`The Kindly Mirrors of Future Times'

Forty-one years ago last month I went away to college, the first in my family to do so, when I was seventeen and ridiculously unprepared. I had read too much and comprehended too little. For two years I lived in Rodgers Quadrangle, a men’s dormitory on the campus of Bowling Green State University in Ohio. This is where I first rehearsed adult living, the scene of many rites of passage, most of them embarrassing to recall. The dorm was demolished last year to make way for a new one. A friend sent me a brief video of the destruction and I found another.

It’s not nostalgia I feel. That’s an indulgence I instinctively resist. Rather, knocking down the dorm leaves me with another mental map that no longer corresponds to an existing place. My memory is spatial. I remember rooms and the arrangement of objects in rooms. I remember the corner of my dorm room where I taped a sepia-toned picture of Kafka. I remember where we put the stereo and listened to An American in Paris and “Layla” for the first time. I remember the gooseneck lamp I used so as not to bother my roommate while I annotated Ulysses. And I remember the blanket on which I sat while reading Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading.

My favorite among Nabokov’s stories is “A Guide to Berlin,” written in Russian in 1925 and not translated into English (by the author and his son Dmitri) until 1976, when it was published in Details of a Sunset. It’s about the creation of memories and the possibility of willing ourselves into the memories of others. The narrator says:

“I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: To portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade."

`Prophecy Is a Matter of Seeing Near Things'

Seeing an artist’s work for the first time in person after viewing it for years online or in books is risky, a set-up for disappointment. Before entering the gallery I recalibrate expectations and try to shed them, knowing it’s not possible but hoping to simulate a first-time experience.  If the work is mediocre or lousy, I’ve lost nothing, only a little time. If it’s as good as I had hoped, or better, my pleasure is heightened by the sense of discovery and surprise.

Mary McCleary’s collages are better than I could have expected, more technically accomplished, more densely layered, more exuberant, funny, frightening and “literary” than I could have wished for. Twenty-seven of them are on display at Art League Houston through Nov. 12, and most can be seen on McCleary’s website.

Take “The Fall of Rome,” a small mixed-media collage from 2006. McCleary divides her rectangle into two triangles, blue above, white below, night sky and snow. Moving downward left to right along the diagonal is a herd of twelve reindeer, perhaps Santa’s. That’s it, except for a multi-colored strip of text running like ticker-tape around the perimeter of the picture. The text is small and unobtrusive, integrated unpretentiously into the design. Typed on it is the poem by W.H. Auden that lends its title to the collage. The final stanza comes as a sort of punch line to McCleary’s picture:

“Altogether elsewhere, vast

Herds of reindeer move across

Miles and miles of golden moss,

Silently and very fast.”

By taking Auden’s image literally, McCleary permits us to read his 1947 poem as if for the first time. She does something comparably comic and inspired in “Time the Painter,” a large (59-3/4 inches by 45-1/4 inches) collage from 2006. A man in overalls stands on a ladder (McCleary is fond of diagonals), painting a clapboard house. I should note that though her collages look like paintings from a distance and in reproduction, each is meticulously assembled from thousands of three-dimensional objects. Along the top edge of the collage is another of McCleary’s ticker-tape texts, this one unidentified but instantly identifiable--

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.”

--as the opening lines of “Burnt Norton,” the first of the Four Quartets. Another of my favorites among her works is “Trotline” (2009), in which a man watches as nine boys “bob” for apples hanging by strings from a trotline. Several of the boys have tags hanging from strings around their necks. One is labeled “2 Cor. 11:14.” In the King James Bible: “And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.” A trotline is a long fishing line strung with shorter lines, each ending with a baited hook. If, instead of being a Christian Scientist, Joseph Cornell had been an apocalyptically minded reader of the Book of Revelation, his work might have come to resemble McCleary’s.

Her collages are always reminding me of Flannery O’Connor’s stories. I don’t know whether she has read O’Connor or feels any conscious kinship, and I’m not suggesting anything so banal as “influence.” In an essay from 1960, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” O’Connor writes of grotesque characters in contemporary fiction (principally her own, we infer):

“They seem to carry an invisible burden; their fanaticism is a reproach, not merely an eccentricity. I believe that they come about from the prophetic vision peculiar to any novelist whose concerns I have been describing. In the novelist's case, prophecy is a matter of seeing near things with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up. The prophet is a realist of distances, and it is this kind of realism that you find in the best modern instances of the grotesque.”

Images of paradise lost, of hell with a happy face, proliferate in McCleary’s collages. In near things she sees signs and portents.

`Inconsistent With the Poetic Perception'

Looking for accounts of earlier North American droughts, I found this passage in Thoreau’s journal entry for Aug. 18, 1854:

“A great drought now for several weeks. The hay makers have been remarkably uninterrupted this year by rain. Corn and potatoes are nearly spoiled. Our melons suffer the more because there was no drought in June and they ran to vine, which now they cannot support. Hence there is little fruit formed, and that small and dying ripe. Almost everywhere, if you dig into the earth, you find it all dusty. Even wild black cherries and choke-cherries are drying before fairly ripe, all shrivelled. Many are digging potatoes half grown. Trees and shrubs recently set out, and many old ones, are dying. A good time to visit swamps and meadows. I find no flowers yet on the amphicarpaea.”

The final word refers to Amphicarpaea bracteata, the hog-peanut, which despite its common name has delicate flowers and protein-rich underground beans. I assume Thoreau sampled this toothsome legume. His description of the Northeastern drought is almost identical to what we’ve been enduring in Texas, along with the usual Yankee drollery – “remarkably uninterrupted” and “A good time to visit swamps and meadows.” It seems 1854 was a dry year for much of the country.

Most of the summer in Houston was almost free of mosquitos but the rains two weeks ago rekindled their life cycle. People are complaining, though I haven’t been bitten and have killed only five of them, a paltry showing. Later in the same day’s journal entry Thoreau writes:

“I have just been through the process of killing the cistudo for the sake of science; but I cannot excuse myself for this murder, and see that such actions are inconsistent with the poetic perception, however they may serve science, and will affect the quality of my observations. I pray that I may walk more innocently and serenely through nature. No reasoning whatever reconciles me to this act. It affects my day injuriously. I have lost some self-respect. I have a murderer's experience in a degree.”

A new word: “cistudo.” That’s an Eastern box turtle. Thoreau began collecting them in 1847, along with other species of fauna, for Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-born Harvard biologist. Among his thanks to contributors included by Agassiz in Contributions to the Natural History of the United States (1857) we find “Mr. D. Henry Thoreau, of Concord.” In “Agassiz” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981), Guy Davenport notes:

“The Thoreau to whom Agassiz made his acknowledgement was a scientist, the pioneer ecologist, one of the few men in America with whom he could talk, as on an occasion when the two went exhaustively into the mating of turtles, to the dismay of their host for dinner, Emerson.”

`Trying to Break Into an Electric Light Bulb'

A longtime reader of Anecdotal Evidence, Mary McCleary of Nacogdoches, has been named Texas Artist of the Year 2011 by Art League Houston. Her pictures are mysteries, as works of art ought to be, and simultaneously invite and elude efforts to pin them down and reduce them to “meaning.” But neither do they play the postmodern swindle of reveling in meaninglessness. The mystery starts with the medium, collage, manipulated in such a way as to simulate painting. She assembles them, McCleary says:

“…by attaching layer upon layer of materials such as paint, paper, rag board, foil, glitter, sticks, wire, mirrors, pencils, nails, glass, painted toothpicks, string, leather, lint, small plastic toys and other objects on heavy paper, much in the way a painter builds layer upon layer of paint on canvas.”

Her collages encourage us to read them the way we read Flannery O’Connor’s stories. They throw us into the middle of things, often mundane scenes – boys playing, a man painting a house – made fantastical and a little frightening. Her sense of irony is exuberant but fine-tuned. Nabokov said Gogol’s art “appeals to that secret depth of the human soul where the shadows of other worlds pass like the shadows of nameless and soundless ships.” McCleary's work dwells in that Gogolian realm. She writes:

“Drawing my subject matter from history and literature, I like the irony of using materials that are often trivial, foolish, and temporal to express ideas of what is significant, timeless, and transcendent.”

Take the 2008 collage “Sugaring Moths.” We see what appears to be a specimen case holding dozens of moths from various genera. This would be an amateur’s collection, the sort I kept as a kid, not an entomologist’s. Prominent in the upper left is Hyalophora cecropia, the largest species in North America. The expression “sugaring moths” is not whimsical but refers to a method used to attract the largely nocturnal insects. Go here and here for recipes.

