firmly declined to read about a fruit `dehiscing loculicidally.’”
Wilmer includes among his poems a prose anecdote/meditation, “A Woodland Scene.” This is from the second of its five sections, describing a painting about which little is known:
“Watercolour, overlaid with bodycolour. `Ruskinian,’ a friend calls it. And so it is: in its anxious piety—in the endeavour to speak, crisply, of the transitory variegations of light on bark, or, where a bough has been shorn off, of light on pith; everywhere modified by the intervention of leaves, translucent or shadow-casting. Ruskinian, too, in the implied continuity of the given world with whatever a mesh of boughs and branches, contained within an arbitrary rectangle, can itself contain. Speaking, then, of the world at large, the picture expounds no painter, is devotional.
“Encrusted with light, the leaves lose substance. Fretted with bodycolour, surface becomes depth. It is a sunny day. In our looking, we cool ourselves on the banks of a stream. We are somewhere in the depths of a wood. No people, no birds or beasts, and the world is still.”
This is prose worthy of Ruskin on a good day, almost a pastiche of his best effects. There’s something admirably valiant about a writer championing an important writer of the past who, though not entirely erased from cultural memory, is no longer central and certainly not fashionable. Guy Davenport often encouraged me to read Ruskin, in particular Fors Clavigera. He will never again have a large, devoted following of readers, but I can think of few others so deserving of reclamation. Consider one of his most peculiar volumes (all of his books are peculiar, and their weirdness is beguiling) – Proserpina (1886). To give its full title: Proserpina: Studies of Wayside Flowers while the Air was Yet Pure among the Alps and in the Scotland and England Which My Father Knew. This is how Ruskin closes his introduction, which is dated “Rome, 10th May (my father’s birthday)”:
“I found the loveliest blue asphodel I ever saw in my life, yesterday, in the fields beyond Monte Mario,--a spire two feet high, of more than two hundred stars, the stalks of them all deep blue, as well as the flowers. Heaven send all honest people the gathering of the like, in Elysian fields, some day!”
[Go here to see Ruskin’s exquisite drawing of a snake's-head fritillary stem and flower, and here for his rendering of oak leaves.]
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
`The Crowds of Starnels Whizz and Hurry By'
I read A Sentimental Journey again recently and marked this passage in Sterne’s novel:
“What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life, by him who interests his heart in everything, and who, having eyes to see what time and chance are perpetually holding out to him as he journeyeth on his way, misses nothing he can fairly lay his hands on.--”
The Reverend Mr. Yorick repudiates those so little gifted with imagination as to complain of boredom. The phrase “this little span of life” is doubly poignant, as Sterne died of tuberculosis, age fifty-four, on March 18, 1768, less than a month after publishing A Sentimental Journey. Already he had laced Tristram Shandy with the theme of trying to outrace death in the act of writing. I’ve returned to Sterne by way of John Clare, who spent twenty-six of his seventy years in mental asylums. In a letter to his friend William Knight, written July 8, 1850, from the Northamptonshire County General Lunatic Asylum, Clare says:
“I am still wanting like Sternes Prisoners Starling to `get out but can’t find the way.”
Clare refers to the caged starling appearing in three chapters of Sentimental Journey (“The Passport: The Hotel at Paris,” “The Captive: Paris” and “The Starling: Road to Versailles”). Yorick says:
“In my return back through the passage, I heard the same words repeated twice over; and, looking up, I saw it was a starling hung in a little cage. — `I can’t get out, — I can’t get out,’ said the starling.”
Nine months later, on April 11, 1851, Clare again writes to Knight:
“I would try like the Birds a few Songs I’ the Spring but they have shut me up and gave me no tools and like the caged Starnel of Stern `I can’t get out’ to fetch any so I have made no progress at present—but I have written a good lot and as I should think nearly sufficient—so `I rest from my labours and my works do follow me’—I love the `rippleing brook’—and `the Singing of Birds’—But I cant get out to see them or hear them—while other people are looking at gay flower Gardens—I love to see the quaking bull rushes & the broad Lakes in the green meadows—and sheep tracks over a fallow field & a Land of thistles in flower—I wish I could make U a little book of Songs worth sending but after some trials I can’t do it at present…I am in this d-----d mad house and cant get out.”
Clare’s biographer, Jonathan Bate, glosses this heartbreaking letter:
“The phrase `they have shut me up’ following immediately upon an image of birdsong has extraordinary poignancy: Clare is not only a man enclosed but also a songster silenced.”
“Starnel” is an English dialect word for “starling” (from the Old English stærlinc) related to Sturnus – the starling genus, so named by Linnaeus in 1756. The species known to Sterne and Clare was Sturnus vulgaris, the common European starling. Sterne was punning on his own name, and in the text of Sentimental Journey includes a picture of “this poor starling as the crest to my [coat of] arms.” Tim Parnell in his notes to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the novel (2003) writes:
“…the arms and crest pictured had been used by Sterne’s great-grandfather Richard Sterne (d. 1683), archbishop of York, on his episcopal seal. Although the family may not have had a legal right to them, Sterne himself used a seal impressed with the arms. The Sternes appear to have adopted the starling crest on the basis of a punning association between starn (Yorkshire dialect for starling) and the family name.”
In connection with the Reverend Mr. Yorick, we might mention that the starling appears once in Shakespeare, in Henry IV, Part 1, when Hotspur says:
“I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak
Nothing but 'Mortimer,' and give it him
To keep his anger still in motion.”
Again, this is Sturnus vulgaris, and we can indirectly thank Shakespeare for its plentiful presence in the New World. In 1890, Eugene Schieffelin, invariably described as an “eccentric drug manufacturer,” released some sixty European starlings in New York City's Central Park, and forty the following year. He had imported them from England as part of his plan to introduce into North America every species of bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays and poems. The skylarks and song thrushes never caught on but starlings, tough and readily adaptive, are among our most common birds, considered pests by some. Clare writes in “Autumn Birds”:
“The crowds of starnels whizz and hurry by.”
“What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life, by him who interests his heart in everything, and who, having eyes to see what time and chance are perpetually holding out to him as he journeyeth on his way, misses nothing he can fairly lay his hands on.--”
The Reverend Mr. Yorick repudiates those so little gifted with imagination as to complain of boredom. The phrase “this little span of life” is doubly poignant, as Sterne died of tuberculosis, age fifty-four, on March 18, 1768, less than a month after publishing A Sentimental Journey. Already he had laced Tristram Shandy with the theme of trying to outrace death in the act of writing. I’ve returned to Sterne by way of John Clare, who spent twenty-six of his seventy years in mental asylums. In a letter to his friend William Knight, written July 8, 1850, from the Northamptonshire County General Lunatic Asylum, Clare says:
“I am still wanting like Sternes Prisoners Starling to `get out but can’t find the way.”
Clare refers to the caged starling appearing in three chapters of Sentimental Journey (“The Passport: The Hotel at Paris,” “The Captive: Paris” and “The Starling: Road to Versailles”). Yorick says:
“In my return back through the passage, I heard the same words repeated twice over; and, looking up, I saw it was a starling hung in a little cage. — `I can’t get out, — I can’t get out,’ said the starling.”
Nine months later, on April 11, 1851, Clare again writes to Knight:
“I would try like the Birds a few Songs I’ the Spring but they have shut me up and gave me no tools and like the caged Starnel of Stern `I can’t get out’ to fetch any so I have made no progress at present—but I have written a good lot and as I should think nearly sufficient—so `I rest from my labours and my works do follow me’—I love the `rippleing brook’—and `the Singing of Birds’—But I cant get out to see them or hear them—while other people are looking at gay flower Gardens—I love to see the quaking bull rushes & the broad Lakes in the green meadows—and sheep tracks over a fallow field & a Land of thistles in flower—I wish I could make U a little book of Songs worth sending but after some trials I can’t do it at present…I am in this d-----d mad house and cant get out.”
Clare’s biographer, Jonathan Bate, glosses this heartbreaking letter:
“The phrase `they have shut me up’ following immediately upon an image of birdsong has extraordinary poignancy: Clare is not only a man enclosed but also a songster silenced.”
“Starnel” is an English dialect word for “starling” (from the Old English stærlinc) related to Sturnus – the starling genus, so named by Linnaeus in 1756. The species known to Sterne and Clare was Sturnus vulgaris, the common European starling. Sterne was punning on his own name, and in the text of Sentimental Journey includes a picture of “this poor starling as the crest to my [coat of] arms.” Tim Parnell in his notes to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the novel (2003) writes:
“…the arms and crest pictured had been used by Sterne’s great-grandfather Richard Sterne (d. 1683), archbishop of York, on his episcopal seal. Although the family may not have had a legal right to them, Sterne himself used a seal impressed with the arms. The Sternes appear to have adopted the starling crest on the basis of a punning association between starn (Yorkshire dialect for starling) and the family name.”
In connection with the Reverend Mr. Yorick, we might mention that the starling appears once in Shakespeare, in Henry IV, Part 1, when Hotspur says:
“I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak
Nothing but 'Mortimer,' and give it him
To keep his anger still in motion.”
Again, this is Sturnus vulgaris, and we can indirectly thank Shakespeare for its plentiful presence in the New World. In 1890, Eugene Schieffelin, invariably described as an “eccentric drug manufacturer,” released some sixty European starlings in New York City's Central Park, and forty the following year. He had imported them from England as part of his plan to introduce into North America every species of bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays and poems. The skylarks and song thrushes never caught on but starlings, tough and readily adaptive, are among our most common birds, considered pests by some. Clare writes in “Autumn Birds”:
“The crowds of starnels whizz and hurry by.”
Monday, September 26, 2011
Christopher Ringwald, R.I.P
An old friend, a former newspaper colleague, apparently took his life this morning in Albany, N.Y. Chris Ringwald was a husband, father of three, author of three books, editor of his diocesan newspaper. We used to talk about John Berryman’s “Eleven Addresses to the Lord”:
“Forsake me not when my wild hours come;
grant me sleep nightly, grace soften my dreams;
achieve in me patience till the thing be done,
a careful view of my achievement come.
“Make me from time to time the gift of the shoulder.
When all hurt nerves whine shut away the whiskey.
Empty my heart toward Thee.
Let me pace without fear the common path of death.”
Go here to see Chris Ringwald's obituary.
grant me sleep nightly, grace soften my dreams;
achieve in me patience till the thing be done,
a careful view of my achievement come.
“Make me from time to time the gift of the shoulder.
When all hurt nerves whine shut away the whiskey.
Empty my heart toward Thee.
Let me pace without fear the common path of death.”
Go here to see Chris Ringwald's obituary.
`To Cheer & Check Fears'
A reader in Juba, South Sudan, suggests I might enjoy Edward Hirsch's The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems 1975-2010, in particular one of the new poems, “The Case Against Poetry”:
“While you made the case against poetry—
Plato’s critique of the irrational,
Homeric lying, deluded citizens—
to a group of poets in Prague
“night deepened in old windows,
swallows gathered on a narrow ledge
and called to the vanishing twilight,
and a beggar began to sing in the street.”
Plato’s critique of the irrational,
Homeric lying, deluded citizens—
to a group of poets in Prague
“night deepened in old windows,
swallows gathered on a narrow ledge
and called to the vanishing twilight,
and a beggar began to sing in the street.”
I’ve never bought the so-called case against poetry, Plato’s or anyone else’s, though I strongly endorse the case against badly written poetry (and prose), based as it is on a literary application of Gresham’s law. Hirsch’s understanding of poetry is a little too mushily Romantic for my taste – swallows, twilight, singing beggar – but at least he pits his poem against the positivists. Also, Hirsch wrote a piece about John Clare some years ago which I remembered being useful. A rereading partially confirmed my impression:
“Clare was a prodigious walker, a solitary who sought out the secret recesses of nature, a hidden, underappreciated, overlooked country, which he detailed with a sharp eye and a naturalist's sensibility. Accuracy was a scrupulous habit, a moral imperative.”
