Hitchhiking in Algeria

     Algeria had enjoyed at the time of my visit less than a decade of independence. People pointed to bullet-scarred walls with pride. The government was the secular National Liberation Front – the Islamic fundamentalists were studying scripture instead of seeking to take power. In several ways, the revolution was evident even to the casual traveler; the contrast with Morocco was inescapable. Instead of cramped rooms where boys crowded on benches and chanted Koranic verses all day, there were many small, modern schools. Health clinics, though decidedly modest, operated even in small towns. When a beggar approached the tourist seeking a handout, a practice approved by Islam, others sometimes stepped up to say that no one needed to beg, that the NLF provided for all.
     We set out eastward from Oran, taking a bus to the edge of town and then seeking to hitchhike the coastal road to Roman ruins in Cherchell and on to Algiers. The fact that we caught a few rides only took us into the deep countryside where we became stranded. In the U.S.A. hitchhiking, now all but extinguished, was fairly efficient back then, but along this particular route we saw only a horsecart every twenty minutes or so, a car or truck once or twice an hour. We were in a rural spot, well out of any town, yet somehow a crowd of children gathered from here and there once they had heard about the novel attraction. They hunkered down just across from us and gazed with satisfaction, thinking perhaps of how their friends would be impressed by their encounter with such exotic characters. When we opened a backpack to get a drink of water, the crowd stirred in excited interest; boys craned their necks to learn as many of our secrets as they might.
     Patricia felt a desire to pee. There was no cover for a considerable distance, and the children would never have let one of us out of sight in any event. We waited. In the distance a man on a donkey appeared, not a promising figure from our point of view. He approached and trundled by with hardly a glance our way.
     After several hours, a pickup truck pulled over, the window rolled down, “Est-ce que vous êtes americaines?” “Oui, oui.” The window rolled back up and the care accelerated. Wondering if the driver was a critic of American foreign policy, we waited on. After ten minutes the car reappeared, the window opened, and through came a hand with an old oversize American banknote, what proved to be a 1907 five dollar bill. “An American army soldier gave this to my grandfather. Take it, you can use it perhaps, but you must write me a postcard from America.” And off he sped.
     We were beginning to consider the possibility of sleeping rough by the roadside, and by now we both wanted to pee. Suddenly, of all things, an empty taxi appeared, though heading in the wrong direction. We remembered a village named Khadra only a few miles back, so we hailed the cab and asked to be taken there, figuring we could catch some sort of bus. The town was small, lacking a hotel or a real restaurant, but there was a small café which, we thought, meant a likely w.c. We went in and inquired and the man behind the counter gestured toward a door. A so-called “Arab toilet” would have been welcome indeed, but, when the door was opened, it revealed only the small back yard of the café which people clearly used as a latrine.
     Thrown into the street, we had by now gathered a crowd of followers even larger than that out in the countryside. A local madman wandered by and they tried to set him on us, and might have enjoyed a more amusing spectacle than the lot out on the highway, but we had by that time found an informant who told us that no bus would leave until five the next morning. We were kindly offered the option of sleeping on board the bus. This seemed satisfactory, though the urination problem was becoming urgent.
     Just then, a car drove up. The local schoolteacher had heard of our arrival and had come to offer us immediate relief and hospitality. Though we were backpackers, we were foreigners who knew something of the world, and he considered himself unfairly stranded in this village, cut off from the modern culture his education had led him to prize, even while he remained rooted in certain traditional Maghrebi values. To us he meant relief (he had running water, even), as well as dinner, and a bed.
     Later that evening, as his wife brought steaming tajines from the kitchen and he urged us to eat more and more, we tried to be civil by exchanging a few words with her. “No,” he said, “Don’t bother with her, she is ignorant. She doesn’t know French, she can’t read at all. Forget her.” We imagined that she and the children would share whatever we failed to consume and found the thought no spur to appetite.
     The following morning, the night watchman in a ragged djellaba, who carried a rusty old blunderbuss older even than himself, tapped on the window to awaken us, and we caught the five o’clock bus for Mohammedia from which one might board the main line of the train system to Algiers. It was most unlikely we would have another opportunity to see the mosaics at Cherchell.

William IX: A Study in Transformation of Convention

The curious thing about love in the poetry of William IX is that the personae are sometimes obscene, sometimes tender, sometimes idealizing after the manner of "courtly love." I seek here to make sense of this apparent self-contradiction. The notes, I am afraid, are missing.