McCleary often includes texts in her collages, and these can be difficult to decrypt online. Mark Sprinkle, in a blog post at The BioLogos Forum, helps with the text to “Sugaring Moths.” As he notes, most of it consists of another moth-attracting recipe, but the final two lines are the most suggestive: “He set them in order. Gathering against the night.” Sprinkle’s gloss is thoughtful and sympathetic, and I won’t elaborate on it except to say McCleary’s collage reminds me of a “trivial, foolish, and temporal” poem by Don Marquis, creator of archy the cockroach and mehitabel the cat. In “the lesson of the moth,” archy speaks with a moth who is “trying to break into / an electric light bulb / and fry himself on the wires.” archy asks why he does this and the moth explains:

“it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty”

Archy can’t agree, “but at the same time i wish / there was something i wanted / as badly as he wanted to fry himself”

`Spare His Dust'

With a birthday gift-card from friends I’ve ordered The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941-1956 . Until it arrives I’ll content myself with excerpts published online, including this passage quoted by Michael Dirda in his Washington Post review:

“Fifteen or twenty years of silence and solitude . . . I feel this evening that that would suit me, and suit me the least badly possible. I have bought a wheelbarrow, my first wheelbarrow! It goes very well, with its one wheel. I keep an eye on the love-life of the Colorado beetle and work against it, successfully but humanely, that is to say by throwing the parents into my neighbor’s garden and burning the eggs. If only someone had done that for me!”

Dirda quips: “That last sentence is characteristic of the gloomy Beckett we all love.”

Beckett is never “gloomy.” Mordant, yes. Grimly funny, blackly Irish, but never gloomy, a state that implies Eeyore-like lugubriousness. With Flaubert and Joyce, Hugh Kenner numbers Beckett among his “stoic comedians.” In gloominess I hear a strain of self-pity Beckett habitually mocks. He writes in Molloy:

“And as to making up my mind which quarter of the heavens was the least gloomy, it was no easy matter. For at first sight the heavens seemed uniformly gloomy. But by taking a little pains, I obtained a result, that is to say I came to a decision, in this matter.”

The almost scientific quest for gloominess cannot be gloomy. It is absurd and ridiculous; and thus, funny in a Swiftian vein. Consider Beckett’s self-mocking pleasure in his wheel barrow, an appropriate emblem of his art -- “It goes very well, with its one wheel” -- and his war with the Colorado potato beetle. Who knew Beckett’s interest in entomology extended beyond Kafka? His “humane” extermination of the beautiful and rapacious insect is a set-up for a self-deprecating punch line: “If only someone had done that for me!” From gardening woes to wooing oblivion in twenty-five words or less.

Andrei Alyokhin is an associate professor of applied entomology at the University of Maine who devotes a website to the Colorado potato beetle (a natural progression: Ireland, potatoes, Maine). Alyokhin shares Beckett’s delight in a life grounded in death:

“Humans, with our supposedly superior intelligence, have been trying to defeat this small and rather dumb animal for over 150 years. The weapons ranged from deadly chemicals to plagues of disease and parasites, and from flame throwers to genetically engineered chimeras. Yet, our ten-striped nemesis still represents a major threat to solanaceous crops. So, I salute you, Leptinotarsa decemlineata, for keeping me gainfully employed for the years to come.”

Farmers, biologists, the Irish and a few poets share a matter-of-fact amusement at the facts of life and death. None is sentimental or gloomy. In Beckett’s Dying Words (1993), Christopher Ricks quotes the reply by Beckett’s great favorite, Samuel Johnson, to Anna Seward, as reported by Boswell:

“The lady confounds annihilation, which is nothing, with the apprehension of it, which is dreadful. It is in the apprehension of it that the horror of annihilation consists.”

In 1796, twelve years after Johnson’s death, Seward published “Epitaph on Samuel Johnson” in the General Evening Post:

“The groans of Learning, tell that JOHNSON dies—
Adieu, great Critic of Colossal size;
Grateful, ye Virtues, round his tomb attend,
And deeply mourn your energetic friend.

“Avaunt, ye Vices, he was foe to you,
Yet one the subtlest of your tribe he knew—
He knew — but, ENVY, to his fame be just,
And though you stain'd his spirit, spare his dust.”

`Thankful to Be Down at Seven in the Morning'

In Stanley Elkin’s story “Perlmutter at the East Pole” (Criers & Kibitzers, Kibbitzers & Criers, 1966), Morty Perlmutter complains on the telephone:

“`I’m very low,’ Morty said again. `I’ve been thinking about you a lot. Today’s my fifty-ninth birthday. I haven’t got any friends, any family. My money is almost gone. My health stinks. I’m restless. Also I’m worried about the synthesis.’”

Never mind about the synthesis. Read the story for that. Morty’s line that always cracks me up is “I’m restless.” This is a complaint? Morty’s an anthropologist. Shouldn’t he know better? Laughing at what we narrowly miss being is always a blessing, even if it’s delusory.

On April 13, 1965, his fifty-ninth birthday, Samuel Beckett began writing his first television play, Eh Joe, devoted to “Joe, late fifties, grey hair, old dressing-gown, carpet slippers, in his room.” Joe might be Morty’s unhappier Irish cousin. The voice of a never-seen woman, a former lover, torments him for thinking he could ever forget her. Joe never speaks and she never stops:

“The best’s to come, you said, that last time . . . Hurrying me into my coat ... Last I was favoured with from you ... Say it you now, Joe, no one’ll hear you ... Come on, Joe, no one can say it like you, say it again now and listen to yourself ... The best’s to come ... You were right for once ... In the end.”

Today is my fifty-ninth birthday and I’m neither restless nor confined to a room, on the cusp of – what? Late middle age? My golden years? Dementia praecox? I’m not Morty or Joe, though I recognize them in the mirror.

I’m feeling closer to John Ruskin, who writes in his diary for Feb. 8, 1878, that he is “thankful to be down at seven in the morning, or only five minutes later, in good active health, ready either for writing or wood-chopping, on my fifty-ninth birthday, and with so much in my hands to do for everybody.”

Of course, by this point Ruskin is already turning quite daft.

`Winter in Summer?'

The first time I visited Albuquerque almost twenty years ago, friends warned me about “brown shock.” To a lifelong Northerner, the Southwest can appear monochromatic and blighted. Green is sparse and muted, and visitors must learn to live with a new palette.

On Monday, flying back into Houston from Seattle, I suffered from a mutated strain of brown shock. On my first trip to Houston seven and a half years ago, the city stunned me with its greenness from the air. I’ve never seen a city so densely planted with trees, and now after months of almost unrelieved drought, millions of them are dead and dying. From the air, acres of trees, loblolly pines in particular, look toasted by the sun.

John Clare’s “To a Dead Tree” is marred by sentimentality but one line is pertinent and worth salvaging: “Thy honours brown round thee that clothed the tree.” Over the weekend and during the flight I was reading the Collected Poems of Geoffrey Grigson (Allison & Busby, 1982). I had already associated the Dutch elm blight of half a century ago with the drought’s mass arboricide when I came upon Grigson’s “Driving Through Dead Elms”:

“Elms have died, over a green land

Is each, here, there, a leafless sad

Black upright drawing. It is

Winter in summer. 

“Through each delicate dead drawing

Sky shows. In some are black

Nests. But no rooks are in and out about

New life cawing

“Before leaves are coming. Why must that

Which is all the time here, be now

Visible—the winter,

Winter in summer?”

`From a Bare Bow'

I remember two non-musical, non-comedy LPs from childhood. One was a recording of ambient sound effects my brother and I found in a convenience store bin. The only cut I recall is of pigs in a slaughter house. It was so disturbing we listened to it hundreds of times – terrified hog snorts, men shouting, unidentified crashes like sledge hammers on sheet metal.

The other recording, an album of bird songs from the library, could have come from a different universe. Each cut represented the song of a single species identified in the liner notes. Memory leaves few specifics except a grinding sense of boredom after a few tracks. Why? Perhaps because I heard birds singing every day in the woods behind our house and could already connect song with species. The record had a context-less museum-like artificiality about it. I may have known little about avian courtship and territorial imperative, but I knew a bird was more than his song. The recordings left out feeding habits, the color of feathers and style of flight. The bird songs sounded birdless.