That’s a quality I expect of good poetry and prose – the scrupulous habit of accuracy, which is never contrary to a vigorous imagination. Fancy rooted in particulars is almost the definition of art – and a “moral imperative.” Richard Mabey devotes some of the best pages in Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants to Clare’s close observations of the natural world in his native Northamptonshire. Mabey praises Clare for writing about plants and animals as “things-in-themselves, not as a colourful palette of symbols and metaphors,” and his celebration of the poet sent me back to The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare (ed. Margaret Grainger, Clarendon Press, 1983). Once you’ve accustomed yourself to Clare’s unschooled spelling and grammar, his prose can be photographically scrupulous without being dull or uninspired. In his journal for Sept. 10, 1824, Clare writes, like Hirsch, about swallows:
“My health woud permit me to do nothing more than take walks in the garden today what a sadly pleasing appearence gardens have at this season the tall gaudy holliock with its melancholy blooms stands bending to the wind and bidding the summer farewell while the low asters in their pied lustre of red white & blue bends beneath in pensive silence as tho they mused over the days gone by & were sorrowful the swallows are flocking together in the skies ready for departing & a crowd has dropt to rest on the wallnut tree where they twitter as if they were telling their young stories of their long journey to cheer & check fears”
[On Saturday I watched Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch again. As the bunch rides out of Angel’s village, his people sing the beautiful “La Golondrina” – “The Swallow.” The song is reprised at the end of the film, after the massacre at Agua Verde, over Freddy Sykes’ laughter.]
Sunday, September 25, 2011
`With Flowers and Grass All Sweet and Green'
In Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants (HarperCollins, 2010), Richard Mabey writes about one of my favorite paintings, Albrecht Dürer's Das große Rasenstück (Large Piece of Turf ). Of the 1503 watercolor he says:
“This is a clump of weeds looked at with such reverent attention that they might have been the flowers of Elysium.”
Mabey describes the perspective from which Dürer paints the turf as “not from above, or any other conventionally privileged viewpoint, but from below,” and likens it to John Clare’s habitual “dropping down” to look more attentively at plants or insects. Anyone devoted to the natural world will recognize this craving to observe ants or blue-eyed grass more closely and with greater acuity, though desire outstrips the limits of our senses. Art rooted in intense observation, whether Dürer's, Clare’s or Thoreau’s, can feel more “real” than the phenomena observed. It seems we see better with the aid of a sharp-eyed intermediary. Mabey the naturalist catalogs Dürer's miniature arboretum:
“In the foreground are three rosettes of greater plantain, a weed that has so closely dogged human trackways across the globe that it was also known as Waybread and Traveller’s-foot. They’re surrounded by wisps of meadow-grass. Two dandelion heads, some way past flowering but still topped with yellow, lean leftwards. At the very rear of the painting – and its only concession to the less than commonplace – a few leaflets of burnet-saxifrage are just visible through the mesh of grass leaves…The bottom quarter of the picture is almost entirely devoted to the mottled patch of earth in which the weeds are visibly rooted…It is a visually exquisite and scientifically correct composition. What you are looking at is a miniature ecosystem in which every component, from the damp mud at the base to the seeds on the point of flight, is connected.”
In The Painter as Naturalist (Flammarion, 1991), Madeleine Pinault notes that Dürer's painting is not exclusively a watercolor, that first he drew some of the plants with pen and ink, then retraced them with watercolor and gouache. This lends the image a solidity, an emphatic thereness, further emphasized by the blank abstraction of the background – not the way we see plants and soil in nature. “Dürer,” Pinault reminds us, “was not a scientist, but an artist.”
Today, when I think of Large Piece of Turf, I think of the cover of Fred Chappell’s Spring Garden: New and Selected Poems, published by Louisiana State University Press in 1995. Chaucer-like, with nods to Herrick and Ronsard, Chappell prefaces his vernally celebrative collection with “The General Prologue,” including these lines:
“There’s still a bit of summer before the fall—
So here’s that gay rondeau of Maytime weather:
“Summer has ordered his footmen in
To freshen his chateau cheerfully,
To brighten up his tapestry
With flowers and grass all sweet and green.”
Saturday, September 24, 2011
`You Can Unroll the Rotten Papyrus'
Dave Lull alerts me to a new poem by Kay Ryan, “Tree Heart/True Heart,” in the Sept. 26 issue of The New Yorker:
“The hearts of trees
are serially displaced
pressed annually
outward to a ring.
They aren't really
what we mean
by hearts, they so
easily acquiesce,
willing to thin and
stretch around some
upstart green. A
real heart does not
give way to spring.
A heart is true.
I say no more springs
without you.”
Ryan again borrows a phenomenon from the natural world and turns it into a human metaphor. She knows the inner layer of a tree’s growth ring is called “spring wood.” That’s when the growth is rapid and the wood less dense than later in the season, when “summer wood” forms, at least in temperate zones. The metaphor works because it’s not true to our nature. People are not trees. Ryan takes a valentine rhyme – “true”/”you” – and reanimates it, as she surreptitiously rhymes “pressed” and “acquiesce,” “mean” and “green.” No one rhymes more wittily, and the final two lines can be read as a renunciation of love or a pledge of devotion.
The science she draws from is dendrochronology, the dating of trees by counting rings in horizontal cross-sections of the trunk. The discipline was formalized in the last century by an astronomer, A.E. Douglass, founder of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona. I learned the early history of tree-ring science from Guy Davenport in his foreword to the 1983 North Pont Press edition (read the essay here) of Montaigne’s Travel Journal (collected in Every Force Evolves a Form, 1986):
“A lively conversation with a craftsman in Pisa causes an invisible event which we read over in innocence unless alerted to what's happening. When, on Saturday, 8 July 1581, Montaigne in Pisa learned `that all trees bear as many circles and rings as they have lasted years,’ he is recording that fact for the second time in history. Until recently, we thought it was the first time.”
In Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1986), Robert D. Richardson reports Thoreau read Harland Coultas’ What Can Be Learned from a Tree soon after it was published in 1860. Coultas writes:
“It is well-known that the age of a tree may be ascertained by counting the rings visible on the cross section of its stem, and that the impress of centuries of seasons has been faithfully recorded in its woody layers.”
In the fall of that year, Thoreau was already counting rings and making charts of tree growth in his journal. On Oct. 19 he writes:
“Thus I can easily find in countless numbers in our forests, frequently in the third succession, the stumps of the oaks which were cut near the end of the last century. Perhaps I can recover thus generally the oak woods of the beginning of the last century, if the land has remained woodland. I have an advantage over the geologist, for I can not only detect the order of events but the time during which they elapsed, by counting the rings on the stumps. Thus you can unroll the rotten papyrus on which the history of the Concord forest is written.”
Like Ryan, Thoreau takes the biology of tree growth and turns it into a human metaphor, albeit darker and sadder than the poet’s:
“It is easier far to recover the history of the trees which stood here a century or more ago than it is to recover the history of the men who walked beneath them. How much do we know — how little more can we know — of these two centuries of Concord life?”
Richardson says Thoreau was counting tree rings on Dec. 3, 1860, when he caught a cold – Thoreau called it influenza -- which turned into bronchitis, which aggravated his tuberculosis. He was housebound most of the winter and wrote progressively less in his journal. The following year, one month after Fort Sumter, he made a two-month recuperative journey to Minnesota by rail and steamboat. Still weak and never well, Thoreau succumbed to tuberculosis on May 6, 1862.
[Go here to see “The Ultimate Tree-Ring Web Pages.”]
“The hearts of trees
are serially displaced
pressed annually
outward to a ring.
They aren't really
what we mean
by hearts, they so
easily acquiesce,
willing to thin and
stretch around some
upstart green. A
real heart does not
give way to spring.
A heart is true.
I say no more springs
without you.”
Ryan again borrows a phenomenon from the natural world and turns it into a human metaphor. She knows the inner layer of a tree’s growth ring is called “spring wood.” That’s when the growth is rapid and the wood less dense than later in the season, when “summer wood” forms, at least in temperate zones. The metaphor works because it’s not true to our nature. People are not trees. Ryan takes a valentine rhyme – “true”/”you” – and reanimates it, as she surreptitiously rhymes “pressed” and “acquiesce,” “mean” and “green.” No one rhymes more wittily, and the final two lines can be read as a renunciation of love or a pledge of devotion.
The science she draws from is dendrochronology, the dating of trees by counting rings in horizontal cross-sections of the trunk. The discipline was formalized in the last century by an astronomer, A.E. Douglass, founder of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona. I learned the early history of tree-ring science from Guy Davenport in his foreword to the 1983 North Pont Press edition (read the essay here) of Montaigne’s Travel Journal (collected in Every Force Evolves a Form, 1986):
“A lively conversation with a craftsman in Pisa causes an invisible event which we read over in innocence unless alerted to what's happening. When, on Saturday, 8 July 1581, Montaigne in Pisa learned `that all trees bear as many circles and rings as they have lasted years,’ he is recording that fact for the second time in history. Until recently, we thought it was the first time.”
In Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1986), Robert D. Richardson reports Thoreau read Harland Coultas’ What Can Be Learned from a Tree soon after it was published in 1860. Coultas writes:
“It is well-known that the age of a tree may be ascertained by counting the rings visible on the cross section of its stem, and that the impress of centuries of seasons has been faithfully recorded in its woody layers.”
In the fall of that year, Thoreau was already counting rings and making charts of tree growth in his journal. On Oct. 19 he writes:
“Thus I can easily find in countless numbers in our forests, frequently in the third succession, the stumps of the oaks which were cut near the end of the last century. Perhaps I can recover thus generally the oak woods of the beginning of the last century, if the land has remained woodland. I have an advantage over the geologist, for I can not only detect the order of events but the time during which they elapsed, by counting the rings on the stumps. Thus you can unroll the rotten papyrus on which the history of the Concord forest is written.”
Like Ryan, Thoreau takes the biology of tree growth and turns it into a human metaphor, albeit darker and sadder than the poet’s:
“It is easier far to recover the history of the trees which stood here a century or more ago than it is to recover the history of the men who walked beneath them. How much do we know — how little more can we know — of these two centuries of Concord life?”
Richardson says Thoreau was counting tree rings on Dec. 3, 1860, when he caught a cold – Thoreau called it influenza -- which turned into bronchitis, which aggravated his tuberculosis. He was housebound most of the winter and wrote progressively less in his journal. The following year, one month after Fort Sumter, he made a two-month recuperative journey to Minnesota by rail and steamboat. Still weak and never well, Thoreau succumbed to tuberculosis on May 6, 1862.
[Go here to see “The Ultimate Tree-Ring Web Pages.”]
Friday, September 23, 2011
`Savours It Slowly That Its Meaning and Relish May Stay'
In the foreword to his friend Roy Bedichek’s posthumously published The Sense of Smell (1960), J. Frank Dobie lauds Bedichek’s gift for preserving in memory whatever he had read:
“He could have produced a magnificent anthology of English poetry solely out of his memory—as rich as Lord Wavell drew from his memory in Other Men’s Flowers.”
The name stopped me. Who is Lord Wavell and what is Other Men’s Flowers? Looking for the answers confirmed my ignorance and the life of an extraordinarily accomplished Englishman. He was Field Marshal Archibald Percival Wavell, 1st Earl Wavell GCB, GCSI, GCIE, CMG, MC, PC (1883-1950), a veteran of the second Boer War and both World Wars (he lost an eye in the Second Battle of Ypres, 1915) and the penultimate viceroy of India (1943-1947). In his foreword, dated “New Delhi, April 1943”, Wavell writes:
“`I have gathered a posie of other men's flowers and nothing but the thread that binds them is my own.’ So wrote Montaigne [in “On Physiognomy”]; and I have borrowed his title, my memory being the binding thread.”
From the Greek (anthos, “flower” + legein, “to gather”), an anthology is a collection of flowers, a bouquet of poems. Jonathan Cape published Wavell’s in March 1944. The Fondren Library’s copy is the third edition, November 1945, published on thin, coarse paper to meet the “Book Production War Economy Standard,” as the copyright page explains. A book plate at the front notes the 432-page volume comes from “the library of Edgar Odell Lovett first president of the Rice Institute.”
