Poetry on the Loose

Index

2012-01-01T06:35:00.000-08:00

To locate an essay from this index, the reader must note the date of its posting and then select that month from the Blog Archive. Five titles will then appear from which the desired one may be selected. (I realize that this is cumbersome and that there is surely a simpler hypertext method. Perhaps one day I’ll learn it.)

Though the index serves, I think, a clear purpose, not every posting falls easily into the categories. One essay might equally be placed under literary theory or medieval texts while another might fit under memoir, politics, or travel. Translations with comment might be either criticism or translation. Poke around a bit.

The categories are:
1. speculative, familiar, and other essays
2. literary theory
3. Greek texts
4. medieval texts
5. other criticism
6. translation
7. poetry
8. politics
9. memoirs
10. travel

1. Speculative, familiar, and other essays
Biking (November 2009)
Dead Reckoning (February 2011)
Dust: a meditative riff (November 2009)
Food for the Gods (December 2011)
Hippie (April 2011)
Iowa Communards (December 2011)
A Library’s Commonplaces and Curiosities (May 2011)
Supermarkets (October 2010)
Taking Off (November 2009)

2. Literary theory
Art and the Marketplace (April 2010)
The Formation of a Christian Rhetoric (April 2011)
How and Why to Signify (July 2011)
Idea of Comedy (January 2012)
The Inconsequential Bayonets of Art: Militant Rhetoric and the Avant-Garde (May 2010)
Lament for the Loss of the Avant-Garde (March 2010)
Millenarian Rhetoric and the Avant-Garde (August 2010)
Placing the Popular in the Structure of Literature (October 2010)
Poetry Amid the Fierce Chaos of the World (December 2009)
The Signifying Monkey Talks Literature (April 2010)
Sweet Treason: Translating Lyric Poetry (November 2009)
Winged Words: Notes on the Oral Performance of Poetry (May 2010)

3. Greek texts
Aphrodite’s Bed: Love in the Homeric Hymn (August 2010)
The Birth of Erato: Lyric, Vision, and the Spread of Writing (January 2010)
Gorgias (February 2010)
Oedipus and the Meaning of Polysemy (July 2011)
Professors Kick the Willy Bobo [on Athenaeus] (December 2009)
The Role of Rhetoric in Theocritus (February 2011)
Sappho’s Holy Tortoise Shell: Eros and Poetry in Ancient Greece (December 2009)
Seneca the Elder (March 2010)
Two Passages from Marcus Aurelius (June 2011)

4. Medieval texts
The Buddha in Europe: the Apologue of the Man and the Unicorn in Barlaam and Ioasaph (January 2011)
Chaucer’s Version of the Golden Age (June 2011)
A Conventional Ending in a Middle English Romance (September 2011)
Distant Rhyme in Two Medieval English Lyrics (August 2011)
The Early English Carol (June 2010)
Geoffrey of Vinsauf (April 2010)
Functions of Alliteration in Thirteenth Century Lyrics (February 2011)
Hypermetric Lines in Beowulf (January 2011)
An Introduction to the Troubadours (January 2010)
Mechthild von Magdeburg (July 2010)
A New Look at Jaufré: Amor de Lonh as Criticism (December 2010)
Openings in the Middle English Romance (July 2010)
The Pearl-Poet’s Use of Link-Rhymes (November 2011)
Phonetics and Semantics in the Last Line of Beowulf (March 2011)
Piers Plowman and the Man in the Moon (October 2011)
The Prima Etade of Literary Ambition [Petrarch] (March 2011
Transformation of Convention in Early Minnesang (April 2011)
William IX (September 2010)

5. Other criticism
Comics (February 2010)
The Critical Palimpsest: Black African Literature through White American Eyes (January 2010)
Down the Dirt Road Blues (October 2011)
Flash Reviews of Thirty African Novels (November 2011)
Flyin’ with the Muses: Kirpal Gordon’s Eros in Sanskrit (May 2011)
Han Shan (December 2010)
Kerouac’s Weakness and Strength (January 2011)
Lu Xun (October 2010)
Notes on Liu Xie (August 2011)
Notes on Recent Reading [Melville, Greene, and Whalen] (September 2011)
Notes on Recent Reading 2 [Crane, The Crowning of Louis, Thornlyre] (October 2011)
Notes on Recent Reading 3 [Kipling, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Lynn’s Tao-te-ching] (November 2011)
Notes on Recent Reading 4 [Sarah Scott, de La Fayette, Wharton] (January 2012)
Notes on Recent Reading 5 [The Deeds of God in Rddhipur, Burney, Cooper] (January
2012)
A Poem by Theodore Roethke (September 2011)
Rereading the Classics [Burton] (November 2011)
Rereading the Classics [Rabelais] (December 2011)
Shelley”s “Ode to the West Wind” as Structuralist Charm (May 2011)
The Texture of Traherne’s Religious Thought (October 2010)
Thematic Continuity and Development in the Poetry of Christopher Smart: the Jubilate Agno and the Minor Poems (November 2010)
Two Graffiti (May 2011)
“Walkin’ Blues” [Son House] (December 2011)

6. Translation
Christian and Dedicatory Epigrams from the Greek Anthology (March 2010)
Emmy Hennings (February 2010)
Emmy Hennings Poems (More from Die Letzte Freude) (November 2010)
Four Poems from the German of Richard Huelsenbeck (January 2010)
Hans Arp (April 2010)
Hugo Ball (July 2010)
Hymn to Aphrodite (August 2010)
Leonidas of Tarentum (May 2010)
Some Anonymous Middle High German Lyrics (August 2011)
Translations of William IX (September 2010)
Wordsworth Speaks German (July 2011)
Yet Two More Versions of Wang Wei (June 2011)

7. Poetry
African poems (August 2010)
How to Be a Poet (June 2010)
Mexican poems (September 2010)
Poems from New Mexico (July 2010)
Poems from Turkey (June 2010)
Produce poems (May 2010)
Some Sonnets (April 2010)
Three Poems from Peru (August 2011)
Two Lyrics on Death from Central America (January 2012)

8. Politics
Hard Rain Still Fallin’ (September 2010)
How to Get Serious about Fighting Crime (January 2010)
Occupy Wall Street (November 2011)
The Role of Higher Education (November 2010)
Voluntary Poverty (October 2011)
Why I am a Socialist (March 2010)

9. Memoirs
A Garland of Greek Professors (December 2010)
Grandparents (December 2009)
Hip Poets of Seventies San Francisco (January 2011)
How I Was Hired to Teach in Nigeria (May 2011)
IWW (April 2011)
March in Cicero (December 2009)
My Most Politically Active Year (February 2011)
Nova Academy (March 2011)
Poetry on the Loose (September 2011)
Suburbanite in the City (November 2010)
VISTA Trains Me (June 2011)

10. Travel
Acadiana [Lafayette, Louisiana] (May 2010)
Cookie Man (October 2011)
Creel (October 2010)
Election Day in Chichicastenango (January 2012)
An Evening in Urubamba (July 2011)
Festival in Ogwa (January 2011)
Haarlem (July 2010)
Hitchhiking in Algeria (September 2010)
Hungarian Food (December 2010)
Introduction to Tourist Snapshots (June 2010)
Jemaa el Fna (December 2010)
Najibe’s Stories (September 2011)
Nigerian Names and Vehicle Slogans (March 2011)
A Palm Wine Shack (December 2011)
Portraits from a Floating World (Najibe and Sandro) (February 2010)
Portraits from a Floating World: Gahlia and Jack (June 2010)
Portraits from a Floating World: Leslie Stein and Pa’ahssyzy (August 2010)
A Problem on the Border [Algeria] (June 2011)
A Reading in Kathmandu (November 2009)
Sacred Space as Sideshow [Prague] (February 2010)
St. Joseph’s Day at the Laguna Pueblo (April 2011)
Tetouan (November 2010)
Two Parades [India and Peru] (August 2011)
The Valley of Beautiful Women [Eger, Hungary] (March 2010)
Vignettes of Sunny Nigeria (March 2011)
A Waterfall near Marrakech (February 2011)

Notes on Recent Reading 5 [Deeds of God in Rddhipur, Burney, Cooper]

2012-01-01T06:25:00.000-08:00

The Deeds of God in Rddhipur, translated by Anne Feldhaus

This 13th century devotional text, translated from Marathi, records anecdotes of the life of Gundam Raul, regarded as divine by followers of the Mahanubhava sect. This school, like Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and other movements, split from Hinduism, objecting to the traditional pantheon of divinities, the caste system, and the stress of ritual purity and precisely performed sacrifices. The Mahanubhavas are virtually monotheistic and their divine Raul provocatively violated caste and ritual rules
The book consists of 323 short chapters recounting incidents in Gundam Raul’s life. Some are the ordinary stuff of hagiography; miracles including raising the dead, controlling the weather, bringing prosperity to those in his vicinity, and sometimes simply glowing with numinous light. But this is commonplace, universal stuff. What marks Gundam Raul’s particularity is his apparent madness. Apart from his intentional violation of caste, he is constantly playing with sacred images, pretending to ride horses that are really rocks; he scolds a squeaky gate and his own rear end for their noises; he loves food and is not above snatching sweets from others. The locals are sometimes moved to declare, “The Raul is mad, the Raul is possessed.” The book is a lively and entertaining account of the career of a figure whom might equally be viewed as a lunatic or as an enlightened reformer who used theatrical means to bring others wisdom.
Feldhaus does a tasteful job of editing, providing useful background and analysis but in no way overdetermining her readers’ responses. Apart from providing useful information specific to medieval India, her comments led me to read about St. Simeon Salos, the patron of “holy fools” and puppeteers, for, I believe, the first time. His story is a partial corrective for anyone thinking there is no analogue for the Raul or for mad Chinese mountain sages in Christian tradition.

Burney’s Evelina

Though it may seem to have close affinities to Richardson’s novels due to its epistolary form and its theme of a distressed young lady (familiar also from Perils of Pauline and Yuan Dynasty drama), Burney’s novel is ever so much funnier. Evelina is so artificial – surpassingly lovely and motivated by the highest morality, yet often paralyzed by social anxiety and quite passive -- her very helplessness is a sort of absurd exemplar of the restrictions on women in her day. If the jokes such as the Captain’s xenophobia become a bit repetitive, so were most people’s favorite bits of Seinfeld. The same circumlocutions that express the delicacy and sentiment of the Rev. Villars or Lord Orville make Sir Clement ridiculous. The book is as well an example of the common literary dodge of portraying forbidden material by making it, at the end, a negative example, as, in the 14th century Cleanness exhibited the dreadful doings of the Sodomites for readers both to savor and condemn. The author is then not only blameless, but improving to her audience.
The book throughout is comic from Villars’ too-serious (though highly emotional) tone to the marvelous expedient of the old ladies’ race and the ape at the end. Extraordinary coincidences shape the plot from the secret of the heroine’s birth to her chance meetings with her grandmother, brother, and foster sister in turn. Evelina has been read as a sly feminist heroine with Villars as the self-righteous chauvinist heavy, but surely the extreme characterizations are intended as just. Though often paralyzed by self-consciousness, she is the soul of virtue, her innocence and naïveté impenetrable. He is unfailingly high-minded and responsible, a model of sensibility in his devotion to his oh-so-feminine step-daughter.
Burney has great fun mocking Mme. Duval and the Brangtons, but their deepest sin seems not to be their thoughtlessness but their vulgarity. Lord Orville, on the other hand, must be rich and noble and good, but what matters is his courtly manner, inherited from the Renaissance ideal of the courtier as a sophisticated and sensitive lover. It is this primarily that excites Evelina’s admiration of his manly and genteel behavior. In this aesthetic standard the lower classes have very little place. Given sufficient education, keeping a low profile, they might be more or less respectable.
The author and her circle would have had no difficulty in recognizing Sir Clement’s note (purporting to be from Lord Orville) as an “outrageous, a wanton insult” utterly reversing Evelina’s good opinion. The note (which had been designed to offend) merely offered to correspond and expressed affection, but, in a cultural context of fetishized virginity and modesty, with the parameters for proper courtship rigorously defined, any violation signified barbarity, a failure of style but likely a giveaway to base motives as well. It’s a good thing Burney made a joke of the scene, though she had little choice but to live it as well.

Cooper’s Home as Found
Readers of Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales will be forgiven for finding the chief appeal of those works in the mythic frontiersman and his Indian side-kick, a pair of a type known through American literature. Each plot, however, has a respectable couple to provide a conventional love story rather like the Marx brothers used to do. In Home as Found these less interesting characters are the entire novel, but, fortunately, given the field, they have divided themselves into the truly genteel and the objects of satire. We can delight in the sharp satire of what he called “this malign influence,” America’s cash-driven “mania” which “has so destroyed the usual balance of things, and money has got to be so completely the end of life, that few think about it as a means. In these days of right-wing demagoguery, I can even sympathize with his observation that “men have got to be afraid to speak the truth, when that truth is a little beyond the common apprehension.” He is on the mark as well about Americans’ restless instability, moving among places (notably Westward) and classes.
The fact is, that, though a major mythographer of America’s frontier, Cooper remained a convinced aristocrat. To Cooper, in spite of the class mixing that may have necessarily occurred in early days, once the land is settled, only a “gentleman” could possess “dignity and fair-mindedness.” Even the foolish and vulgar Aristabulus Bragg, had he only been brought up in “a better sphere,” might have improved and “most probably would have formed a gentleman, a scholar, and one who could have contributed largely to the welfare and tastes of his fellow-creatures.” For many years Cooper’s popularity was far greater abroad (where he lived for some years) than at home. No wonder he quarreled with the American public throughout his life.

Notes on Recent Reading 4 (Sarah Scott, Madam de La Fayette, Wharton]

2012-01-01T06:20:00.000-08:00

Sarah Scott’s Millenium (sic) Hall

Scott’s 1762 novel attracts attention primarily due to its subject matter. In recent decades its depiction of an all-female utopia has justifiably enjoyed considerable attention from feminist critics, but Scott’s themes are more revealing and complex than some reductive summaries might suggest.
The women of the Millenium Hall commune (critics generally use the original edition’s spelling) live a life in many ways entirely rational. They spend their time in fully human activities, pursuing the arts in an Edenic setting. Each is a refugee from the persecutions of men and each has found, in female affection and support, satisfaction otherwise unavailable. In fact the place has the air of blithe eighteenth century Enlightenment absoluteness: the women, the reader is told, are altogether harmonious. With the conflicts occasioned by gender removed, they can enjoy daily happiness. Passion appears invariably accompanied by error at the least and very often wickedness. The few satisfactory marriages one glimpses are wholly cerebral. Though love between men and women seems virtually always harmful, among the women one hears no hint of lesbianism. The author herself had a very brief disastrous marriage and a longterm relationshop with Lady Barbara Montagu (sometimes considered co-author) during which they put into practice many of the ideas suggested in the novel.
Nonetheless, Scott is socially conservative enough to present the ladies as endorsing marriage as a general rule and assisting others in finding proper matches even while rejecting life with a man for themselves. Chastity and sexual reputation have such importance in their minds that one woman actually accepts a mismatched marriage rather than allowing a wholly untrue rumor to circulate.
Indeed, the bliss of Millenium Hall is such that the place might seem as though it must have the ennui of Eden as well as its charms. The critic seeking a route to social reform might note that each woman has come with an independent fortune -- it is markedly easier to construct a utopia if one need not bother about anyone’s earning a living. Still, even the ladies’ sometimes absurd gentility may be read as a response to the very real economic domination of men.
Radical as it may be in some of the claims on behalf of women, the book is scrupulously conservative in essentials: for instance, claiming that while “every station has its duties, those of the great are more various than those of their inferiors.” Scott’s conservatism is even stronger in matters of religion. Far from ideas like eighteenth century deism, Scott advances a wholly confident orthodoxy, often invoked to place the seal of undeniable truth on the ladies’ contentions. Their spirituality is shallow with one exception: they are philanthropic, helping their poorer neighbors (while not questioning the class system). This benevolence is the most certain evidence of their Christian virtue. In contrast, the sympathetic male narrator has just returned from the slave plantations of the Indies where he made his fortune never, apparently, thinking of the well-being of the workers.
The narratives of the lives of the groups’ members, while programmatically determined, are often similar to the incidents in novels like Richardson’s. Seductive aggressive males, fainting females, marriage, money, and class generate the incidents. In this way the book conforms to the “conduct novel” which, by setting forth exemplary behavior, both to be emulated and avoided, anticipates the self-help genre which occupies so many best-seller notches today.

de La Fayette’s Princess de Clèves

More a soap opera than a roman d’analyse, Princess de Clèves depicts a world in which the courtiers spend their time in elaborate intrigues, pursuing power and sex, because they have nothing else to do. However deceitful and selfish their methods, they have exquisitely developed sensibilities. It’s like a despiritualized Genji where every act is a theatrical gesture and refinement is cultivated by all. Vanity here presents in one of its purest forms. Surely the idlers who filled the courts of many absolute monarchs in all parts of the world must have similarly passed their time seeking pleasure while pursuing the more serious occupation of jockeying for influence by backstabbing and lying.
In this context the heroine is the exception. She excels in every quality admired by the nobles around her. In fact, an annoying habit of the author is to use empty superlatives. Not Madame de Clèves alone, but many characters are the noblest, the most handsome, charming, witty, yet the reader is given virtually no specific detail to make these grand abstractions imaginable. These are less descriptions of individual than they are rhapsodies for beauty that is too beautiful to be quite real.
Unfortunately for Madame de Clèves, she is also too good to survive. In an amoral court, she is incongruous. Having entered a loveless marriage with little hesitation, she then insists on being faithful, eventually dying for virtue (as her long-suffering husband had done before her). The one who inspired her passionate unfulfilled love, the Duc de Nemours, one learns in a one-sentence paragraph, found that time ameliorated his loss and his love faded.
The narrative, far from being a psychological masterpiece as some have said, strikes me as melodramatic and sentimental. The court’s aesthetes appreciate their own reaction more than the object of their contemplation. Nonetheless, the reader must admire the novel’s brevity, structure, and the lofty pitch of its abstract ideals.

Edith Wharton’s Hudson River Bracketed

Oddly, toward the end of her career, Edith Wharton produced a work that looks very much like someone else’s first novel, a Bildingsroman (more specifically a Künstlerroman) about an sensitive but awkward Midwesterner experiencing a love-tragedy amid the pretentious New Yorkers. Unlike most critics, Wharton thought this one of her best works. For me the satiric material on the Middle West, reminiscent of Floyd Dell or Sinclair Lewis, is awkwardly done and fits poorly into the plot. For a college graduate in the twenties, with or without literary interests, to take the temple at Delphi for a Christian Science Church, as Weston does, is not quite believable. Similarly, Wharton’s treatment of “modern” styles in fiction has aged poorly. One hears of “pure manly stories of young fellows prospecting in the Yukon” [London] and “descriptions of corrupt society people” [Wharton]. Rauch and his Voodoo poems sound like e. e. cummings with their tradition under a show of modernism, and I suppose Weston himself is based on Wolfe. But where is the strong mainline of modernism, Eliot, Pound, Stein, Joyce? The writers here seem like a shallow bunch. Vernon Lee criticized the book for its “cult chat,” but it is hard to associate these paper dolls with real writers.
Significantly, the descriptions of Vance’s blockages are okay, while his transports are weak. In fact all the rhapsodies of nature and of psychology sound flat to my ears, and the view of writer as unique seer badly puffed up. The vague concept of “Mothers” is perhaps meant to demonstrate the young writer’s intuitive brilliance, but it sounds rather silly instead. Wharton’s images too often seem like Weston’s, such as the self-dramatizing of feeling “handcuffed and chained” to one’s life.
The sentimental plot, generated by the virtuous self-control of Halo Spear and Vance Weston, is about to conclude in a conventional happy ending, when, in the space between the beginning and the end of the very last sentence Wharton’s tone switches. At first it seems the two, now each freed of their marriages, can find their destiny with each other: “And when at last he drew her arm through his and walked beside her in the darkness.” Without warning, Vance’s alienation returns: “the creator of imaginary beings must always feel alone.”
Though myself a “raw product of a Middle-Western town,” I found her literati to be reductive even as caricatures and the love story emotionally simple, which is to say sentimental. I imagine the sequel, The Gods Arrive, is more of the same, but I rather doubt I shall ever find out.

Idea of Comedy

2012-01-01T05:44:00.000-08:00

Unable after searching to recover my notes for a course I taught during the eighties on the idea of comedy, I have here attempted to set down my views in summary. Though these notes lack much in the way of illustrations, authorities, and documentation, they represent my current thinking.

Idea of Comedy

All art brings beauty and pleasure, but comedy brings gaiety and joy as well. Thematically, in the broadest sense, comedy represents a positive response to life, an affirmation, a celebration, a delight. This is neither more nor less accurate (that is, true to experience) than the pity and fear of tragedy or the simpler sympathy of sentiment and melodrama; it is their complementary counterpart. At the conclusion of the Symposium, when the partiers are for the most part, passed out, Socrates is maintaining the equivalence of the two. [1] Don Quixote, Pantagruel, and Falstaff are certainly as profound to readers as Agamemnon or Hamlet, and likely to be more moving than any hero in Racine. When we momentarily feel successful (or even indifferent) in dealing with the terms of existence, or when we choose to play at feeling such victory, we laugh.
Aristotle tells us that tragedy provides catharsis through pity of the other (compounded, I would add, of charitable love for fellow humans and Schadenfreude at witnessing someone else’s misfortunes). Fear arises since every member of the audience is aware that the fate of every individual is inevitably tragic. Looking at life straight on with open eyes may naturally elicit a tragic response. But a later ancient text which may preserve Aristotelian theory says that comedy “through pleasure and laughter” effects “the purgation of like emotions.” [2] In other words, ultimately the functions of tragedy and comedy are precisely parallel; both enable one to go on in spite of the intolerable conditions of life.
In comedy, the self is generally normative, observing with a critical eye the foolishness of those on every side. Thus humor requires a butt and comedy is often quite aggressive. [3] The characters in American half-hour comedy television shows pass their lives insulting those around them; in Oscar Wilde, the benighted Philistine is put down; in Huckleberry Finn America is lacerated without mercy. Here comedy is close to its roots in the ancient komos Old Comedy, and the modern Carnival with ridicule of prominent people, a trend that continues unbroken into the present. [4]
At the same time, though, comedy can seem amoral, when it tends to view faults abstractly as incongruity, as oddly amusing grotesque distortions in a formal pattern rather than as the source of pain and suffering. In caricature the lovesick youth, the miser, the braggart, the macho man and all other endless varieties of human folly appear as sideshow attractions rather than psychological, spiritual, or social pathologies causing real harm. Bergson insists on “the absence of feeling,” what he calls “a momentary anesthesia of the heart” required for comedy, itself “wholly intellectual.” [5] According to Aristotle, the ridiculous must never be “painful nor destructive.” Of course, Wile E. Coyote is never injured, though he may be smashed like a pancake or blown into the sky, he returns ever undiminished. So the whole competition between him and the Roadrunner, between the Signifying Monkey and the lion, between Chaplin and the bushy-browed Eric Campbell, all contention seen through a comic lens is finally a game, a pretence, a sport to while away a lifetime.
Paradoxically, though, comedy does in the end care a great deal about consequences, for every comedy must end happily. Every situation comedy ends in the restoration of a harmonious family, every romantic comedy ends in marriage. Human beings are such social animals that the endangerment of the social group by an individual’s violations of convention is seriously disturbing. Harmony must be reconstituted, if only through the sympathetic magic of drama.
Aristotle notes that comedy is “an imitation of characters of a lower type,” portraying as “ludicrous” “some defect or ugliness.” [6] The viewer will feel superior to the comic figures (though suspecting that the difference may be uncomfortably small) just as he feels inferior to the heroes of tragedy (while knowing that their fate is his in the end). Comedy finds amusement in every vice and failing – selfishness, libertinism, paranoia, vanity most all. Every fault is in fact a sort of vanity and ignorance – with a clear and objective view (like the reader) one would never behave in a ludicrous fashion. [7] By defining lapses, one defines norms. Comedy has been considered fundamentally conservative by some and inherently subversive by others because it is equally likely to criticize a present offender by calling for a return to earlier ideals or by denouncing the outdated values of the present and proposing radical new ones.
Apart from character faults, comedy exploits our physicality. Faults which are body-based such as gluttony and lust are a rich source of laughter, but moral failing need not come into the picture -- perfectly ordinary facts will work as well: sex, excretion, farts, belches, sleepiness, sweating, slipping on a banana peel. In fact, commonality lies behind the comic impetus to deflate the pompous with such expressions as “he thinks his shit don’t smell” or “he puts on his pants like the rest of us, one leg at a time.” However, this basis for universal sympathy can equally serve to stigmatize individuals. Any anomaly, including physical defects or simply unusual characteristics such as short stature, red hair, or minority racial identity, can be fair game, as every elementary school child knows. [8]
The incongruity that inspires laughter may be of any sort, in Aristotle’s language “that which is out of time and place, without danger.” It may arise from exaggeration or disproportion [9], indeed from any difference. A phrase whose meaning shifts between two possibilities, a sucking puppy among the piglets, a soldier out of step, an Amish rap singer, the possibilities are endless. According to Emerson [10] “The balking of the intellect, the frustrated expectation, the break of continuity in the intellect is comedy.”
Comedy is clearly associated in particular with topics about which people are anxious, such as sex, drunkenness, and social propriety in general. Laughter brings a simultaneous physical relief of tension and restraints and the intellectual assurance that reassurance that our own trials may, like those of comic characters, be overcome. Laughter has a social function [11], chastening nonconformists and creating a sense of shared values and feelings in the audience.
The deepest roots of comedy are surely in the rituals of springtime, the joy of the earth’s regreening, the acceptance that welcomes the replacement of the old with the new. The promise of the spring and the reappearance of fresh produce must have been associated with high spirits. [12]
There is finally a sort of cosmic comedy, reflected in the daily laughter among Tibetan monks, or that of altogether mythic figures as Durga who roars with laughter as she decapitates Mahishasura. Nietzsche provides a secular analogue in his story about Zarathustra coming across a shepherd with a snake in his throat. Horrified, Zarathustra urges the man to bite the serpent’s head off. When the shepherd does, he suddenly becomes “changed, radiant, laughing.” “Never yet on earth has a human being laughed as he laughed. Oh my brothers, I heard a laughter that was no human laughter; and now a thirst gnaws at me, a longing that never grows still. MY longing for this laughter gnaws at me.” [13] This is nothing less than the laughter in reaction to the absurdity of existence. “The deeply wounded have Olympian laughter; one has only what one needs to have” [14]
Emerson makes a similar point sparing the symbolic apparatus. “The whole of nature is agreeable to the whole of thought, or to the Reason; but separate any part of nature and attempt to look at it as a whole by itself, and the feeling of the ridiculous begins. The perpetual game of humor is to look with considerate good nature at every object in existence, aloof as a man might look at a mouse, comparing it with the eternal Whole; enjoying the figure which each self-satisfied particular creature cuts in the unrespecting All, and dismissing it with a benison. Separate any object, as a particular bodily man, a horse, a turnip, a flour-barrel, an umbrella, from the connection of things, and contemplate it alone, standing there in absolute nature, it becomes at once comic; no useful, no respectable qualities can rescue it from the ludicrous.” [15]

1. More precisely, he claims that at a gifted tragedian should also be able to write comedy.

2. From the Coislinian Tractate, an anonymous condensation of a work from the first century B.C.E. Proclus and Iamblichus also treat comedy as catharsis. In the twentieth century Elder Olson revived the term katastasis as a comic analogue to catharsis, defining it as the “restoration of the mind to a pleasant, or euphoric, condition of freedom from desires and emotions; conversion of the grounds of concern into nothing.”