Andrew Young (1885-1971) was born the same year as Ezra Pound and died one year earlier. Unlike Pound, Young makes few concessions to the twentieth century in his poems, making “The Gramophone” (Speak to the Earth, 1939) noteworthy in its modernity. The English “gramophone” is the American “phonograph” (Edison’s coinage), though the demarcation was never absolute. Both referred to flat discs inscribed for storing sound, the immediate successor to wax cylinders. In the poem, one senses a lingering wonder at the novelty of a still-new technology:

“We listened to your birds tonight
By the firelight,
The nightingales that trilled to us
From moonlit boughs.

“Though golden snowflakes from the gloom
Looked in the room,
Those birds’ clear voices lingered on
Your gramophone.

“`Goodnight’ we said and as I go
High-heeled with snow
I almost hope to hear one now
From a bare bow.”

In the nineteen-thirties, it was still worth noting that one could listen to a bird “pouring forth thy soul abroad / In such an ecstasy!” while the snow was falling. A surfeit of sounds has jaded our ears. As Keats reminds us in another ode: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.”

`To Pursue Liberal Studies the Rest of Their Lives'

Since last spring I’ve been away from the classroom – the formal one, I mean, with blackboards, desks and discontent – and hardly miss it. I miss some of the kids but education in public schools is, at best, an inadvertence. Teaching is what you know and how you embody it -- a heresy to school administrators. Even a dumb kid knows when a teacher is bluffing, and thus learns early the importance of bluffing. In the third chapter of Walden, a punningly tart sentence Thoreau devoted to individuals has grown institutional in application:

“We spend more on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment.”

Much of Saturday was consumed with my sixth-grader’s linear algebra and a book project. I’m tempted to ignore the latter – a silly exercise devoted to a silly book – except to say that little hard knowledge was learned by anyone involved. The algebra, on the other hand, was bracing, like good coffee. I haven’t studied algebra in more than forty years, and it felt like a good workout followed by a good meal. This too recalls a passage from Thoreau, the one-time school teacher, who writes in the chapter of Walden cited above:

“It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure—if they are indeed so well off—to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives.”

`To Become Foundlings'

Back in Bellevue, Wash., for a long weekend with the family, I’m getting a brief respite from Houston’s muted autumn. Here the maples are yellowing and some have turned red and reddish-orange (the genus Acer is an exotic in Houston), and a roadside line of tulip trees is buttery yellow. The preponderance of conifers with their uncountable shades of green detract from one’s template of how autumn is meant to look. As with Lester Young’s tenor and Shakespeare’s sonnets, we measure each autumn against an exalted standard acquired early.

From the big-leaf maple in the backyard I picked a handful of samaras, tossed them in the air and watched their diffusive descent. I was testing a passage I read on the plane from A Prospect of Flowers: A Book About Wild Flowers (1945) by the poet, botanist and clergyman Andrew Young. The idea is for arboreal offspring to move away from the parent tree so as not to be smothered:

“Trees and shrubs use fleshy, or at least edible, fruits to scatter their seeds. It is not desirable that young plants should grow up beneath their parents; the parents might overlay them with their shade, or, absorbing the soil water, take, so to speak, the food out of their mouths. They too might suffer when the young plants grew up. Rousseau disposed of his children by carrying them out of the house to become foundlings; plants dispose of theirs in much the same way.”

I wasn’t expecting a satirical jab in the middle of a botany lesson, but this one is too good not to share. Like Mrs. Jellyby, Rousseau was a “telescopic philanthropist,” a broadly dispersed species today, sensitive to safely distant suffering and injustice, indifferent to the close-at-hand. The always trustworthy Flann O’Brien seems to have shared our opinion of the author of Émile. In At Swim-Two-Birds his narrator and friends are leaving a pub when:

“a small man in black fell in with us and tapping me often about the chest, talked to me earnestly on the subject of Rousseau, a member of the French nation. He was animated, his pale features striking in the starlight and his voice going up and falling in the lilt of his argumentum.

“I did not understand his talk and was personally unacquainted with him. But Kelly was taking in all he said, for he stood near him, his taller head inclined in an attitude of close attention. Kelly then made a low noise and opened his mouth and covered the small man from shoulder to knee with a coating of unpleasant buff-coloured puke. Many other things happened on that night now imperfectly recorded in my memory but that incident is still very clear to me in my mind. Afterwards the small man was some distance from us in the lane, shaking his divested coat and rubbing it along the wall. He is a little man that the name of Rousseau will always recall to me.”

`I Think of All the Sleeping Seeds'

One need not be a feckless optimist to see spring in the coming of fall. It’s among the rewards of age, I suppose, perceiving the bigger cycles, not mistaking now for forever. Even in Houston, where the temperature recently topped 100 degrees for thirty-six consecutive days, we’re basking in the forties overnight. Leaves don’t change color, except to turn a little browner, and winds gusted all day Wednesday. October in Houston felt like April in Cleveland. This latency of the seasons, the correspondence between opposing equinoxes, is distilled by the Scottish poet Andrew Young (1885-1971) in “Autumn Mist”:

“So thick a mist hung over all,
Rain had no room to fall;
It seemed a sea without a shore;
The cobwebs drooped heavy and hoar
As though with wool they had been knit;
Too obvious mark for fly to hit!

“And though the sun was somewhere else
The gloom had brightness of its own
That shone on bracken, grass and stone
And mole-mound with its broken shells
That told where squirrel lately sat,
Cracked hazel-nuts and ate the fat.

“And sullen haws in the hedgerows
Burned in the damp with clearer fire
And brighter still than those
The scarlet hips hung on the briar
Like coffins of the dead dog-rose;
All were as bright as though for earth
Death were a gayer thing than birth.”

Younger readers may find Young's final lines baffling. Spring, after all, represents birth and rebirth, right? Young titled his 1933 collection Winter Harvest. A similar imaginative grasp of the seasons and mortality is expressed by H.E. Bates in Through the Woods: The English Woodland—April to April (1936):

“Autumn slips a finger into August, but Spring has a revenge in December. Winter blows on September, but October still remains, with May and June, the loveliest month of the English year, a kind of second spring, uncertain but exhilarating, sunny and snowy, hot and frosty, bright and dark by turns, a sort of autumnal April.”

Nature supplies its fecund opposites. In another poem, “Autumn Seeds,” Young reminds us of the “sleeping seeds”:

“Although a thoughtful bee still travels
And midge-ball ravels and unravels,
Yet strewn along the pathway lie
Like small open sarcophagi
The hazel-nuts broken in two
And cobwebs catch the seed-pearl dew.

“Now summer’s flowers are winter’s weeds,
I think of all the sleeping seeds;
Winds were their robins and by night
Frosts glue their leafy cover tight;
Snow may shake down its dizzy feathers,
They will sleep safely through all weathers.”

My brother posted a picture he titles “October 18th,” though he might have called it “Halloween.” He shot it earlier this week at four o’clock in the afternoon in suburban Cleveland. It’s a Kentucky coffee tree growing between his house and the driveway. When I last lived there, more than forty years ago, it was treeless grass.

`This Set Off a Conversation'

In his attractively slender Whistling in the Dark: In Pursuit of the Nightingale (1993), Richard Mabey fashions a hybrid of commonplace book and discursive meditation on humans and birds. He includes the greatest hits of nightingale poetry (Keats, Clare, Coleridge) as well as a lovely passage from H.E. Bates’ Through the Woods: The English Woodland—April to April (1936). Mabey ponders why the song of this rather drab, elusive bird has resonated for centuries with our species:

“As for the nightingale’s song, it has always had for me the extra resonance of oratory. It hovers on the edge of speech, of dramatic monologue. And with its crescendos and redolent pauses, the whole performance could, at a pinch, be described as operatic.”

We know the feeling. Humans crave meaning and craft it where it may not already exist. Anthropomorphically simple-minded or not, we fancy nightingales and the rest of creation speak to us, and each of us decides whether to listen and how: “Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain.” A Russian listener writes:

“But birds talk as they always have done, and listening to them one feels convinced that there really is such a thing as bird language, the study of which must once have been the greatest of sciences. A friend of mine here had a splendid dream (in general, he is lucky with his dreams): he saw a bird with a long beak sitting on the window-sill and spoke to it, as we often do to hens and other domestic fowl: `Don’t be afraid of me!’ And the bird suddenly replied: `But I’m not afraid of you!’ This set off a conversation between them which was remarkably significant in some way, but he has unfortunately forgotten the sense of it.”