     The small corpus of cansos by William IX of Acquitaine contains pieces representing a bewildering variety of uses of convention: melodic, rhetorical, and thematic. Since he is the first of the poets of southern France whose vernacular lyrics are extant, he has attracted a great deal of attention, and the extraordinarily broad, to many readers even self-contradictory, range of his work has been interpreted by some as historical anticipation, as though he conveniently provides an epitome of all that is to follow (thus Jeanroy, xviii or Goldin, Lyrics, 5). Others have described the same striking breadth in psychological or psychosocial terms. To Wilhelm he is "the whole medieval man" (59), and to Bond "a strong individualist" who tailored his work to different audiences (11).
     While each of these comments doubtless has some validity, they are limited by their overlooking the possibility that the answer lies not in the specific circumstances of the single series of poems, but rather in more general literary characteristics which happen to be highlighted in the scanty and provocative oeuvre of an individual. The constellation of conventional transformation available from William's work may also be viewed as a prototype or paradigm for the nature of conventional transformation in all poetry. His poems are indeed remarkable, but largely because they do in a few pages what is normally found only in a much larger volume of text; that is to say, they economically represent virtually all the possible transformational forms of certain central thematic conventions. Thus, it is hardly surprising that they could be said to contain the future, indeed, with their unusually compact encyclopedic scope, they contain the past as well. (See Dronke, Rise, Ch. 1.)
     Jeanroy's conceptual arrangement of the texts from "les pièces badines" to "la pièce du ton le plus grave" (recalling the traditional division of Biblical texts attributed to Solomon from youth to middle to old age), and -- when this criterion is inconclusive -- from the simpler to the more complex forms may be wholly unjustified as evidence for dating, but it admirably serves the present synchronic project. William's constant theme, a theme which is demonstrably present even when seemingly absent, is the investigation of the "other" in the form of woman.
     It is upon this thematic progression that Jeanroy filed the texts, and it is nonetheless appropriate for being obvious. One need not, however, assume that the poet was primarily concerned with women in the poet’s lived experience while addressing the topic so insistently. All of the biographical data, including a number of charming anecdotes, are finally irrelevant in addressing the poetry. Apart from the sort of formal play which is the special province of the aesthetic text, many thematic concerns are commonly encoded into comment about women. Among the most likely to occur to William's twentieth century readers are self-description, exploration of the nature of feudalism, of spirituality, or of the Jungian anima.
     This claim is far from denying specific referentiality for the texts, though. Rather it cautions against any interpretation which seeks hegemony for a single simple referent. The complexity and ambiguity of William's poems render irredeemably problematic any attempt to return his ideas to the world of lived experience in exhaustive prose paraphrase. What emerges unmistakably from an examination of his use of convention is not an idea or an attitude but a pattern of formal play. Only after recognizing the inherent value of this pattern as an almost musical system can the reader return to the question of the "meaning" of the poems.
     According to an ancient and universal convention the qualities of woman elude adequate formulation for the male poet. To represent this mystery, he has recourse to figures of speech, and one of the oldest and most common is the description of the woman as an animal. This may, of course, be honorific even to apotheosis as in the bestial epithets of certain Homeric goddesses or in Diane di Prima's Loba; it may on the other hand be pejorative even to the point of scurrility (as in Semonides or Juvenal). Many examples are not so unequivocally colored by a judgement. More frequent is
the complexity of Catullus 11, the Harley lyric "A waile whit as whalles bone," or Wyatt's sonnet "whoso list to hunt, I know when is an hind."
     William's poem 1 "Companho, faray un vers covinen" identifies "his" Agnes and Arsen as "dos cavalhs" in what has always been read as a coarse, masculine," double entendre. The convention is closely paralleled in blues lyrics. The closest to William's conceit is probably Charlie Patton's "Stone Pony Blues," but the same motif appears with great frequency, including in Son House's "Pony Blues" and the widespread "Easy Rider."
     It is undeniably true that William's poem, like these songs, exploits the natural association of sexual activity with riding. For the Provencal lord, the arrogant gab is built about the analogy of castle possession and domination. The announcement of the poem as "covinen" may be taken as a straightforward claim that the poem is in fact proper and that the notions that first come to the reader's mind are likely to be correct. There can be no doubt that William is explicitly celebrating male power, his own power being reinforced by state power due to his rank, and demanding the subjugation of desired women verbally, by calling them livestock, that is, mere chattels. He proclaims that he feels "erhueill" toward all. The meaning of the image on this primary level is clear, whether its performance be imagined to have produced giggles, blushes, anger, or self-satisfaction.
     The form of the poem, two eleven syllable lines followed by a fourteen syllable line, all of which rhyme, is quite distinctive within William's poetry, appearing in poems II and III as well as in I. The three are linked by tone and content as well as by prosody. The form has been traced by different investigators to popular, sacred, and Arabic models (see Bond's notes for references to the major studies). Which diachronic conjecture is more accurate may never be known. Here it is sufficient to assume that for William's time and place, the form was appropriate for generating the effect he desired. Whether his intention was direct or ironic may be ignored when considering the construction of pattern that he elaborates in the set of poems seen as a group. There can be no question that William employed this meter to mark off this series of poems as a cohesive unit, or -- what is really the same contention -- that they must be read as a unit.
     The second of them, William's poem ii ("Compaigno, non puosc mudar qu'eo no m'effrei") maintains meter, theme, and animal convention, but with a significant twist. While the beloved is called merely "lo bon conrei" ( 1. 16), that is, "the fine goods," doubtless with a pun on "con" for cunt, rather in the same manner as poem I, the description is amplified by adding information on the lady's likely reaction to such an approach. The sexism of the original begins then to be complicated by a dialectic. While the first poem had attempted to present itself as a fitting and even decorous pleasantry ("covinen" stressing its social acceptability) while sounding like a brag or gab, this poem is an unmistakable castei or castigation, a genre associated with the clergy and the law.
     Just as Marcabrun mounted grand tirades of bitter moralizing on the topic, William takes up the cause of women who are held closely as valuable possessions by their husbands, it is this practice that "disturbs" him according to the first line of the text. Mention of the woman's keepers (1. 3), her bonds (1. 6), and the apparent image of a carter all maintain the original convention deprecating women as property, but the poem goes on to describe the inevitable consequences of such oppression.
Slyly using the same horse imagery as in poem I, William warns the possessive husband that "si non pot aver caval . . . compra palafrei." This line projects the horse image back upon the man with its suggestion that if the woman is successfully prevented from arranging a courtly dalliance with a lover of her own class, she will seek out whoever is available. Though love may remain "degraded" by a bestial affair, here it is the man, acting against the "dreit" and "lei" by unfairly restricting his wife, who thus becomes something less than a fine horse, less even than a poor one, out of the picture and rejected entirely, and by his own doing.
     The meter is substantially identical to that of poem I, but since the authorial persona is here that of the learned moralist, rather than the lascivious playboy, the irony of the form has undergone a twist.
     In both of these poems, then, the image of the beloved as an animal carries associations of erotic sensuality. Likewise, both include economic semantic elements suggesting the aristocratic expectations that accompany horse ownership and which prescribe certain obligatory forms of behavior is status is to be maintained. However, the satiric horse of the second poem reverses some of the implications of the first by applying the image to the other character, the man, and by capping the claim of the first with the more extravagant claim of the second.
     While poem I's use of the horse image could be reductively paraphrased as “1 own women as 1 own horses,” the image of poem II points to something like "the man who tries to control women is lower even than a horse." The original poem's psychological assault has been returned with wit in a form that transforms and consumes the original, in which the initial ideas are assumed, and the discourse rises to a new level. What is constant in the verbal battle is the association of sexual relations with economic power and selfish interests in general, as well as the base, "animal" associations that surround the body and love, though the second text suggests that a richer sort of love exists.
     The two uses of the horse image studied thus far might be schematically represented as follows.