3. See the Philebus, particularly 48-50. To Plato, comedy works through phthonosor malicebeing pleased at the misfortunes of our neighbor (Philebus 48a).

4. The same principle occurs worldwide. For instance, the ancient Irish kings feared being lampooned in a glam dicenn (satire-poem). Of course, in the Middle Ages poets were considered so close a thing to magicians that they were also believed to be able to bring real boils to the face of a victim. In West Africa, the Ibo “moon-songs” sometimes ridicule individuals who have violated group norms.

5. In “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of Comic,” translated by Cloudesley Brereton L. es L. (Paris), M.A. (Cantab) and Fred Rothwell B.A. (London). Bergson says, “It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion.” Also, “to produce the whole of its effect . . . the comic demands something like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple.”

6. Chapter V of the Poetics, Butcher’s translation. He is followed by the Coislinian Tractate and by Cicero who, in “On the Character of the Orator,” says “turpitudine.” In the twentieth century Northrup Frye used Aristotle as the basis of his analysis of the “low mimetic mode” in Anatomy of Criticism.

7. Plato says comedy springs from “ignorance of self.”

8. There is a reference to a dancing dwarf in the court of Neferkere during the Sixth Dynasty of Egypt (Third Millennium B.C.E.).

9. Cicero in On the Character of the Orator uses the term “deformitate.”

10. In “The Comic.”

11. This is Bergson’s third principal point.

12. Some authorities would link the customs associated with All Fool’s Day with the old medieval New Year just before.

13. Emphasis in the original from Walter Kaufmann’s translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 3rd Part, “On the Vision and the Riddle.”

14. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, fragment 1040.

15. From “The Comic.”

Two Lyrics on Death from Central America

2012-01-01T05:32:00.000-08:00

Macaws by the Gate of Copán

In Copán trees macaws fly, scream, and groom,
their scarlet feathers looking much like blood
that flowed here long ago and recently.
The feathers of their tails stream out behind.
The passerby feels blest though he is not.
Before his blood flows just like everyone’s,
like that that flowed in grooves on altar-stones,
and blood that flowed from army massacres,
as long as flesh unruptured holds,
he’ll make himself as busy as these birds.

Día de los Muertos

On Dia de los Muertos some here choose
to picnic with their loved ones by their graves,
and some then strive with Gallo beer to kill
mosquitoes of the mind that can draw blood.
Out front a wobbly Rambo sheds his shirt
and dares the other men to come and fight.
In corners of red eyes I see bright tears.
Thin dogs with hanging dugs pace back and forth.
Their glance explains -- there’s nothing more to say.

Election Day in Chichicastenango

2012-01-01T05:23:00.001-08:00

The market in Chichicastenango, Guatemala is sometimes called the finest in Central America. It is largest on Sundays and Thursdays and, the day the visitor arrived, it was further swollen by country people come to town to vote in the run-off election for president. He could barely make his way down the lanes, squeezing by locals and passing gauntlets of aggressive vendors. The hardware, fabric, fruit, and vegetables are sold not far from the wooden masks and other “artesania” (for which the proper English is souvenirs). A head taller than most of the Quiche Mayans, the tourist recalled reading that the ancient Mayan nobles were taller, apparently more naturally “noble” in appearance, than the commoners, due, of course, to their better diet. Children approached, at first selling, then begging, then just trailing after with diminished hopes. A haggard specter-woman appeared, saying she’s hungry, pointing to her mouth, “I have no tortillas.” Legless, wheelchairless people perched in front of the Iglesia de Santo Tomás. Inside the church the row of low pagan Mayan altars up the central aisle have many fresh offerings of copal incense and flower petals, while in the side chapels candles are available for those who prefer the intercession of Catholic saints.
Outside, by the plaza, two long tables were set up to certify voters, and then allow them to mark their ballots and deposit them in a box. Behind the officials and registrars were naïve murals depicting the suffering of the people during the civil war. A man working his cornfield is approached by a soldier with a raised assault rifle; a woman screams as her home is burned; a group of peasants scatters at the approach of helicopters; a depiction of wolves’ heads is titled “lynchings”; people make ritual offerings while in the background, their fellow countrymen are burned alive and crucified.

I had difficulty in choosing a candidate in this run-off between two right-wingers, a plutocrat and a mass-murderer. On the one hand, one might vote for multimillionaire Manuel Baldizón of the Democratic Freedom Revival party. Often accused of ties to organized crime and certainly linked to the previous corrupt administration, he had promised to lead Guatemala’s team to the World Cup and, more plausibly, to bring in the death penalty and to televise executions. Attempting the gain credibility as a populist, he borrowed an old gambit from Argentina’s Juan Perón and offered every worker an extra month’s salary every year. He claims to be a devout Christian. In the most puzzling aspect of his career, he did earn a genuine honors degree in English from Oxford.
He was opposed by retired general Otto Perez Molina of the Patriotic Party, a conservative group that annoys me by using a clenched fist, the worldwide symbol of the left for over a hundred years, as its logo. Despite overwhelming evidence of his direct involvement in one massacre and his suspected oversight of many others, he not only denies responsibility, but claims, contrary to all nonpolitical investigators, that such things never occurred. A graduate of the U.S.’s School of the Americas, he headed the training program for the elite commandos called “kaibiles” blamed for most of the torture and killing of civilians. Runner-up in the last election, he is the first military man to advance to this point in national politics since the end of the armed conflict. Much of his campaign was based on promises to be “tough on crime” in a country suffering increasing operations by Mexican and Colombian narcotraffickers. [1]
By nine in the evening Perez Molina had been declared the winner. Fireworks went off for several hours, resuming at about 4:30 in the morning, but the celebration seemed perfunctory. The pattern of the presidency being won by the second-place finisher from the previous election had held true once again. This has been the case since the restoration of the forms of democracy in 1986. It is as though the populace is dramatically enacting the unfortunate fact that the mainstream parties are much the same, and the selection of a winner matters only to the factions of the ruling class. No one speaks for the people.
My cynicism must have been shared by a good number of Guatemalans. We saw billboards from the university-based Movimiento de Integración. [2] Some read “Politicians are turds. We’re fed up.” Others list the names of the presidents in modern times, saying they “have robbed us of nine hundred million quetzals. We’re fed up.” Yet others read: “Seven presidents have held office, seven have been locked up. If you want another jailbird, vote for a politician.” [3]

1. In Puerto Barrios we saw SUVs and pickups with darkly tinted windows. We were told, “Everyone knows who they are, but no one will say anything. That car will never be stopped, so matter what its driver does.” While such violent and powerful organizations are clearly destructive, they also gain favor by the heaps of money they toss around in otherwise poor areas.
2. I have since read that this organization erected five hundred such signs.
3. “Los politicos son una mierda. Ya estamos hartos.” “Vinicio Cerezo, Serrano Elías, Ramiro de León Carpio, Álvaro Arzú, Alfonso Portillo, Oscar Berger y Álvaro Colom nos han robado Q900 millones. Estamos hartos.” “Siete presidentes hemos tenido, siete trabadas nos han metido. Si quiere otra trabada vote por los politicos.”

Food for the Gods

2011-12-01T04:42:00.000-08:00

Anyone contemplating the pre-Columbian civilizations south of the U.S. border must be struck by the importance of human sacrifice. Who can forget the tens of thousands regularly killed by the Aztecs, the mummified Inca children found on mountaintops, the Mayan altars with a concavity atop for the victim’s heart and carved grooves for comely symmetric flow of blood? Such practices, virtually universal during the Bronze Age, but originating far back in Paleolithic times and continuing into the present, puzzle if they do not shock us moderns. Was Adorno correct in classing a practice so widespread with the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis as “touchstones of barbarity”?
The killing of servants to accompany a royal pooh-bah, attested in many cultures, may be viewed as simply a reinforcement of hierarchy and control and the deaths of war captives as a gloating display ritual. When I entered the courtyard of the Oba of Benin City, I saw an image, made of the same rusty-red laterite clay as the palace, depicting the ruler with a large blade in one hand and half a human body in the other, an image clearly designed to intimidate visitors. I recalled the gruesome tales of the sacrifice of over a hundred told by a member of the punitive expedition of 1897. [1] The offering of people of status, however, must arise from other causes.
The Hebrew scripture contains ample evidence for human sacrifice in the ancient Near East. The binding of Isaac will come first to mind. Abraham is specifically ordered to make his son “a burnt offering upon one of the mountains.” (Genesis 22:2) Whatever else it may signify, this narrative surely was written to justify the end of a ritual that had existed earlier. Jephthah’s burnt sacrifice of his daughter (who willingly cooperates) in return for victory in battle reminds the reader of another general, Agamemnon, and his equally cooperative daughter Iphigenia. (Judges 11:29-40) [2]
Clearly, human beings caught up in a world they cannot control have always striven to master the situation through currying favor with greedy deities. Since we are self-interested, we assume god must be as well. Do ut des. The old ritual magic compelled divine gifts, but the gifts do not come for free. The more valuable an offering one can give, the greater the likelihood one’s prayers will be answered. From this perspective, human sacrifice is simply a stronger magic than the offering of animals or flowers. [3] The use of incense or candles preserves the archaic notion that some “sweet savor” ascends to the Almighty who inhales it with pleasure. The body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist ratchets the value up further from the human victim to a divine one. The central duty of both Brahmins and Kohanim is the proper administration of sacrificial offerings in order to obtain benefits for the donor.
This practical ego-centered motive, however, by no means exhausts the meaning of human sacrifice. Most importantly, the shedding of blood dramatically enacts the fact that life lives only upon life. There is no inorganic food. Survival depends on consuming living things (animal or plant makes no difference), making them a sacrifice to ourselves. Thus, the offering of life to god reflects human recognition of our necessary ensnarement in the web of life and death. We eat, and, if we are not cremated, our bodies are eaten. Ahimsa is an unrealizable ideal. Even a fruitarian sannyasin can only approach perfect non-violence as he destroys the potential to grow and reproduce of the products he consumes. Human sacrifice dramatizes this fact in the most memorable way.
Surely the witness to human sacrifice would experience pity and fear even more profoundly than the audience at a Greek tragedy. To witness the spectacle of death straight-on with open eyes portrays our human condition more profoundly than any philosophical text. How else can one explain the popularity of gladiatorial contests, executions, and bloody Mexican tabloids, not to mention the otherwise gratuitous violence in popular American films? Watching others die, we rehearse our own death, at once pleased not to be for the moment at least on center stage, yet knowing that our time will come, that each will play the central part, at once so titanic a change and so utterly ordinary.
As mythology, of course, the dying and reborn god is characteristic of planting societies, and the individual who is to die not infrequently welcomes this fate. Sacrifice means to consecrate or make holy, to the believer a desirable end. Martin Luther King’s apothegm “undeserved suffering is redemptive” includes of course the implication that death that serves the deity, whether through magic or morality, carries the highest “redemptive” value. The selflessness that enables such sacrifice is the opposite of the ego-driven motive in political and magical uses of sacrifice.
The practice of human sacrifice implies the ultimate identity of the mundane and the divine as one can pass into and fructify the other. Even more deeply, it suggests what the Uddalaka Aruni tells his son in the Upanishad [4] “That is you.” Far from the idea of the divine as “utterly other,” this identity implies the same sort of radical monism one finds in Parmenides, Stoicism, Spinoza and the mystics of many traditions. Modern physicists, while seeking to account for experimental results, have provided excellent images for this sort of view.
These sorts of sacrifice -- political, magical, psychological, ritual, philosophic, moral, and mystical – are not mutually exclusive. Like the meanings in every work of art, every cultural construct, they exist together in a dynamic and complex balance. The great essayist Montaigne relays a song sung by a prisoner of war during the time before he is killed and eaten by his captors. He invites his tormentors. “Let them boldly come altogether, and flock in multitudes, to feed upon him; for with him they shall feed upon their fathers, and grandfathers, that heretofore have served his body. These muscles, (saith he) this flesh, and these veines, are your owne; fond men as you are, know you not that the substance of your forefathers limbs is yet tied unto ours? Taste them well, for in them shall you finde the relish of your owne flesh.” [5] One hears, through the languages and the centuries, the defiant and stoical brave man taunting his murderers. One infers the victors’ aspiration to magically assume such courage from the vanquished. And for me at any rate, there is at least a hint of those more sublime intuitions: that each takes a turn in the procession of the flesh, and that in the end there is no distinction, they are he and he is they and in eating him they eat themselves.
I readily concede, of course, that this reflection would have had little meaning to the captive in question. While every cultural practice contains symbolic insights and, through its functional value to humans, is “true” from a certain perspective, human sacrifice and a number of somewhat less horrifying institutions (such as war, slavery, and oppression of women) should be banned by our species, regardless of past tradition. All the same, as a visitor to the once bloody altars of Mesoamerica, I recalled Montaigne’s conclusion that what he had heard of the New World “canniballes” sounded no more barbarous than what he knew without doubt to be occurring in Christian Europe, and, we may add, what we read in our daily newspapers. “There is nothing in that [American] nation, that is either barbarous or savage, unlesse men call that barbarisme which is not common to them. And indeed, we have no other ayme of truth and reason, than the example and Idea of the opinions and customes of the countrie we live in. There is ever perfect religion, perfect policie, perfect and compleat use of all things.”

1. See Alan Maxwell Boisgragon’s The Benin Massacre.

2. Biblical examples of other sorts of human sacrifice occur as well. For instance, “Thou shalt not delay to offer the first of thy ripe fruits, and of thy liquors: the firstborn of thy sons shalt thou give unto me.” (Exodus 22:29); Jeremiah 32:35 describes Israelites offering their own children to Molech (as the King James has it) though the text condemns this sacrifice; in I Kings 16:34 Hiel rebuilds Jericho through the loss of his children; II Kings 23:20 tells of the burning of false priests on Jehovah’s altar; Deuteronomy 13:13-19 tells of the burning of an entire defeated town “for the Lord thy God.”

3. In Genesis 4:4-5 God accepts Abel’s animal sacrifice, while rejecting Cain’s vegetable one. The early Israelites were, of course, primarily pastoral people while the older civilizations around them depended on agriculture.

4. In the Chandogya Upanishad, 6th Prapathaka, 8th Khanda, verse 7.

5. “On Canniballes,” quoted from Florio’s admirable 1603 translation.

A Palm Wine Shack

2011-12-01T04:32:00.000-08:00

I had spent the day with Mr. Varghese, a pleasant and kind Indian Christian from Kerala. He and his wife were the only other foreigners at Unity School in the Niger Delta of Nigeria-. We had idled away the day in the offices of bureaucrats at the provincial Education Ministry in Benin City. Mr. Varghese and his fellow Indians had mastered, so far as a mortal may, the techniques of survival for the expatriate in Nigeria. His favorite gambit when he had to visit the capital of Bendel State was to avoid the officials, instead bringing seven or eight cold Cokes to the file clerks in the Records Department. He regularly cultivated these lowly workers, expressing his faithful friendship with a gift always welcome in their sweltering rooms, where the files had overflowed their cabinets and were stacked on the floor as though the entire government was a compulsive hoarder in need of immediate intervention. When Mr. Varghese wished to accomplish anything, he would simply get his file from the young workers (though how they located anything was a marvel). He could then make whatever adjustments he required without bothering to go through channels.
On this occasion, though, this method could not serve and we had spent eight hours in fruitless waiting while our classes, of course, did not meet. We may both have been somewhat weary. On our way we passed a river with wide belts of vegetation as profoundly green, surely, as anything ever has been, and so extremely dense one could not see a foot into the bush. Not far further was a palm wine stand with enormous calabashes hung in clusters. We looked at each other, but passed on only to see another palm wine spot, and at that point we could not resist.
Mr. Varghese pulled up, rolled down his window, and inquired “Sweet one?” (as opposed to “strong one”). Satisfied they had his drink, we went under their thatch, still dripping from the recent rain and joined several other patrons on a wooden bench.
For twenty kobo (maybe twenty-five cents) our waiter (a boy of perhaps seven years) brought a gourd holding at least a pint. It was colored with coarse red specks, cam wood or something like, and had the yeasty, “working” fizz of fresh palm wine.
We sat in this place, feeling as though we were present at the dawn of the world, still just poised before tumbling into the endless “nightmare” of history (as Joyce’s Stephen had it). One could hear the nearby stream purling on. Now and then a drop fell from above like a benediction. We did not speak.
A woman dressed in neatly tied and knotted fabrics, including an elaborate headdress, strolled over from the nearby fire where she prepared food for the palm wine customers. She seemed shaken to see me there and once her comments had begun, they did not cease and her fixed gaze never left me: “Why are you here?” (A good question, I do not doubt.) “Do you drink palm wine? Is bad, very bad for oyibo [white person]. Oyibo, give me money. I need money to drink for myself. Why are you drinking and you don’t want me to drink too. Oyibo, palm wine is not for you, give me mooooney. You are bad oyibo if you no give me moooney.”
Eden had slipped away once more from right between our fingers. We finished our drinks hurriedly and returned to the dusty car. We hadn’t been stopped long enough for our sweat to dry on the seats.

Rereading the Classics [Rabelais]

2011-12-01T04:23:00.000-08:00

In a few months, I shall visit Portugal. We have engaged a room in Navaré on the coast during the days of Carnival and shall blame only ourselves if we are kept awake by revelry. I have, in anticipation, been thinking of Bakhtin’s study of Carnival customs and of Rabelais. While dealing with Stalinism and his own osteomyelitis, Bakhtin found in the great Renaissance monk an irresistible source of laughter, a way to cope with being human, with belches and farts and pains and death and murderous hypocrites in power all the while.
Now, of course, physicality has always been a major source of humor, puncturing pretensions and downing idealistic flights of fancy. It is the stock in trade of clowns, of commedia dell’arte, and of a good many contemporary comic actors like Jim Carrey. Though comedy often springs from the most material human attributes, the abstract logical mind is the another major source, perhaps equally significant. This reflects the human predicament: as Pascal had it, neither wholly angelic nor wholly bestial. [1] Thus cerebral humor like incongruities and puns generate a laugh as well as pratfalls and stomach gurgles. [2]
The physical side has attracted the most attention to Rabelais. His reputation for obscenity and crudity is, in the end, inconsistent with his utter normalcy; his body-consciousness strikes the reader as unusually healthy. In spite of the basic impulse of monasticism to reject the world, Rabelais embraces physicality, not with resignation but with joy. Life, death, eating, excreting are such fun, such loci of energy that they inevitably spawn great torrents of words. Rather than fleeing their humanity, Gargantua and Pantagruel magnify it through their gigantism, and the language does its best to keep up.
His book, however, is as erudite as it is vulgar. Of course, the manipulation of symbols is indeed more distinctly human than intestinal gas, at which bovines, for instance, far surpass us. Surely the mind is the single characteristic that most distinguishes our species, the most critically important in the development of homo sapiens. Semiotic use belongs to humanity as pouncing to cats or webs to spiders, and Rabelais delights in language, the most sophisticated code in existence. His book is filled with effervescent examples of what the medievals called amplificatio, piling it on, compiling great catalogues, adding one largely synonymous figure to another, listing authorities as though presenting a learned argument. He makes endless allusions, employs every sort of rhetoric and verse imaginable, and elaborates commentaries on commentaries for the sheer exhilarated joy of it. Knowing no bounds, he invents outlandish names and words, and shuffles foreign tongues together. Such Whitmanic/Joycean exuberance in a learned French monk!
Loving language, he loves literature, and book-studies of all kinds. He is full to overflowing; he is encyclopedic. He mixes high and low styles in a way that would have seemed barbaric to the ancients. In the list of Gargantua’s games one feels the pulse of life even more than in Breughel’s painting. In Xenomanes’ description of King Lent [3] are a hundred surrealist images. Few others construct such grand textures of words out of playful high spirits alone.
His rhetorical figures correspond precisely to the author’s world-view. He is constitutionally filled with a buoyant delight at existence, inspired by learned studies no less than by a fine dinner or an admirable sunrise. This delight in simply being alive is stronger in some passages than others, but never absent through the entire work. This is surely in fact the work’s most significant theme. It may be true, as the Buddha said that life is suffering, but it is no less true that life is joyful, and it can only be salutary to look through the eyes of one who expresses the other half of the undeniable self-contradictory truth. As Rabelais says, echoing Aquinas in his initial address to his readers: “to laugh is natural to men.” [4]
Pantagruelism, according to its creator, arises from “a certain jollity of mind, pickled in the scorn of fortune” [5] But in fact, what the translator calls “jollity” is in French gaîté, and this word has a long history in French poetry. Among the troubadours “gai” was used to imply a sort of sublimity bordering on divine afflatus. [6] Thus gai saber came to be used for the “sciences” of poetry composition and of lovemaking as in the 14th century Consistori del Gay (or Gai) Saber. Rabelais in the stirrings of the Reformation and Nietzsche with the 19th century “death of God” both saw the world opening before them. Nietzsche says in his Fröhliche Wissenschaft, “Indeed, we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel, when we hear the news that ‘the old god is dead,’ as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an “open sea.’” [7]
In a temperament of a soberer sort, George Santayana thought of the world as a grand mardi gras, saying “It is a great Carnival, and amongst these lights and shadows of comedy, these roses and vices of the playhouse, there is no abiding.” [8] In fact, Pantagruel’s whole story, like that of Dante or of Monkey in Journey to the West is a journey toward enlightenment.
Less foregrounded, but a natural consequence of Rabelais’ sensibility, is his political radicalism, his uncompromising sharp satire of the ruling class of church and state, and his admiration for More’s communist utopia. Bakhtin was on the money, as many subsequent critics have agreed, when he associated Rabelais’ attitude with the social practices around Carnival in which social order was overturned, at once revealing temporarily the artificiality of the everyday and reinforcing its essential reality by playfully enacting its opposite. All laughter has an element of letting go, of a sudden release of repressed ideas. [9] When Epistemon’s throat is cut and he finds himself in the underworld, social roles are reversed. [10] Kings and conquerors are reduced to beggary, while the philosophers prosper. Of course, in the Abbey of Thélème, with its slogan “Do as thou wouldst,” the inmates need not support themselves; indeed, like nobles, they have troops of workmen to provide their needs. Their behavior is decorous due to the aristocratic virtue of “honor,” really an aesthetic category. Still, Rabelais’ book must be counted among those that presaged the breakdown of Roman Catholic hegemony and of European feudalism, though what followed was not liberation but new varieties of Protestant intolerance and capitalist exploitation.
Am I the only reader to suspect a poignant note in the constant barrage of good humor about drinking alcohol? To me it sounds as though, for all the ebullient story-telling, all the optimistic brio, all the hearty Renaissance self-celebration, the subject in the end must seek some anesthetic or analgesic at least to make it through the night. Even the healthiest of monkish physicians felt the need for a chemical fix when it seemed that reality was gaining on him. In addition the fantasies of titanic meals may be seen as the inversion of the sort of starvation anxiety Bettelheim found in stories like Hansel and Gretel. Clearly, the fantastic liberty of actors like Pantagruel and Panurge gains its appeal from the compromised and highly programmed lives most people live. Similarly, Rabelais’ frequent “jolly” references to people identified as physically ill (most often “syphilitics” and “gouty ones,” two conditions that were associated with over-indulgence) reinforces the fact of mortality and the transience of worldly things. Just as in ancient Greek and Chinese poetry, the recognition of the illusory nature of pleasure heightens its enjoyment even as it adds a dark shadow to the scene.
Glorious as I find him, Rabelais is not, indeed, to everyone’s taste. For those of us who like to believe in the power of words, it is gratifying to find that the Church is still after him as it was during his life. The Catholic Encyclopedia says of Rabelais’ book, “It is impossible to analyse it” yet adds as well the caution: “as a whole it exercises a baneful influence.” I would not blame the pious fathers for doubting that the author of Gargantua and Pantagruel was a believer in original sin.
He is also capable of offending George Orwell who calls him precisely what he is not: “an exceptionally perverse, morbid writer, a case for psycho-analysis.” Orwell marvels that “anyone can find something ‘normal’ and ‘hearty’ in coprophilia,” [11] and suggests that Rabelais’ reputation can only exist due to people’s failing to actually read his book.
Orwell wrote on the eve of the immensely and deservedly popular translation of an abridgement by Samuel Putnam. Urquhart/Motteux is good fun but can tire the reader. J. M. Cohen’s Penguin version is complete and reliable as well as inexpensive and easily available. Donald M. Frame’s The Complete Works of François Rabelaisis the best current scholarly version for serious students who don’t read French. I can only think that the more people who read Rabelais, the better. He is an enormous spirit and we can all use the tolerance, good sense, and profound learning as well as his high spirits which delighted not only in food and drink but in the most entertaining play of all, the play of the mind.