The author is Andrei Sinyavsky (1925-1997) who wrote under a pseudonym he took from a renowned Russian-Jewish gangster, Abram Tertz. Historians date the start of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union to the 1966 trial of Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, who were found guilty of smuggling anti-Soviet manuscripts out of the country. Sinyavsky was sentenced to seven years in a forced labor camp; Daniel, five.

The passage is from A Voice from the Chorus (translation by Kyril Fitzlyon and Max Hayward, 1976), a volume based on the two letters per month the Soviets permitted Sinyavsky to send to his wife. During his six years in the camp, he was not otherwise permitted to write. Near the end of the book, in a passage from 1971, Sinyavsky writes:

“What is the most precious, the most exciting smell waiting for you in the house when you return to it after half-a-dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, mouldering books.”

`All I Do is Remember Parts of Your Poems'

I’ve always been amply supplied with good teachers, regardless of what they do for a living. Good teachers excite us to remedy our ignorance. Among my chief educators today are such bloggers as Mike Gilleland, David Myers and Stephen Pentz. Each reliably alerts us to new writers worth reading and new ways to read worthwhile old writers.

On Monday, Stephen posted a fine poem by Stanley Cook (1922-1991), an English poet whose name I’m certain I’ve never heard before, though the title of the collection Stephen cited, Woods Beyond a Cornfield: Collected Poems (Smith/Doorstop Books, 1995), evoked a happy memory. If you look out the window of the second-floor study in Arrowhead, Herman Melville’s home in Pittsfield, Mass., where he completed Moby-Dick in 1851, you’ll see to the north the whale-shaped silhouette of Mount Greylock. But if you lower your gaze, you’ll see a field of corn and beyond it a line of woods. Melville planted the field in corn and potatoes the year he finished Moby-Dick.

Cook’s poems are gently ruminative, unpretentious in their engagement with the natural and human worlds. He’s the sort of quietly confident poet who would never presume to speak of “poetics” because he’s too busy trying to write good poems. For most of his life he was a teacher in Yorkshire. He had a wife and three children. He was “literary” only in the sense that he produced literature. In his introduction to Woods Beyond a Cornfield, the poet Peter Sansom quotes from an introduction Cook wrote to a pamphlet of his poems:

“I hope the steelworker and his wife next door would never need a dictionary to read my poems. I like to feel, too, that I have been as practical and unsentimental with a poem as if I had farmed, smithed or carpentered it—that the rest of the family would think I had done some `real’ work and not let them down.”

Often the subject of Cook’s poems is village life and the lives of his neighbors and relatives. He writes without a sense of self-dramatizing alienation. A poet and teacher is a worker among workers. Cook romances neither himself nor his working-class neighbors. None is a case study. Here is “Summer Evening”:

“Every Summer comes a transparent evening
Before the leaves are shopsoiled with dust
Or dated with Autumn. The eye and landscape
Linger upon each other, houses and hillside
Like an undeclared lover about to say
What he means. Time stops in the long twilight
For lovers outdoors; beyond the reach
Till the next time at least of biology
They watch the insects on scaffoldings of grass.
Games grow meaningless with repetition
And children whom rivalry nudges no longer
Go home together cooling in their sweat.
People exhibit their lives and life leaves time
To marry everyone: but the shops shut,
Bingo comes out, pubs close,
The bright sky tinges like petals of a flower
Stood in ink and the last bus runs.
Mind more than ever is crucified upon the body,
But the evenings I imagine must exist
For me to think of them even in error.”

Few poets today betray any knowledge of the lives of others in their poems. Cook has a fiction writer’s interest in human quiddity, its hardiness and vulnerability. I haven’t detected even one lapse into political pleading or posturing in Cook’s poems. The poetic precursor he most often cites is John Clare, another chronicler of nature and village life. In “To John Clare,” Cook might be addressing himself:

“Ghosts of smoke from the low cottage chimneys
Fail to define themselves, as they drag in the breeze
Beneath the weight of the rain-filled air
That utters the first stammering drops of a shower.

“Evening comes on and trees are dark
As a patch of damp, flowers from hemlock
And hedge parsley beaten down
By previous rain dim on the ground.

“Nothing clear remains for me to measure by
As shadows gather momentum toward the night;
Real and imaginary sorrows move
Gigantically within the gloom.

“Too dark to read: all I do is remember
Parts of your poems; time is maddening enough—
That all these trees stand around to pick
Your buried bones—without the world’s neglect.”

Like Clare and Melville, Cook has suffered “the world’s neglect.” Someday, perhaps, as has happened with Clare and Melville, this failure will be redressed.

`If Only to Wake My Neighbors Up'

In a letter to Horatio Robinson Storer written Feb. 15, 1847, while living at Walden Pond, Thoreau says:

“Though I live in the woods I am not so attentive an observer of birds as I was once, but am satisfied if I get an occasional night of sound from them.”

At 2:17 a.m. Monday I was exceedingly satisfied when a northern mockingbird perched in the post oak outside my bedroom window commenced his solo recital. I couldn’t fault him, and he was a “him.” He was looking for love, pitching avian woo. What pleases me most about the mockingbird is not his gift for stealing the songs of others, but the force and purity of his tone. There’s a defiant jauntiness about his sound. In this, he resembles Louis Armstrong.

For three minutes by the clock I lay there listening, enjoying the intrusion, comforted by the certainty I would soon fall back to sleep. His riffing started with a series of rising arpeggios, dropped and promptly resumed, with blue jay calls thrown in for counterpoint. The sound was fluid, confident and precise, and suddenly he stopped and I was out for another three hours. B.C. Robison writes of the mockingbird in Birds of Houston (Rice University Press, 1990):

“It will sing throughout most of the year, and in the breeding season of spring and early summer the melodies of this sassy, conspicuous bird will grace the daylight hours and often late into the night. I recall once being awakened well after midnight in the spring by a boisterous songster in the back yard. High up in a large sycamore tree, in the clear bright moonlight, a mockingbird was cheerfully singing, oblivious to the late hour.”

Cheeriness and confidence, we know, can mask their opposites. Let’s hope my out-of-season chanticleer is soon singing the occasional duet. Thoreau writes in Walden:

“I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.”

`The Candle Cures the SEEMS'

Roger Boylan has discovered a painter of one great painting, perhaps two, and that is more than sufficient. He describes George Ault’s Bright Light at Russell's Corners (1946) as “haunting, chilly, and perfectly conceived,” neatly distilling its genius. Ault is a geometrician, a deft arranger of lines and planes, black and white. His night is not some melodramatic maelstrom of darkness. It has the “chilly” perfection of a schematic diagram, without being thematically schematic. The painting invites precisely the metaphoric readings it most easily eludes, and Ault’s coolness cloaks a feverish existence.

As Roger suggests, the artist’s life was anything but deft. In his recently published To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America (2011, Smithsonian American Art Museum and Yale University Press), Alexander Nemerov says Ault’s “wish for order stems from a deeply personal cause,” and explains:

“Few other artists suffered no much personal misfortune. In 1915 his younger brother Harold killed himself in a suicide pact with his wife. In 1920 his mother died of anemia in a mental hospital. In 1929 his father dies of cancer, around the time that the family’s savings were lost in the stock market crash. In 1930 and 1931 Ault’s older brothers Donald and Charles killed themselves, one with gas, the other with strychnine. By the time he moved to Woodstock [N.Y.] with [his wife] in 1937, Ault was depressed, `erratic,’ and an `embittered alcoholic’ who had lost his gallery representation and alienated many of his artist friends and acquaintances…”

In 1948, Ault, age fifty-seven, drowned in a stream near his home in Woodstock, probably a suicide. In his final eleven years of suffering, he did his best work, including four nighttime paintings of Russell’s Corners and January Full Moon (1941). Roger writes:

“Fortunately, he left behind one or two near-perfect canvases, including [Bright Light at Russell’s Corners]. All the sound and fury of his life matter little now.”

Henry Vaughan fancied night as “thy dark Tent,” suggesting shelter, a counterintuitive notion. Closer to the truth for most of us is an October 1802 passage from Coleridge’s notebook. His son Hartley’s candle is Ault’s Bright Light:

“Hartley at Mr Clarkson’s sent for a Candle—the Seems made him miserable—what do you mean, my Love!—The Seems—the Seems—what seems to be & is not—men & faces & I do not [know] what, ugly, & sometimes pretty & then turn ugly, & they seem when my eyes are open, & worse when they are shut--& the Candle cures the SEEMS.”