poem 1 poem II
man as lord woman as horse
dominates dominates
woman as horse man as less than horse

     In William's poem 111 "'iTant ai agutz d'avois conres" the opening line restates the already familiar idea of the woman as the possession of the successful courtier, even us-ing the same punning objectifying word "conres." This poem, however, proceeds rapidly into a series of tightly knotted contradictions.
     The first explicit identification of a woman with an animal is in line 5 which equates "cons gardatz" with "gorc ses peis" (an animal image heavy with suggestive connotation even on the isolated level of concrete qualities). The primary thrust of the equation is controlled by the claim that those women who are too closely guarded resemble, not an economically useful animal, but rather the lack of one. Just as the selfish male lover of poem 11 becomes less than a nag, the woman he overzealously seeks to dominate becomes less than a fish pond, a barren place, unproductive and infertile, whose unfructifying moisture mocks at its own failure to fulfill its destiny.
     Though hints of the hunt and the social power of wealth still cling to the image, its new aspect is recalled in intensified and elaborated form in the later lines: "Per un albre c'om hi tailla n'i naison [ho] dos ho treis/ E quam lo bocx es taillatz nais plus espes." (ll. 15-16) Here the almost magic fecundity promised as a reward for participation in life, the proliferation that follows from the enjoyment of the world is stated in a way that has little to do with the specific social circumstances of forestry or fishing or romance in William's time and place. The notion is exceedingly archaic, dating at least from the time of the neolithic “Venuses.” There is no gab of the ego, the talk of possession and taming vanishes before this marvel identified with woman. Rather than prudentially warning husbands that guarding their ladies may bring about results that they would prefer to avoid, this poem states "de con cals es sa lei" (1. 10) in a way more profound than the phrase may predict, and the result is incantatory, charming. The animal and even vegetable life of the forest is here no symbol for fallen human nature (fallen through sin or through realistic portrayal that deflates idealized concepts) but instead the fountain of all earthly energy. To fail to fully participate in love again here diminishes all parties, but the sanctions are defined not in social or psychological terms, but rather as the withdrawal from life itself, an act by definition bad.
     The image of the woman as animal has here been answered, not by its return upon the man as in poem II, but with a transcending figure in which the charge of animality is accepted and celebrated and sexuality is affirmed as a mysterious forest very like that in D. H. Lawrence. The original theme of male domination, which had met its answering antithesis in poem II is here transformed, in the poet's constant play with the expectations of his audience: the theme is announced, then reversed, and in poem III it may be said to be inverted (in the sense of the millennial inversions of the Sermon on the Mount), since the identification of nature with woman is accepted, but an opposite value judgement constructed. The apparent descent from man to woman to horse to fish to tree is suddenly revalued even as it is extended.
     “Farai un vers de dreit nien” (poem IV) says a great deal about the nature of language and poetry which is not to the point here, but it also continues the development of the themes of the first three texts. Here the poet directly engages the conventions recognizable to the modern reader as definitively courtly. The lover suffers madness, confusion, and physical illness; he is quite at the mercy of his obsession. Here an individual love object is mentioned for the first time and with this new element, the poet must confess the descent into subjectivity and the loss of categorical truth which must follow.
The poet's persona, which had been more than adequately constituted by lands, manors, and subject women, is now helpless before his passion for the beloved. Strangely, it is due to the very fact that the poetic persona now speaks of a specific individual that he cannot focus and is obliged to name his topic as “dreit nien,” and to stammer out contradictions. It is clear that the discourse which had begun on the level of social reality (where the myth of the social lie in nearly every culture requires the illusion of permanence) has moved to the more vulnerable levels of the ego below.
     While the beloved controls the whole poem's movement, she is present no more concretely than, say, Jaufre Rudel's “amor de lonh.” She is not identified or even characterized by the images. Animal references persist, but they have been scattered to the margins of the text.
     The horse of line 5 may remind the reader of poem I, but it is here no wildly energetic force submitting to the imperious master. Rather it is part of the absurd scene of a mount whose rider is sleeping, unconscious, the ego distracted to the point that social status is irrelevant or undefined. The ant of line 17 indicates nothing but triviality, and the rooster of line 34 is mentioned as the sign of next to nothing. What might have been a proud or ironic image of male swagger here indicates simple nonentity.
     Love then, in this poem is so disorienting that despite striving through the whole piece to get a firm grasp of his subject, to define and thus verbally master the beloved, the poet succeeds in describing only his inability to do so. "Amigu' ai ieu, so sai qui s'es." (1. 25) He cannot even see her, much less possess her.