1. Blaise Pascal, Pensées 329.

2. For the gastric sounds I am thinking of Chaplin’s “stomach duet” with a charitable prison visitor in Modern Times, for which he created the noises himself by blowing bubbles into a pail of water.

3. Book IV, chapters 30-32 contains such figures as “his lungs like a fur-lined hood,” “his imagination like a peal of bells,” and “if he blew his nose, it was salted eels.”

4. Rabelaisian it may sound, but the line is directly from the Summa Theologica, LI, 1.

5. “Une certaine gaîté d'esprit confite dans le mépris des choses fortuites.” In Urquhart’s edition, though by this point translated by Motteux, from the prologue to Book IV. Motteux was also an early translator of Don Quixote, though, according to Samuel Putnam, he was very free, adding obscene material in particular and omitting at liberty while emphasizing the “slapstick.” His death in a brothel led to a sensational closely watched trial.

6. See, for instance, the Contessa de Dia’s “Ab joi et ab joven m’apais,” William IX’s “Pos de chantar m'es pres talenz,” and Peire Vidal’s “Ab l’alen tir vas me l’aire.”

7. Aphorism 343 of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft in Walter Kaufmann’s translation. Nietzsche owes to Emerson for these concepts. Among the many commentators, Harold Bloom regards Nietzsche as “Emerson’s belated rival.”

8. Santayana 34 in "Carnival" from Soliloquies in England and later soliloquies.

9. For Freud, humor arose from a rejection of reality and a triumph for the pleasure principle, the superego temporarily allowing the ego to gain id satisfaction from introducing tabooed topics. Among the likely sources of comedy, then are sex and scatology, heterodoxy and revolution.

10. Rabelais owes a debt, here, to Lucian’s Menippus.

11. The line is from a dismissive review of Albert Cohen’s now-forgotten Nailcruncher that appears in George Orwell, My country right or left, 1940-1943, p. 45-6. I am curious as to what episode Orwell thought could properly be termed “coprophilic.”

Walkin' Blues [Son House]

2011-12-01T03:59:00.000-08:00

Another close reading of a blues song (see “Down the Dirt Road Blues,” posted during October 2011). My goal in this series is to demonstrate the subtlety and poetic value of these great American lyrics.

Son House’s “Walkin’ Blues” is at once a narrative, like a brief short story, and a lyric cri de coeur. Musical style and tone are masterfully unified in a classic statement of the Delta blues.
The persona of the song (recorded in significantly different form by Robert Johnson) opens with a blues formula. The speaker comes into consciousness (“got up this morning”) in darkness and bewilderment (“feeling ‘round for my shoes”). While disorientation in the dark nighttime might be normative, this is unusual. Unable to put things straight, he acknowledges his ill: the “walkin’ blues.” Parallel to “walking pneumonia,” he is stricken, though able yet to function.
Initially the first person pronoun is omitted, universalizing the line and making it seem a general characterization of the world. When this is repeated in the third line, the sufferer is particularized as “I,” as though his pain has caused him to emphasis his individual ego. The fourth line addresses the listener as a potentially sympathetic confidant, an amelioration of his condition created by his words. Though the second person may lack the singer’s first-hand experience, he has experienced the blues through the lyric.
This relationship is expanded in the second verse which characterizes the blues as a “chill,” a symbolic negation of the “warmth” of life as well as a straightforward medical symptom. The relationship between imagined speaker and projected listener becomes reciprocal as the one expresses good wishes for the other: “If you ain’t had ‘em I hope you never will.” The fragility of the persona is enacted in his hesitation, as he repeats “I” in a stammer that poignantly indicates the instability and, at the same time, the trembling vulnerability of the ego.
This other figure crystallizes in the third stanza. She is a woman with whom he has a conflicted relationship. The first line kindly offers her emotional support and invites reciprocity (“When you get worried drop me a line”) but his thoughtfulness turns immediately to pessimistic self-absorption expressed ironically: “If I don’t go crazy, honey, I’m going to lose my mind.” The affectionate term “honey” appears though his distress is attributable to her failure to accept his love.
The fourth through the sixth stanzas analyze the mésalliance. The singer indicates their racial compatibility, implicitly suggesting that she is “dicty” or hoity-toity, and denouncing himself for his mad infatuation, yet ultimately he can only renew his lament, finding himself with “nobody to throw his arms around” when “the sun goes down.” He has made all possible effort toward harmony and must ask in the end her pity, despairing for the moment of her love.
The profundity of his desire is expressed in the imagery of the seventh stanza which sounds archaic enough to be Neolithic: “I love my baby like the cow love to chew her cud.” The depth of desire and the utter naturalness of the singer’s need heighten his poignant predicament. His life is aimless and pointless without love. His wife’s mistreatment, presumably infidelity, her “lowdown ways,” makes time spread out to purgatorial lengths of suffering. Convinced that “somebody is stealing my jelly roll,” he has recourse to a supernatural consultant.
The poem ends with a renewal of lament and a final resolution. “Feeling sick and bad,” he can only contrast his state with past “good times.” As the sun disappears in a lyrically distorted stanza with prolonged cries of loss, and the evening that brings depression returns, the singer declares his own righteousness to the society of men who might sympathize: “I wouldn’t do nothing boys, not against my woman’s will.” Yet in the end, he does. He resolves to leave his unfaithful wife for “a great long time,” never to return until she changes her mind.
The world of the song is hazardous and mysterious; the singer is lost, sick, and fears mental breakdown. The polarities within which he must try to make life livable – black and white, male and female – seem all but impossible to reconcile. At the moment he is alienated from a tangled love relationship. The regular recurrence of nightfall seems sinister and foreboding, magnifying the singer’s Angst and helplessness. Yet the singer, and each of us who hears him, simply go walking on toward the uncertain future, lured always forward by the memory of “good times” in the past and the ideal of satisfaction evident in the down-home image of the ruminating cow.

Walkin’ Blues Son House

Well got up this morning, feeling ‘round for my shoes
Know about that, I got the walkin' blues
I said I got up this morning, I was feeling ‘round for my shoes
I said you know about that now, I got the walkin' blues.

The blues ain’t nothing but a lowdown shaking chill
If you ain’t had ‘em I hope you never will
Oh, the blues is a lowdown old aching chill
If you ain’t had ‘em boys, I -- I hope you never will.

When you get worried drop me a line
If I don’t go crazy, honey, I’m going to lose my mind
When you get worried I said sit down and drop me a line
If I don’t go crazy, honey, I’m going to lose my mind.

Your hair ain’t curly, your doggone eyes ain’t blue
If you don’t want me what the world I -- I want with you?
Oh, your hair ain’t curly and your doggone eyes ain’t blue
I said now if you don’t want me, babe, what the wide world I want with you?

Don’t a man feel bad the Good Lord’s sun go down?
He don’t have nobody to throw his arms around
Can’t a man feel bad, I said when the Good Lord’s sun go down?
I said he don’t have a soul, not to throw his arms around.

Looky here baby, what you want me to do?
I’ve done all I could just to get a-along with you
Looky here honey, what do you want poor me to do?
I say I’ve done all I could, honey, just to get along with you.

You know I love my baby like the cow love to chew her cud
I’m layin’ round here though I aint doin’ no good
Ooh, I love you honey like the cow love to chew her cud
I’m layin’ round here, baby, but I -- I sure ain’t doin’ no good.

You know the minutes seem like hours, the hours seem like days
Seem like my baby don’t stop her lowdown ways
Oh, the minutes seem like hours, I said the hours, they seem like days
You know it seems like my bride never stop her old lowdown ways.

I’m going to the gypsy now to have my fortune told,
I believe somebody is stealing my jelly roll
I’m going to the gypsy, I believe I’ll have my fortune told,
'Cos I believe somebody is trying to steal my jelly roll.

I got up this morning, feeling sick and bad,
Thinking ‘bout the good times that I once have had
I said soon this morning, I was feeling so sick and bad,
You know I was thinking ‘bout the good times now that I -- I once have had.

The sun is going down behind that old western hill
Yes, yes,
Ooh, behind that old western hill
And I wouldn’t do nothing boys, not against my woman’s will.

You know I’m going away, I’ll stay a great long time
I aint coming back here until you change your mind
Oh, I’m going away, I believe I’ll stay a great long time
I said I aint coming back, honey, until you change your mind.

Iowa Communards

2011-12-01T03:48:00.000-08:00

My Uncle Bill, a factory worker who lived his entire life on a small farm near Cedar Rapids, Iowa, knew that, if he entered the bar of one of Amana’s popular eateries not far from his home, he would probably find an acquaintance or two, perhaps someone who, like himself, rarely shed his bib overalls. Their quiet beer-sipping was hardly a footnote to the tourists – though little-known outside the region, the Amana Colonies are Iowa’s top tourist attraction. (To some, of course, the very idea of a tourist attraction in Iowa is oxymoronic.) Apart from today’s family-style dining and an appliance name now belonging to Whirlpool, from 1855 until 1932, the Amana Colonies were the site of one of the most successful of nineteenth century America’s many experiments in communal living.
The Germans who settled these lush fields were members of a small sect. Their beliefs had deep roots even within the Roman Catholic Church which had always included mystical and pentecostal tendencies as well as spawning heretics of more radical views. The followers of Montanus are a significant early example and Meister Eckhart’s Friends of God a medieval one. The hierarchy did its best to control these extra-bureaucratic movements, however, and they found more space in the left wing of the Reformation.
Among Protestants, Anabaptists from the 16th century had sometimes chosen to remain aloof from the inevitably corrupt institutions of church and state. They refused oaths and military service, and sought direct openings from God. By the late 17th century there arose groups of Pietists who stressed individual morality and Inspirationists who believed there were prophets among them. Philipp Jakob Spener preached universal priesthood, and in 1716 E. L. Gruber organized the group that was to come ultimately to the United States. In the broader sense one may include in the varied complex of this general trend of belief Evangelical Lutherans, Brethren, and Mennonites. The Society of Friends (Quakers), Methodism, and Baal Shem Tov’s Hasidic Judaism are similar in certain significant ways as well.
What these groups had in common was a suspicion of institutional hierarchy and an emphasis on individual behavior and the possibility of direct contact between the individual and the divine in the modern age. In the religious sphere, these movements reflect the Renaissance appreciation of individuality; we moderns, too, tend to be sympathetic to the privileging of each person’s experience over the dogmatic transmission of tradition that had obtained since the Stone Age. Whereas the shaman’s skills, the priest’s learning, and the aristocrat’s authority had long insisted on their prerogatives, with the coming of earliest capitalism came mysticism’s transvaluation of values, which sees the holy glow in each soul and in acts of everyday life
The group that founded Amana (after first establishing the Ebenezer commune in New York) was descended from Gruber. Calling itself the Community of True Inspiration (Die Gemeinde der wahren Inspiration), they were enthusiastic Pietists who sought to live a fully Christian life and convinced Inspirationists who believed they heard prophets among them, though they had no ministers, regarding all true Christians as equal.
Upon settlement in America, they determined to take seriously the words of Acts that described the early Christians’ communal life. [1] The means of production, land and workshops, were held in common, though people lived in individual homes. Meals were served in silence to sex-segregated diners in groups of thirty to sixty. After the age of two children attended school. Their enterprise was successful enough that they flourished for nearly a hundred years in consistent prosperity. According to an observer in 1876, “They live in such perpetual peace that no lawyer is found in their midst; in such habits of morality that no sheriff walks their streets; in such plenty that no beggars are seen save such as come from the outside world.” The description concludes polemically: “If Communism can be applied with such beneficent results in the case of seven villages, why not over an entire county? Why not over a State? Why not over a Nation?” [2]
These partisan words were written at a time during the nineteenth century when America had a great many of these utopian experiments. Some were secular: Brook Farm, the Fourierists and Owenites, all the factions Marx would deride as “utopian.” Many were religious such as Oneida or the Shakers. They had in common a rejection of the economic system and the social values of capitalism. Instead, they sought to substitute a loving community in which each was supportive of all and all of each. In their separate groups the pious and the irreligious alike attempted to create a society in which work would be a pleasure and alienation would vanish. Many of these experiments arose in the Western part of the United States where land was still cheap or free.
Apart from available land, all such societies benefited from the significant economies of communes, the efficiencies of central planning, and social cohesion of a committed population, at least at first. The shortest-lived, in both periods of communalism (the mid-nineteenth century and the latter part of the twentieth) were the intellectuals and the anarchists such as Fruitlands, Brook Farm, and the latter-day Drop City. The socialists lasted, in most cases, little longer. Those groups which had a rigid organization or a charismatic leader -- recent examples include Baba Ram Dass at Lama, Gaskin at the Farm, or the Krishnas in New Vrindaban -- lasted longer, as did the Amanas, America’s longest-lived commune to date.
Doubtless the society was broken primarily by the end of its isolation. Governor Harding’s chauvinist 1918 Language Proclamation banned the use of languages other than English in such public places as stores, streets, schools, and churches. [3] Once people could travel more easily and hear of doings outside Amana, they became restless. Mass culture arrived, and the group, once passionately attached to their way of life, became uncertain. The radio was perhaps the greatest single factor in the so-called Great Change – once the youth got wind of popular culture, the traditional ways became unacceptable. In fact, faith had been eroding and people had begun falling away long before the end in spite of graduated sanctions with total banishment as the most severe. It is sufficient evidence that the influence of the church authorities and the traditions of the settlement had been on the wane for a long time that in the 18th century there were eighteen prophets, called “Werkzeuge” or “instruments;” in the 19th century there were but three, and none had appeared since the death in 1883 of Barbara Heinemann Landmann.
The contemporary visitor enjoying a hearty meal served family style, tasting perhaps a bit of rhubarb wine at the Colony Inn Restaurant or the Ox Yoke Inn might reflect on how people here had sought to pursue perfection, to realize the ideals of the gospel in their daily lives. They were, for several generations, convinced that, if they wanted a loving community, they would have to do as the Wobblies said, “to build the new society within the shell of the old.”

1. Acts II 44-45: “and all that believed were together and had all things common. They sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.” Acts IV 32-35 “And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things in common . . .Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles’ feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.”

2. American Communities, William Alfred Hinds. New York: Corinth Books, 1961. 55. Hinds’ book is an excellent account of a variety of nineteenth century utopian communities. The author himself grew up in John Humphrey Noyes’ Oneida where all members were united in marriage together. Much the same ground is covered in another early book: Charles Nordhoff’s The Communistic Societies of the United States (1875).
More modern general studies include Mark Holloway’s Heavens on Earth. Utopian Communities in America, 1680-1880 and Delores Hayden’s Seven American Utopias. The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790-1975.
References focusing on individual states include Robert V. Hine’s California's Utopian Colonies and Catherine M. Rokicky’s Creating A Perfect World: Religious and Secular Utopias in Nineteenth-Century Ohio.
William H. and Jane H. Pease are the authors of Black Utopia: Negro Communal Experiments in America.
Probably the best guide to contemporary or recent communes is the authorless Communities Directory: A Guide to Communal Living published by the Fellowship for Intentional Community.
Though less scholarly than some of these and broader than others, I find Kenneth Rexroth’s Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century engaging and engaged, a good read apart from the information it contains.

3. The rule was overturned after World War I, but the use of German and other languages had already been profoundly affected.

Notes on Recent Reading 3 [Kipling, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Tao-te-ching]

2011-11-09T03:50:00.000-08:00

Kipling’s The Light that Failed

I admire Kipling’s dexterity with verse and his knowledge of India and of plotting. Even from a political point of view, he made an excellent exhibit A for Jonah Raskin in The Mythology of Imperialism (a few years after Kate Millet focused entirely on “male chauvinist” writers in Sexual Politics). On this point one might recall Engel’s famous remark in a letter to Margaret Harkness, pointing out the superiority of the depiction of society in the work of the royalist Balzac over consciously “revolutionary” authors like Zola, saying that “even in economic details” Balzac contains more than “all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period together.”
In this novel fighting the “fuzzies” is in the background, and what remains is Hollywood’s idea of the tragic. In fact, Wellman’s film with Ronald Colman and Walter Huston may well be a better work than the novel – movies were then a genre more congenial to the sentimental and the melodramatic. The view of the period’s artistic scene is quaint; that of the war illustrators picturesque.

By Popular Demand, The San Francisco Mime Troupe

Though I was pleased to find this book, I am afraid these plays are not the same on the printed page. The Mime Troupe should really be seen in a public park after the Gorilla Band has gathered passers-by (some of whom may never have witnessed live theater before). These newcomers then join the group’s aficionados (and the hip always say “meem”) who have seen America’s outstanding street theater company over the more than fifty years of its history. For those with personal experience, this collection of eight scripts will vividly recall the live performances. The Mime Troupe arose out of the Actors Studio, based in R. G. Davis’ training in mime and commedia dell’arte and produced between one and two hundred original shows, experiencing arrests and collectivization (after which Davis departed for Berkeley’s Epic West). Combining commedia dell’arte with slapstick, farce, vaudeville, and current popular culture they always delight the onlookers, who invariably have a high time, applauding and laughing at all the right places, and by the end it always seems as though they will surely head off into the streets and foment revolution then and there. Though this desideratum has not been achieved, the troupe has regularly staged excellent shows.

The Classic of the Way and Virtue, the Tao-te ching of Laozi including the third century commentary by Wang Bi, translated by Richard John Lynn (inconsistent transliteration from the book)

The Laozi, to use the most generally accepted form of the name today, is probably the Chinese classic most commonly translated into European languages. For those with no Chinese the choice is bewildering and many readers have found themselves reading, as I have, one version after another for the sake of what portions of one text or another we can digest.
Thus I shall not speak here of the general appeal of this most appealing work, but shall confine myself to the particular qualities of this edition. Lynn reminds the reader that a good deal of the book explicitly addresses governance. Laozi regarded role of the ruler in the nation as analogous to that of the patriarch in the family or the ego in the mind. To regulate any of these levels properly requires adherence to the same Way. This closely resembles Confucius’ approach, but differs sharply from that of the more anarchic Zhuangzi. Since the elder master was said to have been run out of the country himself, heading into unknown mountains, he was easily assimilated to the quietistic, antinomian thought that arose centuries after his day.
Another feature of this volume is its inclusion of the commentary by the philosopher Wang Bi of the Three Kingdoms era. Though his words sometimes seem to merely repeat, and occasionally to obfuscate, the text, it is often useful to see a paraphrase of the original verses by a savant of the direct tradition closer to the text than to us.

Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-09T03:46:00.000-08:00

Several months ago I was discussing the decline of progressive politics with a friend who, like me, had been in university during the sixties. We marveled at the popularity of politicians whose actions harm their constituents and yet are elected repeatedly; radio hosts who gather enormous audiences while professing bizarre right-wing fringe views; and the size of a Tea Party that represents primarily the interests of a few masters of large corporations. Even more unlikely, the title of Christian seems to have been appropriated by people who share nothing whatever of Jesus’ pacifism or his solidarity with the poor, outcast, suffering, and oppressed.
My friend said that large numbers of citizens will not oppose the fat cats unless middle class people can be shown how big business is picking their own pocket. He argued that ordinary people do not sympathize with the underclass; indeed, the respectability of some lower middle class people is built on contempt for a group beneath them. The anger arising from economic anxiety or distress even of educated people is often directed at the weaker and poorer rather than at the powers that be. According to this analysis, campaigns for such righteous causes as gay marriage or for the environment are counterproductive because they fail to appeal to the masses and, indeed, alienate some potential allies in the larger economic struggle.
I recalled this conversation last month when the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations began. Though the participants were criticized for lacking a specific set of demands, it is precisely this openness that allows people of all sorts to unite against the economic inequities in our system. The extraordinary tenacity of the New Yorkers and the remarkable proliferation of similar actions in other cities suggest that my friend’s analysis was accurate. Whether one likes it or not, most people will only move to seek their own advantage, and Occupy Wall Street has proclaimed the fact that nearly all of us are being cheated by the present system. The college students with onerous debt from student loan, youth who cannot find jobs, the transit workers whose new contract is worse than the one before, retired people seeing their investments shrink as social security is threatened, nursing home aides without medical benefits or pension, all these find themselves in the same slowly sinking boat. Only when these “mainstream” elements act in concert with advocates for smaller groups such as the disabled, welfare recipients, immigrants, gay people, ethnic minorities, and radicals can they move America.
Many unions, which had had no part in Occupy Wall Street at the beginning, saw the potential for a strong alliance and declared solidarity. On October 5 I joined a bus from the Hudson Valley Area Labor Federation to support the demonstrators. Traveling with me were a crew of young Teamsters (with shirts reading “kicking ass for the working class”), representatives of other unions (teachers and nurses were well-represented, though it was a work-day), and a few older activists lit by new hope.
In the city we joined an even more diverse group: black and white; middleclass, working class, and underclass; toddlers and the elderly. The event itself was decentralized, in part because our numbers and the peculiar police lines kept the crowds in odd and awkward positions, leading occasionally to chants of “let us out” directed at law enforcement (as well as “Who pays the police? We pay the police!”). Far from a scripted rally (such as one sees at the national political party conventions), there was an amiable chaos. A loudspeaker carried some speaker’s words, but three-quarters of the crowd was more engaged with what was happening closer to hand. Three or four bands played in different areas, many people carried homemade signs. As the most popular chant of the day had it, “What does democracy look like? This is what democracy looks like!”
In spite of the atmosphere of anarchy, people behaved in an exemplary fashion, obeying the General Assembly’s dictates about peace and orderliness. Once, when an excited marcher began loudly contesting with the only heckler I saw all day, several other marchers approached him to settle the scene. In the sixties, I had witnessed government agents provocateurs incite stone-throwing to justify a violent police attack. Such a gambit, it seemed, would have been immediately suppressed here.
My support of Occupy Wall Street is based on these considerations.