[Go here for a lecture on Ault by Nemerov (the son of poet Howard Nemerov and nephew of photographer Diane Arbus). Dave Lull passes along this exerpt from Nemerov's book.]

`As Familiar Things Become Surprising'

Seldom does a death out of popular culture touch me or trigger even a momentary lapse into nostalgia. Some writers become friends whose lives and deaths are emotionally freighted, but not singers or actors. What they do gives me pleasure apparently neither deep nor lasting. Don Herbert was different. He was a “television personality,” an actor of sorts, one who mastered the role of teacher/magician. As Mr. Wizard, he performed science experiments with the pacing and payoff of magic tricks, but kept nothing secret. He wanted to teach you the trick so you became the magician. Viewers, in effect, were sorcerer’s apprentices.

His show went on the air in 1951, the year before I was born, so my memories of him pick up in the late nineteen-fifties, the immediate post-Sputnik era when science was patriotic. It was also fun and suggested that things happened for reasons that could be discovered and understood. The world was an orderly, law-driven place as well as a disorderly mess. When I was driving home from work one evening in June 2007, I heard on the radio that Herbert had died and I was unexpectedly saddened. The loss of a real teacher is rare and painful.

A.M. Juster publishes an elegy for Herbert, “Farewell, Mr. Wizard,” in the November issue of First Things:

“I conjure NBC in black-and-white.

You drop dry ice in water; fog is rising.

You sell us Celsius and Fahrenheit. 

“I lose you in a cloud of advertising—

Winston, Esso, Zenith, Mr. Clean,

those thirty-second breaks for Ovaltine—

then smile at Bunsen burners and balloons,

more ropes and pulleys. You are mesmerizing

as familiar things become surprising.

I dream of robots, rayguns, Mars and moons,

and know that someday Chevrolets will fly. 

“POOF! Static. I can’t make your show go on.

Space shuttles fall; the pumps are running dry.

Jihadists shop for warheads…Godspeed, Don.” 

That’s the lasting lesson of a good teacher: “You are mesmerizing / as familiar things become surprising.”

`To Think, Feel, Do Just As One Pleases'

October has cooled sufficiently to permit long, non-perspiring walks around campus at lunchtime. I never walk for fitness. That’s gravy. Mostly I walk to see and hear things, to empty my head and refill it with what serendipity delivers. Hazlitt puts it like this: “The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases,” and what pleases me on a walk is the quiet non-digitalized stuff of the world.

Much of the university stands on drained, filled-in marshland, and even months of drought leave damp patches, but most of the ground is dusty enough for me to polish my shoes after a walk. As a Northerner living in Texas, I see plants that will always remain exotic to my eyes – palms, live oaks, banana trees – but also familiar species as adaptably nomadic as I have been – dandelions, white clover, plantains. This mingling of foreign and familiar keeps things interesting.

On Friday I saw two old friends. The great or common mullein, Verbascum thapsus, sinks a deep taproot in its first year, insurance against dry Texas summers. The one I saw is about five feet tall, mostly brown, probably at the end of its second year. It stands in the dusty space between a chain-link fence and the north-facing wall of a lab. The leaves are still velvety but growing brittle. The flowers on the long raceme have dried up and it looks like a wick waiting to be dipped in tallow.

Nearby, in a rare patch of tall grass, grows a cluster of Dipsacus fullonum, thistle-like teasel, also spelled “teasle,” “teazle” and “teazel.” The heads are spiky and were used to raise the nap on fabrics – that is, tease it. The genus name is from the Greek for “thirst” (as in dipsomania), a reference to the rain water that collects in the little bowls formed by the axils of the leaves along the stem. Like the mullein, the teasels I saw were gray-brown and dry like beached driftwood.

For the first time I'm reading the English naturalist Richard Jefferies, his Wild Life in a Southern County (1879). Too often, Jefferies' prose, true to his century, is flaccidly rhapsodic. Occasionally, when naturalist trumps prose-poet, he writes with the exactitude of a true poet. Here is his beautifully detailed description of a teasel collecting water, a set-piece worthy of Agassiz or Thoreau:

"The large leaves of this plant grow in pairs, one on each side of the stem, and while the plant is young are connected in a curious manner by a green membrane, or continuation of the lower part of the leaf round the stem, so as to form a cup. The stalk rises in the centre of the cup, and of these vessels there are three or four above each other in storeys. When it rains, the drops, instead of falling off as from other leaves, run down these and are collected in the cups, which thus form so many natural rain-gauges. If it is a large plant, the cup nearest the ground--the biggest--will hold as much as two or three wine glasses. This water remains there for a considerable time, for several days after a shower, and it is fatal to numbers of insects which climb up the stalk or alight on the leaves and fall in. While the grass and the earth of the bank are quite dry, therefore, the teazle often has a supply of water; and when it dries up, the drowned insects remain at the bottom like the dregs of a draught the plant has drained. Round the prickly dome-shaped head, as the summer advances, two circles of violet-hued flowers push out from cells defended by the spines, so that, seen protruding from the hedge, it resembles a tiara--a green circle at the bottom of the dome, and two circles of gems above."

`Autumn Inspiration Makes a Summer All Its Own'

Retiring faculty and staff at Rice University with at least twenty years of service get a tree. That is, one of the roughly 4,200 trees on campus is dedicated to them. A metal plaque with their name and title, and the name of the tree (we have eighty-eight species), is bolted to a stone and the stone is planted beneath the tree. For my money, this beats having your name affixed to a nanotechnology lab.

On the way back from the library I paused to read one of the plaques, this one dedicated to the late Norman Hackerman, a chemistry professor and for fifteen years the president of the university. His tree is a particularly lush Quercus virginiana, a southern live oak that stands across the road from my building and appears unfazed by the drought. One of the associate deans walked past and expressed the fear that because a lot of people work a long time for the university, easily accruing twenty years and more, we may soon run out of trees. We agreed the solution was a happy one: Plant more of them.

I realized that standing beneath one of the dedicated trees and reading the plaque reminded me of another, more somber act – reading headstones in a cemetery. Not all of the dedicatees are dead, of course, but still there’s something reverential about the act, demanding thoughtfulness and respect, even if  we've never met the retiree or recognized the name. For this reason, living trees, cared for by campus groundskeepers but necessarily tough customers in this climate, are fitting shrines, one I hope to earn.

In the Nov. 4, 1950, issue of The New Yorker, Richard Wilbur published “In the Elegy Season,” a poem collected that same year in Ceremony and Other Poems. It’s a tour de force of technique and feeling. All Souls’ Day is Nov. 2, Día de los Muertos for many in this part of the country. The poem’s second line is one of the finest Wilbur has ever written, as is the entire poem:

“Haze, char, and the weather of All Souls’:
A giant absence mopes upon the trees:
Leaves cast in casual potpourris
Whisper their scents from pits and cellar-holes.

“Or brewed in gulleys, steeped in wells, they spend
In chilly steam their last aromas, yield
From shallow hells a revenance of field
And orchard air. And now the envious mind

“Which could not hold the summer in my head
While bounded by that blazing circumstance
Parades these barrens in a golden trance,
Remembering the wealthy season dead,

“And by an autumn inspiration makes
A summer all its own. Green boughs arise
Through all the boundless backward of the eyes,
And the soul bathes in warm conceptual lakes.

“Less proud than this, my body leans an ear
Past cold and colder weather after wings’
Soft commotion, the sudden race of springs,
The goddess’ tread heard on the dayward stair,

"Longs for the brush of the freighted air, for smells
Of grass and cordial lilac, for the sight
Of green leaves building into the light
And azure water hoisting out of wells.”

The seasons in Houston are flattened, without the colorful demarcations of the North. I miss the latitudinal drama of autumn, its beauty and cyclical reassurance, but take some comfort in Wilbur’s reminder that “an autumn inspiration makes / A summer all its own.”