An English major today could earn a Ph.D. while remaining blithely ignorant of most of the poems in Wavell’s collection. The poet most often represented is Kipling, with twenty-eight titles. Next, Browning with nineteen; Chesterton, ten; Masefield, eight. In his foreword Wavell explains:
“Browning and Kipling are the two poets whose work has stayed most in my memory, since I read them in impressionable youth. I have never regretted my choice. They have courage and humanity, and their feet are usually on the ground. G. K. Chesterton has the same qualities, with a more romantic and less practical strain; he has become my third favourite, and much of his verse is in my heart and my head; there also is much of Masefield, the poet of adventure and toil by land and sea.”
The selection is not only personal but personally felt. Wavell includes the warhorses, the poems we grew up reading and memorizing – “Annabel Lee,” “Invictus,” “If” (though “hackneyed,” he judges), “Lepanto,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” He’s fond of Hilaire Belloc, including this epigram:
“When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”
Wavell’s literary sensibility is indelibly nineteenth-century. From among the moderns he includes one poem by Frost and two by Yeats, and in the introduction to his first chapter he writes:
“Much of the work of T. S. Eliot has obvious dignity and beauty, and is a pleasure to read as long as one makes no effort to solve his cryptograms; but some of it seems deliberately ugly as well as cryptic. I look on him as one who has sinned against the light of poetry by wrapping his great talent in the napkin of obscurity.”
Most of Wavell’s anthology is a pleasure to read (except for Poe) as an idiosyncratic time capsule assembled by a dignified soldier-reader, a man whose life embodied the wracking continental drifts of the twentieth century. We no longer expect children to commit poems to memory, and little poetry is being written worth memorizing. As a result, we’ve lost a sense of communion and shared culture, not to mention the private solace we know when declaiming a poem aloud or in the cloister of our heads. Let me quote Lord Wavell at length on the virtues of declaiming poetry:
“Driving a motor car alone or riding a horse alone I often declaim out loud; but not when walking. Walking for me is somehow a more serious business and does not seem to loosen my memory to verse; perhaps pace is required as an incentive. I neither sing nor recite poetry in my bath. I have never piloted an aeroplane alone, but I feel it would move me to declaim in the skies. Practically all the verse in this collection is capable of being declaimed; it seems to me a function of poetry that it should be so. Poetry in its origins was certainly a declamatory art, usually post-prandial or post-proeliatory. It is one of my charges against modern poetry that it does not easily lend itself to memorizing or declamation. The Prime Minister, Mr. Winston Churchill, has stored in his prodigious memory much poetry which he declaims on apt occasion; I have had the pleasure of hearing some of the verses of this anthology repeated by him—with characteristic gusto. Lord Allenby was another under whom I served with a great store of poetry in his head and the ability to give it forth in season. My experience is that one can never properly appreciate a poem until one has got it by heart: memory stumbles over a word or a line and so wonders why the poet wrote it so, and then savours it slowly that its meaning and relish may stay.”
Other Men’s Flowers is at once a pleasure and a poignant reminder of how much has been lost:
“I sometimes fear that the stream of English poetry is running dry and turning muddy; but my son, for whose judgment I have very great respect, reads both the old and the new poets and on the whole prefers the latter, so perhaps it is just that I am growing old.”
“He could have produced a magnificent anthology of English poetry solely out of his memory—as rich as Lord Wavell drew from his memory in Other Men’s Flowers.”
The name stopped me. Who is Lord Wavell and what is Other Men’s Flowers? Looking for the answers confirmed my ignorance and the life of an extraordinarily accomplished Englishman. He was Field Marshal Archibald Percival Wavell, 1st Earl Wavell GCB, GCSI, GCIE, CMG, MC, PC (1883-1950), a veteran of the second Boer War and both World Wars (he lost an eye in the Second Battle of Ypres, 1915) and the penultimate viceroy of India (1943-1947). In his foreword, dated “New Delhi, April 1943”, Wavell writes:
“`I have gathered a posie of other men's flowers and nothing but the thread that binds them is my own.’ So wrote Montaigne [in “On Physiognomy”]; and I have borrowed his title, my memory being the binding thread.”
From the Greek (anthos, “flower” + legein, “to gather”), an anthology is a collection of flowers, a bouquet of poems. Jonathan Cape published Wavell’s in March 1944. The Fondren Library’s copy is the third edition, November 1945, published on thin, coarse paper to meet the “Book Production War Economy Standard,” as the copyright page explains. A book plate at the front notes the 432-page volume comes from “the library of Edgar Odell Lovett first president of the Rice Institute.”
An English major today could earn a Ph.D. while remaining blithely ignorant of most of the poems in Wavell’s collection. The poet most often represented is Kipling, with twenty-eight titles. Next, Browning with nineteen; Chesterton, ten; Masefield, eight. In his foreword Wavell explains:
“Browning and Kipling are the two poets whose work has stayed most in my memory, since I read them in impressionable youth. I have never regretted my choice. They have courage and humanity, and their feet are usually on the ground. G. K. Chesterton has the same qualities, with a more romantic and less practical strain; he has become my third favourite, and much of his verse is in my heart and my head; there also is much of Masefield, the poet of adventure and toil by land and sea.”
The selection is not only personal but personally felt. Wavell includes the warhorses, the poems we grew up reading and memorizing – “Annabel Lee,” “Invictus,” “If” (though “hackneyed,” he judges), “Lepanto,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” He’s fond of Hilaire Belloc, including this epigram:
“When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”
Wavell’s literary sensibility is indelibly nineteenth-century. From among the moderns he includes one poem by Frost and two by Yeats, and in the introduction to his first chapter he writes:
“Much of the work of T. S. Eliot has obvious dignity and beauty, and is a pleasure to read as long as one makes no effort to solve his cryptograms; but some of it seems deliberately ugly as well as cryptic. I look on him as one who has sinned against the light of poetry by wrapping his great talent in the napkin of obscurity.”
Most of Wavell’s anthology is a pleasure to read (except for Poe) as an idiosyncratic time capsule assembled by a dignified soldier-reader, a man whose life embodied the wracking continental drifts of the twentieth century. We no longer expect children to commit poems to memory, and little poetry is being written worth memorizing. As a result, we’ve lost a sense of communion and shared culture, not to mention the private solace we know when declaiming a poem aloud or in the cloister of our heads. Let me quote Lord Wavell at length on the virtues of declaiming poetry:
“Driving a motor car alone or riding a horse alone I often declaim out loud; but not when walking. Walking for me is somehow a more serious business and does not seem to loosen my memory to verse; perhaps pace is required as an incentive. I neither sing nor recite poetry in my bath. I have never piloted an aeroplane alone, but I feel it would move me to declaim in the skies. Practically all the verse in this collection is capable of being declaimed; it seems to me a function of poetry that it should be so. Poetry in its origins was certainly a declamatory art, usually post-prandial or post-proeliatory. It is one of my charges against modern poetry that it does not easily lend itself to memorizing or declamation. The Prime Minister, Mr. Winston Churchill, has stored in his prodigious memory much poetry which he declaims on apt occasion; I have had the pleasure of hearing some of the verses of this anthology repeated by him—with characteristic gusto. Lord Allenby was another under whom I served with a great store of poetry in his head and the ability to give it forth in season. My experience is that one can never properly appreciate a poem until one has got it by heart: memory stumbles over a word or a line and so wonders why the poet wrote it so, and then savours it slowly that its meaning and relish may stay.”
Other Men’s Flowers is at once a pleasure and a poignant reminder of how much has been lost:
“I sometimes fear that the stream of English poetry is running dry and turning muddy; but my son, for whose judgment I have very great respect, reads both the old and the new poets and on the whole prefers the latter, so perhaps it is just that I am growing old.”
Thursday, September 22, 2011
`In the Hope of Finding Surcease'
Terry Teachout reports an “oft-quoted remark” by Henri Matisse that was news to me:
“What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity, and tranquility, without any disquieting or preoccupying subject matter, an art that could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a tonic, a cerebral calmative, something like a good armchair that relaxes him from his physical fatigue.”
On my drive home from work, which on a good day lasts thirty to forty minutes, I listen to music; of late, Aaron Copland, Paul Desmond and Blossom Dearie. At home, I’ve been reading Chesterton and the new biography of him by Ian Ker, as well as Ben Jonson’s poems and a recently published posthumous volume by David Stove, What’s Wrong with Benevolence. I don’t watch television but on weekend nights I enjoy watching movies – lately, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo. Each of the artists and works cited serves as a “cerebral calmative” (for me, perhaps not you), and each qualifies without a qualifier as art, whether “high” or “low,” “literary” or “genre,” “bourgeois” or “transgressive.” Terry writes:
“We think of art as something to do, not something to use, and many of us also suffer from the mistaken notion that art must be challenging in order to be good.”
On the same day I read Terry’s post I came across a blogger and putative history professor who criticizes a television show for not permitting “a transgressive identification” with its characters, whatever that means. The show sounds like garbage and I can’t imagine wanting to watch it, but I likewise can’t imagine seeking out the “transgressive” in any part of my life. I’m simply too happy for that sort of thing. Art that sets out to “transgress” is adolescent, like the twelve-year-old who just discovered cursing, and won’t for long command the attention of a grownup.
Terry’s use of “challenging” is worth considering. For some it means difficult, obscure or offensive, and this, of course, is the pose of contemporary art-snobs and egotists, their way of saying, “I think Naked Lunch is funny and you’re offended by sexual pathology, so I’m more sophisticated than you.” When I listen to Blossom Dearie singing “Surrey with a Fringe on Top,” I'm moved, soothed, reassured. Am I any in sense “challenged?” Only in the sense that worthy art enables self-forgetting.
Is Ulysses “challenging?” Early readers mistook the most tightly organized novel ever written for chaos. With time, Joyce has taught readers how to read it. For some of us, it qualifies as a “cerebral calmative” because Joyce’s challenges reward us. The book is funny and touching and almost cosmically happy, a great “yes” of a novel, one that encourages us to happily reread it. “A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader,” says Nabokov, that tireless proselytizer for “aesthetic bliss.”
In the preachers for transgression and other wet-blankets I hear echoes of a mutated puritanism. I’m sorry they can’t relax enough to enjoy themselves. Art is not punishment or obligation. All it requires is the engagement of a willing imagination. Dull art and dull consumers of art deserve each other. In a radio talk, Chesterton asks, “We talk about life as being dull as ditchwater, but is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.” At the end of a long day, I’ll settle for "quiet fun" and happily embrace it. Terry writes:
“To take uncomplicated pleasure from beauty is a wholly worthy activity, and to do it in the hope of finding surcease from whatever may be troubling us is no less worthy.”
“What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity, and tranquility, without any disquieting or preoccupying subject matter, an art that could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a tonic, a cerebral calmative, something like a good armchair that relaxes him from his physical fatigue.”
On my drive home from work, which on a good day lasts thirty to forty minutes, I listen to music; of late, Aaron Copland, Paul Desmond and Blossom Dearie. At home, I’ve been reading Chesterton and the new biography of him by Ian Ker, as well as Ben Jonson’s poems and a recently published posthumous volume by David Stove, What’s Wrong with Benevolence. I don’t watch television but on weekend nights I enjoy watching movies – lately, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo. Each of the artists and works cited serves as a “cerebral calmative” (for me, perhaps not you), and each qualifies without a qualifier as art, whether “high” or “low,” “literary” or “genre,” “bourgeois” or “transgressive.” Terry writes:
“We think of art as something to do, not something to use, and many of us also suffer from the mistaken notion that art must be challenging in order to be good.”
On the same day I read Terry’s post I came across a blogger and putative history professor who criticizes a television show for not permitting “a transgressive identification” with its characters, whatever that means. The show sounds like garbage and I can’t imagine wanting to watch it, but I likewise can’t imagine seeking out the “transgressive” in any part of my life. I’m simply too happy for that sort of thing. Art that sets out to “transgress” is adolescent, like the twelve-year-old who just discovered cursing, and won’t for long command the attention of a grownup.