1. The group points to the correct source of America’s problems: maldistribution of wealth and corporate control. Society’s inequities are particularly evident when one considers the financial sector which produces nothing whatsoever and yet is absurdly highly compensated. The favored slogan “we are the 99%” expresses the fact that, though we do all useful work, the corporate parasites and those living on what is properly called “unearned income” take most of the wealth.

2. The occupiers have somehow maintained effective order within their own body, insisting on orderly demonstrations and absolute nonviolence, while maintaining a direct democracy, consensus-seeking decision-making process at the daily assemblies. They have to this day no leaders, no spokespeople, only a community of equal citizens calling for redress of grievances.

3. Because of its general character and the lack of specific demands, this action has succeeded in motivating youth and many otherwise unaffiliated individuals. Union actions, like those by environmental, feminist, ethnic, and neighborhood groups, though they have sometimes attracted large numbers of participants, have failed to ignite the interest of those not directly involved.

As filmmaker John Wellington Ennis said, “How can we not occupy Wall Street? Wall Street occupies US.”

The Pearl-Poet's Use of Link-Rhyme

2011-11-09T03:44:00.001-08:00

The linking word system of the verse groups of 14th century alliterative poem The Pearl is a striking example of textual accommodation to the simultaneous demands of predictability (for intelligibility and internal coherence) and novelty (a wholly familiar work would have no particularity and thus no real independent existence). Verse especially can hardly avoid taking an explicit position between these poles. The rhyme scheme within the stanzas of The Pearl indicates the clearly equivocal pattern ABABABABBCBC. The very fact that the simple pattern of alternating lines rhyming has become established after eight lines allows a variation to appear though the new C-rhyme is welded to the old structure by the re-use of the B-rhyme. The same sort of ambivalence is evident in the linking words: they act at once to pull the text together and to articulate its changes.
A simple glance at a list of the linking words will suffice to demonstrate their primary unifying functions: spot, dub, more, precios, pyece in perles pyʒt, juel, deme, blysse, quen of cortayse, date, more, grace inoghe, ryʒte, perle, Jerusalem, lesse, mote, John, sunne ne mone, delyt, paye. The most apparent fact about this list is that virtually all the linking words are positive, even hyperbolic, and the accumulation of their associations tends to ring the poem with an appropriate nimbus corresponding in purely linguistic terms to the poet’s removal from everyday life as described in the text. This aura of glory is of course particularly strong about the Pearl herself and indeed, the word “pearl” is twice the linking word, while the semantically similar “jewel” is used once. The only negative sounding words (lesse, mote) are used only for litotes. Thus they function in context as positive markers. “More” occurs twice, as though to point to the transcendent aim of the poem.
As a unifying device, the linking words tie groups of stanzas and individual stanzas and link the end of the poem to the beginning. They even tend to begin with the same sound (three-quarters of them begin with one of five letters — an improbable result in a random word-list).
The divisive, particularizing aspect of the linking words, though, is also operative in every case. They generally avoid exact duplication of meaning even in the different occurrences of a single word, preferring to trace a field of semantic variation within which the term can oscillate between meanings. For example the first linking word “spot” is used in two different senses alternately through its ten repetitions. In the second group, the word “dub” is used as a noun and as a verb, while “more” in the third modifies different parts of speech.
In the fourth group, the link formula is a phrase rather than a word and sometimes only one of its terms is repeated, sometimes all four. In the fifth group, the word “juel” refers to the man (as jeweler) in some lines and to the woman (as precious) in others. This variation in meaning is not necessitated by the conditions of composition: it would have been possible to retain much closer the original meaning for each word. I believe the poet is consciously manipulating the value of these key-words and thus reflecting on the instability of the rest of his verbal creation. The fact that this variation is part of the design of the poem is more obvious when one notices that it intensifies toward the end of each sequence. There is a greater likelihood of new “complicating” meanings appearing in the very last use of each word, the one that is in a “foreign” strophe group. (See stanzas 31 where “deme” means simply say for the first time, 36 where “bliss” is lengthened to “blissful,” 45 where “date” means simply time, etc.)
There are a few linking words missing where one would expect them to be; this disruption is clearly possible only within a context of order. For instance, the failure to provide an expected linking word at the opening of stanza 61 announces the critical looseness that transforms “perle” into “maskel” as key-word of group XIII.
The potential for transformation from the mundane to the priceless is indeed the poem's theme, but it is also the poem's style.

Rereading the Classics [Burton]

2011-11-09T03:40:00.001-08:00

This is the first of what I expect to be a series of essays along the lines of Kenneth Rexroth’s Classics Revisited, originally a feature in the Saturday Review during the later sixties when intelligent literary comment could still find a page in a magazine of more or less general circulation. Rexroth said that he was not engaged in picking a top forty, his own version of Dr. Eliot’s five foot shelf, but merely talking about books he loved. He had a good-sized list of topics he never reached, and the reader can regret the lack of his pithy words about Water Margin, say, or the essay he projected grouping Kropotkin with Ruskin and William Morris. Having, like Rexroth and my topic in the piece below, spent a good share of time in reading, I, like them, speak perhaps most precisely about myself when speaking about books.

Robert Burton, the British scholar and divine, author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621, enjoys something of a cult, which is only to say that, while he is not to the taste of many, his partisans feel immoderate affection for his book. What is more, his partisans include such contrasting sensibilities as Dr. Johnson and John Keats, as well as the ill-starred General Custer.
During the same period when Burton chose to investigate the human psyche in his monumental work, sometimes called the earliest comprehensive text on psychiatry, Francis Bacon was pursuing truth in other realms of natural history. As a courtier (Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Albans and Lord Chancellor of England) Bacon wrote several accomplished if unimpressive poems in pious and classicizing veins. In his philosophic writing, however, he regularly emphasizes the fictive quality of poetry, calling it “feigned history.” Though “a part of learning,” poetry “being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined, and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things.” He cites “One of the fathers” who called “poesy vinum daemonum, because it fireth the imagination; and yet, it is but with the shadow of a lie.” Its only power was “to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things denies it.” [1]
Burton might have argued in turn that all he knew was his own mind and thus to report this knowledge is the veriest direct observation. Surely, too, his pages contain the fruits of exhaustive research and a plenitude of cases for inductive analysis. And many a reader will testify to having found more than a “shadow of satisfaction” in their books. In the twenty-first century, we can scarcely avoid observing that Bacon’s descendants have immensely expanded the privileges of science and technology, though psychiatry has been reduced to diagnosing and prescribing, and humanistic studies have, especially in recent years, withered.
A writer’s writer, Burton weighs each element of syntax and constructs dynamic and elegant mobiles of words. A scholar for whom Classical citations constitute a good share of discourse, he refers to authorities obscure even at Oxford with perfectly natural familiarity. Further, he is a true philosopher, in the old sense of Buddha and Socrates, for whom the primary question, the really important one, is how to find happiness in life. Finally, many readers through the years have found his Anatomy, the only book he wrote other than a satire in Latin, to be a most entertaining volume, suitable for taking up and putting down at any point. In this extraordinary book, while discussing the capacity of vicious spirits to bring melancholy, he manages to swerve into an inquest on the corporeality of spirits with prodigious batteries of experts testifying on either side, and he turns then to the natural question of whether, if they be bodily, they must then have excrement. [2] Other authorities, we hear, believe all spirits to be strictly spherical in shape. Burton exhibits the views of the learned; the reader may decide on the evidence.
Though Burton provides a rigorous outline plan, his tendency always is to wander in what can approach stream of consciousness. Focusing on infirmities of the mind, he finds occasion to discuss human psychology in an all but unrestricted way. After all, according to Burton, all men are depressive. And for him the term melancholy is broad enough to take in mania as well as depression, as well as the derangements of every deadly sin, and countless other irregular forms of behavior. While he reviews the entire world (or at least a library reflecting the entire world), he tells his readers his motivation is intimately personal: “I write of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy.” [3] His true topic, though, goes beyond even psychology and tends toward the encyclopedic. Burton declares, “I had a great desire. . .to have some smattering in all, to be aliquis in omnibus, nullus in singulis.” Wishing to consume all knowledge, this “roving humour” has led to systemless study: “I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method. I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit for want of art, order, memory, judgment.” Yet Burton’s mental life was teeming, and he found his academic seclusion, “a monastic life ipse mihi theatrum.” [4]
The universal scope of his interests is consistent with his wandering style which moves from one thing to another naturally but unpredictably. Though never shy about expressing opinions on these multifarious issues, he tends, as real life does, to simply present the evidence and leave the contradictions for the reader to sort.
Because of his desultory style and constant patchwork of quotation, Burton may be claimed by post-modernists as a bricoleur, pasting together as he does a tissue of others’ utterances Only perhaps in the pages of Athenaeus does the reader find a like delight in moving from one thing fluidly to another, engaging with all that is human, making an unmapped voyage of discovery by dead reckoning, and thus reproducing the quality of lived experience.
Burton’s ultimate contribution is his attitude, his convincing pose as the man who has researched the cosmos, and, familiar with the endless odd vagaries of the human mind, has become broadly tolerant, accepting, and moderate in all things. Sex, food, party politics, he is easy-going in most things. His intimate acquaintance with the past has brought him a sophisticated recognition of what never changes. The passions of our hearts – romantic, religious, and simply depressive -- are too familiar to dismiss lightly yet too absurd to take seriously. Like the Epicureans of late antiquity, has achieved a sort of weary acceptance, facing up to the terrible terms of existence with dignity and a redemptive style, spinning the most wonderful tapestries of words while waiting to die. He is, of course, nominally a Christian (indeed a vicar and a rector), and he asserts conventional Christian doctrine and Christian prejudices, but the reader may doubt that that role sufficiently characterizes his spirituality or what he offers to a modern.
Frye, whose Anatomy of Criticism was a central text of my own early literary education, regards the anatomy as a subgenre of Menippean satire, and the spirit of Menippus the Cynic (and his teacher Leucippus) does inform Burton’s work. Yet, if Burton never cared to deflate the holy afflatus as his models Leucippus and Democritus had done, he did gaze at life with the same wide open eyes and then managed to so relish words that he built a fabulous monument of them, sometimes resembling Seneca, of whom he thought so much, and sometimes looking more like one of those weird and endless outsider art constructions like Cheval’s Palais Ideal or Henry Darger’s endless illustrations.
Democritus, whose character he assumes, was said to leave his retreat now and then to walk to the port and “laugh heartily at such variety of ridiculous objects, which there he saw.” As Juvenal tells us, Democritus “found food for laughter at every meeting with his kind: his wisdom shows us that men of high distinction and destined to set great examples may be born in a dullard air, and in the land of mutton-heads.” [5] In the same way, when Burton’s depression weighed upon him, unrelieved by either his beloved books or his eloquent pen, he would walk to the Bridge-foot in Oxford and his spirits would rise as he listened to the barge-men scolding and storming and swearing at each other. There must have been a grand edge to that laughter, and we know from his book that Burton would have found the very king’s court equally ridiculous.

1. The Advancement of Learning. Bacon refers to Augustine in Contra Academicas (386). In light of these views, it is amusing to recall the faction over the centuries that has maintained that Bacon, a “concealed poet,” was the true source of Shakespeare’s plays.
2. These topics are covered in one small section of Pt. I, Sec. 2, Mem. I, subs. 2.
3. 20 in the 1932 Everyman edition.
4. 17-18
5. This translation by G. G. Ramsay.

Flash Reviews of Thirty African Novels

2011-11-09T03:37:00.000-08:00

The reader will notice that this list is rather dated. It is directly transcribed from the notebook I kept while teaching in what was then Bendel State (now Delta State) in Nigeria. Posted to a bush school a couple of miles from the nearest village, I was dependent on the periodic visits of the library’s bookmobile from which I read Evans-Pritchard’s excellent book on the Zande Trickster, a number of random literary classics including much of Byron, odd bits of history and criticism donated or left by Brits, and a good number of African novels, most of them Anglophone. Perhaps these instant reactions might be useful to someone drawing up a reading list.

Peter Abraham’s Mine Boy is lit by some memorable characters, but, for the most part, slides by on post-Hemingway simple laconic phrase with occasionally eloquent elongations. The story of Xuma is at times pat or melodramatic, especially in Paddy’s speeches and the sentimental conclusion. The slummy local color is convincing.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is a transition novel with sometimes creaking literary and psychological machinery. Okonko’s tragedy proceeds in sparse and expectable figures with a plodding flatness of sentence structure.

I found Achebe’s Arrow of God richer and weightier than Things Fall Apart, far more complex and mature (including more obscenity). Ezeulu is a stronger character than Okonkwo (whose fall was formal and slow like Eisenstein’s Ivan). The many proverbs were a pleasure, though at times the obligatory anthropological data from our cultural ambassador get in the way. Achebe’s style seems only half developed.

Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, despite melodrama over the upright and passive and transition stereotyping, the story of Okonkwo’s grandson Obi displays an exuberant mastery of narrative time with effective flashbacks and fades. I enjoyed also what sometimes seemed and delighted detailing of scenes for their own sake. Is Africa allowing itself an aesthete?

Achebe’s A Man of the People offers first-rate social analysis, many perceptive and expressive scenes, and eloquent pidgin marred by a jejune first person narrator.

T, M. Aluko’s One Man, One Matchet had in its best moments a nicely ironic tone and some absurd situations reminiscent of Waugh. I found also thick-fingered manipulation and an intention to be grave while seeming a bit silly.

In spite of some clever flashes, Aluko’s One Man One Wife the fundamental poverty of invention is clear in the repetition of incident and situation and such devices as filling space with hymn texts.

Elechi Amadi’s The Great Ponds is another painfully inexorable procession toward ruin as two villages war over fishing rights. The book includes good evocations of social structure and magic (which here is efficacious), compelling storytelling throughout, but marred by the cheap end of Wago’s suicide (not to mention the flu epidemic). So much pain! – difficult to wade through it all.

Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is refreshing with its obscenity, its nimble language, and especially its lovely revelation of rot and ugliness. I’m afraid the social theme, though right-on, remains simplistic. Yogi is a Myshkin-like hero, engaging to follow, but the ugly banister and the bathroom slime seem likely to prove more lasting.

Armah’s Fragments is supported by the same rich sense of corruption as Beautyful Ones but is more sophisticated and complex. Baako, a sensitive writer, struggles against his suffocating family and his crass society while Naana plays the ancient noble savage. The book has some finely understated lines, some overfamiliar moralizing. Madness is portrayed with less sense of real whirling instability than in Bessie Head.

This Earth My Brother by Kofi Awoonor has some fine lyric lines and haunting dreamlike recollection scenes. Its highly complex texture is generally well-handled; the mythic structure actually works, a few gaucheries in the modernist line.

Cyprian Ekwensi’s People of the City approaches a kind of charm in its pulp tough guy hero but always falls short. The book has simply incompetent passages as well as sexuality more adolescent than Kerouac’s.

Ekwensi’s Burning Grass is more spare, dignified, and effective by far. The narrative line here includes a fine drawn wire of tradition. Yet too often the author indulges in overwrought passages of description and the bumpy plot, based on an unlikely journey, is finally unsatisfying.

Alex la Guma’s The Stone Countryy is a surprisingly unpolitical South African prison story with marvelous nicknames and slang and some impressive surrealist humor especially in the prisoners’ stories.

Bessie Head’s A Question of Power is a South African journey of the soul in which the thought swarms of madness and mental attachments are handled as equivalent to holy pursuits for all their undiminished horror. Dizzying, tiring phantasmagoria, sometimes beautiful and moving, sometimes overdone. Near the end more lucid, vulnerable, contrary to life, with memorable phrases.

The Naked Gods by Chakwuemeka Ike is an altogether silly university story with howling errors of fact and idiom and some dreary machinery of titillation, local color, and satire, all disunited vectors, like brief lost fireworks.

Camara Laye’s The African Child (from L'Enfant noir in Guinean French) is a nostalgic recreation of childhood. After threads of magic at first, it turns to sentiment, smooth and graceful but uninteresting. Truffaut should make the movie.

In Many Thing Begin for Change by Adaora Lily Ulasi is an Ibo woman’s comic story told for outsiders. It is flawed by the inappropriate use of pidgin among villagers speaking to each other in 1935, the ubiquity of telephones (not yet a reality) and other anachronisms. Limp story line and unlikely development sink the plot.

Naguib Mafouz’ Madiq Alley is an Egyptian macramé of lives well-knotted: vivid and convincing yet dramatic and highly colored. Neatly worked absorbing characters though with a somewhat diffuse impact.

Oil Man of Obange by John Munonye is the excruciating story of Jeri’s sacrifices for his children’s education in a life of grinding poverty. The singleminded intense plot becomes hard to take but it is well-executed and simply but tastefully written. Its modest and clearly defined goals are fulfilled.

The Kenyan James Ngugi (Ngugi waThiongo) produced in The River Between a verbally varied and sophisticated transition novel (though the hero is as usual virtuous and wronged). The book has some very effective images, but little jolt behind its skill.

Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child is fundamentally still another idealistic village boy transition novel, but here the Mau Mau theme is unfortunately reductive – gone is the delicate lyricism of The River Between, leaving little. Having read of his recent detention, I think his heart is in the right place, but politics can be an almost irresistible red herring for an ethical African.

Nkem Nwanko’s Danda has a refreshing ne’er-do-well hero and some high-spirited lines. In spite of a number of memorable comic moments in an original tale, the plot wanders, lost, and ends inconclusively. The book needs more structural bones.

Gabriel Okara’s The Voice is an experimental stab with intriguing systematic distortion of language, but I found its existentialist quest vapid at last and I became fatigued with inside Ijaw lore. For the most part the book is a transition novel hiding in embarrassment, though it has some moving and well-written dream sequences.

The Victims by Isidore Okpewho, a classicist from the Urhobo Division) tells the sordid story of Obanua and his two wives. The plot moves consistently toward death despite a trickle of comedy and a steady background of natural description that never quite meshes with the narrative. Sometimes trite or vapid, the novel is at times effective and occasionally pretty. The plot is neatly wrought with well-realized characters and an exquisite sense of the fatalistic life of the drunk.

God’s Bits of Wood by Sembene Ousmene is a heroic proletarian novel. One’s interest is always sustained in the history, sporadically in the particulars, leading to a bit of a scattered effect on the whole. The reader finds persuasive detail but no surprises with what feel like predetermined themes on women and religion. His movies are better.

In Houseboy Ferdinand Oyono of the Cameroons has an insubstantial motif supported by some real wit, particularly in the early parts. The pathetic denouement is thin and confused.

Sol T. Plaatje’s 1917 South African novel Mhudi is a melodrama reflecting true glints despite dialogue sometimes reminiscent of old movie titles and some descriptions brittle with cliché. Some engaging oratory, proverbs, a solid image in Halley’s Comet, sun and moon. Subtle, prismatic shifting sympathy between Boers, Barolong, and Matabele is far more revealing than Things Fall Apart though with the same corrective idealization of custom (dark areas projected as well). A remarkable man with a Standard III education who wrote on “the social ethos of black-white sex relationships” and worked as a political leader.

Amos Tutuola’s Palm Wine Drinkard is a powerful driving linear narrative that synthesizes folk motifs more successfully than, say, Jaime de Angulo: wonderful quaint locutions, strange changes, dream and folktale turns, appetite and fear and terrible babies, merciless as Trickster. The first African novel to gain a wide readership, touted by Dylan Thomas, it is no wonder than the celebrity of this “naïve” work annoyed the more literate African writers, yet the novel is strong regardless of such concerns. I do recall when Tutuola was brought to the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program and was completely dumbfounded by the questions of scholars and critics. I only wish he had written a novel about life in Iowa City.

Voluntary Poverty

2011-10-01T06:33:00.000-07:00

I was pleased today to hear voices of people in their twenties participating in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. Varied in ideology, they agree on the ugly maldistribution of income in the United States which becomes more extreme year by year. The absurd thing is that no one could possibly actually use an income bigger than – what? -- maybe a million dollars a year. The financial district tycoons are sinkholes of money that is never enjoyed by anyone. In fact, there is a case to be made that greater pleasure accompanied less wealth. Not so very long ago, this case was compelling to many.
American society is so powered by the dynamo of addictive consumerism that people are apt to consider acquisitiveness an innate human trait. Yet we all know many people who have ignored the pursuit of wealth, devoting themselves instead primarily to art, politics, religion, or, most commonly, family.
Furthermore in many cultures having more than one’s neighbors is discouraged. Though they may be quite stratified, tribal societies generally are highly communal in economics. The hunters share their catch; if the chief has more cassavas in his storehouse, he is also expected to give them to needy neighbors. Mechanisms such as the financing of fiestas in Guatemalan villages and the potlatch system of the Northwest Coast natives discourage the accumulation of wealth. As Chief O’waxalagalis of the Kwakiutl told Boas “It is a strict law that bids us distribute our property among our friends and neighbors. It is a good law.” Even in modern Japan not only is the distribution of wealth far more egalitarian than in America; the well-fixed try to build homes that are not ostentatious as it is considered bad form to flaunt one’s advantage. Rather the opposite of the conspicuous consumption which Veblen described among the newly rich, but which now characterizes the aspirations at least of the greater part of the population.
The idea of voluntary poverty is particularly associated with spirituality. From the shramanas of ancient India through many subsequent religious practitioners the shedding of possessions is considered a gateway to growth. To the Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains desire for worldly goods leads to rebirth as a preta, a hungry ghost, with a “mouth the size of a needle’s eye and a stomach the size of a mountain.” Lao Dz says that when people come to desire things hard to obtain, they become thieves. Christian monasticism often, though not always, involved voluntary poverty. Less theocentric thinkers, as well, from Diogenes and Epicurus to Thoreau and the members of the British Fellowship of the New Life, have considered poverty a characteristic of the good life rather than its enemy.
The notion of literary bohemia, whatever roots is had (among the Goliards, for instance) had become a fixed idea by the time of Romanticism. In the US the tradition of the artist “on the road,” bumming around, precedes Kerouac. Among the best-known were Vachel Lindsay (who made his way across the country trading poetry pamphlets for board and room) and Jack London (whose book is called simply The Road). Orwell could never have portrayed social conditions as an outside observer as he did in Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. For him there could be no substitute to actually sleeping is the doss-house. For Henry Miller scrounging and scraping indicated the authenticity of his values. His years of poverty could never be offset by his late success.
I don’t seek here, though, to provide a history of the idea and the practice, rather I wish only to present a sort of apologia or explanation at any rate for one significant thread of my own life.
I was hardly alone in my rebellion against American bourgeois values. To many of my generation, the social and the spiritual motives seemed entirely harmonious. Growing up in the suburbs I could participate in the attitude expressed in the 1962 Port Huron Statement, the founding position paper of SDS. The document begins. “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” That “discomfort” is later expressed as “emptiness of life” and as “anxieties.” The authors found that “Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today.” For many, the route toward replacing the cash nexus with more satisfying human relations includes resigning from competition in amassing heaps of goods.
Though every human could easily be given more than sufficient food and shelter, it is impossible for everyone to consume as much energy as an American, even an American on welfare. Everyone cannot eat meat or fish in great quantities daily. Economic democracy worldwide will mean a lowering of consumption for those who have been greedy Gargantuas. One who realizes these simple facts will naturally feel it is in better taste to live simply.
Determined to declass myself, even in high school, I preferred old and unfashionable clothing. I considered Chicago’s “bad neighborhoods” to be by far the most fascinating. In college I slept on a mattress on the floor and learned how to survive on next to nothing while engrossed in studies with no vocational aim whatsoever. .
My own conviction in the late sixties was that we were indeed in a post-industrial economy, that all the work needed to produce enough to support a good life for every human on earth would require only an inconsequential amount of labor from each. The human species could then devote itself to the pursuit of artistic and intellectual pursuits, considered broadly enough to include, I suppose, the drama of NASCAR and connoisseurship of snow globes. In other words, the prophetic motto of Rabelais’ Abbey of Theleme would finally be realized: “Do as thou wouldst.”
Most people’s jobs are, after all, unproductive in this basic sense. For instance, if everyone were entitled to medical care and health staff were simply salaried by government, all the people making out bills, all the insurance workers, the great majority of workers in the health care industry, would be unnecessary. If there were no advertising of unnecessary model changes and automobiles were available at a single lot in every geographical area, the great majority of workers in that industry would be superfluous. I often said that America was a land of such wealth, money was sloshing around and it would never be difficult to get enough to get by.
All this is only to explain why I so stubbornly bought clothes only in thrift stores, made all food (including bread and yoghurt – using dried milk) at home, and went for years without a car or a telephone. I used to like to say that I spent money only on luxuries, not on necessities, and we were little limited by our budget (spending weeks in Mexico, for instance, while living on a fraction of what the government considered poverty).
The case for the wisdom of these choices seemed overwhelming. It is clearly advantageous to buy second-hand clothes from the point of view of cost, but to rely on that alone would be mean. I also felt any object made by people represented the hours of labor that had been invested in its manufacture, involving large numbers of cooperating people. To discard it when it remains usable is not simply wasteful but in addition disrespectful to the workers. Most persuasive, though, for an aesthete, selecting clothes at the Salvation Army allowed the purchaser to display not his wallet but his taste, discerning the best choices in the mountains of junk. Every individual would then appear in a unique ensemble expressing individual value judgments rather than those programmed by large corporations.
The same principle applies to other habits. I continue to believe that the traveler will have a better experience patronizing a market vendor or a little hole-in-the-wall spot as opposed to a large, “touristic” restaurant or, worse yet, the one in the Hilton. Here one not only saves money, but one consumes the true national favorites in a setting much more conducive to conversing with fellow diners or staff.
Is not such a coincidence of advantage entirely convincing? Though some chose voluntary poverty to cultivate humility in an ascetic spirit, others found it encouraged and enlivened the senses and, even more significantly, separated those who sought to really living in an alternative fashion on a daily basis and to build a new culture from those for whom to be hip was a fashion alone.
I must confess the past tense in some of this prose arises from the fact that, a decade or so before retirement, it seemed prudent (and I have generally valued responsibility and care) to accumulate some resource against the formidable challenges of aging in America. Accordingly, for a decade or so, we both worked at more or less middle class (if underpaid) jobs, retaining some but not all of what had for decades been a rather intense frugality. We now find ourselves in retirement, in a home bigger than we need, putting out a small fraction of the trash that every neighbor seems to produce, and deriving some comfort from the news that young Americans are continuing to call attention to the pernicious effect of concentrated wealth in that epicenter of economic injustice, New York City’s financial district.