     Thus in poem IV the woman is conspicuously absent from the poem's vocabulary of concrete imagery. The very fact that the poet cannot summon up any ready conventional declaration about woman may be said to be the theme of poem IV. This is itself a highly conventional topos, of course, dating back to Ovid and beyond, it is this weakness, this failure, this inability that emphasizes the radical profundity of his love (though it is not to the point here to determine whether the poem is ironic or straightforward). The image that has been seen in the earlier poems in what has been called direct, reversed, and inverted forms is here present by its very absence.
     In William's poem V "Farai un vers pos mi sonelh" the sleeping persona reappears, again the image of the ego at a loss, the king dethroned, but the tongue-tied helplessness of the lover before his lady is here recast in comic form. As is appropriate for the comic, low-mimetic mode, the risk at which the lover finds himself in this text is wholly physical. The “conres” earlier controlled and manipulated here returns with a vengeance as the man's flesh is savaged in an encounter too powerful for him to master.
     The threat of the power of the woman is embodied in the cat, a frequent source of obscene slang in antiquity as well as today as reference to The Maculate Muse or Eric Partridge will demonstrate. The claws of the cat make it a formidable incarnation of the vagina dentata nightmare fear in a fabliau-type anecdote which for all its light joking represents the fierce wildness of sensuality so vividly as to suggest sado-masochism.
     The usage of the poem in part resembles that of poem II in which the horse image was reversed. Here, too, the man is subject to the bestial (the cat) and wholly inferior to the animal in terms of control of his environment, but here it is not his own failings that are central, but the animal's power. He acquiesces to the two women and their cat as though he cannot resist, it is precisely as though he is in the power of a pair of witches and their familiar. The miraculous power of nature so striking in poem III here reappears in a very sinister form for all the high-spirited wit.
     A briefer account of the remaining lyrics of William IX will suffice to indicate how they fit into this unfolding pattern. In poem VI there is no imagery which corresponds to the series thus far defined, instead the use of language derived from gambling games suggests a view of love as a contest in a way closely related to the familiar battle imagery of love.
     In poem VII the first of a fully developed subclass of nature images appears. This poem opens with a reverdie introduction that seems at first to be a diminution of the marvelous forest of poem III, here rendered in a more decorative way. It seems more "conventional" in the pejorative sense because the topos is so commonplace and because it is elaborated here at far greater length than would have been necessary to suggest the idea of human love as a spark in the dynamo of nature. The code seems uneconomical and overdetermined, too "amplified," in the rhetorician's sense.
     But the reader who continues to poem VIII must wonder whether this "simple," conventional version is not merely the preparation for a surprise. In this text, the nature introduction reappears, but in reversed form. Rather than feeling the warmth of spring and thus turning to thoughts of love, the poet laments the end of warmth, recognizes the coming of winter, and feels at once the chills of the literal cold and of his rejection as a lover.
     In poem IX the image of vegetable nature resolves the contradictions the poet had earlier generated by turning darkness into light (1. 12) and illness into health (1. 35) in a cycle which is said to be uniquely capable of renewing the flesh (1. 35 "la earn renovellar").
     Poem X provides the most amplified version of the idea of the world energy seen in non-human nature, an extension of the simpler form seen in poem VII.
     Finally, in poem Xl nature is virtually absent as the poet takes leave of worldly life. The only suggestion of the corporeal is what is left behind, the husks and shells of used-up life, the vestiges of pleasure and luxury, the lordly-furs to which the poet bids adieu in the haunting last lines.
     A summary catalogue of the array of possibilities for conventional transformation which have been adduced in William's work would have perhaps six items. First, the basic convention may be stated, though what is "basic" may be far from evident. Second, the convention may be reversed; the audience's expectations may be turned backward. This may involve a reversal between two individuals, as in poem II, or, as in the case of the two nature introductions, simply a denial of the anticipated implication of the convention. Thirdly, the convention may be "inverted" by accepting its terms and then revaluing them in a novel way. A similar effect results when the basic proposition is presented along with its opposite, or by otherwise retaining the terms of the argument while radically criticizing its original meaning. A fourth possibility is that the convention may be significant in its absence is the context would create expectations for it in the competent reader but it does not appear, it may be explicitly said to be absent; it may appear only in decidedly marginal details, or it may not be mentioned at all. Finally, a fifth and sixth form of transformation of convention are characterized by the expansion by the addition of new information to the system or diminution if meaning is retained but is referred to only elliptically.
     Not all of these will occur in a given text, of course, or even a given body of texts, and not all have been equally evident in William's poems, but they form an adequate working inventory of possibilities to analyze the operations of convention in other texts. For William's work the implications of this view of convention are rich and suggest a range of questions of practical criticism, of interpretation, and of literary theory.