Terry’s use of “challenging” is worth considering. For some it means difficult, obscure or offensive, and this, of course, is the pose of contemporary art-snobs and egotists, their way of saying, “I think Naked Lunch is funny and you’re offended by sexual pathology, so I’m more sophisticated than you.” When I listen to Blossom Dearie singing “Surrey with a Fringe on Top,” I'm moved, soothed, reassured. Am I any in sense “challenged?” Only in the sense that worthy art enables self-forgetting.
Is Ulysses “challenging?” Early readers mistook the most tightly organized novel ever written for chaos. With time, Joyce has taught readers how to read it. For some of us, it qualifies as a “cerebral calmative” because Joyce’s challenges reward us. The book is funny and touching and almost cosmically happy, a great “yes” of a novel, one that encourages us to happily reread it. “A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader,” says Nabokov, that tireless proselytizer for “aesthetic bliss.”
In the preachers for transgression and other wet-blankets I hear echoes of a mutated puritanism. I’m sorry they can’t relax enough to enjoy themselves. Art is not punishment or obligation. All it requires is the engagement of a willing imagination. Dull art and dull consumers of art deserve each other. In a radio talk, Chesterton asks, “We talk about life as being dull as ditchwater, but is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.” At the end of a long day, I’ll settle for "quiet fun" and happily embrace it. Terry writes:
“To take uncomplicated pleasure from beauty is a wholly worthy activity, and to do it in the hope of finding surcease from whatever may be troubling us is no less worthy.”
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
`These Textures Solicit of Us Our Instant Homage'
“Our rich, contingent and substantial world”
Even floating free of context, like dubious emails or graffiti, the words suggest their author. Which poet of the late twentieth century, an American male, in case we’re playing Twenty Questions, might have written them? One who respects words and the world, a mature intelligence, seasoned, philosophical in the rare good sense. That certainly narrows the field. Another clue: In an essay on Moby-Dick, this poet praised Melville’s book as “genial, playful and full of deceptive levity.”
The words quoted at the top are from “Mathematics Considered as a Vice,” one of six previously uncollected poems by Anthony Hecht published in the September 2011 issue of Poetry. Hecht died almost seven years ago, and as his life recedes his work grows ever more essential. One reads Hecht’s poems with the same expectation of serious delight we bring to, say, the poems of Milton or Edgar Bowers. Read David Yezzi’s introduction to the new poems and use the link to see new photographs of Hecht and his work.
Here are “The Plate,” “A Friend Killed in the War,” “An Offering for Patricia,” “The Fountain” (after Baudelaire) and "Dilemma."
It’s a measure of how far poetry and Poetry have fallen that Hecht’s poems appear alongside the feckless humbug of Kevin Young, Sharon Olds, Peter Gizzi, Robert Wrigley and others. They might be written in alien, mutually uncomprehending tongues. We’re grateful for the resurrected poems but mourn all that we've lost. Hecht writes in “An Offering for Patricia”:
“These textures solicit of us our instant homage”
Even floating free of context, like dubious emails or graffiti, the words suggest their author. Which poet of the late twentieth century, an American male, in case we’re playing Twenty Questions, might have written them? One who respects words and the world, a mature intelligence, seasoned, philosophical in the rare good sense. That certainly narrows the field. Another clue: In an essay on Moby-Dick, this poet praised Melville’s book as “genial, playful and full of deceptive levity.”
The words quoted at the top are from “Mathematics Considered as a Vice,” one of six previously uncollected poems by Anthony Hecht published in the September 2011 issue of Poetry. Hecht died almost seven years ago, and as his life recedes his work grows ever more essential. One reads Hecht’s poems with the same expectation of serious delight we bring to, say, the poems of Milton or Edgar Bowers. Read David Yezzi’s introduction to the new poems and use the link to see new photographs of Hecht and his work.
Here are “The Plate,” “A Friend Killed in the War,” “An Offering for Patricia,” “The Fountain” (after Baudelaire) and "Dilemma."
It’s a measure of how far poetry and Poetry have fallen that Hecht’s poems appear alongside the feckless humbug of Kevin Young, Sharon Olds, Peter Gizzi, Robert Wrigley and others. They might be written in alien, mutually uncomprehending tongues. We’re grateful for the resurrected poems but mourn all that we've lost. Hecht writes in “An Offering for Patricia”:
“These textures solicit of us our instant homage”
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
`Grapple Them Unto Thy Soul With Hoops of Steel'
When I returned to Texas in June, I resolved to learn more about the state, including some of its writers. My first memorable discovery was Adventures with a Texas Naturalist (1947) by Roy Bedichek (1878-1959). Though professionally an educator, Bedichek was a naturalist in the best amateur sense. His eye for detail was acute and he loved the varied landscapes of Texas. He started writing Adventures, his first book, at age sixty-eight at the urging of friends and fellow writers J. Frank Dobie (1888-1964) and Walter Prescott Webb (1888-1963), whose books I’m also investigating.
Bedichek’s book is slow-paced and meditative, and doesn’t indulge in politics or nature mysticism. He can write, a rare quality among writers. In a chapter titled “Co-operatives,” he describes a visit in 1937 to a woodland ten miles west of Lufkin, along the Neches River in East Texas. He sees a pair of pileated woodpeckers and scrawny cows in “cut-over lands” created by “big lumber interests.” Then he sees “monster sweet gum” lying on the ground: “Not counting its great bole, the top alone covered a space, oval in shape, approximately one hundred feet long and fifty feet wide at the center.”
Bedichek hears the humming of ruby-throat hummingbirds among the wildflowers growing around the felled tree – “masses of deep purple tradescantia mingled with red mallow in full bloom,” sunflowers, morning glories, “a bell-shaped flower, pale blue with yellow center, which I did not identify,” and “a coneflower called locally queen of the meadow.”
I like the encyclopedic urge to catalog the scene, with Bedichek’s willingness to confess occasional ignorance and his inclusion of folk names for flowers, which are at least as poetic as Latin names. With the “deep bass” of the hummingbirds he hears “humming in a higher pitch” – honeybees – and sees butterflies flitting among the blossoms. Here’s how Bedichek concludes the passage:
“The massive corpse of this tree was disintegrating amid a display of life’s most lively and colorful expressions: bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and flowers. Of course, less conspicuous life was thriving therein, but I can’t find that I made any note of it. I rarely notice an insect until it is in the bill of a bird, and then I want to know all about it.”
This voice of prickly attentiveness and curiosity is one expression of civilization, the gift for perceiving beauty in a clear-cut tract of former woodland, “after the rich and ancient life of the country had been ravaged.” In 1960, the year after Bedichek’s death, Dobie published I’ll Tell You a Tale, an anthology of his work, and dedicated it:
“To the memory of my cherished friend Roy Bedichek, a whole man of just proportions; a rare liver, in solitude as well as with genial companions; ample natured and rich in the stores of his ample mind; always understanding, whether agreeing or not; always enlarging both his own views and those of others. In talk he called forth all my powers, made me laugh, live more abundantly, love life with more reason.”
That stands as the finest epitaph I’ve ever read, confirmed by my reading of Bedichek’s book. It also stands as a pleasing corrective to the prevailing consensus about Texas as a backward, unlettered, marginally civilized place. In his introduction to I’ll Tell You a Tale, Dobie refutes the patronizing charge of regionalism. He’s no “county-minded provincial,” he says:
“Reading Hazlitt, Herodotus, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Boswell, Montaigne, and certain other emitters of luminosity never palls….I am so grounded in respect for the English language as used by noble writers for more than five hundred years that I have never been contemporaneous with more than four or five writers whom I admire. My contemporaries have lacked amplitude, wit, Johnsonian horse sense, play of mind, and other virtues common to predecessors still waiting to be enjoyed. Most modern American writing in the `best seller’ lists is so loosely—often sloppily, ignorantly, hideously—composed that it has no appeal for a craftsman disciplined to lucidity, and the logic of grammar, bred to a style `familiar but by no means vulgar,’ and harmonized from infancy with the rhythms of nature.”
The quoted words are spoken to Laertes by Polonius, a character always more misunderstood than Hamlet:
“Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar:
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel.”
Bedichek’s book is slow-paced and meditative, and doesn’t indulge in politics or nature mysticism. He can write, a rare quality among writers. In a chapter titled “Co-operatives,” he describes a visit in 1937 to a woodland ten miles west of Lufkin, along the Neches River in East Texas. He sees a pair of pileated woodpeckers and scrawny cows in “cut-over lands” created by “big lumber interests.” Then he sees “monster sweet gum” lying on the ground: “Not counting its great bole, the top alone covered a space, oval in shape, approximately one hundred feet long and fifty feet wide at the center.”
Bedichek hears the humming of ruby-throat hummingbirds among the wildflowers growing around the felled tree – “masses of deep purple tradescantia mingled with red mallow in full bloom,” sunflowers, morning glories, “a bell-shaped flower, pale blue with yellow center, which I did not identify,” and “a coneflower called locally queen of the meadow.”
I like the encyclopedic urge to catalog the scene, with Bedichek’s willingness to confess occasional ignorance and his inclusion of folk names for flowers, which are at least as poetic as Latin names. With the “deep bass” of the hummingbirds he hears “humming in a higher pitch” – honeybees – and sees butterflies flitting among the blossoms. Here’s how Bedichek concludes the passage:
“The massive corpse of this tree was disintegrating amid a display of life’s most lively and colorful expressions: bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and flowers. Of course, less conspicuous life was thriving therein, but I can’t find that I made any note of it. I rarely notice an insect until it is in the bill of a bird, and then I want to know all about it.”
This voice of prickly attentiveness and curiosity is one expression of civilization, the gift for perceiving beauty in a clear-cut tract of former woodland, “after the rich and ancient life of the country had been ravaged.” In 1960, the year after Bedichek’s death, Dobie published I’ll Tell You a Tale, an anthology of his work, and dedicated it:
“To the memory of my cherished friend Roy Bedichek, a whole man of just proportions; a rare liver, in solitude as well as with genial companions; ample natured and rich in the stores of his ample mind; always understanding, whether agreeing or not; always enlarging both his own views and those of others. In talk he called forth all my powers, made me laugh, live more abundantly, love life with more reason.”
That stands as the finest epitaph I’ve ever read, confirmed by my reading of Bedichek’s book. It also stands as a pleasing corrective to the prevailing consensus about Texas as a backward, unlettered, marginally civilized place. In his introduction to I’ll Tell You a Tale, Dobie refutes the patronizing charge of regionalism. He’s no “county-minded provincial,” he says:
“Reading Hazlitt, Herodotus, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Boswell, Montaigne, and certain other emitters of luminosity never palls….I am so grounded in respect for the English language as used by noble writers for more than five hundred years that I have never been contemporaneous with more than four or five writers whom I admire. My contemporaries have lacked amplitude, wit, Johnsonian horse sense, play of mind, and other virtues common to predecessors still waiting to be enjoyed. Most modern American writing in the `best seller’ lists is so loosely—often sloppily, ignorantly, hideously—composed that it has no appeal for a craftsman disciplined to lucidity, and the logic of grammar, bred to a style `familiar but by no means vulgar,’ and harmonized from infancy with the rhythms of nature.”
The quoted words are spoken to Laertes by Polonius, a character always more misunderstood than Hamlet:
“Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar:
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel.”
Monday, September 19, 2011
`Qualities We Admire and Talk About'
Through the kitchen window I watched hummingbirds at the feeders, hovering like wasps around rotting plums, when something flashed in the crape myrtle along the back fence. The blossoms are pink shading to magenta, and what I saw was yellow shading to orange, the color of a persimmon. I saw it again and knew, despite my obvious ignorance of bird distribution, it was a Baltimore oriole, one of the gaudiest North American birds. Its name is from the Latin aureolus, “golden.” Dickinson called the oriole “One of the ones that Midas touched.” Go here to see photographs of one taken last week here in Houston.