Piers Plowman and the Man in the Moon

2011-10-01T06:14:00.000-07:00

Self-reflective gestures in literature are often considered a peculiarly modern phenomenon. Often, though, such expressions are purely descriptive, implying elements of a more or less stable aesthetic or literary theory; those which question the stability of the speaking subject itself or the object it considers are likely to be labeled post-modern or deconstructive. Yet such references regularly recur in texts from all ages. In two medieval poems, William Langland’s celebrated epic-length masterwork called Piers Plowman and the enigmatic lyric about the man in the moon, such passages provide striking and critical moments for the poems’ narratives and themes.
For all the obvious differences, “Mon in the mone stond and strit” has many affinities to Piers Plowman: colloquialism, the alliterative hemistichic line, criticism of friars, and the combination of rough realism (including lower-class settings) with suggestions of profound mystery are among the elements common to both poems. In each the narrative voice asserts itself in the action of the pieces, an involvement singularly complicated by its periodic nature and the shape-shifting elusiveness of the characters.
In Piers Plowman such instability is a fundamental and fruitful strategy throughout to such an extent that it can scarcely bear summarizing here. It must suffice in general to say that the confusion or mystic identification of Langland, the dreamer, Piers, St. Peter, and Christ is developed with great drama and subtlety. The process is, I think, more complex in each of the poem's successive editions and is prominent in many of the most striking and significant passages. It is altogether appropriate in terms of the specifically Christian myth with which Langland is working: the worshipper must imitate Christ, must indeed in some sense become Christ. It also functions, though, to remind the reader that the entire narrative is a kind of grand psychomachia enacted within the speaker’s soul or subjectivity. One unforgettable instance of self-reflexive assertion of the extraordinary narrative voice is in B XV 148 which encodes Langland’s name in the poem at just that critical point when, having found Dowel he is being guided toward his search for Dobet which will culminate in the visions of Christ. (In this same passus is found the daring line “Petrus, id est Christus,” exactly the sort of formulation that brought Meister Eckhart before the inquisitors.)
Though all commentators agree that “Mon in the mone stond and strit” is a mysterious text throughout, there can be no doubt that a decisive shift occurs in line 25. Prior to this the poem had consisted of description of the figure of the man in the moon along rather conventional lines, if here unusually elaborate. In line 25 the speaker suddenly turns from the relative detachment of this description and enters the poem with an imperative — the poem, indeed, goes on almost to dissolve in exclamation by its end. What had begun with a clear separation of subject and object becomes somewhat foggy in its distinctions of the mon, the hayward, the baily, the speaker, and Hubert (?) as meaning retreats into obscurity. The poem has been read in an unusual variety of ways. I‘m not sure how to distribute significance among such possibilities as the moon’s banished peasant as social commentary, an Anglified version of the Sabbath stickgatherer of Numbers, the pledge-ower (reminiscent of Walther’s “Fro welt ir suit dem wirte sagen”) , and a number of other competing associations. It is, at any rate, clear that what opens the poem is the entry of the speaker.
What had seemed a simple if imaginative and lengthy elaborated description of images that one may see in the moon is tossed into mystery when, in the third stanza, the celestial figure is seen in a former career, as a farm worker accused of crime. That move is suddenly succeeded by the opening of the fourth stanza where the persona leaps into second person, addressing the moon-man, summoning him down to earth. A bathetic invocation indeed, but the diction descends from there until the last four lines dissolve in exclamation. For the conclusion the speaker assumes the role of dunce who cannot understand why the moon cannot come to join him.
In both poems the subject and object are destabilized. The grand scheme of Langland’s poem depends on the sort of religious mystery in which higher and lower are identified with a sort of verbal spell. The promise of Christianity is that things are not as they seem. In reading the book of nature, every earthly phenomenon contains a host of allegorical potential, and the ordinary worshipper may aspire to blessedness. In “Mon in the mone stond and strit” the poem’s conundrums merely make it “writerly,” in Barthe’s term. Who is speaking, to whom, and what about is suspended every bit as much as in Melville’s The Confidence Man or Donald Barthelme. The reader returns to some works repeatedly because they offer such an elegant statement of a clear feeling or conviction and to others because, on the other hand, unable to formulate such conviction convincingly, they simply beckon from beyond in a way that can seem more familiar than the sharpest verisimilitude.

Cookie Man

2011-10-01T06:03:00.000-07:00

During the month the travelers had been in Fes, they had become habitués of two cafes: the first a small hole-in-the-wall operated by gold-toothed Mufis and his teen-age worker Ahmed who slept on a rug in the back and the second, the Gout de Fes, overseen by Abdullah (who had no teeth at all) and his aged father, while their ancient carp moved sluggishly about their clouded tanks. In either café one was entitled to a comfortable seat among the company of friends if one purchased mint tea once or twice during the day or perhaps a café au lait. In a shadowy corner of the Gout de Fes one was likely to find Driss, who managed to give the impression of reclining while seated in a chair and who kept within the capacious folds of his djellaba a store of kief which the tea-drinker might purchase for a few pennies. Some regulars kept their pipes behind the counter,
Kief (the Arabic word means “well-being” or “pleasure”) refers both to the potent resin glands (or trichomes) of cannabis and to the mixture of this material with finely ground tobacco which is commonly smoked in the Maghreb. Though its use is traditional, it has been technically prohibited in 1954, and many smokers in 1970 were semi-discreet. Still, each café (except for a few would-be French places) had a dealer like Driss who simply lounged about and chatted between serving his clients who sometimes included police officers and army men. Workmen often kept a long pipe with its very small terra cotta bowl next to them as they wove or hammered patterns in metal trays. Though one saw users everywhere, on one medina wall was a government poster warning against cannabis with the most striking skeleton in electric primary colors smoking the Moroccan sebsi and shkaff. Had the traveler only had the temerity to snatch one, it would have been a fine souvenir!
After traveling to Rabat. they were seeking new contacts. They had a room at the Hotel Rigini in the old town for $1.20 a night. Musicians strolled by the streets outside, followed by butchers carrying carcasses, donkeys with bales, and people hawking every sort of goods including, of course, what the travelers sought. When they first encountered the Cookie Man he babbled about his relations with American GIs during World War II, then trailed off in a more confidential voice, slightly husky and damp, naming his prices. At their next meeting both parties felt all right about becoming slightly more confidential. The travelers were prepared to follow to where the Cookie Man led.
Walking along the old city walls, they came upon a series of cafés, the first rather neat and trim for an old town place, the second more funky, descending next to the third and then the fourth level, all contained within the walls of the medina. They entered the humblest establishment close behind their guide. The space was dark and smoky, low-ceilinged but crowded. The Cookie Man pointed to ladder that led to a loft above. They emerged into a room with balconies somehow invisible from below. They ducked next through a low passage to enter a second chamber on this level where they settled in to talk business. The Cookie Man spoke slowly, almost wearily, of his wares in a voice that sounded hypnotic or perhaps hypnotized. He had a variety of kief and hashish. In the middle of leisurely explanations about the town where each product was produced, he paused significantly, and, with an air of incredible lasciviousness, said, “You know, though, what I got is cookie, I got good cookie, gooooood cookie, ahh! Show you good time. Want some coookie?”
He reached into his djellaba and rummaged around, reached a bit further, and withdrew what we recognized as a bit of madjoun, the Moroccan cannabis confection. In this “cookie” were kief and ground almonds and cinnamon and clove and honey and bits of detritus from the realms beneath the Cookie Man’s robes, and the travelers had a taste for it nonetheless and tried some and bought a bit more, and chewed thoughtfully, and eventually somehow they made their way down from the mysterious chamber where he held court and through the twisting streets, through a dozen blind turns, past a lane of metalworkers and the next of leather craftsmen, out in the end to the coast by the old Casbah (or fort). People there were cleaning clothes, where a freshwater stream entered the ocean. The travelers clambered atop huge rocks like frozen sponge, like the surface of the moon, and watched the people doing laundry.
Suddenly the adhan, the call to prayer, arose: Allahu akbar! The people put aside their work, turned to face Mecca, and prostrated themselves in prayer. And, as the sea struck the rocky shore, and an odor of incense mixed with grilled lamb drifted by in the wind, the unbelievers watching from the rocks were moved and doubtless benefited from the pause in the day’s occupations. The water’s roar, constant and urgent as time’s arrow nearly obliterated the sound of the muezzin, whose melancholy soulful tone undermined the reassuring list of certainties he was reciting. “Hayya ‘ala ‘l-falah!” [Come to success!]

Down the Dirt Road Blues

2011-10-01T05:57:00.000-07:00

One of the seminal works of the Delta blues, Charlie Patton’s version of “Down the Dirt Road Blues” opens with the persona suspended in an existential abyss: “I'm goin’ away, to a world unknown.” At the mercy of unknown forces, the helpless speaker is carried toward a hidden fate. The first verse concludes with the potent ambiguity of “I'm worried now, but I won't be worried long” which sounds very much as though he is approaching death, but which might also mean he is close to happiness.
The second verse introduces the erotic motif, reinforcing the positive side of the implications of the opening. Though the woman may be standoffish, what the troubadours called “daunger,” this may be part of a love-game, biologically determined, or an element of an individual relationship. With the repetition of the euphemism “something” intensifying the psychic energy by indicating taboo territory, the singer carries on a pursuit of the beloved even as he is being trundled off to the unknown.
The term “rider” triggers an entire series of metaphors. The vernacular expression is entangled with blues history from the outset. [1] In its earliest uses the expression “easy rider” described a skilled horseman or his animal. The ambiguity between the reference to horse and to rider remains with the expression through its development. It became naturally associated with the complex of sexual metaphor based on the similarity between riding and intercourse familiar from William IX as well as Patton’s own “Pony Blues.” [2] From there some occurrences of the expression emphasize the “easy” element, referring either to promiscuous sex or to freeloading. Thus, at the same time that the singer laments the evasiveness of the object of his desire, he alludes to her habitual complaisance.
In the third verse the speaker’s psychic agitation has increased; his world is in disorder. The “chopping” metaphor for intercourse is close to the etymological roots of “fuck”: to strike, while the phrase “chips flyin' everywhere” suggests confusion. The same anxious instability is then expressed in geographical terms. The singer can find no greater contentment in a “foreign” land, the [Indian] Nation (that is, Oklahoma).
He then develops the metaphor of going abroad as a statement of alienation. The bluesman always finds himself “a long way from home.” Whether the fourth verse refers to the longing for home of a WWI soldier or more generally to the feeling that the human is stranded on this earth, the fourth verse moves the song deeper into melancholy. Apart from being in some sense “overseas,” the speaker’s gloom is unappreciated by the unnamed “others.”
This depression is dramatically deepened in the penultimate stanza when the atmosphere has turned lethal: “Every day seem like murder here.” Surely the line
“My God, I'm no sheriff” expresses not only sadness but the speaker’s vulnerability. Whereas a sheriff might be expected to be at home in a murderous situation, the singer suffers due to his beloved’s rejecting him.
The final stanza emphasizes the intolerable loneliness of the solitary traveler on a lost dirt road in a remote area. Though no respite is available, he cannot endure the road alone. But his complaint elicits only a mocking interjected line suggesting that, should he want a companion, he would find little solace but rather would himself bear a greater burden. Then the garbled syntax of the masterful conclusion, while clearly seeking to reject the previous line’s suggestion, suspends meaning.[3] The subject may after all carry someone, but he may also be carried.
Thus the poet continues down that obscure and dusty road, uncertain about the future, unsettled in soul, just as his listener or reader must do, sustained only by the thread of his lyric. Though it frames its narrative around a love relationship, Patton’s song speaks to the same audience that Gilgamesh commanded when he reflected on mortality, Agamemnon when he returned finally from war, or even St. John of the Cross when he wandered in the dark night of the soul.

I'm goin’ away, to a world unknown
I'm goin’ away, to a world unknown
I'm worried now, but I won't be worried long

My rider got somethin’, she's tryin’a keep it hid
My rider got somethin’, she's tryin’a keep it hid
Lord, I got somethin’ to find that somethin’ with

I feel like choppin’, chips flyin' everywhere
I feel like choppin’, chips flyin' everywhere
I been to the Nation, oh Lord, but I couldn't stay there

Some people say them oversea blues ain’t bad
(spoken: Why, of course they are)
Some people say them oversea blues ain’t bad
(spoken: What was a-matter with ‘em?!)
It must not a-been them oversea blues I had

Every day seem like murder here
(spoken: My God, I'm no sheriff)
Every day seem like murder here
I'm gonna leave tomorrow, I know you don't bid my care

Can't go down any dirt road by myself
Can't go down any dirt road by myself
(spoken: My Lord, who ya gonna carry?)
I don't carry my, gonna carry me someone else

1. Big Bill Broonzy claimed to have learned the blues from a former slave who went by the name See See Rider in 1908 or so. Ma Rainey’s song with the title See See Rider was released in 1925.

2. To mention only a few other variations: In Astrophel and Stella #49 love rides Sydney while he rides a horse. For Freud the horse was the id and the rider the ego. (See, for instance, The Ego and the Id: On Metapsychology.) Plato constructed a more complex chariot allegory in the Phaedrus. In voodoo the divine loa “rides” the worshipper when she or he is possessed.

3. The text is transcribed differently by different listeners. I comment here on the most common version, taking that as my text, whether or not it exactly corresponds to Patton’s intentions. (Authors’ intentions in general can no more be known than individuals’ in our lived experience.)

Najibe’s Stories

2011-09-02T12:07:00.000-07:00

These stories were collected from Najibe who was at the time a street boy/hustler in the fabulous city of Fes. I describe him in a posting for February of 2010. I have many pages of these. They vary from old jokes to folk motifs to careless obscenity. I imagine I was influenced by Paul Bowles who gathered such fine narratives from similar informants.

The Moroccan Visits Paris
One time a Moroccan man went to Paris and there he spent all that he had for a suit of clothes and he went to see the rich people and he convinced them he is the rich man of Morocco. He found the richest man there and he borrowed five million francs from him. He said, “Come to visit me in Fes, and I will pay you back. My name is Sidi Monarfft.” [?] Now what that means is “I don’t know.” So then the next week, the rich Frenchman went to Morocco and he saw a big building, seventeen stories high and he asked the man in front of it who owns it and the man says “Monarfft.” [“I don’t know.”] He strolled into the market and saw a huge rug shop with many salesman, and he asked a passerby whose shop it is and he was told again “Monarfft.” He thought his friend must be indeed wealthy, perhaps even wealthier than himself. Then he passed by a home decked out in mourning. He asked who had died and was told “Monarfft.” “Oh, no,” he thought, “now he’s dead! My money’s gone!”

Zh’hah is Caught Pickpocketing
One day Zh’hah go pickpocketing – he’s caught and brought before the king and the king sentenced him to three hundred lashes. “Oh, king,” he begged, “please permit me first to go and inform my aged mother of my disgrace. I promise to return promptly.” The king gave him permission, but he did not go to his mother’s house. He went instead to the market where he began calling out, “Three hundred clubs for sale. Three hundred strong ones. My price is not high.” And he found a customer and brought the man before the king and said that he had purchased the punishment.

The Fat Man and the Baby
There was once this man who was very fat and he was feeling he should do something so he went to see a doctor and asked if he could become thinner. Now this doctor, he had one woman who makes love for money and she had a baby that she did not want. So he told her to put that baby in his laboratory and he made that fat man go to sleep and when he woke up he gave him baby and said, “Look what I found inside of you!” And the man said, “I don’t seem thinner yet,” and the doctor said, “Don’t worry. Take these pills and you will be” and he sent him out the door with the baby. And the man went to his driver who was waiting by the car and he said, “Look what you do! You joke around with me and so now we have baby!”

The European, the Jew and the Muslim
Some guys were walking along, three of them, a European and a Muslim and Jew and they saw a girl and they went, you know, to speak with her, and she said, “No it’s late now. Tomorrow come see me.” And the first one to come to visit her was the European and he asked her, “What is your name?” and she said “Life.” And then she asked him what he wanted most and he could get it right away. He said, “I want to study” for in Europe everyone is a student. “Give me a book to read,” he said. Now the next to come is the Jew and he said, “Give me good business and intelligent men to help.” Now the third to come was the Muslim who said, “I just want to fuck.”

The Telephone
One man had a telephone that didn’t work and he looked out the window and saw someone coming, but he didn’t want to talk to anyone in person – he just wanted to be able to use the telephone. So he stood right in his front window and pretended to be talking on the telephone. He said, “No, I can’t see you, I am too busy. I don’t care how important your business is. I can’t see anyone.” And the man who had come walking up knocked on the door and the man look out the window and said, “You cannot come – I am too busy. You must have heard me telling this other one.” And the visitor said, “I have come to fix your broken phone.”

The Kief Smokers
One day two fellows are sitting smoking kief, you know, just like us, and one fellow he sees a fly on the ceiling and he says “Is King Fly,” and the other says “If is King Fly you need a motorcycle.”

A Conventional Ending in a Middle English Romance

2011-09-02T12:03:00.000-07:00

The conclusion to the medieval English romance of Sir Orfeo [1] is one of the most conspicuously conventional passages of a highly conventional poem.

Thus com Sir Orfeo out of his care.
God graunt ous alle wele to fare.

The same parallel comment on the hero’s fate and to the hopes of the audience occurs in many poems, but the essential aspect of the formula is neither of these parts, but the idea of positive fate in any form. The wish for the salvation of the listeners may appear without reference to a similarly happy end for the hero, or his eventual victory may be restated without explicitly asking the same for others. In King Horn the entire ensemble is present in the C-text while the L and 0 versions do not mention the listeners, but only the characters of the poem.
Similar lines conclude many other Middle English romances (sometimes using a couplet rhyming “king” and “blessing,” as in Octavian and Isumbras). Gowther, Amadace, and Emare are among the romances which use the convention but which adopt slightly different phrases to express it.) Texts using altogether different wording but which likewise turn the implication outward at the end in some form of a wish for the reader's good luck include the Pearl and the A-text of Piers Plowman.
The fact that this convention is so common in English romances must not lead the reader to think that it is an invariable concomitant of the genre. In fact, going back one historical step, one notes that Marie de France never ends with such a statement. Rather she regularly glances backward in the last words to the written piece itself, as though for her the emergence from the text requires a confirmation of its existence, its veracity, and its immortality. An example is the conclusion of Bisclavret.

L'aventure k'avez oie
Veraie fu, n'en dutez mie:
De Bisclavret fut fet li lais
Pur remembrance a tut dis mais.

[The adventure you have heard really happened, do not doubt it. This lay was made about Bisclavret to be remembered forever.]

In the form in which it appears in Sir Orfeo, one might at first regard this convention of closure in the first instance as equivalent to the final shot of a film: The End. It is, however, more ambitious. The phrase affirms Orfeo’s experience and links it to the reader’s in an emphatic signifier that these words have power both to encapsulate experience and to shape reality. Immediately after confirming the truth of the story, the poet speaks of the reader in the optative mood. The poem is well set off from ordinary experience by a frame which honors it, which constructs a halo of “blessedness” about the entire narrative. On a social level the convention indicates politeness in the form of a pious compassion for the souls of the listeners. Perhaps, too, it banishes any sense of wrong-doing from the literary experience, often considered dubious once sacred and profane art parted ways. Finally, however, the convention seems most potent viewed as a form of sympathetic magic with little specifically Christian content. By linking hero and reader and by imagining them prosperous or saved or both, the text attempts to fulfill a therapeutic role by causing the banishing in reality the sort of obstacles which it tells of the hero's overcoming in fantasy. Every child is better prepared for the inevitable blows of life after hearing of resourceful and courageous heroes who vanquish villains in fairy tales, and Christians are taught that Christ’s victory over death enables their own.

1. The same matter survived to become Child’s ballad 19.

An Appreciation of Theodore Roethke

2011-09-02T12:00:00.000-07:00

Poet Will Nixon (author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges) invited me to write a piece for his blog (http://willnixon.com/blog/) explaining my fondness for a poem. I am posting it here as well but suggest that readers have a look at his site which includes plenty of his own writing as well as other guest contributions.

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I'd have them sing in a chorus, cheek to cheek).

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin;
I nibbled meekly from her proferred hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing we did make).

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant notes to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved).

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways).

When I first began to read poetry (poetry, that is, other than the lyrics of Walter R. Brooks’ Freddy the Pig, Walt Kelly’s Pogo, and Robert Service), it was the late fifties and, like a great many others of my cohort, I was excited by the Beats. From my suburban home, I studied the Donald Allen anthology and wrote to most of the small presses listed in the back. At the same time, however, I leaped into the ocean of words, trying to read everything: oral and written; ancient, medieval, and modern; American and Chinese and African and Indian. In spite of my particular affection (or weakness) for the hip writers, I was also taken by a number of quite different contemporary American authors, among them Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke. The two poets were sometimes associated due to their psychiatric diagnoses or their escape from the formal mold of the fifties (which each had practiced so expertly), but to me their appeal was as craftsmen.
Roethke’s well-known lyric “I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,” is as perfect as a troubadour song or an Elizabethan sonnet. If the poem breaks no new ground for the language, it is nonetheless a rare achievement. Using erotic energy, one of the most traditional poetic dynamos, Roethke manages to devise new locutions to express the oldest and simplest themes.
What may seem mannered and exaggerated adoration of the female is nothing more than a realistic portrayal of ardent desire, constrained, in the interests of art and civility, into a dance of meter and rhyme with rhetorical grace-notes and flourishes at every turn. Detailed formal analysis could not, however, demonstrate excellence. In any event, when one catches one’s breath in awe, proof seems beside the point.
As with the sonneteers the very polish of the verse takes a seductive role. Yet, the reader notes that the love-object is entirely unspecified. She could be anyone. The praise is a pure display of the poet’s imagination. Loveliness in the bones is not visible, nor is the beloved likely literally to sigh at small birds in passing. These images are for the mind alone and not the eye; they are distinguished by the extravagance of their claims rather than by any descriptive power.
The humor toward the first stanza’s end recalls Donne, at once witty and ever so earnest. The “English poets who grew up on Greek” (and fewer they are with every passing year) appear as an afterthought but then spawn the absurd image of the chorus line, more Rockettes than Aeschylus, which nonetheless prepares the way for the playful use of Turn and Counterturn to follow. The mere capitalization of “Touch” assigns it the burning urgency of desire, and the entire stanza is filled with sexual implication without the slightest explicit word. The agricultural metaphors for sexuality are universal indeed – the curious can have a peek into The Golden Bough or a reference book on vulgar slang – but Roethke lightens his version of this archaic figure with the play on “rake” and the casual word “pretty” before presenting his powerful and enthusiastic image of “prodigious mowing.” Highly physical implications continue through the third stanza: whatever it may mean that she could make “one hip quiver with a mobile nose,” it certainly sounds sexy.
The final stanza opens with almost Biblical grandeur: “Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay,” followed, with fine alliteration, by the martyr/motion line, and then a classic statement of the love as spiritual training. In what might have been a quite Platonic formula were the beloved male, the poet adores eternity in his lady. The white shadow is an excellent figure for the wonder that is love. Time collapses, and the poet concludes with a fine metaphysical crescendo, though clinging to the physical with the words “wanton” and “sways.”
Though Roethke did not feel licensed to wander freely in his backbrain for entire poems at a stretch until perhaps I Am! Says The Lamb (1961) or The Far Field (1964), he had declared as early as his “Open Letter” in 1950 an intention to “fish, patiently, in that dark pond, the unconscious, [to] dive in, with or without pants on, to come up festooned with dead cats, weeds, tin cans, and other fascinating debris.” Roethke not only did that; he proceeded to make objects of surpassing beauty with what he brought to the surface.