`To Keep Art From Being Too Refined'

With his Tuesday post at First Known When Lost, Stephen Pentz includes a lovely painting, “A Clearing in the Wood” (1942) by Eliot Hodgkin. The English artist, who died in 1987 at age eighty-one, specialized in still-lifes. I see no portraits and few landscapes among his works available online. To the editors of The Studio, an art magazine in England, he wrote in 1957:

“In so far as I have any conscious purpose, it is to show the beauty of natural objects which are normally thought uninteresting or even unattractive: such things as Brussels sprouts, turnips, onions, pebbles and flints, bulbs, dead leaves, bleached vertebrae, an old boot cast up by the tide. People sometimes tell me that they had never really ‘seen’ something before I painted it, and I should like to believe this…”

Art cleanses vision. Attentively read, passages in Clare, Ruskin and Thoreau sharpen visual acuity. Nothing, correctly seen, is “uninteresting,” to use Hodgkin’s word. Look again at "A Clearing in the Wood." Hodgkin is no photo-realist. There’s a softness to his lines, not a hard focus, but without sacrifice of detail. The time depicted appears to be early autumn – a light fog (“Season of mists”), mushrooms and moss, brown leaves on the ground, trees largely leafless. In design and palette, though not season, the painting recalls Albrecht Dürer's Das große Rasenstück (Large Piece of Turf ).

Consider another Hodgkin painting, “Leaves and Tubers” (1941-42), with a palette similar to “Clearing.” So too is the complicated mesh of diagonals. Scroll down to read of Hodgkin’s interest in creating a “pictorial record” of the “colonization of London’s bombed sites by wild flowers-willow herb, ragwort, etc.” He chooses to paint tubers, the appendage in which some plants store nutrients. They are visually interesting but also suggest energy, fecundity, a future – priceless wartime qualities.

In Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Unloved Plants (2010), Richard Mabey writes about the remarkable efflorescence of flowers and other plants in London’s bomb sites. The English botanist Sir Edward James Salisbury documented the phenomenon in Weeds and Aliens (1961). Citing Salisbury’s work, Mabey mentions both plants Hodgkin specifies – “the purple surf of rosebay willowherb – already christened `bombweed’ by Londoners” and “The jazzy chrome flowers of Senico squalidus (Oxford ragwort – an eighteenth-century immigrant from the slopes of Mount Etna) had graffitised the rubble of London’s Wall.” Mabey writes:

“Professor Salisbury logged a total of 126 species in all. It was a weed storm, a reminder, if anybody needed one, of how thinly the veneer of civilization lay over the wilderness.”

The art of nature seems mortally bound to the nature of art. Randomness and order intermingle. Anthony Hecht writes in “The Gardens of the Villa D’Este,” collected in his first book, A Summoning of Stones (1954):

“For thus it was designed:
Controlled disorder at the heart
Of everything, the paradox, the old
Oxymoronic itch to set formal strictures
Within a natural context, where the tension lectures
Us on our moral state, and by controlled
Disorder, labors to keep art
From being too refined.”

`A Subtle and Spiritual Idea'

“Mr. McCabe thinks that I am not serious but only funny, because Mr. McCabe thinks that funny is the opposite of serious. Funny is the opposite of not funny, and of nothing else.”

What ought to be obvious sometimes arrives with the force of revelation. This is Chesterton humorously disarming a humorless critic in “On Mr. McCabe and a Divine Frivolity” (Heretics, 1905). Chesterton goes on to ask: “About what other subjects can one make jokes except serious subjects?” The McCabe in question is Joseph McCabe, a one-time Roman Catholic priest who left the church and became a champion of “rationalism.” McCabe is a figure, like Soame Jenyns, best remembered for being dismantled by a vastly greater writer – a humorous fate.

I remembered poor laughless McCabe during an exchange of emails with Elberry, when I thanked him for sending me something and added:

“Most days your blog remains a reliable source of laughter, which is becoming for me almost the most important thing in the world.”

I’ve always associated the absence of a sense of humor with dullness, poverty of imagination, a pinched spirit. Chesterton is right: Only the serious is worthy of joking. Joy-killers preoccupy themselves with trivia. Elberry replies in words that unknowingly echo Chesterton:

“Humour is serious, important, but it's impossible to construct a manifesto, school, or philosophy of humour - it really is `the thing itself’, you can't mess about with it or really do anything with it - that makes it tremendously valuable, as an undeniably real thing in a world of bullshit, posturing, lies, and outright insanity. i think if you write something that makes someone smile or laugh, that's a wholly real thing and the more real things people have, the less authoritative bullshit comes to seem. i say it's serious but there's no need to be serious about it, indeed that would be like saying sex is important so we should be very serious and ponderous about it. As Wittgenstein said of logic, humour takes care of itself.”

That’s the Chestertonian spirit. Elberry also writes:

“i once asked a friend who is a mystic of sorts, if god has a sense of humour. He thought about it for a while, then said: `he doesn't make jokes. But i think he has a sense of the general irony of things.’”

In “The Cockneys and Their Jokes” (All Things Considered, 1908), Chesterton writes:

“When once you have got hold of a vulgar joke, you may be certain that you have got hold of a subtle and spiritual idea.”

`Before Our Eyes Stood All the Promise of the Year'

A friend is about to become a grandmother for the first time. The due date is Oct. 20. Monday morning, thinking of her daughter, soon-to-be granddaughter and the world they inherit, my friend started to read Yeats’ “Among School Children,” but after a couple of lines she began to cry and closed the book. “I can’t read poetry now. It scares me,” she said. Early in the poem Yeats writes of

“...a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy –"

Hardly a Hallmark sentiment for an incipient grandmother. We thought we had switched topics by talking about the impending centennial celebration at Rice University. What would the university’s first president, Edgar Odell Lovett, think of the place if he were to return to campus in 2011? “He would be horrified,” my friend said, and I had to agree. “He would be scared and appalled.” Ours is not a world he could have foreseen.

We tried another conversational gambit and found a happier subject. Despite pornography, Facebook, computer games and other horrors, we agreed the Internet is a wonderful invention. My friend’s mother is eighty-four and cyber-phobic. She challenged her mother to name any subject that interested her. “The Old Gold Dancers,” the octogenarian replied. In seconds, my friend came up with this.

I shared my most recent Internet triumph. Over the weekend I had reread The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolly and marked this passage:

“Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than daffodils. Spring is a call to action, hence to disillusion, therefore is April called `the cruellest month.’ Autumn is the mind's true Spring; what is there we have, `quidquid promiserat annus’ and it is more than we expected.”

I got the Eliot but the source of the Latin tag stumped me. A few keystrokes took me to a disputed scrap of verse by Petronius, author of Satyricon. Go here and scroll down to Fragment XXX for the Latin. Here is a translation by Harold Edgeworth Butler (Post-Augustan Poetry: From Seneca to Juvenal, 1909):

“Now autumn had brought its cool shades, Phoebus’ reins glowed
less hot and he was looking winterward. The plane was beginning
to shed her leaves, the vine to count its clusters, and its
fresh shoots were withered. Before our eyes stood all the
promise of the year.”

And here is a version by R. Bracht Branham and Daniel Kinney (Satryica, University of California Press, 1996):

“Autumn had broken summer’s sweltering shadows
and Phoebus steered a cooler course toward winter;
the plane-tree had begun to shed, the vine
to cast its leaves and reckon up its bunches;
before our eyes there hung the whole year’s promise.”

`Such Is the Wisdom of October'

“October’s cache receives Summer.

Under creaking branches bared to rain

Wet wads of leaves clog the gutter.”

All day the rain fell, starting before dawn when the sound of rolling thunder woke me. The gentle crash accompanied by the thrum of rain on the roof is a comfort, and I fell back to sleep. The lines above are from Tony Connor’s “Autumn” (Things Unsaid: New and Selected Poems 1960-2005).

By mid-morning, the trees and grass had recovered some of their greenness. Eddies of dirt formed on the driveway and in the street, as rain washed away six months of dust. The ground is baked hard and is slow to absorb so much water. I replenished the backyard feeders and the birds bathed and fed at the same time. I counted three blue jays and two cardinals, male and female. One exotic showed up – a pale yellow parrot who fed on the seeds that had fallen to the ground. I watched him through the kitchen window with binoculars and saw that his features resembled a parakeet’s, but larger.

Except for one errand I stayed indoors all day, reading, writing and cleaning. Despite the rain, the small cat periodically went outdoors. Each time she came back in, the big cat washed her with her tongue, concentrating on face and ears. Cyril Connolly writes in The Unquiet Grave (1944):

“Cracking tawny nuts, looking out at the tawny planes [that is, plane trees] with their dappled festoons of yellow and green, reading the Tao Te Ching by a log fire: such is the wisdom of October: autumn bliss; the equinoctial study of religions.”