     The apparent inconsistency of William's work is seen now as an extraordinary completeness. Critics who seek to establish a historical or psychological basis for this scope will not appreciate the poet's achievement in constructing a lyric encyclopedia of attitudes, aiming for a special sort of sublimity available only to the all-inclusive. Far from indicating frivolity and muddle-headedness, this encyclopedic tendency is common among many poetic works in other genres accepted in the traditional canon of greatness such as the epic and the anatomy. The reader wishing to understand William's work as a structural field of related attitudes and impulses need not reconcile contradiction nor relegate works which seem to interfere with a given thesis to a secondary rank (e.g. "merely facetious"). The reader must rather pursue the patterns themselves in the spirit of Socrates' acceptance of comedy and tragedy as equally sublime forms of drama, and trace the oppositions they describe to define not what love is, but in what terms its problem may be stated. Poetry's peculiarity as a form of linguistic technology is just this resistance to paraphrase, this embrace of inconsistency, ambiguity, and mystery.
     Thus, in the larger question of the definition of courtly love (still a living issue since many critics continue to assume the old paradigm based on Andreas Capellanus despite the patent variety among so-called courtly texts), the same maneuver may be applied to the whole cultural phenomenon. The old notion of a chivalric ideal of romance, and the answering claim of a demystifying physical sense of sensuality are properly seen as complementary. Neither the old textbooks which focused on Chaucer's "Knight's Tale" nor the new which omits it in favor of the Miller's will do; the student must be given both.
     This attitude by no means denies the evolution of the concept of love through history. It merely resists claiming absolute novelty and hegemony for a single and repeating set of linguistic and behavioral conventions. In a similar way, the recurrent discussions of irony in medieval literature in which some scholars see innovative defamiliarizing twists where others see only replication of past models must be reconsidered if irony is no more "critical" of received ideas than its lack.
     The formal play of conceptual elements, what Found called logopoeia then comes into its own as a fundamental poetic technique. In the Middle Ages melodies in poems were often admired as much as the words, but this new sense of conceptual play reminds the reader that there are melodies in ideas, too. Logopoeia as an essential element of poetic practice is no more linked to referentiality than prosodic patterns are. The poems concepts constitute an intellectual melody upon which the author may work variations for their formal value alone, as in the sonnet sequences of the Elizabethans or the psalms of the ancient Hebrews where a wide variety of moods are melodiously concatenated. Thus William is willing to entertain a full range of concepts of women in part simply to elaborate the widest inventory of choices and to delight in manipulating the expectations of his audience, tugging and teasing the competent reader.
     This idea of the poem as an exercise demonstrating all the logical permutations of an idea suggests how it may be relished in an abstract way just as a fugue proceeds through variations and inversions or artistic works such as the mandalas of Tantric Buddhism display beneficent and malevolent aspects of deity side by side in a symmetrical but ambiguous arrangement.
Referentiality, though, is never wholly lost. The cognitive value of the mandalas and of William's poetry is recoverable, but only according to the unique requirements of aesthetic interpretation, it is the peculiar task of artistic structures of the word to articulate oppositions, tensions, problematic contradictions of the sort than Levi-Strauss found to underlie myth. Clearly the "truth" about love lies more in the relation between the sexes, in the paradoxical ambiguities ("bittersweet" in Sappho's word) than in any single mood or definition.
     In the specific case of William's poetry, the crucial problems are quite clear. The alignment of one sex with social dominance produces certain tensions immediately. In any society, though, love and the aggressive desire to possess is balanced by the fear of injury or loss and the vulnerability of the need to be loved. The question is ultimately whether to be engaged or detached from the world in general, and single-minded choices, though they may accurately reflect the bent of some individual sensibilities, may not produce the finest poetry. The structure of state power in French territories, the ego less than firmly ensconced on its throne within the skull, the risk that always accompanies aspiration, the pain that sets- off pleasure -- these themes and more are evoked in William's texts in a distinctly poetic way. This aesthetic exposition is more precise than other discourses because it is more conflicted and ambiguous, because the poet delivers a whole panoply of possibilities. The role of convention is to compress and complicate the statement of the issues so that entire realms of idées reçues may be summed up and overturned in a single half-line of verse.
     The phenomenon described above, far from being peculiar to William is universal in literature and may be demonstrated wherever sufficient data are available. It may be produced also by reader's reactions as in Blake's finding Satan to be the ironic hero of Paradise Lost or in de Man's tour de force of critical reading Blindness and Insight.
     In the case of medieval European lyrics, one symptom of the dynamic principle of the transformation of convention (rather than the static construction of convention) is the problematic status of courtly love. The debate over whether such a code was dominant either poetically or socially may be resolved by the suggestion that simultaneous and opposed conventions emerged in a dialectic, complementary fashion as evidenced by William's work.