Notes on Recent Reading [Melville, Greene, Whalen]

2011-09-02T11:54:00.000-07:00

Melville’s Redburn

Redburn is clearly shallow, all the more when juxtaposed to a huge metaphorical construction like Moby Dick or a subtle metaphysical mystery like The Confidence Man. Figures pregnant with symbolic weight such as the mysterious Harry Bolton and the sinister and fated Jackson never ripen into meaning. The book is in fact filled with such false starts: the wholly fantastic trip to a London pleasure palace, for instance, or the use of the outdated Liverpool guidebook. Melville feels free to include divigations on whatever comes to mind without tying these remarks to the rest of the text. (The discussion of immigration in Chapter 58 and the passage at the end of Chapter 29 questioning whether sailors can ever “be lifted wholly out of the mire” are examples.) His several lapses into common piety (such as the conclusion of the same chapter: “God is the true Father of all”) likewise play purely to received ideas in a way the later Melville avoided. Redburn is part self-portrait, part unconvincing artifice (his ingenuousness is forced when, for example in Chapter 42 he wanders into a private club and expresses surprise at his expulsion).
The biographers tell us that Melville was writing speedily for money when he produced what he called “a little nursery tale,” “beggarly Redburn,” “calculated merely to please the general reader, & not provoke attack.” In spite of his announced ambition to write “those sort of books which are said to ‘fail,’” economic pressure led him to write Redburn in less than ten weeks. He wrote in his journal “I, the author, know [Redburn] to be trash, & wrote it to buy some tobacco with.”
Its strengths include the simple inclusion of the details of sea life which he knew so well: rigging, slang, the social order on board. One finds excellent paragraphs throughout such as the one in Chapter 24 describing Redburn’s learning to work aloft, comparing his sense of mastery over the canvas to Richard II’s satisfaction as quashing the Peasant’s Rebellion.

Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay

Robert Greene’s name is most commonly recalled as the author of A Groats-Worth of Wit, itself remembered only because the pamphlet satirizes Shakespeare, but he also wrote a number of romances and plays, including Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Though educated at Oxford, he acquired a reputation as a demimondaine and his leaflets display considerable knowledge of the libertines and confidence men of his era. He is rightly associated with Marlowe, not merely because this play includes devil-conjuring like Faustus but also because the author was reputed to live loosely and cultivate scandalous conduct as well as opinions. Greene’s “celebrity” image, if such a term can be used of a sixteenth century man, was that of a daring immoralist, and his readers and listeners must feel a bit of the savor of safely second-hand license.
The play is lively and entertaining enough, as it drifts from romantic reverie to slapstick to melodrama, ending in marriages. Bacon’s unregenerate servant Miles is carried off by a devil, scapegoat for all the darker psychic contents churned up by the story. After all, viewers have witnessed Lacy’s abrupt and cruel testing of his beloved, the senseless deaths not only of Serlsby and Lambert but of their sons as well, in addition to a considerable dose of Satanic conjuring, which may have seemed worst of all.
The verse is agile and imaginative, lit with the ornaments of an age that enjoyed language, but it lacks powerful image systems. Green’s word-play entertains, no mean achievement if not the highest praise.
There was surely plenty of spectacle (a theatrical quality that seems to dominate Broadway and a good number of today’s movies). Thematically, in the primary plot of the victory of Friar Bacon’s better self, Greene works the basic gambit of warning spectators against immoral conduct by exhibiting it for their edification. Of course, his reformation is caused not by enlightenment but by the most mundane of failures, simple fatigue and his servant’s irresponsibility. The love story of Lacy and the Fair Maid of Fressingfield, complicated by Edward’s lust as well as by Lacy’s strange misleading of his beloved, ends as satisfactorily as it would have in a ‘thirties film. The four deaths are tossed with very little reason other than to keep the pot boiling.

Whalen’s Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head

I have often lamented the fact that the hip people of my own generation recorded so little of their experience. In contrast to the passionate authors of the fifties, many of whom were intellectual as well as adventurous, many rank-and-file bohemians of the next wave, ten years later, took their principal art to be rock and roll. In this and in his other novel You Didn’t Even Try, Philip Whalen, the “Warren Coughlin” of Dharma Bums, records life among his Berkeley friends. Written in the sixties while he was living in Kyoto, practicing zazen, and teaching English, the title of the novel derives from Robert Greene’s play and its origin is more than coincidental, for it shines a spotlight of the learning cultivated by Whalen and the people of his circle. Though it may not be a novel of the highest standard, Imaginary Speeches reminds us that the hip scene was never limited to Kerouac and Cassady, and the discourse in the counter-culture of the time was not necessarily dominated by “goofing.” Though they do violate taboos (smoking a bit of dope and hanging out with gay people was much more edgy half a century ago), Whalen’s characters also pursue “elite” high culture: they prepare elaborate European meals and play string quartets with their friends. One of the principal figures in the book is a poet of somewhat irregular habits, but another is a linguistics professor at Berkeley who seems fully to participate in academic hustling. The reader is best advised to first go through Whalen’s poetry, some of which is first-rate, but the novels have for me a casual charm of their own.

Poetry on the Loose

2011-09-02T11:49:00.000-07:00

This is my first gesture toward setting down an account of Poetry on the Loose which has presented hundreds of programs since its first show in 1993. Those who recall other information that ought to be included are welcome to contact me.

A week after I moved from Brooklyn to Orange County, New York, in December of 1991, I was pleased to see a notice for a reading featuring Mikhail Horowitz and Edward Sanders at the local community college. The English Department there was also at the time advertising for an English professor. Temporarily convinced of the wisdom of residing in the exurbs, I later found that poetry events were few and far between (and I didn’t get the job). Having spent my life in big cities and university town, I missed the density of cultural life that is sustainable in America only in those environments.
Patricia was working in a psychiatric inpatient unit and came home one day with a leaflet for a new gallery a psychotic artist had given her. Before the universality of personal computers, this document was typed and pasted up and looked tossed together, full of messiness, misspellings, and extravagant artistic claims. The place seemed, in short, ideal for a poetry series. I contacted the gallery operator, Steve Clair, to propose doing poetry and found him receptive. Clair was an active, imaginative fellow with energetic eyes who worked in some dismal factory during the day and devoted himself to art the rest of the time.
During this era, Middletown, New York had been convinced that they could rejuvenate the city by attracting artists. The city offered to subsidize the rental of the many abandoned factories in town for tenants who wanted to establish studios or galleries, even advertising in The Village Voice. Clair had secured a huge old furniture factory for a few hundred dollars a month and named it Zukabee. The place was vast, a grand wandering brick Leviathan where hall led on to hall with surprising bits of debris around every corner and great quantities of unused furniture – more upholstered chairs and sofas than we could use. A magnificent spot, it had a clandestine ambiance and the industrial chic was undeniably authentic..
I posted notices of the first show which featured me (in fact, the only talent of which I was then aware) in December of 1993 on telephone poles and trees. Fifty-four people attended, virtually none of whom I had known before. I booked the next three or four shows that evening. Poetry on the Loose was under way.
Though oddly magnificent, one drawback of the space was its lack of a working heating system. I believe some sort of furnace existed somewhere on the premises, but it functioned only marginally. When there was no heat at all, the tenants were obliged to do without water as well to avoid freezing the pipes. As it happened, Clair had rented some of his space – he had plenty – to an acquaintance of irregular habits. I believe his tenant had turned on the water with the modest hope of flushing a toilet, but then had never turned it off, and the pipes, never slow in administering retributive justice, burst. There was now no running water art all.
Those who attended the poetry were discomfited, perhaps, by the lack of an operating bathroom, but Clair and his roommate had to actually live there. During this frozen period of the series, while male art-lovers had to piss in the parking lot snow and the females did I know not what, we decided to try to warm the atmosphere by lighting a pot-belly stove in a room next door to the performance space. It seemed to be more or less intact and was visibly vented to the wall. We had been collecting firewood for some time, not always simple in the middle of town, but had a sufficient stockpile, we thought, to provide significant warmth. When the audience was assembled, we set it alight only to discover that the stovepipe must have been blocked as black smoke billowed into the room. We hung a curtain to try to contain the noxious gases and, throughout the entire evening, now and then a draft or wayward gust would move the curtain aside and send a fresh effusion into the crowd. It was like the special effects of a grandstand heavy metal show.
Clair eventually suspended industrial space heaters resembling jet engines that sent forth great tongues of flame and made everything toasty. How he obtained them I cannot imagine. His art was on the very edge of the American scene, itself marginalized. Finding his gallery on the other end of the block of a Salvation Army drop-box that was invariably overflowing with largely valueless donations, he did a good deal of work with found materials.
For his Disgust-o-tronic show, in May of that year, the gallery was filled with works constructed from found materials, each cleverly outfitted with little motors and pumps so that every work of art could be set in motion by the viewer. It would have been every child’s favorite exhibition. One piece, titled “Skinny Boy” represented a typical American living room with a television in place of honor, snacks stacked about a figure resting in an easy chair, a figure made by wiring together the bones of a deer skeleton the artist had found. When the button was pushed, the television would crackle with threat and the skinny boy would, rattling, lift his soda can to his lips.
For the gala opening, Clair eschewed to customary white wine, cheese, and crackers of countless openings, offering instead chitterlings, chicken gizzards, and pigs feet. I believe very little was consumed.
Clair later moved his gallery to a downtown storefront. Here we were visible from the street and enjoyed good and unpredictable crowds. The gallery, of course, was not self-sustaining and eventually Clair moved on to other scenes. After one event in Middletown’s skyscraper (is it 26 North Street?) and series of four in the Art Center building, we made an agreement with the Unitarian Universalist Church and, between 1995 and 2008, this was the Poetry on the Loose venue. What had once been the Universalist Church is a fine old building from the turn of the twentieth century, including Tiffany windows and a very staid layout, remarkably High Church for a Unitarian hall, though the wall did bear colored felt symbols of the religions of the world. In February of 2008, the series moved to Warwick, in Steve Calitri’s old brick building by the Wawayanda where, a year or so later, Calitri led the establishment of the College of Poetry which was incorporated as the Northeast Poetry Center.
I chose the name Poetry on the Loose because my idea was to stress performance. I was thinking of Dada as well as the happenings, Cloud House events, and other manifestations in galleries and public spaces with which I had been involved. We have featured slam performers [1], numerous bands [2], aleatory and collective compositions [3], and such performance events as a mock funeral complete with coffin and prayer cards and a site-specific reading in a tepee. We have arranged social galas such as the Beaux Arts Ball and the Skull Beneath the Skin Ball. Themed events have included readings for the Dog Days and Valentine’s Day. Several programs of “spirit voices” featured recordings of poets of the past. Readers have included the broadest spectrum of the population from high school age to a Holocaust survivor in his nineties, drop-outs to university professors, blacks, Asians and Hispanics, gay and straight. Many readers have been local, but some have come from Texas, Hawaii, California, Colorado, Nepal, and the United Kingdom. [4]
A few readers have gone on too long; one dropped his pants on stage; one saw her jealous ex-boyfriend invade the space from the rear and begin challenging the view of their history the reader was presenting. Dozens have enacted their visions and neuroses. The slogan was always, “The door is open wide.”

1. The national slam winners from Austin, Texas and the second-place team from NYC both performed the same evening.
78. August 12, 1995, open reading featuring August 17, 1996 reading in a tepee

2. These include Rick Pernod’s House of Pernod and James Antonie’s Utopian Direction Band. Among the artists who used music have been the July Church (with Manuel Ayala’s guitar), Oliver Grech, Word of Mouth Burning Art Theatre (Liz Gottlieb and Joe Karpienia), Ramesh Laihiri and his ensemble, Clint Partridge, Mikhail Horowitz and Gilles Malkine, and violinist T. G. Vanini.

3. Experiments like the Pomomat Collective Composition event and the pas de deux flyting.

4. Long-time attenders will remember Tim Wells and Salena Saliva from London. More recently, Yuyutsu Ram Dass Sharma from Kathmandu read.

Two Parades

2011-08-01T07:19:00.000-07:00

1. Republic Day Parade in India

Actually, it was the full dress rehearsal for the Republic Day parade, but it was difficult to imagine the real thing to be much grander or more ceremoniously conducted. Security was fierce -- it was, after all, only a few months after a terrorist attack in Mumbai that in which hundreds died, but the supervision seemed ill-organized and full of holes. All observers, and there were tens of thousands, were to have tickets. Countless security forces, army, police, who knows what, shepherded people around. A great variety of tickets separated those in higher who were allowed into grandstands while common observers took up street-level positions along Delhi’s grand boulevard, the Rajpath. A complex system of color codes indicated not only status but location along the route. We, of course, had no tickets of any sort, having only just heard about this celebration. One gracious officer told us we could go ahead though we lacked tickets. The next said we had to be gone, yet, that said, he ignored us as we proceeded. After some time, during what may have been our sixth or seventh conversation with the authorities, a friendly stranger offered us tickets that permitted us legitimate standing room among the crowds.
First came the regular military display: flyovers, tanks, and marching bands galore, including grandly mustachioed Rajasthani troops, drummers dressed in faux leopard skins, and others in flamboyant costumes such as massive bright turbans topped with even brighter starched fans, others with outsize batons to toss high in the air. One unit played band instruments from the backs of resentful-looking camels; others proceeded on grave elephants. There were several units of tartaned bagpipers. I recalled Malcolm Muggeridge’s line: “The last Englishman will be an Indian,” and wondered if he would be wearing kilts.
Then came floats from each of India’s provinces representing regional culture and economy. One group of tribal dancers succeeded another, each impossibly exotic even, I take it, to the Delhi-wallahs. From this outsider’s perspective, it was more Mardi Gras than Fourth of July. There were huge leering faces, the divinities difficult to distinguish from the heroes of history, tableaux in which half the figures were living, half were dummies. Even what one might reasonably have expected to be tiresome, the floats from bureaucratic government agencies, had their charm. On the float of the rural electrification commission, for instance, there were power lines ending in delighted couples in front of computer screens as though the first effect of peasants’ receiving electric power would be their purchase, not of an electric light, but of a Dell computer. There were no beauty queens but there were cars carrying the winners of the National Children’s Award for Bravery. The viewer could only imagine what they had done, but I have no doubt it was truly heroic.

2. Fiesta for San Juan Bautista

I hadn’t been sure we would make it to Puno, at 12,500 feet on the shores of Lake Titicaca. Demonstrations by farmers wishing to stop large-scale mining which they felt endangered their water supply had closed the roads and cut off the town in the previous week. But a short-term agreement to cease action until after the election had quieted the scene. One evening I followed the sound of pipes and drums to a small church outside of which the band played to a small group dressed some in suits and some in local costume. They tossed multi-colored confetti in the air and set off fireworks. As I stood outside the fence watching an elder man gestured to me to enter. It was the feast-day of John the Baptist. I had seen the church with his name across town on the other side of the square. Someone appeared from inside the church with a basket of ritual bread – I was given a piece. Fortunately no one asked me if I were a Catholic or even a Christian. Youths in tee-shirts and jeans played a dozen pipes while seven drums made up the rest of the band. Next thing I knew a religious image was thrown about my neck by a member of the local St. Anthony of Padua club. Then six men lifted the large wooden frame, and, holding the saint’s image, they set out for his church, music playing all the way, punctuated by occasional fireworks. We walked through the square, past the shattered windows of the Justice Department and the banks. Marching in the middle of the musicians, with the insistent pipes of all sizes, with the drums sounding somehow anxious for all their emphatic punch, one felt that the hearts of the devotees of St. John were beating in unison, even the heart of the interloper who just happened by.

Distant Rhyme in Two Medieval English Lyrics

2011-08-01T07:15:00.001-07:00

I
It is a fundamental paradox of language that, as the Muses told Hesiod, it both lies and speaks the truth, expresses and conceals, represents and obscures. This antinomy is a constant subject for poetic language in particular which is, in Eco's terms, “ambiguous and self-focusing.” Two of the most frequently used devices in aesthetic texts — metaphor and rhyme — mirror this simultaneous likeness and difference. As such they may in their least significant uses merely mark off a text as poetic, but they are more likely to bear considerably more information.
Irregular uses such as “distant rhyme” in which the sound similarities occur separated by many lines of verse present an intriguing special case. Eva Guggenheimer’s Rhyme Effects and Rhyming Figures which finds meaning in inexact correspondences separated by twenty lines of epic verse suggests the attractiveness of the territory, to say nothing of Saussure's fanciful anagrams.) Without attempting any general theory on the specific properties of the phenomenon, I would like to offer a few observations on the use of distant rhyme in two Middle English poems. I have selected one example in which the relevant rhymes occur as part of a regular stanzaic pattern and one in which they do not, and regarding each I comment first on formal properties and second on thematics.

II
In the well-known “Bitwene Mersh and Averil” the rhyme scheme is ABABBBBC (stanza) DDDC (burden). The C lines here have an obvious structural utility. As the most consistently recurring end-sound of the piece, they bind it together. More specifically, they link each stanza with the burden and relieve the monotony of the series of B rhymes (which have created a situation in which even a non-rhyming line would be acceptable, perhaps even a relief). As a formal element, too, these rhymes raise the historical question of the relation of this sort of lyric stanza to the carol or other dance forms on the one hand and to the processional hymn on the other. Further, and more problematically, this pattern could be treated as an elaboration on the BBBA CCCA AA identified with Moorish poetry in which the A rhymes bind the whole.
Thematically, the rhyme has the definitive effect of returning the subject with an appropriately obsessive chime always to Alisoun. Just as her name concludes each refrain, it is partially contained and thus evoked in each stanza’s end. The specific rhyme words of these A lines explicate as well as buttress the poem’s theme: her “bandoun” is the problem of the poem; “adoun” emphasizes the gravity of the lover's distress; while “toun” strikes me as a throwaway conventionalized choice without specific weight in this instance. “Roun,” the last rhyme, directs attention to the poem as a poem, as though in the completion of the form Alisoun herself has been transcended by the power of language. The tension thus relieved, the piece can end.

III
In “Worldes blisse, have good day” the rhyme pattern is AABBAABA, CCCCDDC, CCEEEAA. This melodious and complex pattern, while not altogether predictable includes a return at the end of each of the first two stanzas to the rhyme of that stanza’s beginning, and at the end of the third a return to the rhyme of the opening of stanza one. This knits the structure neatly, reproducing the smaller in the larger and defining a pleasant circularity for the whole.
The rhyme words here indeed trace the poem’s development in miniature. The first two A rhymes are imbedded in an apotropaic formula increasing in vehemence from the ironically dismissive “good day” to the command “away.” One might say the day must “away” to clear the ground for the speaker’s meditation.
It is noteworthy that these opening rhymes are spelled (and pronounced?) differently from all the other A rhymes as though the disappearance of the –ay marks the success of the command of lines 1-2. “Me,” the next A rhyme, places the poet's project internally, while “tree” and “three” (evoking the Trinity) announce the subject and means of access. These images are themselves insufficient for his purposes, however, and the second stanza proceeds to the devotional exercise of visualizing the Passion. Its very lack of A rhymes sets it apart as a separate contemplative act. Finally, the likeness in difference between the “thee” which is Christ and the “me” as worshiper encapsulates much of the mystery of Christian myth.

Some Anonymous Middle High German Lyrics

2011-08-01T06:47:00.000-07:00

I use the convenient text in Max Wehrli’s Deutsche Lyrik des Mittelalters. Each poem is identified by the number it bears in this collection.

7.
What is happening here?
what’s with these girls so dear?
They want to go loveless, alone,
until hot summer’s flown!

Wehrli tells us that this quatrain, one of the few in German in the 13th century Carmina Burana, is thought to have been performed by women in a round dance. Should this be true, this choral dance of the young reminds the reader of the performative character of much medieval poetry. The fact that one would have assumed the persona to be male further intensifies the playful, teasing, flirtatious tone already underlined by the high temperature. Similar to Herrick’s “Gather ye rosebuds,” the summertime also suggests youth, even life itself. The enthusiastic males are here caricatured by the more cautious females in a sexual tension that pervades human culture and, indeed, manifests in other species as well.

10.
You are mine, I yours,
of that you can be sure.
You’re locked within
under my skin --
the key is lost, my fair!
You’ll have to stay right there!

These twelfth century verses are written at the end of a nun’s highly rhetorical Latin love letter. The reader might reflect on the variety of motives that might have led a medieval lady to take the veil, on the dangers of collapsing all passionate attachment into sexual love, or on the proximity of human and divine affection. Though this question is unanswerable, the poem expresses in the first two lines a reassuring mutuality, only in the next two to employ imagery of domination.

11.
If all the world were mine
from the seacoast to the Rhine,
I’d give it all away
if only England’s queen might lie
in my arms to stay.

Hidden love is fine,
it makes one’s spirit shine.
Love’s what one should chase
And if one’s not love’s servant true
he is no more than base.

This (also from the Carmina Burana) begins with the hyperbolic trope “all the world for love.” The queen is Eleanor of Aquitaine, celebrated for her courts of love and patronage of poets. The use of a pseudonym, though, serves to underline the value of love’s concealment (the adjective in line six is tougen or tugen, defined in Lexer’s lexicon as dunkel, finster, verborgen, geheim, wunderbar). Eleanor’s regal status is a metaphorical compliment. The privacy of love is protected by such use of by-names, though one might assume that in the courtly setting there was considerable speculation about the parties’ identity. At any rate, the intimacy of the relationship can flower when all but the lovers are excluded. The “darkness” and “secrecy” of the boudoir leads to the marvel of love. Love here is the sole criterion for measuring worth: it alone ennobles the lover.

The translations strive to retain the rhyme schemes of the originals, though the rich rhyming of much medieval lyric sounds inappropriate to modern ears. The language is simple, but I won’t detail the inevitable compromises and misstatements entailed by even a modest attempt to reproduce the poems’ original formal patterns.

Notes on Liu Xie

2011-08-01T06:39:00.000-07:00

I seek here only to draw attention to the extraordinary 5th century work of Chinese literary theory by Liu Hsieh (Liu Xie), The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons. The book is available in translation by Vincent Yu-chang Shih (along with the original text). A more recent version by Yang Guobin using the same title is doubtless more accurate. I had not seen it when I first studied Liu and came upon it only in the final stage of writing these notes. I hope I do not confuse readers by using the now accepted pinyin form of Chinese words while quoting from Shih’s book which uses Wade-Giles.