Like the scarlet tanager and indigo bunting, the oriole imports unlikely tropical colors to the North. Exotics are always a treat to see, but the thrill of novelty fades. (Dr. Johnson, wrong for once, on Tristram Shandy: “Nothing odd will do long.”) My tastes run to plainer beauties. Consider Mimus polyglottos, the Northern mockingbird, state bird of Texas, an avian post-modernist recycling the sounds of other birds. I heard one in upstate New York simulating the gurgle of water in a downspout. In Adventures with a Texas Naturalist (1947), Roy Bedichek devotes three chapters to the mockingbird, a bird with whom he obviously feels some affinity:
“The mockingbird has no color, no peculiarity of form, is of conventional size for the passerine order to which he belongs, never appears in great numbers, can’t be eaten, and is not a pest unless there is ripe fruit about the place…Yet inconspicuous as he is in appearance, if a poll were taken throughout his range, he would come forward in the upper five per cent of the birds readily recognized. There are dozens of other birds just as common that we see every day and never think to ask the names of. It is the mockingbird’s personality, even more than his song, which distinguishes him. He has qualities we admire and talk about.”
Sunday, September 18, 2011
`I Counsel Thee, Shut Not Thy Heart
It’s an intellectual parlor game, the fruit of late-night bull sessions, harmless if not taken seriously – setting up polarities between pairs of writers or thinkers, and dividing the world between them. One, we’re told, cannot be at once a Platonist and an Aristotelian. For George Steiner, the choice to be made was Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. (The answer, obviously: Chekhov.) The latest literary fight promoter is Arthur Krystal in “Slang-Whanger,” an essay about William Hazlitt in Except When I Write: Reflections of a Recovering Critic (Oxford University Press, 2011):
“Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate [book] collection, be shy of showing it; or if thy heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy books; but let it be to such a one as S.T.C. [Coleridge] -- he will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury: enriched with annotations, tripling their value. I have had experience. Many are these precious MSS. of his -- (in matter oftentimes, and almost in quantity not unfrequently, vying with the originals) -- in no very clerkly hand -- legible in my Daniel: in old Burton; in Sir Thomas Browne; and those abstruser cogitations of the Greville, now, alas! wandering in Pagan lands. ---- I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library, against S.T.C.”
“Prepare yourself: you cannot be both a Coleridgean and a Hazlittean. I’m sorry, but it needed to be said. This doesn’t mean that you can’t like both `Kubla Khan’ and `The Indian Jugglers,’ but somewhere along the line you have to choose. It’s an ontological thing. Coleridge had an idealizing nature, Hazlitt a skeptical one. Coleridge gravitated toward the Absolute; Hazlitt fled from it.”
No, I don’t have to choose. Opposed writers are not matter and antimatter; they can coexist. To my tastes, Hazlitt must even coexist with himself. By that I mean, he ranks among the prose stylists I most admire, and yet he can be a nasty, argumentative cuss. His sentences, at their best, drip with “gusto,” the quality he prized above all others in literature and life (as did Marianne Moore, an unlikely Hazlittean). Krystal says: “Hazlitt takes language for a ride.” To confirm this, just read “The Fight,” “On Reading New Books” and “On the Pleasure of Hating.” In the last he writes:
“The popularity of the most successful writers operates to wean us from them, by the cant and fuss that is made about them, by hearing their names everlastingly repeated, and by the number of ignorant and indiscriminate admirers they draw after them.”
We know what he means. Hazlitt’s prose makes palatable some of his crankiest moments, and ours. He makes hate loveable, fleetingly. This suggests the less attractive side of Hazlitt – several sides, actually: his nettlesome pettiness and imbecility about women and politics. He squandered his final years writing a four-volume biography of Napoleon. He’s a writer we can never whole-heartedly embrace. We love him and then we’re appalled by something he says, a reflection of the peculiar vacillation he repeatedly enacts. In “On the Pleasure of Hating” he writes:
“As to my old opinions, I am heartily sick of them. I have reason, for they have deceived me sadly. I was taught to think, and I was willing to believe, that genius was not a bawd, that virtue was not a mask, that liberty was not a name, that love had its seat in the human heart. Now I would care little if these words were struck out of the dictionary, or if I had never heard them. They are become to my ears a mockery and a dream.”
In this we hear the stammeringly fluent rhythms of a self-lacerating village scold. Krystal adores Hazlitt, who shows up in five of his twelve essays, and should be commended for his literary reclamation project. If there’ a choice to be made – and there isn’t – a more appropriate antagonist than Coleridge is a friend to him and Hazlitt, Charles Lamb. More than three years ago I wrote: “Hazlitt is the superior writer, I suppose, though I cast a sentimental vote for Lamb, a lovable man and essayist.” Today, for this reader, Lamb is champ, the greater essayist, big-hearted and generous enough to remain ever loyal to both Hazlitt and Coleridge, world-class egotists and soul-testers. In “The Two Races of Men” Lamb writes:“Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate [book] collection, be shy of showing it; or if thy heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy books; but let it be to such a one as S.T.C. [Coleridge] -- he will return them (generally anticipating the time appointed) with usury: enriched with annotations, tripling their value. I have had experience. Many are these precious MSS. of his -- (in matter oftentimes, and almost in quantity not unfrequently, vying with the originals) -- in no very clerkly hand -- legible in my Daniel: in old Burton; in Sir Thomas Browne; and those abstruser cogitations of the Greville, now, alas! wandering in Pagan lands. ---- I counsel thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library, against S.T.C.”
One can’t imagine such devotion and humor out of Hazlitt, who died 181 years ago today.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
`What Matters Is the Beauty of the Attempt'
"The language I have learn'd these forty years,
My native English, now I must forego:
And now my tongue's use is to me no more
Than an unstringed viol or a harp,
Or like a cunning instrument cased up,
Or, being open, put into his hands
That knows no touch to tune the harmony.”
I spent the morning interviewing a postdoctoral research fellow in computational and applied mathematics who also plays violin and viola. That math and music are intimately meshed isn’t news. We’ve known it since Pythagoras. This researcher’s aim is to “optimize” – in the mathematical sense – violin design. He writes algorithms to customize fiddles for individual players, indulging nuances of eccentric taste in a notoriously intransigent instrument.
Among the instruments he owns is an experimental violin with an angular, asymmetrical body painted black and red, built of balsa wood by a boatmaker in Maine. In his small office with the door closed, standing six feet away from my chair, the mathematician played the opening of the Sibelius Violin Concerto. My eyes teared from the unmediated force of his playing. I asked if he knew “Ashokan Farewell,” and he played it, and my eyes teared again.
The poet Donald Justice was a pianist who studied composition as a young man with Carl Ruggles at the University of Miami. Among his last poems was “At the Young Composers' Concert”:
“The melancholy of these young composers
Impresses me. There will be time for joy.
“Meanwhile, one can't help noticing the boy
Who bends down to his violin as if
“To comfort it in its too early grief.
It is his composition, confused and sad,
“Made out of feelings he has not yet had
But only caught somehow the rumor of
“In the old scores--and that has been enough.
Merely mechanical, sure, all artifice--
“But can that matter when it sounds like this?
What matters is the beauty of the attempt,
“The world for him being so far mostly dreamt.
Not that a lot, to tell the truth, has passed,
“Nothing to change our lives or that will last,
And not that we are awed, exactly; still,
“There is something to this beyond mere adult skill.
And if it moves but haltingly down its scales,
“It is the more moving just because it fails;
And is the lovelier because we know
“It has gone beyond itself, as great things go.”
The lines at the top of the post are from Richard II (Act I, Scene 3). The king has halted Mowbray’s challenge of Bolingbroke and banished him. Stung by the arbitrary severity of the king’s pronouncement, Mowbray replies, already knowing words fail him. There’s no human gift I envy more than musical performance. Words are a second-best substitute.
My native English, now I must forego:
And now my tongue's use is to me no more
Than an unstringed viol or a harp,
Or like a cunning instrument cased up,
Or, being open, put into his hands
That knows no touch to tune the harmony.”
I spent the morning interviewing a postdoctoral research fellow in computational and applied mathematics who also plays violin and viola. That math and music are intimately meshed isn’t news. We’ve known it since Pythagoras. This researcher’s aim is to “optimize” – in the mathematical sense – violin design. He writes algorithms to customize fiddles for individual players, indulging nuances of eccentric taste in a notoriously intransigent instrument.
Among the instruments he owns is an experimental violin with an angular, asymmetrical body painted black and red, built of balsa wood by a boatmaker in Maine. In his small office with the door closed, standing six feet away from my chair, the mathematician played the opening of the Sibelius Violin Concerto. My eyes teared from the unmediated force of his playing. I asked if he knew “Ashokan Farewell,” and he played it, and my eyes teared again.
The poet Donald Justice was a pianist who studied composition as a young man with Carl Ruggles at the University of Miami. Among his last poems was “At the Young Composers' Concert”:
“The melancholy of these young composers
Impresses me. There will be time for joy.
“Meanwhile, one can't help noticing the boy
Who bends down to his violin as if
“To comfort it in its too early grief.
It is his composition, confused and sad,
“Made out of feelings he has not yet had
But only caught somehow the rumor of
“In the old scores--and that has been enough.
Merely mechanical, sure, all artifice--
“But can that matter when it sounds like this?
What matters is the beauty of the attempt,
“The world for him being so far mostly dreamt.
Not that a lot, to tell the truth, has passed,
“Nothing to change our lives or that will last,
And not that we are awed, exactly; still,
“There is something to this beyond mere adult skill.
And if it moves but haltingly down its scales,
“It is the more moving just because it fails;
And is the lovelier because we know
“It has gone beyond itself, as great things go.”
The lines at the top of the post are from Richard II (Act I, Scene 3). The king has halted Mowbray’s challenge of Bolingbroke and banished him. Stung by the arbitrary severity of the king’s pronouncement, Mowbray replies, already knowing words fail him. There’s no human gift I envy more than musical performance. Words are a second-best substitute.
Friday, September 16, 2011
`He Would Have Received You With All Kindness'
Some writers are part of one’s mental furniture, as solid and dependable as a couch. Others, though fondly recalled, hardly amount to cobwebs on the ceiling, fragile filaments of association with scant content. Such is Samuel “Breakfast” Rogers (1763-1855), an English poet with a nickname worthy of a Mafioso. Nige sits on Rogers’ bench in London and reconjures for me this “poet and conversationalist”:
“Rogers was one of those figures who loom very large in their time, less for what they have written but for their conversation – Rogers’ was sharp, fluent and witty, by all accounts – and their prodigious abilities as mixers. He moved in the highest circles, both literary and social – the kind of man who knew everybody and was invited everywhere.”
Perhaps I read Rogers, or about him, in school, but the memory evaporated like morning dew. Guy Davenport reanimated him for me, as he did so many writers, speaking of him with affection, like an old if not terribly consequential friend. I had noted parenthetical mentions of “Breakfast” in his essays, and asked Davenport about him in 1990 when I visited his home in Lexington, Ky. He recalled Rogers with the fondness we reserve for benign but essentially silly aunts and uncles. In the title essay of The Geography of the Imagination (1980), Davenport writes:
“Shelley had put Petra in a poem as soon as Burckhardt discovered it: it is one of the places the wandering youth visits in Alastor; the others are taken from Volney’s Les Ruines (1791), which had also inspired Queen Mab and The Daemon of the World. [John William] Burgon, stealing half a line from Samuel Rogers’ Italy, makes Petra `half as old as time,’ for creation was still an event dated 4004 B.C.”
In “Travel Reconsidered” (The Hunter Gracchus, 1996) Davenport notes:
“Swiss and French travelers made ruins fashionable and invented Shelley. Wordsworth invented the Alps and taught us that waterfalls are grand. Byron organized these new feelings about travel into so many romantic thrills (`Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,’ 1812) and Samuel `Breakfast’ Rogers organized them (in his poem `Italy,’ 1822) for the less strenuous.”
And in “Horace and Walt in Camden" (The Death of Picasso: New and Selected Writing, 2003), Davenport writes:
“Goethe’s Johann Peter Eckermann, Samuel Johnson’s Boswell, Ben Jonson’s Laird of Hawthornden: to all of these interlocutors we are grateful for leaving a record. There are people remembered only for their talk: the infinitely witty Sydney Smith, the champion gossip Samuel `Breakfast’ Rogers; and, to a substantial degree, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Oscar Wilde.”