`Yes, I Like Rain'

I hear people sympathizing with the trees in our ongoing drought, an admirable sentiment, but rain is more than utilitarian. Like squirrels, blue jays and mushrooms, rain is inexpensive entertainment.

Lately, it’s been scarce but emphatic. It fell for five minutes Saturday morning, hammering the roof of my car as I drove to campus. Pedestrians panicked. A woman’s umbrella inverted. She wrestled with it in the rain instead of stepping under a nearby awning. Others held shopping bags over their heads, and paper coffee cups sailed down the gutter. Joggers ran faster.

G.K. Chesterton loved rain and his wife hated it. With her cousin, Chesterton founded the Society for the Encouragement of Rain. His biographer, Ian Ker, reports: 

“Meetings were to take place on Salisbury Plain under the sign of an umbrella, at which members would be served coffee and cakes under the rain.” 

Ever playful, like a happy child, and always grateful for the world’s gifts, Chesterton writes in an 1895 letter quoted by Ker: 

“I have just been out and got soaking and dripping wet; one of my favorite dissipations. I never enjoy weather so much as when it is driving, drenching, rattling, washing rain….Yes, I like rain. It means some thing, I am not sure what; some thing freshening cleaning, washing out, taking in hand, not caring-a-damn-what-you-think, doing-it-duty, robust, noisy, moral, wet.” 

In the parking lot, I watched a blue jay in a puddle taking an enthusiastic, all-over bath.

`Trembling in Front of the Shelves'

Elberry passes along a remembrance of libraries by the English playwright and novelist Alan Bennett, who is grateful for them and recalls them in detail, though his early experiences were unlike my own:

“This resentment, which was, I suppose, somewhere mine, had to do with feeling shut out. A library, I used to feel, was like a cocktail party with everybody standing with their back to me; I could not find a way in.”

I don’t remember ever feeling baffled, intimidated or excluded by a library. Mine was not a bookish family and I had no models of assiduous reading. Fortunately, my bent was always oppositional: My parents smoked, I never did. They didn’t read, I never stopped. Libraries were the ideal home – quiet and filled with books. We had two within walking distance, and later added the main library downtown, reachable in thirty minutes by bus. Bennett writes:

“For a child a library needs to be round the corner. And if we lose local libraries it is children who will suffer. Of the libraries I have mentioned the most important for me was that first one, the dark and unprepossessing Armley Junior Library. I had just learned to read. I needed books.”

It’s a hunger that never abates, one that Alfred Kazin shared. In A Walker in the City (1951) he writes of growing up in Brooklyn:

“On those early summer evenings, the library was usually empty, and there was such ease at the long tables under the plants lining the windowsills, the same books of American history lay so undisturbed on the shelves, the wizened, faintly smiling old lady who accepted my presence without questions or suggestions or reproach was so delightful as she quietly, smilingly stamped my card and took back a batch of new books every evening, that whenever I entered the library I would walk up and down trembling in front of the shelves. For each new book I took away, there seemed to be ten more of which I was depriving myself.”

It’s a reassuring hunger because I’ve always understood it would never go away but there was always another book to read. On Friday I was in the basement of the university library, trolling in one of its backwaters near the end of the Library of Congress alphabet, the T’s, U’s and Z’s, books about cooking, bibliographies and military science. This is largely terra incognita, ripe for exploration and deployment of the library’s most reliable reference guide – serendipity. I returned with treasures:

Vietnam Zippos by Sherry Buchanan (Thames & Hudson, 2007), an amply illustrated history of the cigarette lighters carried by American troops in Southeast Asia.

Animal to Edible by Noëlie Vialles (Cambridge University Press, 1994), an anthropological study of abattoirs in the Adour region of southwest France.

A Civil War Cook Book: Typical of the Times But Timely for Today by Myrtle Ellison Smith (Lincoln Memorial University, Harrogate, Tenn., 1961). Here is Ms. Smith’s recipe for lard:

“Cut the pork fat up in pieces about 2 inches square; fill a vessel holding about 3 gallons with the piece; put in 1 pint of boiled lye make from oak and hickory ashes, and strained before using; boil gently over a slow fire until the cracklings have turned brown; strain and set aside to cool. This will give more, whiter and better lard than any other process.”

`There Is Nothing More to Say'

“To delight in the aspects of sentient ruin might appear a heartless pastime, and the pleasure, I confess, shows the note of perversity.”

This is Henry James in “Roman Rides” from Italian Hours (1909), a collection of travel pieces written over a span of forty years. Before she settled on Pleasure of Ruins as her title, Rose Macaulay contemplated calling her 1953 study of architectural decay A Heartless Pastime. For months I’ve driven almost daily past the foundation of a house that was standing when I moved from Houston more than three years ago. I didn’t notice it until it was gone, and I stopped this week to take a closer look.

Like most houses in Houston, it had no basement. What remains is a cement slab. Leading to what was once the front door are a stone sidewalk and two cement steps. I’m not sure this constitutes a “sentient ruin,” as in capable of feeling, but like any former dwelling it carries an aura of habitation. The lines traced by the interior walls that no longer exist are visible. Imagination fills in the rooms, five of them. Plaster, pipes, lathing and glass litter the slab, and grass grows in cracks and dust.

Is it accurate to say this torn-down house is beautiful? If not, it certainly stirs something akin to an aesthetic reaction. There’s a poignancy and human resonance, a great latency of feeling in what is no longer there. If I viewed a house destroyed in a war zone, especially if I knew its inhabitants had been wounded or killed, my response would be different, closer to pity or sorrow. A house abandoned or demolished for less malevolent reasons suggests, in their absence, the lives of its former occupants. Is this tainted by James’ “note of perversity?” Two sentences after the passage above from Italian Hours, he writes: “Beauty is no compensation for the loss, only making it more poignant.”

Looking at some of Wright Morris’ photographs of empty houses, many in his native Nebraska, I thought of E.A. Robinson’s early villanelle “The House on the Hill”:

“They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.

“Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.

“Nor is there one to-day
To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.

“Why is it then we stray
Around the sunken sill?
They are all gone away,

“And our poor fancy-play
For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.

“There is ruin and decay
In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say.”

Villa: from the Latin for “country house.” Villanelle: the same, by way of Italian for “rural, rustic.” Villain: “a low-born base-minded rustic” (OED).

`I Dwell on These Rarities'

It was on the ground between a bicycle rack and a brick wall. I mistook it for a piece of bark among the dried-up leaves of a fallen live oak branch. I looked again and understood it was a sparrow lying on its side. I nudged him with a stick and knew he was dead. In a residential neighborhood, a cat surely would have carried him off but I’ve never seen a cat on campus.

His feathers were pristine. This was a house sparrow, the humble distillation of birdness turned invisible by familiarity. Their springy hop when feeding is distinctive, a pleasure to watch, inducing what Chesterton called “the ecstasy of the ordinary.” Seeing a dead bird brings a fleeting sense of guilt and uncertainty. It seems indecent to let it rot or for a groundskeeper to lift it with his shovel. I kept walking.

Robert Wells is an English poet born in 1947. He was a friend to Edgar Bowers, and I’ve been reading his Collected Poems and Translations (Carcanet, 2009). There I found “Common Sparrow”:

“A poisoned seed or knock from a windscreen: loosely
The slight body lies in the handkerchief.

“I set you among oakleaves, turn you with a twig,
Ruffle your feathers and draw out the wing.

“Bird of Venus, show me how you are made,
the markings that you were quick to hide. Your tail

And folded sides dark feathers edged with brown,
Your breast the colour of an uncertain sky,

“The yellow patch at the base of your squat beak,
Your freckled top and cheeks of puffed grey down,

As if guilty of some cherished crime, I dwell
On these rarities and make my acknowledgement.”

The sparrow is “common” yet possesses “rarities.” Wells might have written “respect,” but that’s too emphatic and self-regarding. With “acknowledgement,” a seemingly unpoetic word, he chooses well. In a Nov. 22, 1817, letter to Benjamin Bailey, Keats writes:

“I scarcely remember counting upon happiness — I look not for it if it be not in the present hour — nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.”

`The Handmaid of Sorrow and Fear'

The initiated will know our man – or men -- from the first line:

“For Your Cliché Album

In what can no man tell the future has for us?

Store.

With what do certain belligerents make their military dispositions?

Typical Teutonic thoroughness.

In what manner do wishful thinkers imagine that the war will be over this year?

Fondly.