[The essay goes on to examine the earliest German Minnesang and to outline the same sort of structure of convention and its transformation.]

Two Poems by William IX, Duke of Aquitaine (Guilhèm de Peitieus)

William IX is the earliest troubadour, a marvelous poet, and, in his day, one of the most powerful nobles of Europe. I have never successfully translated his lyrics. The Occitan lyric dazzles with its meter and rhyme, using elaborate effects that are – for me – impossible to recreate in English. The two poems that follow are prosy, but the movement of thought should remain visible. As the following essay examines thematics, even a flat-footed version is preferable to none. 

“Companho, faray un vers . . .covinen” 

My friends, I’m making a verse that’s nice, 

with more of craziness than sense 

all mixed with love and joy and youth. 

Whoever cannot understand’s a jerk, 

whoever doesn’t learn it in his heart. 

It’s a heavy thing to give up love, love that fits his soul. 

My saddle fits two fine and gentle horses, 

good, dexterous in battle, valiant as well; 

but I can’t hang on to both, one won’t live with the next. 

If I could just domesticate the pair, 

I’d never deploy my equipage any other place, 

for I’d be mounted better than any man around. 

The one was racing champ of the hills, 

and it has long been high-spirited and wild, 

so savage and wary, it cannot be brushed. 

The other grew up around Confolens, 

and you never saw one lovelier, I know. 

No gold or silver purse could buy that horse from me. 

I gave it to its master in its youth, 

but I retained the right, that every year 

he rode, I rode a hundred or more. 

Oh knights, give me advice, I’m in tight straits, 

I’ve never felt so torn in a dilemma, 

I can’t tell if I should keep Milady Agnes or Arsen. 

I hold the castle of Gimel, 

with Niol I show off my pride, 

for both are bound to me and pledged by oath. 

 “Companho, tant ai agutz d’avols conres” 

My friends, I have had a lot of bad stuff. 

I can’t keep from singing and feeling so blue. 

But I don’t want to let out quite all my affairs. 

So I’ll tell you how things seem now to me: 

I hate a guarded cunt and a lake without fish, 

and the boasting of jerks who never will act. 

Almighty God, my captain and king, 

he who first guarded his cunt should have died. 

Pretending to serve, he hurt his beloved. 

Let me give you the rules of the laws of cunt, 

for I used to go wrong and I’ve suffered a lot: 

Most things get less when you take some away, cunt grows. 

And to those who will not believe what I say, 

let him look in the park near the woods: 

cut down a tree, two or three grow instead. 

The more that it’s cut, the more that grows there, 

the owner will end with more than before! 

He’d be mad to complain when he’s suffered no loss. 

 It’s wrong to cry out in that case.

Hard Rain Still Fallin’: More Thoughts on the 60s

After the last presidential election Bill Ayers, whose relations with Obama had been made an issue by the right wing, wrote a piece for In These Times describing his experience of notoriety. Reflecting on the events of half a lifetime ago and following up on Ayers' article, I wrote this.