Rogers was a friend to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Scott, Thackeray, Tennyson and the Duke of Wellington, and best friend to the comparably well-nicknamed Richard “Conversation” Sharp. Charles Lamb wrote a sonnet to him. Dickens dedicated Master Humphrey's Clock and The Old Curiosity Shop to Rogers, who boasted that he had entertained three American presidents in his home – John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren and Millard Fillmore – as well as Daniel Webster, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. Hershel Parker in Herman Melville: A Biography 1819-1851 (1996) reports that the American novelist
“…arose early on [Dec. 20, 1849] to accept the honor of breakfasting alone with Samuel Rogers, whom he found a `remarkable looking old man truly,’ and whose paintings he found superb. Rogers paid him the high compliment of inviting him back to meet some ladies on Sunday.”
My edition of Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers (1856) was published in 1953 by the University of Kansas Press. It begins like this, in the manner of Uncle Toby:
“I was taught by my mother, from my earliest infancy, to be tenderly kind towards the meanest living thing; and, however people may laugh, I sometimes very carefully put a stray gnat or wasp out at the window.—My friend Lord Holland, though a kind-hearted man, does not mind killing flies and wasps; he says, `I have no feeling for insects.’”
The book is full of such tidbits, toothsome if not always filling. (It might be noted that Davenport put out bowls of sugar water to attract bees and wasps, and spare them the fly-swatter.) Rogers is reported saying:
“My friend [William] Maltby and I, when we were very young men, had a strong desire to see Dr. Johnson; and we determined to call upon him and introduce ourselves. We accordingly proceeded to his house in Bolt Court; and I had my hand on the knocker, when our courage failed us, and we retreated. Many years afterwards, I mentioned this circumstance to Boswell, who said, `What a pity that you did not go boldly in! he would have received you with all kindness.’”
Here is a sample of Rogers’ gift for economical storytelling:
“One night, after dining at Kensington Palace, I was sitting in the carriage, waiting for Sir Henry Englefield to accompany me to town, when a sentinel, at about twenty yards distance from me, was struck dead by a flash of lightning. I never beheld anything like that flash : it was a body of flame, in the centre of which were quivering zigzag fires, such as artists put into the hand of Jupiter; and, after being visible for a moment, it seemed to explode. I immediately returned to the hall of the Palace, where I found the servants standing in terror, with their faces against the wall.”
Rogers acquired his nickname for the breakfast gatherings (though he might also have been justly named “Dinner”) he hosted at his house in St. James’s Place – thus, Table-Talk. Go here to see “Samuel Rogers at his Breakfast Table,” an engraving by Charles Mottram in the Tate.
“Rogers was one of those figures who loom very large in their time, less for what they have written but for their conversation – Rogers’ was sharp, fluent and witty, by all accounts – and their prodigious abilities as mixers. He moved in the highest circles, both literary and social – the kind of man who knew everybody and was invited everywhere.”
Perhaps I read Rogers, or about him, in school, but the memory evaporated like morning dew. Guy Davenport reanimated him for me, as he did so many writers, speaking of him with affection, like an old if not terribly consequential friend. I had noted parenthetical mentions of “Breakfast” in his essays, and asked Davenport about him in 1990 when I visited his home in Lexington, Ky. He recalled Rogers with the fondness we reserve for benign but essentially silly aunts and uncles. In the title essay of The Geography of the Imagination (1980), Davenport writes:
“Shelley had put Petra in a poem as soon as Burckhardt discovered it: it is one of the places the wandering youth visits in Alastor; the others are taken from Volney’s Les Ruines (1791), which had also inspired Queen Mab and The Daemon of the World. [John William] Burgon, stealing half a line from Samuel Rogers’ Italy, makes Petra `half as old as time,’ for creation was still an event dated 4004 B.C.”
In “Travel Reconsidered” (The Hunter Gracchus, 1996) Davenport notes:
“Swiss and French travelers made ruins fashionable and invented Shelley. Wordsworth invented the Alps and taught us that waterfalls are grand. Byron organized these new feelings about travel into so many romantic thrills (`Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,’ 1812) and Samuel `Breakfast’ Rogers organized them (in his poem `Italy,’ 1822) for the less strenuous.”
And in “Horace and Walt in Camden" (The Death of Picasso: New and Selected Writing, 2003), Davenport writes:
“Goethe’s Johann Peter Eckermann, Samuel Johnson’s Boswell, Ben Jonson’s Laird of Hawthornden: to all of these interlocutors we are grateful for leaving a record. There are people remembered only for their talk: the infinitely witty Sydney Smith, the champion gossip Samuel `Breakfast’ Rogers; and, to a substantial degree, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Oscar Wilde.”
Rogers was a friend to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Scott, Thackeray, Tennyson and the Duke of Wellington, and best friend to the comparably well-nicknamed Richard “Conversation” Sharp. Charles Lamb wrote a sonnet to him. Dickens dedicated Master Humphrey's Clock and The Old Curiosity Shop to Rogers, who boasted that he had entertained three American presidents in his home – John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren and Millard Fillmore – as well as Daniel Webster, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. Hershel Parker in Herman Melville: A Biography 1819-1851 (1996) reports that the American novelist
“…arose early on [Dec. 20, 1849] to accept the honor of breakfasting alone with Samuel Rogers, whom he found a `remarkable looking old man truly,’ and whose paintings he found superb. Rogers paid him the high compliment of inviting him back to meet some ladies on Sunday.”
My edition of Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers (1856) was published in 1953 by the University of Kansas Press. It begins like this, in the manner of Uncle Toby:
“I was taught by my mother, from my earliest infancy, to be tenderly kind towards the meanest living thing; and, however people may laugh, I sometimes very carefully put a stray gnat or wasp out at the window.—My friend Lord Holland, though a kind-hearted man, does not mind killing flies and wasps; he says, `I have no feeling for insects.’”
The book is full of such tidbits, toothsome if not always filling. (It might be noted that Davenport put out bowls of sugar water to attract bees and wasps, and spare them the fly-swatter.) Rogers is reported saying:
“My friend [William] Maltby and I, when we were very young men, had a strong desire to see Dr. Johnson; and we determined to call upon him and introduce ourselves. We accordingly proceeded to his house in Bolt Court; and I had my hand on the knocker, when our courage failed us, and we retreated. Many years afterwards, I mentioned this circumstance to Boswell, who said, `What a pity that you did not go boldly in! he would have received you with all kindness.’”
Here is a sample of Rogers’ gift for economical storytelling:
“One night, after dining at Kensington Palace, I was sitting in the carriage, waiting for Sir Henry Englefield to accompany me to town, when a sentinel, at about twenty yards distance from me, was struck dead by a flash of lightning. I never beheld anything like that flash : it was a body of flame, in the centre of which were quivering zigzag fires, such as artists put into the hand of Jupiter; and, after being visible for a moment, it seemed to explode. I immediately returned to the hall of the Palace, where I found the servants standing in terror, with their faces against the wall.”
Rogers acquired his nickname for the breakfast gatherings (though he might also have been justly named “Dinner”) he hosted at his house in St. James’s Place – thus, Table-Talk. Go here to see “Samuel Rogers at his Breakfast Table,” an engraving by Charles Mottram in the Tate.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
`I Hid in My Own Stillness'
John Alec Baker’s The Peregrine (1967), another book I reread almost annually, when the memory of its inscrutable charm stirs again. In the backyard I’ve found evidence of hawk strikes, explosions of feathers on the brown grass. On Tuesday, they were blue, gray, black and white – the remains of a blue jay. I hear them daily, but I haven’t seen or heard a hawk since returning to Houston. On this rereading I noticed how often Baker uses “silent” or “silence” – twenty-two times in 190 pages, by my count, usually in reference to hawks or other birds. Nature is a noisy place, but Baker writes:
“I waited at the bridge. Birds were silent, and there was no wind. The sun shone in mist, like a burning moon [an effect I’ve often noticed, but Baker wrote it down]. I hid in my own stillness.”
In six words, that final sentence distills the book. Baker is often moving across the fields of Essex, following peregrines, yet remains still and silent, almost disappearing from his first-person narrative. For these reasons his voice sometimes reminds me of Beckett’s voices. Baker again:
“A hoarse bellowing shriek drew out to a sharp edge, and bristled away to silence. But not the silence that was there before.”
Here’s a five-sentence lesson in how to craft prose and how to simulate the way another species perceives the world:
“The white fields were littered with black rocks of birds; with the bulky outline of mallard, moorhen, and partridge; with the narrower shapes of woodcock and pigeon; with the small spots and streaks of blackbirds, thrushes, finches, and larks. There is no concealment. It is easy now for hawks. Their eyes see maps of black and white, like a crackle of silent film. The moving black is prey.”
I try to be quiet in the woods, hoping to disappear and observe, but only once can I remember being involuntarily struck into muteness. Twenty years ago I was walking across a field in a nature preserve in upstate New York, when I came to a road. To my left, weaving along the pavement, was a fat raccoon. His movements were spastic. He would stop, sit upright, shake his head and grasp the air with his forepaws. He made a catlike growl, more childish-sounding than threatening.
As a kid I’d seen a raccoon drop from a tree onto a dog’s back and tear into it. I knew this animal was rabid but for seconds I froze, even as it ran toward me. My mouth was dry and I couldn’t have yelled even if anyone had been close enough to hear. Finally, I trotted to the ranger’s station and reported the raccoon to a friend who worked there as a naturalist. He fetched his .22 from the gun rack and left to deal with the sick animal.
Years later, reading Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, I came upon a passage that described my experience with the raccoon, though Browne was writing “Of the Wolf”:
“The ground or occasional original hereof, was probably the amazement and sudden silence the unexpected appearance of Wolves do often put upon Travellers; not by a supposed vapour, or venomous emanation, but a vehement fear which naturally produceth obmutescence; and sometimes irrecoverable silence.”
“Obmutescence,” from the Latin obmutescere, “to become dumb or mute,” one of the hundreds of Browne coinages. It’s the first citation (1646) given in the Oxford English Dictionary, but I also like the fourth, from O. Henry’s “Heart of the West” (1904): “I was manna in the desert of Jud's obmutescence.”
“I waited at the bridge. Birds were silent, and there was no wind. The sun shone in mist, like a burning moon [an effect I’ve often noticed, but Baker wrote it down]. I hid in my own stillness.”
In six words, that final sentence distills the book. Baker is often moving across the fields of Essex, following peregrines, yet remains still and silent, almost disappearing from his first-person narrative. For these reasons his voice sometimes reminds me of Beckett’s voices. Baker again:
“A hoarse bellowing shriek drew out to a sharp edge, and bristled away to silence. But not the silence that was there before.”
Here’s a five-sentence lesson in how to craft prose and how to simulate the way another species perceives the world:
“The white fields were littered with black rocks of birds; with the bulky outline of mallard, moorhen, and partridge; with the narrower shapes of woodcock and pigeon; with the small spots and streaks of blackbirds, thrushes, finches, and larks. There is no concealment. It is easy now for hawks. Their eyes see maps of black and white, like a crackle of silent film. The moving black is prey.”
I try to be quiet in the woods, hoping to disappear and observe, but only once can I remember being involuntarily struck into muteness. Twenty years ago I was walking across a field in a nature preserve in upstate New York, when I came to a road. To my left, weaving along the pavement, was a fat raccoon. His movements were spastic. He would stop, sit upright, shake his head and grasp the air with his forepaws. He made a catlike growl, more childish-sounding than threatening.
As a kid I’d seen a raccoon drop from a tree onto a dog’s back and tear into it. I knew this animal was rabid but for seconds I froze, even as it ran toward me. My mouth was dry and I couldn’t have yelled even if anyone had been close enough to hear. Finally, I trotted to the ranger’s station and reported the raccoon to a friend who worked there as a naturalist. He fetched his .22 from the gun rack and left to deal with the sick animal.
Years later, reading Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica, I came upon a passage that described my experience with the raccoon, though Browne was writing “Of the Wolf”:
“The ground or occasional original hereof, was probably the amazement and sudden silence the unexpected appearance of Wolves do often put upon Travellers; not by a supposed vapour, or venomous emanation, but a vehement fear which naturally produceth obmutescence; and sometimes irrecoverable silence.”