Though its most recent translator Yang Guobin says The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons has “attracted . . . unprecedented interest in the recent decades,” its reputation among Sinologists has not brought non-specialists even the barest acquaintance with its ideas. Rather like the medieval rhetorics of Matthew of Vendome, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and John of Garland, Liu systematized a theory of literature revering antiquity yet allowing for innovation. He surveyed the nature of literature itself as well as the conventions of his tradition, its genres and figures and the place of the canonized classics.
His work to some extent reflects ideas similar to those familiar in Europe: the distinction between content and form, for instance, suggested by the title, and the Horatian formula of “teach and delight.” His comments on the emotional core of lyric, on style as a mirror of the individual, and on the organic form of a work of art will also sound familiar to Westerners.
Further, Liu agrees with his medieval European counterparts in his understanding of how convention as a dynamic and flexible code facilitates signification, allowing the unique density of meaning in literary discourse. Just as all language depends upon a considerable common base in order to communicate at all and yet allows every utterance to be unique, poetry requires an audience competent in its specific system of convention. For Liu, Lao Zi and Confucius (as well as the “classics” associated with Confucius’ name) provide the base of the literary code, a position similar to that of the Greek and Latin classics in the European literary tradition. Liu’s reverence for these texts is such that he declares that he would write poetry were it not that he could not hope to improve upon the great works of antiquity. In his final chapter (I use Yang’s translation again here) he criticizes contemporary writers, saying, “We are now far removed from the time of the sages, and the ways of writing have degenerated. Writers of rhyme-prose love the exotic and like to use shocking and frivolous language. . . .They deviate ever more from the norm and head towards fallacy and excess.” For him the classics are “the starting point” for any poet. (25)
Yet Liu clearly recognizes the role of innovation. For him, while genre is set, “the very essence of style” is its “adaptability to new modes and cadences,” adding that “only by observing this truth can a writer gallop on a road that does not end in an impasse, or drink out of a spring which is inexhaustible.” (232) Just as Geoffrey of Vinsauf wrote of Poetria Nova, saying that literature must constantly rejuvenate itself, Liu says literature “renews itself from day to day.” (236) His 45th chapter surveys Chinese history indicating how the work of every era reflected the historical conditions as “the process of transformation circles endlessly.” (344)
Liu can perhaps point out a new solution to the problem of language’s mimesis. He explicitly denies the adequacy of language yet avoids the opprobrium of Plato’s “imitation of an imitation.” His chapter on Imagination (shensi) recalls Longinus yet cautions “The subtle meanings beyond our thought and the profound inner workings of the heart inexpressible in words are not to be reached with language; here one should know enough to halt his brush.” (220) And, even more clearly, “words do not completely express ideas; it is difficult even for the Sage to find it otherwise. If one’s knowledge is by nature limited to the capacity of a jar or tube, how can he be expected to offer all the general principles?” (6) Finally, in his postscript (omitted from Shih’s version) he notes “Language cannot exhaust meaning.”
This limitation is, however, illusory because, as his first chapter makes clear, for Liu literature reflects the Dao. A successful work, one which is “true” will necessarily arise from this universal principle. The legendary figures who established literature “drew their literary embellishments from the mind of Tao.” (12) This entails a profound realism and a dedication to truth. The word wen refers to literature as in the book’s title, but also to patterns of any sort. Beasts have patterns in fur or feathers, heavenly bodies in their revolutions, and humankind, too has patterns in mind which may be made concrete in poetry. Indeed, none of the other patterns that indicate the beauty of the cosmos could be perceived without mind, and humans uniquely possess mind. Just as all natural phenomena have characteristic patterns, man, as a signifying animal, creates symbolic patterns in art such as literature generated by his own nature. In this way even poems which fail to perfectly represent reality, precisely and accurately represent human nature and thus arise from the Dao. As the book’s opening words declare, wen is as old as creation.
The parallelism so characteristic of Chinese poetry, far from being ornamental, as it often seems in Cicero, reproduces for Liu the creative dialectic most familiar as yang/yin. According to Liu just as “nature, creating living beings, endows them with limbs in pairs” the mind, creating literary language “organizes and shapes one hundred different thoughts, making what is high supplement what is low, and spontaneously producing linguistic parallelism.” (270) Thus for him what might seem an artificial literary convention is instead altogether natural.
He does not distinguish between poetry and philosophy, saying that “words with pattern indeed express the mind of the universe. The sage is the poet, and poetry, no less than plants and animals, is among the “natural, organic expressions of the divine.” (10)

Three Poems from Peru

2011-08-01T06:37:00.000-07:00

1.
Andean Day

The Urubamba rushes toward its end
without the slightest care for what’s to come.
A solitary piper on a dust-
filled street in town puffs out his fate – it’s gone.
Big-kerneled corn grows dry and strong in sun –
Take some to save against what jars may come.
A bowl of coca leaves can soften some
the stones and bones of every passing hour.
Thin air sublimes my thoughts and makes them rare,
for heaven tells no more than these high peaks.

2.
Red plastic bag like refuse marks the chicheria,
its benches half the width of my behind.
This shed I think was built in just a day –
a few good kicks would turn it to debris,
and yet I think the place must serve up hope.
I’m seated with the rest to seek my share.

A chicheria is an unlicensed establishment
selling the indigenous people’s homemade
beer, usually based in corn.

3.
Altiplano Scene

Alpaca shepherd spins out yarn, one eye
upon his beasts. That turning spool reflects
all other turnings great and small and thus
he keeps his balance on this turning globe.

Oedipus and the Meaning of Polysemy

2011-07-01T06:36:00.000-07:00

Instructors regret students’ use of crib-notes that seek to provide understanding of a text with a summary and a few formulas. Headnotes in textbooks are as bad. Of course, lazy scholars will use these as well as plot-summaries and instant internet précis to fend off encounters with literature. The damage in such a case is not as bad as for the reader who has, in fact, read the material, only to limit his insight to someone’s severely reductive version. If a poem, novel, or play could be adequately paraphrased in a line or two, there would be no need for literature beyond the apothegm.
The literary text is polysemous; that is part of what distinguishes it from other discourses. This is sometimes figured by the naïve as a series of revelations: the words seem to mean X on the surface; the analyst will see beneath that to the deeper meaning Y; the more acute critic may sketch a more esoteric reading yet and call it triumphantly Z. In truth, all meanings which are encoded in the text operate simultaneously. Some are more potent than others; some more likely to strike the casual reader; some interpretations will be elicited by that reader’s prior interests and inclinations; some remain to be spotlighted by future students. Yet even at times when the text seems either to be simple and straightforward or to insist on a certain reading, it can be useful to explore alternatives.
Mythic narrations are especially rich in theme. The stories evolved to bear an extraordinary burden of significance, and the old ones gain more with each reader. One of the richest myths in European tradition is that of Oedipus. Sophocles’ play (Οἰδίπους Τύραννος) makes an excellent case study for this claim. I propose here to set forth a list, by no means exhaustive, which can serve to demonstrate the truth of the claims about the aesthetic text’s unique support of multiple meanings and about myth’s particular semiotic richness. I will not here propose a hierarchy or more and less important resonances, nor will I provide evidence to justify any of these options or to privilege one over another (though I do begin with those heard more commonly). The list of approaches might itself be useful to readers wondering what to do with an entirely different text.

1. An initial view of the play might be simply as spectacle: the dance, the poetry, the costumes, Dionysos seated among the spectators. In this experience of the play the primary significance of the hero is that he is a big man, at viewing whom the common man may feel a vicarious pleasure as American do when reading about celebrities. Here the point of the drama is pleasure – Oedipus, whatever else is nay be, is an evening’s entertainment.

2. In the realistic reading, Oedipus is Everyman. His name, if it means swell-foot (as Shelley had it) is simply descriptive. The theme is explicit in the play’s final verse when the chorus declares that no man should be deemed happy “before he has passed out of life having never suffered pain.” Though the poet dances about the point elegantly, his view was proverbial in Greece even before this play (see Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 928 and Solon’s “No mortal is happy, rather all under the sun suffer.” (Edmonds, 14). Buddha began from a similar realization. Here fate is ethically random but inexorable.

3. In an ethical reading, Oedipus is the hubristic ego, seeking power beyond others, chastened for pride. Though the realistic reading would insist that all people suffer, this approach regards Oedipus as deserving his fate. What happens to him is an example of the sort of retributive justice of which Job’s friends felt so certain. His missing the mark, or ἁμαρτία (the very word used by scripture translators for sin) led to his suffering.

4. A related reading would be the social or historical in which the hero is primarily a bad king who must be expelled before justice is restored to the community. The harmonious kingdom as a philosophic ideal appears in Lau Dz and Confucius as well as in such modern Marxists as Christopher Caudwell and George Thomson. The critic adopting this view might look either at the conditions of the work’s production or the themes of its words.
5. In the ritual view the play may reenact an act of scapegoat magic in the banishment of the old year-spirit in the person of the aged and ineffectual king and his replacement by a more vigorous successor. Oedipus is, in fact, an important text for the Cambridge School anthropologists for whom drama regularly had a ritual origin. (of whom Frazer, Harrison, Cornford, were primarily classicists). The tragedy’s denouement is then a healing process for the community.

6. In the psychological reduction of theme, Oedipus is the stalled ego who has failed to grow up in the immediate sense of remaining in love with his mother (though he may stand as the type of any neurotic). In less psychoanalytic versions, this reading would approach the ethical one with the character flaw of pride regarded not as a sin but as a self-defeating behavioral habit.

7. To the aesthetic reader, Oedipus is simply an abstract pattern among other patterns. This reading is based on the conspicuous care lavished on metric play and other musical elements. Indeed, the chorus itself proclaims the principle, though in a negative formulation: if a wicked man prospers, they ask, “How can any man protect his soul from the blows of the gods? If such men are honored, there’s no point to choral dancing!” (893-6) (Thus, if the chorus is dancing, as it manifestly is during the performance, all must be well.)

These clearly feature certain common elements. Apart from the pleasure-oriented first and last, they portray an extraordinary human individual colliding with the cosmos. Aristotle’s “pleasure” and “fear” and “catharsis” are consistent with all.
Not every text is as susceptible to interpretation as Oedipus, and the close attention to Sophocles’ words during the millennia since its composition have only increased the rich potential of the play. Yet every text, no matter how insubstantial, will have not only the pleasure/entertainment reading (it was either a pleasure or it was not), but also historical readings (as every text is produced in certain social circumstances and nearly every text touches on the relations among humans), psychological readings (as every texts must be produced and consumed by the human consciousness), and aesthetic readings (as it must proclaim itself the right sort of writing and seek to displace what has come before). I have found that one may hit upon new insights while pursuing the most unlikely reading.

Openings in the Middle English Romance

2011-07-01T06:34:00.000-07:00

(Before long, I expect to post my “Mythos and Non-Myth: The English Tail-Rhyme Romances and Structuralist Methodology,” a detailed study of the romance genre, not yet ready for even the informal publication of the blog.)

Medieval romances, broadly defined, were surely the popular medium of the era, rightly compared by Loomis to today’s “theatre, cinema, radio, and television.” In form, like situation comedies and police dramas, they were highly conventionalized; in theme, like most popular and oral literature, they tended to reinforce readers’ preconceptions. Nonetheless, now as in the fourteenth century, convention is far from a mechanical reproduction of one work by another. Rather, conventional expectations in the reader allow the poet to convey more concise and detailed data.
A rough notion of the breadth of variation in these texts is evident simply from a review of their opening passages. A narrative beginning “Sing, o muse!” must inspire different expectations from one beginning “Once upon a time” or “It was a dark and stormy night,” but each of these well-known phrases is associated with a separate genre. Examination of a few examples of the Middle English romance from those collected in Maldwyn Mills well-edited and accessible Everyman volume indicates a wide variation in initial orientation for the reader. Although many levels of irony or conventional intertextuality may complicate the code, these opening passages in general provide a considerable degree of self-reflective definition of a text’s identity in terms of genre, sources, traditions, and function. In this way the competent reading (or listening) community is equipped to be able to pursue productive directions with the narrative that follows, accurately adjusting expectations and interpretations to produce the most productive reading. A few examples will demonstrate that, far from stereotyped repetition, even this form utilizes a great variety of openings.

1. The Sege of Melayne opens with a definition of audience — it is meant for those who relish heroic tales, heroic nonetheless for being true, as the author is at pains to insist.
This theme allows him to articulate several critical oppositions according to which the world of the poem is organized: first of all, the ordered hierarchy of feudalism (the hero is “Charlies of Fraunce,” “the heghe kynge of alle”) and secondly, the opposition to the pagan enemy, the Muslims, in a political and religious act of self-definition. However, it is clear that the authentic heroic age is perceived as in the past, or, that is, in a “dream-time,” the realm of the imagination. In fact, the poetic text may been seen as the surrogate of the heroism missing from everyday life. Those who cannot themselves do great deeds with the style they can conceive, can at least be connoisseurs. These two axes intersect: the order of European society, from top to bottom, is matched against its evil pagan twin.

2. The first words of Octavian define a larger potential listenership: everyone. The poet speaks to a universal audience: “Lytyll and mykyll, olde and yonge.” Far from detailing their differences, the poet seeks to amalgamate them into an all-inclusive audience, the fan-base that is the target of every writer aiming for the best-seller lists and every television producer.

3. Emare, quite differently, begins with an extended religious meditation on the gap between the divine and the earthly with the implication that this poetry, like a liturgical formula or an invocation in a hymn will itself repair the distance it seeks to describe. To the poet, it is the duty of all “menstrelles” to speak first of Christ, the mediator between heaven and earth. (One is reminded of Skip James, the country blues performer who would customarily conclude his performances with a hymn, presumably clearing the conscience from the “devil’s music” that preceded the sacred.) He speaks of his Lord, not for any reason specific to his tale, but rather because, as a pious Christian, he “sholde.” This mere mention is efficacious. Again, the text is the mediator between opposite conceptual poles.

4. Sir Isumbras takes the religious theme further, in this case specifically asking for blessings for himself and his audience, transforming the entertainment of hearing a romance into an act hallowed and protected by the divine.

5. In Sir Gowther the religious opening is melodramatic, focusing on the devil’s manipulation of women. Here we have no formal nod to the divine, nor a positive prayer, but rather an involvement of the cosmic figures in the story through the actions of “a warlocke greytt.”

Each of these openings seeks to define the binary oppositions that create the world of the story as the creation itself grew from the distinctions between light and dark, high and low, earth and sea. Though all the medieval romances recognize such pairs as god/man, truth/poetry, ruler/subject, us/not-us, they appear not as simple alternatives, but as the foundation of a complex dialectic. Thus Christ mediates between the divine and human realms and the individual believer may imitate him with hopes of being lifted to the celestial realm in the end. Poetry, likewise, though differing from lived experience, is, as Aristotle suggested, even more “true.” The king and serf, though occupying opposite ends of the social spectrum, are both necessary for the smooth functioning of society, and military enemies may one day be defeated.
In spite of this shared ideology, aesthetic, religious, and political, the romances set off on differing notes, each with its own character determined by the narrative to follow and by the artist who composed the particular version of the story. As always, poetry serves to first define the painful, all but impossible, contradictions of life and then to provide an imaginative escape. This commonality, though, by no means implies that each text is a slavish repetition of its models. Rather, the shared conventions allow for a free artistic play intelligible to the audience.

An Evening in Urubamba

2011-07-01T06:29:00.000-07:00

1. Chicha

The small town of Urubamba lies below Mount Chicon midway on the ancient route between Cusco and Macchu Picchu. Near to the ruins at Pisac and Ollentaytambo, it has become the hotel center for the region. Across the street from the San Agustin, a place boasting three-stars, several sheds displayed long bamboo poles topped with raggedy red plastic bags. This is the sign of a chicheria, an unregulated vendor of chicha, the local corn beer.
I entered, asked for a chichi, and the woman went back into the earth-floored shack whose boards admitted considerable light on all sides, opened a large plastic container, doubtless the one in which the preparation had brewed, dipped her ladle, and served me a caporal (a half liter) for forty centavos, maybe 14¢. I seated myself outside on one of the narrow wooden benches where a couple of local farmers were drinking. After making a few friendly remarks in my rudimentary Spanish, I tasted my brew and found it perfectly palatable. Room temperature and low in alcohol, it tasted like old beer, though with something of the flavor of corn. People on the other bench were drinking a rosier version which I was told was chicha frutada, with the addition of strawberries.
After a toast or two to each other’s health, I asked my fellow-drinkers their opinion of the election which happened to be held that very day. One of the candidates for the presidency was Keiko Fujimori whose sole qualification seemed to be that her father was Alberto Fujimori, the one-time premier who not only dissolved Congress, suspended the constitution, and ousted judges with whom he disagreed, but who is now serving time for human rights abuses (a euphemism for kidnapping and murder) and embezzlement of millions. Apparently to some these actions seemed so admirable as to deserve loyalty even to the next generation.
Her opponent was an ethnically indigenous one-time army officer, Ollanta Humala, son of a labor lawyer of indigenous descent who was an activist in a Communist faction not far removed from that from the splinter which had produced Abimael Guzman, the founder of the violent Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path movement. As a military man, however, eventually achieving the rank of lieutenant colonel, he was active in suppressing the guerillas as well as in the Cenepa War with Ecuador. In the year 2000 he initiated an attempted coup as waves of revelations of Fujimori’s corruption emerged. Though quickly defeated, he was pardoned by Congress, and allowed to reassume his rank. Now he stood as a populist candidate, promising jobs, education, and health care, and lower gas prices.
I expressed my preference for Humala, delighting my companions. We discussed class consciousness, the rich and the poor, in the United States and in Peru, and when I finished my chicha and excused myself, one of my interlocuters seized my arm and, while I spoke to him, the other purchased me another drink. Calling them my hermanos politicos peruanos, I managed to depart.

2. The Election

That evening I heard the music of celebration some distance off. Checking the computer, I saw that exit polls had declared Humala the victor. I followed the sounds to the local headquarters of his Nationalist Party where a live band was playing as couples in traditional garb, men as well as women, danced. A good-size crowd had gathered, some with children on their shoulders. The Peruvian flag and the rainbow wiphala banner of the indigenous people were waving alongside banners with the candidate’s name. The music alternated with brief speeches and chanting until a group with a street-wide banner came out to lead the celebrants up a narrow street, altogether blocking traffic. “Aqui, alla! Ollante presidente!” People waved from upstairs apartments; others danced in the streets. In spite of the exhilaration, none seemed to be drinking.
In the main square in front of the church under the impassive eyes of four or five National Police, the procession paused for a rally. More speeches with recorded music only (the large harp would have been a chore to transport). After a time they set out again, but I returned to the hotel. Ninety minutes later, I could still hear the music.
There is, of course, no telling what his administration will do. The chief charge against him I heard in Peru was that he admired (or received funds from) Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Humala has been distancing himself from Chavez’s increasingly centralized administration for several years, and even a returned American missionary, no friend of the president, told me that Chavez did good things at first. We have also the models of Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Brazil’s Luiz Lula da Silva (now succeeded by his colleague, the moderately liberal former urban guerrilla Dilma Rousseff).
One can only guess at what is to come for Peru. Watching the people of Urubamba dance and sing and cheer from windows, though, bearing in mind their oppression under colonialism, home-grown dictators, ultra-left guerillas, and multinational corporations, the visitor could have no doubt that, for once, in their own minds at least, they had won one. Having endured so much, Peruvians had a right, as I told my companions at the chicha stand, to expect a better future.

Wordsworth Speaks German

2011-07-01T06:25:00.000-07:00

Ein Schlummer siegelt meinen Geist.
Keine Furcht verwirrt mein Verfahren.
Es scheint mir dass sie fühlt gar nicht
den Druck den irdischen Jahren.
Sie hat nun weder Regung noch Kraft,
nichts hörend, auch nichts sehend,
herumgezogen im irdischen Lauf,
mit Felsen und Baüme drehend.

The target language of literary translation is, of course, ordinarily, the translators’ native language. Yet I was charmed to see an English schoolboys’ book, a slim preparation volume for examinations, called This Way and That which included pieces of Shakespeare and Milton done into Greek and Latin. So, as an experiment or an exercise or a pastime, I offer here a version of Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did my Spirit Seal.”
The shape of Wordsworth's poem is determined, first of all, by the emphatic common measure and the abab rhymes. To carry over as much as possible of this pattern is the first priority in translating particularly since the same stanza is common in German with very much the same folk associations as in English. I was willing to jettison other considerations and to tolerate some awkwardness to keep the gross structure ballad-like. Even so, the odd line rhymes don't appear in my German, and I bought the ones I do have at considerable cost. Even in the rhythm, I deviated from Wordsworth’s absolute with a few stray syllables here and there, but the same number of stresses per line announce themselves, I think, pretty clearly. I maintained a fairly conversational level of diction, but allowed for such reminders of poetic profundity as Wordsworth’s “diurnal.” (The reminders are more generalized in “mire,” but no less present.)
“Schlummer” seems inevitable — equally cute in English and German. “Geist” is made to order, too. I hesitated momentarily over ver- and be- with “siegeln,” since it seemed a little bare and unusual by itself, but I do think it carries the meaning best as is. (This first line translates itself — I expect to see an identical rendering from someone else.) The going gets more dubious in 1. 2 where I introduced “verwirren” and “Verfahren” without textual justification, solely to set up the coming rhyme. (Better to place the weaker structure first, so the conviction of rhyme will properly carry through when it happens.) “Verwirren” isn't too distracting (in fact, it suggests by contrast the automatically functioning natural world of the last two lines.) “Verfahren,” the rhyme word, is a problem. It implies inappropriate action on the part of the passive speaker and even gives that action some shape (course of action, procedure, method) that corresponds to nothing in Wordsworth. Exactly how intrusive the implication is, how wrong the word, I'm not quite sure. Line three looks good to me — idiomatic, short words with portent peeking through. “Druck” is certainly more one-way than “touch,” which might in another, context have a positive — tender or magical — sound but the sacrifice of the ambiguity seemed justified.
I had packed an extra syllable or two in 11. 2 and 4, but l. 5 does arrive like a mouthful, sounding more rhetorically declarative than Wordsworth's downplayed mystery. The participles of the sixth line are tactical — again I'm preparing for the rhyme — this strikes me as the most obvious infelicity of my version. The link created by the grammar between “sehen,” “hören,” and “drehen,” is satisfactory with regard to meaning, but it's syntactically unlikely. The fact that the whole second stanza refers to “her” at least means that confusion of basic meaning is probably not a problem. The seventh line I'm almost satisfied with. “herumgezogen” sounds grandly German but natural. I repeat “irdischen,” but that seems all right. “Lauf” conveys a cyclic sense. The last line is rather stumbling. I gave up trying to retain all three elements, and the supernumerary stones went over the side. This participle is even worse than the ones before.

How and Why to Signify or How to Make the Truth Dance

2011-07-01T06:18:00.000-07:00

This is my closest approach to an informal literary credo. I have only just now tried to collect the ideas that I have found useful in productively interacting with texts.