     Bill Ayers was certainly right when he noted in “It’s Been a Long Strange Trip,” (ITT, November 7) that his few contacts with Obama were in no way relevant to the election, that the Republican propaganda that featured his name so prominently is neither more nor less than McCarthyism, and that a wise leader will seek a broad variety of input, including the opinions of social critics. Though talk about Ayers, SDS, and the Weather Underground was only a distraction in this recent campaign, the fact remains that thoughtful examination of that era remains significant for historians and for all those engaged in activism today.
     Few today would dispute the “rightness” of his generation of activists in the two chief causes of the day: support for civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War. In this broad sense, participants can be proud that their work hastened civil rights legislation, the end of the draft, and the cessation of hostilities in Southeast Asia. Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn are two of many examples of 60s radicals who went on to rich and productive careers without abandoning the goal of advancing social justice.
     Still, Ayers is correct to criticize an attitude of mere nostalgia. Just as those of the New Left pointed out elements in the Old Left that they found erroneous or ineffective, progressives of today can benefit from the experience of Ayers’ generation. These impressionistic notes reflect the experience of one rank-and-file SDS member.
     In one unfortunate way at least, the New Left replicated the Old it had meant to replace. Rejecting both the Soviet and the American empires, it was clear to SDS members that many dedicated leftists of their parents’ era had mindlessly “trailed” the policies of the USSR. This is obvious in the case of the CPUSA, and those who took a Trotskyist line, though capable of naming Stalin’s crimes, could be equally doctrinaire. Well aware of the problems this created, 60s activists nonetheless idealized third world leaders with uncritical adulation. The Fair Play for Cuba group could not criticize Castro. Progressive Labor ended up sharing the hero-worship of Mao that was sweeping China. The fact that Ho Chi Minh earned the title “father of his country” does not negate the fact the North Vietnam imposed policy on the equally heroic NLF from the south after the foreigners were finally expelled.
     Surely it is better to acknowledge the mixed character of even a charismatic leader whom one generally supports. Today the temptation to follow a great man might lead some to Subcommander Marcos, others to defending every move of Hugo Chavez or the insurgents who now govern Nepal. It is always wrong to concede one’s own critical judgment in the service of an individual or a rigid ideology. Apart from the actual mistakes that may ensue, the adoption of a foreign “idol” isolates the activist from the American he must convince.
     Of course, such self-isolation was a satisfying and intentional activity in the 60s. Apart from a few small groups who were inspired by older models of organizing such as the CIO or Saul Alinsky, many in the movement, especially as the decade wore on, strove to separate themselves from American society. Indeed the very concept of “revolutionary youth” as an interest group was culturally based. Whereas old labor demonstrations often carried the flag, and the first civil rights demonstrators wore suits, many SDS youth came to cultivate an appearance and a rhetoric designed to alarm and alienate the very American people whose minds they needed to change. Of course, in a complementary way, this created great warmth and solidarity among the protestors and a nation-wide network of easily identifiable, like-minded conspirators.
     Similarly, the left of the 60s engaged toward the end of the era in a competitive drive toward stances of ever greater militance, regardless of material conditions. From attempting to address the general population, radicals came to concentrate on jockeying for influence within the small realm of the movement. Unfortunately, it is long been the case that, while the toppling of capitalism may be all but impossible, it is far more feasible to topple the largely like-minded competing faction. Only a few can accurately recall the “tendencies” that argued at the 9th National Convention that marked the end of SDS as a mass organization. What meeting was it in NYC where people were admitted only if they responded correctly when asked their position on Albania?
     The 60s leftists got a great deal right as well, or they would not have been as effective as they were. They realized that the Vietnam War was not an expression of LBJ’s wickedness, or Nixon’s stupidity. Imperialism is not a mistake; it is a coherent and internally logical system that emerges naturally from capitalism. The opponents of civil rights are not necessarily ignorant people or those with inherently narrow minds. Racism assists some to have more power than others, and thus it is perfectly “rational” with regard to those people’s self-interest. The ill, the young and the aged, the newly arrived in America, all are vulnerable, not because their needs are unknown, but because they don’t generate the profits that lead to campaign contributions.
     The tactical implication of this kind of analysis is striking. Just as the nobler factions of the labor movement always celebrate solidarity, and the general strike is the ultimate weapon of the working class, in the multiplicity of social movements today, people will have a chance to win only if they unite. For success, even perhaps for survival, anti-racist activists must cooperate with supporters of gay rights; anti-war people must link themselves with both welfare recipients and labor unions. One minority may be suppressed, even in a democracy, but non-white and gay and poor and handicapped and foreign-born and women and all the others short-changed by capitalism together are no minority at all, but a substantial, an overwhelming majority.
     It is necessary to recall that politics is oriented to practical ends, to making things happen. It is a matter of compromise, negotiation, and constantly changing conditions. As a union person I always maintained that anything is possible with organization but, at the same time, admitted that few tasks are more challenging. As an Eisenhower-era adolescent fascinated with the ferocious example of John Brown, the romance of the IWW, and the dramas of the 30s sit-down strikes, I sometimes felt I was born too late. In fact, of course, it is never too late. May the struggle and the discussion continue.