“Obmutescence,” from the Latin obmutescere, “to become dumb or mute,” one of the hundreds of Browne coinages. It’s the first citation (1646) given in the Oxford English Dictionary, but I also like the fourth, from O. Henry’s “Heart of the West” (1904): “I was manna in the desert of Jud's obmutescence.”
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
`No One Relishes a Recondite Beauty More'
In 1934 the poet Edmund Blunden published Charles Lamb: His Life Recorded by his Contemporaries (Hogarth Press), a collection of recollections, anecdotes, letters and diary entries devoted to Elia’s alter ego. I only learned of the volume on Tuesday, and begrudged my job for keeping me from reading it, though not entirely.
Then Dave Lull sent a link to Lamb’s page at LibraryThing. I wasn’t familiar with this site and still don’t understand its purpose, but someone has enrolled Lamb as a member and writes in his voice about the books he owned. The device is corny but I appreciate the effort to recreate the contents of Lamb’s library and catalog it online. Also posted is this observation, attributed to Lamb’s friend Henry Crabb Robinson:
“Mr. Lamb's taste in books is also fine and it is peculiar. It is not the worse for a little idiosyncrasy. He does not go deep into the Scotch novels, but he is at home in Smollett or Fielding. He is little read in Junius or Gibbon, but no man can give a better account of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy or Sir Thomas Brown's Urn Burial or Fuller's Worthies or John Bunyan's Holy War. No one is more unimpressible to a specious declamation, no one relishes a recondite beauty more.”
In fact, the excerpt is from William Hazlitt’s The Spirit of the Age (1825), but “recondite beauty” is an apt description of Lamb’s bookish tastes. Born in the eighteenth, he was at home in the seventeenth century. In an 1829 letter to Bryan Waller Procter, after an editor had turned down one of his sonnets, Lamb writes: “Damn the Age! I will write for antiquity” – a fitting fight song for any serious writer. Lamb dwelled at the intersection of books and life, on the corner where the two were indistinguishable.
Blunden quotes the recollections of Thomas Westwood, a poet who was a schoolboy when he first met Lamb. In Note and Queries (1866), Westwood writes:
“Charles Lamb was a living anachronism—a seventeenth century man, mislaid and brought to light two hundred years too late. Never did author less belong to what was, nominally, his own time; he could neither sympathize with it, nor comprehend it. His quaintness of style and antiquarianism of taste were no affectation. He belonged to the school of his contemporaries, but they were contemporaries that never met him in the streets, but were mostly to be found in Poet’s Corner, or under gravestones of the long ago.”
In a passage Blunden quotes from The Angler’s Notebook (1884), Westwood reports Lamb never “gave a book to the binder,” instead having his dilapidated volumes mended by a cobbler. Westwood writes:
“Elia’s library, in consequence, was of a pervading brownness. Whatever `tooling’ his books might have possessed in former centuries, had been rubbed down to the vanishing point, and was not missed. Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, old Burton’s Anatomy, Drayton’s Polyolbion, Heywood’s Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels, the Duchess of Newcastle’s Sociable Letters, and a host of others, all wore the costume of their time and looked happy and at home in it. The general effect was harmonious, quaint, Elizabethan, and suited to the individuality of the owner. A dear old library, that, in which I passed most of my boyish leisure.”
Reading these recollections of Lamb, my long fondness for him and his essays and letters makes reassuring sense. His charm, learning and humor, his humanity undiluted by the nastiness and egotism of his brilliant friends Hazlitt and Coleridge, make him a proper model for writers working to balance life and literature. The only dissenter I’ve come upon in Blunden’s collection is Thomas Carlyle, a notably unpleasant human being in the manner of twenty-first century public intellectuals, who describes Lamb and his sister Mary as “a very sorry pair of phenomena.” Let’s conclude with the loving portrait of Lamb sketched by John Forster, friend to Dickens and his first biographer:
“When you entered his little book-clad room, he welcomed you with an affectionate greeting, set you down to something, and made you at home at once. His richest feasts, however, were those he served up from his ragged-looking books, his ungainly and dirty folios, his cobbled-up quartos, his squadrons of mean and squalid-looking duodecimos.”
[Dave also sent me the link to Samuel Johnson’s LibraryThing entry.]
Then Dave Lull sent a link to Lamb’s page at LibraryThing. I wasn’t familiar with this site and still don’t understand its purpose, but someone has enrolled Lamb as a member and writes in his voice about the books he owned. The device is corny but I appreciate the effort to recreate the contents of Lamb’s library and catalog it online. Also posted is this observation, attributed to Lamb’s friend Henry Crabb Robinson:
“Mr. Lamb's taste in books is also fine and it is peculiar. It is not the worse for a little idiosyncrasy. He does not go deep into the Scotch novels, but he is at home in Smollett or Fielding. He is little read in Junius or Gibbon, but no man can give a better account of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy or Sir Thomas Brown's Urn Burial or Fuller's Worthies or John Bunyan's Holy War. No one is more unimpressible to a specious declamation, no one relishes a recondite beauty more.”
In fact, the excerpt is from William Hazlitt’s The Spirit of the Age (1825), but “recondite beauty” is an apt description of Lamb’s bookish tastes. Born in the eighteenth, he was at home in the seventeenth century. In an 1829 letter to Bryan Waller Procter, after an editor had turned down one of his sonnets, Lamb writes: “Damn the Age! I will write for antiquity” – a fitting fight song for any serious writer. Lamb dwelled at the intersection of books and life, on the corner where the two were indistinguishable.
Blunden quotes the recollections of Thomas Westwood, a poet who was a schoolboy when he first met Lamb. In Note and Queries (1866), Westwood writes:
“Charles Lamb was a living anachronism—a seventeenth century man, mislaid and brought to light two hundred years too late. Never did author less belong to what was, nominally, his own time; he could neither sympathize with it, nor comprehend it. His quaintness of style and antiquarianism of taste were no affectation. He belonged to the school of his contemporaries, but they were contemporaries that never met him in the streets, but were mostly to be found in Poet’s Corner, or under gravestones of the long ago.”
In a passage Blunden quotes from The Angler’s Notebook (1884), Westwood reports Lamb never “gave a book to the binder,” instead having his dilapidated volumes mended by a cobbler. Westwood writes:
“Elia’s library, in consequence, was of a pervading brownness. Whatever `tooling’ his books might have possessed in former centuries, had been rubbed down to the vanishing point, and was not missed. Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, old Burton’s Anatomy, Drayton’s Polyolbion, Heywood’s Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels, the Duchess of Newcastle’s Sociable Letters, and a host of others, all wore the costume of their time and looked happy and at home in it. The general effect was harmonious, quaint, Elizabethan, and suited to the individuality of the owner. A dear old library, that, in which I passed most of my boyish leisure.”
Reading these recollections of Lamb, my long fondness for him and his essays and letters makes reassuring sense. His charm, learning and humor, his humanity undiluted by the nastiness and egotism of his brilliant friends Hazlitt and Coleridge, make him a proper model for writers working to balance life and literature. The only dissenter I’ve come upon in Blunden’s collection is Thomas Carlyle, a notably unpleasant human being in the manner of twenty-first century public intellectuals, who describes Lamb and his sister Mary as “a very sorry pair of phenomena.” Let’s conclude with the loving portrait of Lamb sketched by John Forster, friend to Dickens and his first biographer:
“When you entered his little book-clad room, he welcomed you with an affectionate greeting, set you down to something, and made you at home at once. His richest feasts, however, were those he served up from his ragged-looking books, his ungainly and dirty folios, his cobbled-up quartos, his squadrons of mean and squalid-looking duodecimos.”
[Dave also sent me the link to Samuel Johnson’s LibraryThing entry.]
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
`Protester Kitsch'
Some time ago I asked Helen Pinkerton to tell me more about R.L. Barth, the poet, editor, publisher and Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War. She obliged and over the weekend wrote a lengthy account of her dealings with him, concluding like this:
“I increasingly admire his poems about his Vietnam experience, as you do, and believe that he has written the best poetry to come out of that war.”
What may appear to be a left-handed compliment is not. True, little of literary worth came out of the war, poetry or otherwise, but Barth’s work, much of it collected in Deeply Dug In (University of New Mexico Press, 2003), is well-crafted, sharp and pointed, like a good knife.
One of his poems came to mind when I read this post by Cynthia Haven, which in turn reminded me of the time I saw Jane Fonda in person. It was November 1970, and I was a freshman at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. The day before, Fonda had been arrested by police when she flew into Cleveland. Her speech I remember only as an orgy of collective self-righteousness. Go here to see her police mugshot, taken more than a year and a half before this better-known photograph of her seated in a Hanoi antiaircraft emplacement.
Barth’s poem is “Movie Stars”:
“Bob Hope, John Wayne, and Martha Raye
Were dupes who knew no other way;
Jane Fonda, too, whose Hanoi hitch
Epitomized protester kitsch.”
Barth exercises exquisite tact in his choice of a final rhyme.
“I increasingly admire his poems about his Vietnam experience, as you do, and believe that he has written the best poetry to come out of that war.”
What may appear to be a left-handed compliment is not. True, little of literary worth came out of the war, poetry or otherwise, but Barth’s work, much of it collected in Deeply Dug In (University of New Mexico Press, 2003), is well-crafted, sharp and pointed, like a good knife.
One of his poems came to mind when I read this post by Cynthia Haven, which in turn reminded me of the time I saw Jane Fonda in person. It was November 1970, and I was a freshman at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. The day before, Fonda had been arrested by police when she flew into Cleveland. Her speech I remember only as an orgy of collective self-righteousness. Go here to see her police mugshot, taken more than a year and a half before this better-known photograph of her seated in a Hanoi antiaircraft emplacement.
Barth’s poem is “Movie Stars”:
“Bob Hope, John Wayne, and Martha Raye
Were dupes who knew no other way;
Jane Fonda, too, whose Hanoi hitch
Epitomized protester kitsch.”
Barth exercises exquisite tact in his choice of a final rhyme.
Monday, September 12, 2011
`The Sunlight, Falling As a Steady Shimmer'
“unremitting light”
Of sand, and given time, each tiny sun
Combined should make a world where starlight stains
The sky bright white and dark would be undone.
And yet the night remains. The dim stars gleam
Their separate ways, and constellations drawn
Connect their dots, while under them we dream
And sleep, then wake to such a thing as dawn.
The universe, expanding since its birth,
Is larger, older than its light; sublime,
The force that keeps this constant day from earth —
The same that measures out our years — is time:
The limitation that provides us night
And saves us all from unremitting light.”
That’s how summer feels in Houston. The sun looms closer than elsewhere, and is harder to ignore. There’s the light, glaring, unmediated white light, and radiant heat and all the invisible wavelengths of light. When I walk outside after being indoors much of the day, my skin tingles as though something crawled on it. The sunlight is palpable, energy with the heft of matter. Seattle averages fifty-eight days of sun a year; Houston, 204.
I think I first learned of Olber’s Paradox from the late Martin Gardner. Why is the night sky dark rather than blazingly light, as the existence of an infinite number of stars would suggest? Collected in Grace Notes: Poetry from the Pages of First Things (2010) is “Olber’s Paradox” by Robert W. Crawford:
“The heavens hold more stars than earth has grainsOf sand, and given time, each tiny sun
Combined should make a world where starlight stains
The sky bright white and dark would be undone.
And yet the night remains. The dim stars gleam
Their separate ways, and constellations drawn
Connect their dots, while under them we dream
And sleep, then wake to such a thing as dawn.
The universe, expanding since its birth,
Is larger, older than its light; sublime,
The force that keeps this constant day from earth —
The same that measures out our years — is time:
The limitation that provides us night
And saves us all from unremitting light.”