Take the word, `relegate’. To what must a person be relegated?

That obscurity from which he should never have been permitted to emerge.

What may one do with a guess, provided one is permitted?

Hazard.

And what is comment?

Superfluous.”

The final exchange in this “Catechism of Cliché” is inarguably true of its author, Brian Ó Nualláin (dba Brian O’Nolan, Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen, etc.), born on this date one-hundred years ago in Strabane, County Tyrone, Ireland. Dissecting humor to biopsy its life force is homicide, which hardly deters the coroners of academe. I have in front of me `Is It About a Bicycle?’: Flann O’Brien in the Twenty-First Century (Four Courts Press, 2011), edited by Jennika Baines. The collection is not entirely horrible, and we can be grateful to its contributors for liberally quoting from the great man’s work, but one of the assembled scholars has the tin-eared temerity to write of At Swim-Two-Birds:

“The modes of play that facilitate cooperative dialogues on L1 (ilinx) and L2 (alea-agôn) become increasingly cluttered with competing voices across L3 (mimicry and agôn) and L4 (untempered agôn).”

As Myles na gCopaleen puts it: “a harrowing survey of sub-literature and all that is pseudo, mal-dicted and calloused in the underworld of print.” The only worthwhile way to celebrate a writer is to read him, chronologically in O’Brien’s case. Let’s begin with At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), this will do, picked at random with the finger method:

“Quickly they repaired to a small room adjoining Miss Lamont’s bedroom where the good lady was lying in, and deftly stacked the papered wallsteads with the colourful wealth of their offerings and their fine gifts—their golden sheaves of ripened barley, firkins of curdy cheese, berries and acorns and crimson yams, melons and marrows and mellowed mast, variholed sponges of crisp-edged honey and oaten breads, earthenware jars of whey-thick sack and porcelain pots of lathery lager, sorrels and short-bread and coarse-grained cake, cucumbers cold and downy straw-laced cradles of elderberry wine poured out in sea-green egg-cups and urn-shaped tubs of molasses crushed and crucibled with the lush brown-heavy scum of pulped mellifluous mushrooms, an exhaustive harvesting of the teeming earth, by God.”

I love the self-parodying Irish excess of such passages, sweet on the tongue. O’Brien’s second novel, posthumously published as The Third Policeman (1967), is a metaphysical horror story (Its final line: “`Is it about a bicycle?’ he asked.”), and some readers prefer it to At Swim-Two-Birds. I know an Irish-born professor of mechanical engineering who grew up reading Myles’ “Cruiskeen Lawn” column in The Irish Times, and who has read An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth) in the original Irish. I spoke with him last week and we swapped favorite Myles bits and laughed till we sputtered and coughed. He’s particularly fond of the running Keats and Chapman routines. This sample of Keatsiana is for Michael Carroll:

“Keats was once presented with an Irish terrier, which he humorously named Byrne. One day the beast strayed from the house and failed to return at night. Everybody was distressed, save Keats himself. He reached reflectively for his violin, a fairly passable timber of the Stradivarius feciture [a word not found in the Oxford English Dictionary], and was soon at work with chin and jaw.

“Chapman, looking in for an after-supper pipe, was astonished at the poet’s composure, and did not hesitate to say so. Keats smiled (in a way that was rather lovely).

“`And why should I not fiddle,’ he asked, `while Byrne roams.’”

Myles turned out “Cruiskeen Lawn” columns from 1940 until the death of Brian Ó Nualláin and the others on April Fool’s Day 1966. The publishing event of the young century would be an intelligently edited and annotated edition of all The Irish Times columns. In “A Bash in the Tunnel,” written in 1951 on the tenth anniversary of James Joyce’s death, O’Brien defines his own “stuff”:

“Humour, the handmaid of sorrow and fear, creeps out endlessly in all Joyce’s work. He uses the thing in the same way as Shakespeare does but less formally, to attenuate the fear of those who have belief and who genuinely think that they will be in hell or in heaven shortly, and possibly very shortly. With laughs he palliates the sense of doom that is the heritage of the Irish Catholic. True humour needs this background urgency: Rabelais is funny, but his stuff cloys. His stuff lacks tragedy.”

[See what Roger Boylan has to say here, here and here about Flann O'Brien.]

[As to "feciture," it's Dave Lull to the rescue here.]

`Enough of Remote and Inhospitable Land'

Probably the first naturalist I read was Edwin Way Teale (1899-1980), author of “The American Seasons” series, four volumes that stirred a boyish urge to explore the American continent. With his Mississippi River books, Mark Twain had a similar impact, as did maps from the U.S. Geologic Survey, John Ford’s westerns and, later, Bernard DeVoto’s histories.

Starting in 1947, Teale and his wife drove more than 75,000 miles across North America, tracking the seasons. The result was North with the Spring (1951), Autumn Across America (1956), Journey Into Summer (1960) and Wandering Through Winter (1965). Coincidentally, Kerouac based On the Road on the journey he made across the country between July and October 1947. Fortunately, Teale, unlike Kerouac, could write.

His prose, however, is sometimes overripe, like Whitman in one of his amative moods. I’m rereading Autumn Across America, which begins which a rhapsody on Monomoy Island off Cape Cod: “Where low dunes roll their yellow waves inland from the shore on Monomoy…” In his third paragraph, Teale reveals his true literary pedigree:

“Not many miles from where we stood, Henry Thoreau once faced the Atlantic on an outer beach of Cape Cod and observed that there a man had put all America behind him. For us, rather, all America lay before us.”

Teale refers to the final sentence in Thoreau’s posthumously published Cape Cod (1865): “A man may stand there and put all America behind him.”

In this case, I prefer Teale’s orientation to Thoreau’s, which is typically snippy. I’ve often dreamed of a westbound journey from one coast to the other, and back. I’ve done it, but only incrementally, in chopped-up fashion. Teale notes that only with the coming of the automobile has it become possible to follow a season in a season. Audubon, Bartram and Muir traveled on foot or by horseback or stagecoach. Rare among nature writers, Teale is grateful for the automobile:

“We talked that day, as we stood amid the seaside goldenrod and sparse marram grass on Monomoy, of all the people to whom we were indebted for bringing within our grasp this dreamed-of journey through autumn—the steel worker, the automobile makers, the road menders, the glass-factory technicians, even those old, old innovators, the first men to use fire and employ wheels and devise cloth and leather to keep themselves warm and dry. They all had contributed something to the travels that lay before us and to them all we were profoundly grateful.”

One of the book’s themes is Teale’s democratic-mindedness. He likes people, average American men and women, and doesn’t count himself part of a literary elite. In Ohio, part of what he calls “the Land of the Turning Wheel,” what we now call the Rust Belt, he writes:

“That undercurrent of poetic feeling that runs through the great mass of men was revealing itself everywhere on place-signs and on rural mailboxes. Here, as all across the land, it was finding expression in the names bestowed by farmers on their homestead: The Seven Pines, Hidden Acres, Long Furrow Farm, Willow Bend, Green Pastures, Killdee Farm, Far Hills, Hickory Stick Farm, The Windy Oaks, Meadow Lane Farm.”

To Teale’s list I can add the name of a farm in Galena, Ill., where we spent a week in the summer of 1966: Shetland Acres. Another of Teale’s endearing qualities is his willingness to complain and admit when he’s bored or frightened. Later in the journey, he visits the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah and marvels at the presence of three monarch butterflies in this vast alkaline wasteland. He writes:

“We looked back on that land of desolation—the end of the world surrounded by mountains—and thought how long a time it would take to feel at home in all this dry country in the west, so lonely and overwhelming. And in that moment I was aware of a curious mental reaction that, no doubt, a psychologist would find revealing. There swept over me a fierce hunger for books, for libraries, for all the worn favorites on my shelves at home, for the commingled smell of old paper and glue and ink that surrounds the stacks of every public library. I longed for Keats and Shakespeare and Conrad and Thoreau and [W.H.] Hudson. I had, for that day, enough of wilderness, enough of remote and inhospitable land.”

I remembered something David Myers wrote about his visit to Bryce Canyon in southwestern Utah last summer during a cross-country drive with two of his sons:

“I couldn’t imagine human life there. The sheer complexity of the geological history on display swallows up any thought of work or politics, makes humanistic speculation pointless.”

In “To a Portrait of Melville in My Library,” Yvor Winters writes:

“Wisdom and wilderness are here at poise,
Ocean and forest are the mind’s device.”