Poems Composed in Mexico

Boca de Tomatlan 

From this cove the hills 

swell up like old tumors, 

straining with luxuriance, 

tense with heat and damp 

 and pain of constant overreaching. 

An iguana with a bad conscience 

dashes down a tree and vanishes. 

A bright orange flower offers 

to sell herself to tourists. 

A pelican bobs like a buoy. 

Its ancient eyes assure 

all who happen here, 

“Have no fear. I, too, 

am your heart’s likeness.” 

 Guaymas 

Desert sun rains stillness over skulls and sentiment. 

Heat falls resigned on cactus sage and slow as teeth. 

On dry hills things scamper, run from themselves, 

scaly feet push off hot earth, thoughts dance 

    like water beads in a frying pan. 

Sun's glance blasts the bay, earth's abdomen rips open 

revealing salt water fish savor sweets fine as filigree glass 

but tender to the tongue when they embrace 

and differences dissolve. 

Piledriver sun stamps a goldfoil nimbus about the brows 

of shoeless bootblacks there. 

 Hotel sin Nombre 

Dust on old shoe streets 

    like mortician's rouge; 

dust on deserted hillsides 

    like mushroom spores 

        dormant for millenia. 

No. 191A behind the cathedral -- 

grand entrance to a courtyard in ruins, 

one side only standing whole. 

Thick jagged walls shattered in shock 

at encroaching construction -- office cells -- 

an elephant on its knees in sight of gleaming glass -- 

revealing twenty foot high ceilings, 

antique dressers, 

cupboards spilling out of the rooms 

into hallways rich with murals, 

and flooring through which sight was clear two flights down! 

The torn court was full of plants; 

in the center an entire tree 

    brilliant with birdsong; 

masses of volcanic rock along the walls, 

dark wood cases with bones, shells, trash, 

    all cunningly and randomly arranged 

        as testimony of all orders. 

Books, too, bound in leather, some: 

    Dante, Wilkie Collins, medical texts, 

"The store used them," the hotelero looks up, 

"the store that was up front -- 

    they added in them -- 

         bananas, beans, oranges, you know" -- 

sigh ripples widen at the back of his skull's wall -- 

"ten years I'm here, and now it's going . . . " 

He returns to the booklet in his lap 

where Superman, bursting down a wall, 

lands again upon his feet. 

The sea a profound green 

     which deep inside 

         reflects beyond tomorrow; 

it reaches out 

     again and then again 

         toward its old love, the moon, 

then spends itself in foam 

     upon the shore where crabs 

         without memory skitter blind. 

Bahia de Banderas 

One day we will 

no longer sit like lords 

on this bright beach 

for long before the engine’s gone 

from these incessant waves, 

before sun’s glint on sea 

has faded and blinked out, 

before the arms of this broad bay 

have wearied and collapsed, 

and earth and air and water mixed 

into some nameless stuff, 

I see succeeding grandees 

make this spot their throne. 

Sunset Going Down Slow 

Sunset clouds -- 

strewn purple sand 

out of focus in forgetfulness -- 

poised on a ridgepole 

between underside's doubt 

and the march-time of the sinking sun. 

This twilight sheds a benediction 

even on averted eyes. 

It tempers the air, 

and shows the middle way. 

The hills, which once thrust out and up 

proud flames, have baked and worn 

and battered to caricature's profiles 

of old intent. Purposes laid bare at last: 

one threadbare hip with vertical striations 

like dry longing lost or apple wrinkles; 

chances budding now anew 

 in small and sudden cacti 

and furtive bushes. Another like goat horns 

sour against supporting earth 

envies the sky's deep frivolity 

it can't afford, rolls unbalanced between, 

 a weighted die, 

    most red-souled of the lot, 

        weeping blood. 

Men’s Clubhouse in Chihuahua 

Bar San Juan 

unlike the barebones Tarahumara mountain cantina in Creel 

     (with weeping ceiling and soulful song to touch the heart direct) 

is a real city longhouse cavern 

with tricky frosted mirrors to avert the enemy 

or surprise the sudden self, 

neons winking hypnotism through the dark, 

and a bouncing band of trumpets, violins, guitars, 

with one saving trickster spirit bass 

running contraries behind. 

But the eikons! on the walls! 

 * Playboy pinups and

 * heads of long-defeated deer grim under hemispheres of light 

 * prick and balls shaped bread hanging on the wall so proud and 

 * if that were not enough, a penis bottle opener (hardwood-carved) 

 * and a framed print with its 1940's Saturday Evening Post epiphany 

    hunters hanging out in camp, no thought of game, 

    must drop their beers and grab their guns, 

    when the deer or reality walks right in. 

No such danger here: 

all around the room embraces 

smoke the blab of business ass-slapping 

raucous noise rising to meet the music 

and a boy sits 

in the thick 

courtyard 

window 

with a Coke 

leaning in 

as far as he possibly can.