I remember concluding when very young that everything – or at least everything humans perceive – was the result of light. No light: no life. Similarly, since first reading the poems of Helen Pinkerton in Taken in Faith: Poems (2002), light and its corollary, darkness, have seemed ubiquitous in poetry, as fact and irresistible metaphor. This should have dawned on me (itself a light metaphor) years ago when first reading Dante. Here is another, earlier poem by Pinkerton, “Visible and Invisible”:
“In touching gently like a golden finger,
The sunlight, falling as a steady shimmer
Through curling fruit leaves, fills the mind with hunger
For meaning in the time and light of summer.
“Dispersed by myriad surfaces in falling,
Drawn into green and into air dissolving,
Light seems uncaught by sudden sight or feeling.
Remembered, it gives rise to one's believing
“Its truth resides in constant speed descending.
The momentary beauty is attendant.
A flicker of the animate responding
Shifts in the mind with time and fades, inconstant.”
The invisible makes the visible possible, light as being, everything the result of light.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
`There is Nothing More Important Than This Wound'
Two American writers, one a Jew, the other a sort of Quaker, both veteran observers of the twentieth century and its barbarisms. One flirted with Marxism in his youth, the other spied for the Soviet Union. Both recanted, the latter turning his witness into a literary masterpiece. Both presciently understood that terror would not die with Hitler and Stalin.
In the January 1949 issue of Partisan Review, Isaac Rosenfeld writes of the Holocaust in “The Meaning of Terror” (The Age of Enormity, 1962):
“It is impossible to live, to think, to create without bearing witness against the terror. But once we do so—behold, our great theme and occupation, our role, our language, our tone, and our audience—for what else is worth hearing today? This is the ground we have to defend against the terror, and on which we may hope to make joy come alive.”
In a letter to William F. Buckley dated Oct. 8, 1956 (Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers’ Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr. 1954-1961, 1969), Chambers writes:
“The age is impaled on its most maiming experience, namely, that a man can be simply or savagely—above all, pointlessly—wiped out, regardless of what he is, means, hopes, dreams or might become. This reality cuts across our minds like a wound whose edges crave to heal, but cannot. Thus, one of the great sins, perhaps the great sin, is to say: It will heal; it has healed; there is no wound. There is nothing more important than this wound.”
Saturday, September 10, 2011
`These Vile Weeds Are Sown by Vile Men'
I grew up calling it Jimson weed, though Nige knows it by the proper genus name, Datura. Just two weeks ago, walking along a freeway access road, I saw one flowering on a pile of dirt in the same empty lot where a single stalk of corn was growing. How’s that for serendipitous symbolism? The blossoms were white and probably it was Datura wrightii. Someone in Limestone County, Texas, named a town Datura in the 1880s. Population in 2000: two.
The Oxford English Dictionary tells us “datura” comes from the Hindi dhatūra, referring to “common Indian species used to stupefy and poison.” The earliest citation, dated to 1662, is from John Davies’ translation of Johann Albrecht Von Mandelslo’s Voyages and Travels in the East Indies: “A drug which… stupefies his senses…The Indians call this herb Doutro, Doutry, or Datura, and the Turks and Persians, Datula.”
In 1862, Henry Beveridge writes in his Comprehensive History of India: “From Hindoos was first learned the benefit of smoking datura in asthma.”
A single plant, known variously as angel’s trumpet, devil’s trumpet, Jamestown weed, thorn apple, Indian apple, moonflower and apple of Peru, has been used as medicine and poison, and as a sacred and recreational hallucinogenic – a lot of significance packed into one plant.
On Sept. 22, 1859, Thoreau inspected the cellar of a house that had been pulled down the previous spring, to “see if any new or rare plants had sprung up in that place which had so long been covered from the light.” Among others he found Urtica urens (annual nettle), Anethum graveolens (dill) and Nicotiana tabacum (cultivated tobacco). He notes that “a curse seems to attach to any place which has long been inhabited by man.” In the newly exposed basement he finds “a crop of rank and noxious weeds, evidence of a certain unwholesome fertility.”
Thoreau works himself into quite a state and writes: “As if what was foul, baleful, grovelling, or obscene in the inhabitants had sunk into the earth and infected it.” Now in a moral tizzy, he comes to datura, Jamestown-weed as he calls it:
“You find henbane and Jamestown-weed and the like, in cellars,—such herbs as the witches are said to put into their caldron. It would fit that the tobacco plant should spring up on the housesite, aye on the grave, of almost every householder of Concord. These vile weeds are sown by vile men. When the house is gone they spring up in the corners of cellars where the cidercasks stood always on tap, for murder and all kindred vices will out. And that rank crowd which lines the gutter, where the wash of the dinner dishes flows, are but more distant parasites of the host. What obscene and poisonous weeds, think you, will mark the site of a Slave State?—what kind of Jamestown-weed?”
Less than a month after Thoreau wrote his journal entry, on Oct. 16, John Brown and his men raided the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Va. They killed six people, including a free black man and two slaves, and 10 of Brown’s men were killed. On May 9, Thoreau and Emerson had attended a lecture given by Brown in Concord. On Dec. 2, 1859, the day he was hanged, Brown wrote:
“I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had as I now think vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.”
The Oxford English Dictionary tells us “datura” comes from the Hindi dhatūra, referring to “common Indian species used to stupefy and poison.” The earliest citation, dated to 1662, is from John Davies’ translation of Johann Albrecht Von Mandelslo’s Voyages and Travels in the East Indies: “A drug which… stupefies his senses…The Indians call this herb Doutro, Doutry, or Datura, and the Turks and Persians, Datula.”
In 1862, Henry Beveridge writes in his Comprehensive History of India: “From Hindoos was first learned the benefit of smoking datura in asthma.”
A single plant, known variously as angel’s trumpet, devil’s trumpet, Jamestown weed, thorn apple, Indian apple, moonflower and apple of Peru, has been used as medicine and poison, and as a sacred and recreational hallucinogenic – a lot of significance packed into one plant.
On Sept. 22, 1859, Thoreau inspected the cellar of a house that had been pulled down the previous spring, to “see if any new or rare plants had sprung up in that place which had so long been covered from the light.” Among others he found Urtica urens (annual nettle), Anethum graveolens (dill) and Nicotiana tabacum (cultivated tobacco). He notes that “a curse seems to attach to any place which has long been inhabited by man.” In the newly exposed basement he finds “a crop of rank and noxious weeds, evidence of a certain unwholesome fertility.”
Thoreau works himself into quite a state and writes: “As if what was foul, baleful, grovelling, or obscene in the inhabitants had sunk into the earth and infected it.” Now in a moral tizzy, he comes to datura, Jamestown-weed as he calls it:
“You find henbane and Jamestown-weed and the like, in cellars,—such herbs as the witches are said to put into their caldron. It would fit that the tobacco plant should spring up on the housesite, aye on the grave, of almost every householder of Concord. These vile weeds are sown by vile men. When the house is gone they spring up in the corners of cellars where the cidercasks stood always on tap, for murder and all kindred vices will out. And that rank crowd which lines the gutter, where the wash of the dinner dishes flows, are but more distant parasites of the host. What obscene and poisonous weeds, think you, will mark the site of a Slave State?—what kind of Jamestown-weed?”
Less than a month after Thoreau wrote his journal entry, on Oct. 16, John Brown and his men raided the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Va. They killed six people, including a free black man and two slaves, and 10 of Brown’s men were killed. On May 9, Thoreau and Emerson had attended a lecture given by Brown in Concord. On Dec. 2, 1859, the day he was hanged, Brown wrote:
“I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had as I now think vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.”
Friday, September 09, 2011
`I Once Set Fire to the Woods'
Not on the drive to campus but only after I had parked the car and was walking to my office did I notice the darkening in the sky to the west. It looked like a distant storm, a blue-gray front low in the sky, but our drought remains unrelieved and no rain is expected. I smelled a hint of smoke, soon dispersed by a breeze out of the east, and knew I was seeing a cloud of carbon and ash from the wildfires burning around the state. The effect was tackily apocalyptic, like a judgment visited on us by Hollywood and computer-generated imagery.
The house of my boss’ cousin in Bastrop burned down last weekend, 110 miles west of here. Fires are also burning in Montgomery County, north of Houston. The immediate causes remain unknown, though the proximate cause is certainly the drought. Given human nature, the fires have spawned conspiracy theories about climate change, as even the natural world has been politicized.
“I once set fire to the woods.”
The words are Thoreau’s, and the hint of braggadocio is real. On April 30, 1844, with his friend Edward Hoar, Thoreau started a fire on the shore of Fair Haven Pond to prepare the fish they had caught. Thoreau was twenty-six. In a journal entry for May 31, 1850, he notes the “earth was uncommonly dry,” the fire spread to the previous year’s dead grass and “in a few minutes it was beyond our reach.”
At this point, one might excuse a young man’s folly, even a Harvard graduate’s. After realizing his mistake, Thoreau runs toward Concord to report the fire. He meets the owner of a nearby field and runs with him back toward the spreading blaze. “What could I do alone,” Thoreau asks, “against a front of flame half a mile wide?” He climbs to the top of Fair Haven Cliff and sits “to observe the progress of the flames, which were rapidly approaching me, now about a mile distant from the spot where the fire was kindled.” Most of us, in Thoreau’s situation, would feel frantic with anxiety. Can we stop the fire? Will anyone be hurt? Thoreau writes:
“Hitherto I had felt like a guilty person — nothing but shame and regret. But now I settled the matter with myself shortly. I said to myself, `Who are these men who are said to be the owners of these woods, and how am I related to them? I have set fire to the forest, but I have done no wrong therein, and now it is as if the lightning had done it. These flames are but consuming their natural food.’ It has never troubled me from that day to this more than if the lightning had done it. The trivial fishing was all that disturbed me and disturbs me still. So shortly I settled it with myself and stood to watch the approaching flames.”
This is rationalization at a sociopathic pitch. The alarm has sounded in town, more than one-hundred acres of woodland will burn, and Thoreau writes, like a demented Yankee Nero: “It was a glorious spectacle and I was the only one there to enjoy it.” Read out of context, in a sort of literary blindfold test, the journal entry is a masterpiece of insight into the workings of the near-criminal mind from “the father of the environmental movement.”
The house of my boss’ cousin in Bastrop burned down last weekend, 110 miles west of here. Fires are also burning in Montgomery County, north of Houston. The immediate causes remain unknown, though the proximate cause is certainly the drought. Given human nature, the fires have spawned conspiracy theories about climate change, as even the natural world has been politicized.
“I once set fire to the woods.”
The words are Thoreau’s, and the hint of braggadocio is real. On April 30, 1844, with his friend Edward Hoar, Thoreau started a fire on the shore of Fair Haven Pond to prepare the fish they had caught. Thoreau was twenty-six. In a journal entry for May 31, 1850, he notes the “earth was uncommonly dry,” the fire spread to the previous year’s dead grass and “in a few minutes it was beyond our reach.”
At this point, one might excuse a young man’s folly, even a Harvard graduate’s. After realizing his mistake, Thoreau runs toward Concord to report the fire. He meets the owner of a nearby field and runs with him back toward the spreading blaze. “What could I do alone,” Thoreau asks, “against a front of flame half a mile wide?” He climbs to the top of Fair Haven Cliff and sits “to observe the progress of the flames, which were rapidly approaching me, now about a mile distant from the spot where the fire was kindled.” Most of us, in Thoreau’s situation, would feel frantic with anxiety. Can we stop the fire? Will anyone be hurt? Thoreau writes:
“Hitherto I had felt like a guilty person — nothing but shame and regret. But now I settled the matter with myself shortly. I said to myself, `Who are these men who are said to be the owners of these woods, and how am I related to them? I have set fire to the forest, but I have done no wrong therein, and now it is as if the lightning had done it. These flames are but consuming their natural food.’ It has never troubled me from that day to this more than if the lightning had done it. The trivial fishing was all that disturbed me and disturbs me still. So shortly I settled it with myself and stood to watch the approaching flames.”
This is rationalization at a sociopathic pitch. The alarm has sounded in town, more than one-hundred acres of woodland will burn, and Thoreau writes, like a demented Yankee Nero: “It was a glorious spectacle and I was the only one there to enjoy it.” Read out of context, in a sort of literary blindfold test, the journal entry is a masterpiece of insight into the workings of the near-criminal mind from “the father of the environmental movement.”
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