The intellectual must analyze the assumptions that underlie individual judgments. In the field of literature the poet need not, but the scholar and the critic must. Examining the implications of the patterns of one’s discernment is an ongoing part of the process for generating well-justified decisions. People who pooh-pooh theory, pretending they have none are either unselfconscious about their own or ignorant. This phenomenon is common in the free-for-all of the American political realm where the illusion has been constructed that only conservatives have values. The literary counterparts of the opportunistic timeserver have less opportunity to wreak harm, perhaps, though who is to say that poetry and art do not provide a part of the sustenance needed by humans.
All human groups possess art, though some may lack metal, pottery, even fire. It is surely absurd to imagine that this devotion of energy to symbolic structures created apparently, in play, is inessential. Human beings are, after all, preeminently a semiotic species: the creation and manipulation of symbols is more our distinguishing characteristic than tool use or an opposable thumb. Though the species had already a hundred thousand years of history, David Lewis-Williams suggests in The Mind in the Cave the simultaneous development of art, language, and religion about forty thousand years ago. Poetry is one indication of the fact that humans build imaginative structures as spiders build webs; it is our nature. The ability to state conditions contrary to observed fact allows lying, fabulation, hypotheses, poetry, and myth.
Most of my own basic assumptions have been set forth in other essays, some numerous times in various forms, but I shall here isolate them from specifics so they may be better judged on their own merits.
Poetry means only things made, constructions, artifacts, and indeed every object made by human hands carries within its design the intentionality of its maker. The students of stone blades have shown what expressive subtlety, what range of skill and inventiveness may be discerned even in such conventionalized and functional objects. From the earliest times, people also made objects for aesthetic purposes that were no less carefully designed, that were, in fact, specifically constructed to bear an astonishing load of meaning.
Art is the more densely significant information-bearing code. In poetry this efficiency is achieved because all elements of the text may be read: not merely what one may take for the straight denotation, but also what is left out, what is stated ironically. The text may also be fruitfully read for its turns on earlier similar texts, each deviation bearing new implications. The aesthetic text uses many figures of speech and thought, each of which requires an attempt to formulate something inexpressible using only its simple terms. Further, the material basis of the poem is itself significant. The series of phonemes that form the poem’s body is also expressive in ways that emphasize, extend, alter, qualify, or deny one’s first reading.
Analysis of a single word can expand in ever-widening waves. The semantic field of any word is unlimited, when one takes into account denotation, connotation, associations, prior uses, sounds, antonyms, homonyms and near homonyms, rhymes and half-rhymes, and the myriad other links. Increasing the unit of speech to the line and the paragraph, to the narrative and the conversation entails vastly more complex networks of interpretation, and moving then to the speech, the lyric, the fiction lifts the hermeneutics yet again.
Within the ocean of words that forms the body of literature itself, every text reacts against every other. Some gestures must be understood as hommages or as deliberate defiance of the reader’s expectations. A set cadence must be established before rhythmic play may begin, and the same rule applies to semantic and other phonic elements. As soon as a recognizable literary convention appears, its opposite, its contrary, its inversion, a whole field of possibilities is generated whose understanding depends upon the original. For too long critics have thought in terms of tradition and innovation as opposed rather than complementary terms.
One of literature’s spectra is that from highly conventionalized and predictable to wildly inventive. Around the one pole work becomes boring and repetitive; around the other the semantic codes weaken and the work approaches incomprehensibility.
It is for this reason that the literary text is distinguished by its polysemy. Though undergraduates may think of the search for multiple meanings at first as a sort of crossword puzzle and later as a license for the validity of any reading whatever, in fact the semantic field of a successful literary text is precisely controlled, its every ambivalence or ambiguity corresponding to traces in the reader’s consciousness.
The text, of course, always is understood with reference to lived experience. Every poem, story, or play implies certain propositions about life off the page. This is by no means always the most significant element in the work, though it is the one most commonly pursued in schoolrooms. (Often the chase is announced with the instructor using the execrable expression, “What is the author trying to say?” as though the poet was all but impossibly tongue-tied.)
The information the literature suggests about the world is itself of a particular type, differentiated from other discourses, such as scientific, philosophical, or historical. The aesthetic text specializes in information generated subjectively: the irrational, the ambivalent, ambiguous, conflicted, the self-contradictory. In this way, art more accurately reproduces the data of experience, often simplified or edited out altogether in everyday transactions. Admitting that pleasure is a primary goal of all organisms, art foregrounds and privileges this drive. The emotions, which are often suppressed as a matter of decorum, are the focus of poetry. Whereas most utterances are concerned with limited subjects, art projects an entire world-view in its every fragment. Furthermore, the literary text can create new thoughts, never before uttered, and thus allow change and progress.
Through these practices art gains its license to investigate the mysteries: the student of love does not turn to a psychology study, the student of death to a medical volume, nor the seeker after Ultimate Reality to theology. If they wish to learn what these things mean to human beings, they will read poetry.
The poet is not, alas, the bearer of revelation from higher realms he was long thought to be, but he is a bearer of a sort of provisional truth, what the world might have seemed like to one person at one moment, and there is no closer approach to truth in life. Whether the poet is wise or foolish, the written record of human reactions with reality, concretized on the page, allow the reader to triangulate and thus compensate for the limitations of every individual view.
The methods of poetry are then necessarily different from those of other discourses. Whereas most uses of language value concision and clarity, seeking a transparent language through which the meaning will appear with a single clear meaning, the literary text foregrounds the material of words itself and makes use of ambiguity and even obscurity. The simple act of framing art in a way that is non-functional in the ordinary sense creates new meaning: a junkyard cannot look the same in a photograph as in a casual glance and the act of recording a moment’s reaction to scenery changes that reaction forever. Always pursuing new shades of meaning, the poet uses music: rhythm, rhyme, half-rhyme, assonance, alliteration. The immense array of figures of speech and thought are all “tropes” that bend language to forge novelty.
The writer may originate poetry and the critic may examine it from a variety of stances. A focus on the author will lead to an expressive theory of poetry (Romantic theory if semi-sublime, art as self-help as the modern epigone). Placing the text at the center will result in an ars gratia artis (as well as New Criticism and all formalist practices). If the writer or reader wish to look particularly at the effect of the text on the audience, the result will be didacticism in some form, Christian, Marxist, or otherwise. (Actually, all popular and oral forms lend themselves to this sort of approach.)
As I said toward the outset, these assumptions underlie my own criticism. They rest on my experience of poetry more than of criticism, though eight years in graduate school can hardly have failed to leave a mark. This is a collection of observations rather than an exposition of an aesthetic. I invite dialogue. It is a pleasure to learn something new, to see reality from a different perspective. Is this not one reason that we read literature?

Two Passages from Marcus Aurelius

2011-06-13T06:12:00.000-07:00

1.
Marcus Aurelius is neither a sublime mystic nor a brilliant poet, but he is an admirable devotional writer. He convinces every reader of his sincerity, even of his humility, no mean trick for a Roman emperor, and he seems primarily concerned with stilling his own mind; indeed, he seems indeed to have called his volume Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν or To Himself. Christians were quite right to value this work; its attitude, though not its language and imagery, is strikingly similar to Thomas a Kempis in urging ego-sacrifice and acceptance as the highest wisdom.
Yet, the philosophical and emotional differences are significant. Concerning the former, I will only note that, though Marcus intuitively accepts the quasi-theistic Logos, he consistently qualifies his comments by admitting that the more materialist Epicureans may in the end have it right. Though this may imply that Thomas embraces god more whole-heartedly, yet Marcus is the one for whom the world is illuminated, with divinity all about him, while Thomas focuses on his own shortcomings, the “fallen-ness” of the world, and the otherness of the divine.
After reminding readers at the beginning of Book III of the fragility and brevity of life, Marcus pushes the point, adding that one must strive for enlightenment since, even before death, senility can destroy an individual’s mind. Immediately then, without transition, he moves into a glorious poetic passage that betrays the fundamental emotional origins of the joyful affirmation that underlies his philosophic posture.

It is necessary to pay close attention to those things consequent to nature’s changes which have each one a charm and an allure. Thus some splits appear in the crust of baking bread, and these have nothing to do with the baker’s plan, yet these have always a certain rightness and stir up a stronger desire for food. And also figs, when they are ripest, gape, and in overripe olives the very closeness to decay adds some beauty to the fruit, and the lion’s furrowed brow, and the foam from the mouths of a boar at bay, and many other things, which, if examined severally, seem far from fair in form, still, having developed closely following the principles of nature, these all help to adorn the world and attract the soul. Thus, if one has a feeling and deeper thoughts concerning the things that come to be in the cosmos, hardly any at all of the things that happen fail to be sweet.

2.
This enthusiastic attitude is the more striking as he regularly goes beyond skepticism into what sounds like nihilism. In Book VII he compiles a list of metaphors for life reminiscent of Macbeth’s “Life's but a walking shadow . . . a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The Diamond Sutra offers a longer series: “like a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream; like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.”
I do not mean to suggest that these poetic assertions are precisely equivalent. Marcus’ metaphors form a unique semiotic field. It is useful to consider each separately. The notion of a “grand procession of empty bustle” suggests indeed the vacancy or vanity of “busy-ness,” but sets it against the magnificent pageant of existence. The theater metaphor (similar to Shakespeare’s Jaques saying “All the world’s a stage” or the implications of Calderón’s La vida es sueño) justifies his reminders to himself that, born an emperor, he must accept his lot no less than a peasant or a beast; one is, after all, simply playing a role. As a play, the human condition is presumably beautiful and absorbing, though it may be ultimately absurd. The animals come next, reminding the reader that a human has no greater place in the cosmos than they. And even then, after sheep and cattle, the image shifts following the interruption of the “contending spears” image, a neat representation of pushy egos. The zoological diminuendo then continues, first to puppies, then fish, then ants, then not mice merely, but little mice. The series concludes with the grim determinist metaphor of puppets. (Elsewhere, Marcus says our desires are what make us puppets.) The potentially bleak implications of this may seem to overwhelm the joy of apprehending the the Logos or World-Fire, but in fact, the final clauses warn against pride, admonishing the reader to be generous and great-hearted to others who may be less enlightened.

[Life is] a grand procession of empty bustle, action on a stage, flocks of sheep, herds of cattle, clatter of contending spears, a little bone tossed to puppies, bits of food tossed into a fishpond, the arduous labor of ants who carry great burdens, a scattering of little mice in all directions, puppets controlled with strings. It is necessary then to be gracious and not to show disdain, realizing that each has merit to the extent that those things do with which he occupies himself.

VISTA Trains Me

2011-06-13T06:00:00.000-07:00

In 1967 I received my B.A. with the ordinary Angst concerning the step to follow. My distaste for capitalism eliminated most career options at the outset even if anyone might actually care to employ an English major with minors in German and Ancient Greek. To complicate matters, graduation meant I would lose the student exemption that had held the draft at bay for four years.
My desire to avoid money and career coalesced with my wish to dodge the draft and with the government’s interest in coopting the radical spirit of the young. Foreign as the inclination to work for subsistence may seem to the present generation, I was far from alone at the time. My social conscience combined with a dash of infatuation with the Other, and I joined VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, created in 1965, later to change to a division of AmeriCorps and only recently all but eliminated. The protection from Selective Service was never guaranteed, and, in fact, one of my cohort was drafted a few months later and went promptly underground.
Though another may be able to characterize such service as part of a glorious continuum of human betterment stretching from early abolitionists and labor organizers through the SDS ERAP projects and Barack Obama’s days with the Developing Communities Project in Chicago, I cannot.
I had specified a preference for work on an Indian reservation, but I was assigned to inner-city youth. The six weeks training period began with classes but quickly turned into a month-long internship. I was to work with Hull House, the historic settlement house in Chicago. At this time Hull House was conducting a pilot program for Job Corps in their rural work camp. The concept of Job Corps from the start had been that taking individuals out of their own neighborhoods and placing them in a new environment might allow them to develop new habits and values. For years Hull House had operated a summer camp for poor city kids called Bowen Country Club near Waukegan which had been donated by the banker, manufacturer, and Hull House chair Joseph Bowen in the ‘30s. This had since been sold and another property purchased in East Troy, Wisconsin, a short distance across the border from Illinois. I don’t know whether some sociologist had suggested the change, but the plan at Hull House’s camp was to bring groups of gang youth en masse so that people’s friends could accompany them to ease the transition. They were to receive a low hourly wage during the week, be paid on Friday and returned to Chicago for the weekend where the administrators hoped they would seem successful with their earnings and attract more youth to give up the gang life and work for a living.
Thus I came to know a few dozen members of the Vice Lords. Referring to the north Lawndale neighborhood where the group had originated they would call out “K-town -- from hell we came to claim our fame – mighty, mighty Vice Lords.” Their leader was Looney, a physically unimposing young guy with a jaunty little fedora on the side of his shaved head. Looney was able to direct his troops by means of oblique and imaginative language. When rendering an opinion or a mandate, he seemed only slightly more explicit than the Delphic oracle. “Weeell,” he would slowly begin, “I knew a lady once, lived about 29th and Federal, and this little dog would bark at her ass every day and she never said a word and one day that little shit-ass dog don’t bark and don’t nobody know where it is and when they asked her, she said, ‘Why you asking me?’ And the son-of-a bitch never bothered her again.” In his crew were Hawk, Cowboy (also called Mossie), Three-Corners (aka Wolfman), Spooky, Peyton, Butch, Midnight (or Captain Midnight), and Peanuts. These are the people with whom I worked and lived. The other main faction was a group of Latin Kings who called each other names like Chico, Flako, and Bongo.
The blacks were close enough to migration from the South for the urban/rural contrast to be a status distinction (as it is in line from a Willie Dixon song that Bo Diddley made a hit: “I may look like a farmer, but I’m a lover.”). They were always calling out, “You dumb-ass Mississippi-bred nigger,” “Hey, black-ass country-bred boy.” They had an elaborate set of literary conventions and tropes. One might say “You my man – die for you – killed three panthers, a lion, and a mountain goat.” I also heard the ironic inversion of this figure: “I killed three roaches, a fly, and a gnat for you, my man.”
I had arrived at the work camp with two VISTA comrades, though the other two were gone after three days. The first was a very nice fellow, a bit callow perhaps, who had just dropped out of training as a Jesuit. As most of us were solidly middle class, during our lectures in preparation for service, we had been instructed about the nature of the poor and the under-class. One speaker had enlarged upon class distinctions among blacks based on income, hair, skin tone, and the like, linking this invidious system of values to the distinction during slavery days between house niggers and field niggers. On our second day in the camp, the first day of contact with “clients,” my colleague found himself washing dishes next to a proud Vice Lord. Probably something at a loss (he wasn’t particularly at ease even in bourgeois company), he seems to have recalled his lesson and made some comment about house and field niggers. Doubtless his interlocutor heard only the epithet and immediately knocked him to the floor with a single punch. Though he shortly came round, he left that evening.
I had suspected my second colleague might be a government agent. He introduced himself as a Berkeleyite, active in the Movement, and wore political buttons as though to reinforce the claim. I had already as an undergraduate known a few infiltrators and agents provocateurs, and I thought this fellow seemed quite suspicious. I must have been wrong this time, though, since, on the evening of our very first day in camp, while socializing, he offered some marijuana to our young charges. Though he may have imagined this would help him to establish rapport as a cool white guy, he was in fact immediately given up when one of his new friends was busted in the city that weekend. “My social worker gave it to me!” VISTA quenched the legal consequences, but he, too, vanished from the program. Though I cannot claim to have accomplished much, I at least had enough sense to avoid such catastrophes.
Some of the urban youth were disturbed by the darkness and silence of the countryside. A few were clearly reluctant to stray from the lighted areas after dark. Before long the belief in a malevolent monster called Grippo began to emerge. Grippo lurked in the woods, awaiting an opportunity to seize some careless human. I can’t say whether some of the more clever guys made this up intentionally to mock the credulous, but I think it is fair to say that the belief spread as time went on. There is no doubt, though that the forest ogre was associated with a real-life figure. My time at the Work Camp coincided with the civil rights demonstration led by Fr. James Groppi in Milwaukee. Rather like Martin Luther King’s open housing campaign in Chicago the year before, Fr. Groppi dramatized Northern segregation in a series of militant marches. The Vice Lords, however, viewing news footage of the priest leading mostly black crowds into hostile neighborhoods, did not seem to view him as a friend. Even to those unsure of exactly what his con was, his motives seemed dark. I heard comments that implied that he was the enemy of blacks, that he was taking advantage of the people with whom he marched. Somehow this suspicion coalesced into a misprision and he achieved the status of a myth. Talk of Grippo increased.
The management was concerned about our image in the small town nearby. Though the camp did patronize local stores and thus curry favor with some merchants, they virtually never saw the urban youth unless they were driven to town for a medical appointment. Several were being treated for gonorrhea, and our administrator thought this might reflect badly on the operation. As many of the gang members were interested in music, he hit upon the expedient of inviting the local village’s big shots to a talent show showcasing their abilities. He could begin with an elaborate dinner to show off the skills of the kitchen staff. He wanted an open bar – not just wine and beer, but all sorts of spirits -- to ensure the jollity of the locals. He even purchased elaborate floral displays from a local shop to impress the guests. When the florist arrived, he caused considerable hilarity when he turned out to be an effeminate guy who was clearly interested in the youth. Not surprisingly, a good share of the liquor was diverted the instant it arrived. By the time dinner arrived, we staff members assigned to the bar were taking our own share as well. In spite of various snafus, we made it through dessert. Unfortunately, by this time, at least half the acts were in no condition to take the stage. Those that did perform made, for the most part, a sorry spectacle. And then, suddenly, a Latin King who had not long before suffered a femur-shattering gunshot wound and walked with an artificial leg, came forward out of turn with some urgent message which he never managed to deliver since, as soon as he had gained the stage, he tripped and stumbled and lost his prosthetic while announcing something in Spanish that he considered very important.
The training concluded, and I made it to a permanent assignment in Minneapolis. I heard that the director was fired shortly after I moved on. If the mingling of middle-class and underclass was to change society, I could not see it from my perspective. What had been learned during my training was, I am afraid, little to the credit of any of those involved.

Chaucer's Version of the Myth of a Golden Age

2011-06-13T05:52:00.000-07:00

Chaucer's short poem “The Former Age” states a commonplace theme, that of a golden age from which mankind has fallen, and it recognizes its own dependence on tradition by recalling classical precedents with references to Jupiter and Diogenes. Moreover, the poem is directly derivative of several works (the most important being Chaucer’s own Boethius). But the use of literary convention is often a highly dynamic process, and this particular restatement is fully effective in both exploiting the potent resources of the archetype and freely yet harmoniously creating new details, new tones. The poem’s implications are enriched not only by its sources, but also by analogous stories whose images parallel its own.
Golden age myths are, of course, current world-wide. The Hindu concept of the satya yuga and the Daoist vision of a primal utopia are two essentially similar variations. The most fundamental import of such stories is to complain against suffering, mortality, and wickedness. Lamenting the fall provides an etiology and a type for any specific lament of the limitations of this life.
But in Chaucer's poem moral corruption associated with the fall is not unspecified. He defines it largely in economic terms. The coming of technological innovation and a cash economy has poisoned relations between men and created an undesirable selfish “delicacye” within individuals. The prior perfection represents a reminiscence comparable to Engels’ primitive communists, [1] or their more modern incarnation -- Gary Snyder’s neolithic communard ecstatics. [2] The present-day failing is described in terms similar to those of “Lak of Stedfastnesse” as the duplicity resulting when men prey upon men prompted by “the anguysschous love of havyinge.”
The second system of corruption the poet suggests is sexual. Though punishment for sexuality is heavily suggested in the Biblical story of Eden it is not explicit here. The ambiguity of line 28 is heightened by line 29. Though the explicit topic is the covetous pursuit of jewels and precious metals, the combination of “swety bysinesse,” “lurkinge,” and “derkesse” in a story of the fall cannot fail to have sexual meaning. (The term “swety” alone is often used by Chaucer in a sexual context — in the Miller's Tale and. in Troilus and Criseyde, for instance. ) ln addition, the sexual associations of
caves are explicated not only by Freud but also by countless others (e.g. the Memphis
Jug Band in their “Cave Man Blues”). Finally, the second stanza’s description of the
crime of wounding the earth with a plow to sow seed more efficiently (objectifying and exploiting the earth) is suggestive enough to drag half The Golden Bough behind it.
Thus, Chaucer attributes to deranged or unhealthy, “fallen,” economic and sexual relations the aggressive content in human society. While the primary stream of meaning in “The Former Age,” this is not the only one. I believe a contrary value system also resonates within the same narrative images. Frequently in fairy tales underground caves are said to contain a treasure guarded by a powerful and malevolent being. The hero proves himself by gaining a victory over the guardian (as in Beowulf). One might generalize such a successful quest as representing adaptation to the world and characterize the dreamer after a golden age as solipsistic and infantile. Further, the very wealth of detail in Chaucer's poem's picture of our degenerate age, the piling up of parallel phrases suggests a delight in the plenitude of the world. Just as Christians speak of that felix culpa that made movement and action possible, that made oneself possible, so here the fall has “thickened the plot.” The final list of crimes (“poyson, manslautre, mordre”) is so extreme as to remove the application from one”s every day to the realm of moralizing about others, as when suburbanites speak of “crime in the cities.” Finally, one must regard the author himself as to some extent dwelling in the golden age since his values are those of the original creation. As a virtuous man he partakes of the nature of that earlier world and proves that it is not wholly lost. All these factors combine with the rather spartan character of life in the golden age as it is portrayed to generate a sort of ambivalent complexity of a sort that would, have been foreign to those who had, as Chaucer says, “no fantasye to debate.” Poignant and vigorous though the lament is, it contains currents of meaning running contrary to the explicit content, which, by their opposition, render the poetry more accurate and more effective.

1. From Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State: There can be no poor and needy – the communistic household and the gens know their responsibility towards the aged, the sick and those disabled in war. All are free and equal, including the women. There is as yet no room for slaves nor, as a rule, for the subjugation of alien tribes.

2. from Snyder “Buddhism and the Coming Revolution”: In fact, it is my own view that the coming revolution will close the circle and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past. If we are lucky we may eventually arrive at a totally integrated world culture with matrilineal descent, free-form marriage, natural-credit communist economy, less industry, far less population and lots more national parks.

Yet Two More Versions of Wang Wei

2011-06-13T05:44:00.001-07:00

empty mountain without men
(one hears some distant sound of speech)
light and shade in deepest wood
green moss creeps up where sun can reach.

mountain void
no one else
faintly
in the distance
men’s voices
chiaroscuro
in deepest woods
green moss rises
illuminated

The Wang Wei poem illustrates the difficulties of translation a forteriori. The poem is written in “five syllable unregulated verse” which typically includes a primary caesura after the second syllable, a secondary one after the third or fourth. The even lines rhyme, couplets mirror each other syntactically, and the tonal patterns link pairs of lines as well. The parallelism will recall the significance of the yang-yin concept in Chinese thought, but it also has links to, for instance, such structures as the classic blues lyric in which the third line answers, opposes, or completes the repeated first line and the Finnish epic pattern in which every line is followed by a weakened repetition. Surely here we are entitled to invoke the words of A. J. Arberry in the introduction to his translation of Sa’adi’s Gulistan Kings and Beggars who declared that rendering poetry in rigorous traditional forms was an acrobatic performance not unlike “setting an elephant to walk a tightrope.”
In my first version I sought to retain the rhyme pattern of the Chinese, though I do nothing with the tones and substitute a four stress line for the five syllable one. The accentual meter is, of course, far less insistent and information-laden than the original with its syntactic parallelisms. The rhyme may threaten to trivialize the lines for a contemporary American reader with associations of nursery rhymes and advertising jingles.
In the second version I have emphasized the apparently spontaneous descriptive impression such lines create in the European reader by spreading the phrases in a sort of verse field and heightening the aesthetic values with the art historical term “chiaroscuro” and the philosophical/spiritual ones with the loaded word “illuminated.”
Both versions sacrifice the intertextuality of the original with its use of words and phrases recalling Buddhist texts or other poems by Wang Wei or by others. For instance, the title is often translated “Deer Park,” recalling the site in Sarnath of the Buddha’s first sermon. In line three the words “fan jing” suggest sunset and the “western paradise” of the Pure Land School. The characters can mean “late sun” or dusk, but more literally denote “returning view” or “pattern.” On the level of the ideogram, the characters might be read as “movement in reverse,” and “sun above hill.”
Furthermore, other hermeneutic directions are suggested by, for instance, the fact that this poem, though often printed alone, is generally paired with one by Pei Di, as are all the poems of the Wang River collection. Thus in the original each text holds a direct if dialectical relation to another, and the meaning must be sought between the two. Some readers (such as John Holcombe) regard the poem as a comment, not on natural scenery, but rather on examples of landscape panting. These approaches by no means exhaust the possibilities. The poem invites new readings.

For comparison’s sake, thanks to Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem Is Translated:

Deer Park Hermitage

So lone seem the hills; there is no one in sight there.
But whence is the echo of voices I hear?
The rays of the sunset pierce slanting the forest,
And in their reflection green mosses appear.
(W.J.B. Fletcher, 1919)

There seems to be no one on the empty mountain...
And yet I think I hear a voice,
Where sunlight, entering a grove,
Shines back to me from the green moss.
(Witter Bynner & Kiang Kang-hu, 1929)

An empty hill, and no one in sight
But I hear the echo of voices.
The slanting sun at evening penetrates the deep woods
And shines reflected on the blue lichens.
(Soame Jenyns, 1944)

La Forêt

Dans la montagne tout est solitaire,
On entend de bien loin l'écho des voix humaines,
Le soleil qui pénètre au fond de la forêt
Reflete son éclat sur la mousee vert.
(G. Margoulies, 1948)

Through the deep woods, the slanting sunlight
Casts motley patterns on the jade-green mosses.
No glimpse of man in this lonely mountain,
Yet faint voices drift on the air.
(Chang Yin-nan & Lewis C. Walmsley, 1958)

On the lone mountain
I meet no one,
I hear only the echo
At an angle the sun's rays
enter the depths of the wood,
And shine
upon the green moss.
(C.J. Chen & Michael Bullock, 1960)

On the empty mountains no one can be seen,
But human voices are heard to resound.
The reflected sunlight pieces the deep forest
And falls again upon the mossy ground.
(James J.Y. Liu, 1962)

Clos aux cerfs

Montagne déserte. Personne n'est en vue.
Seuls, les échos des voix résonnent, au loin.
Ombres retournent dans las forêt profonde:
Dermier éclat de la mousse, vert.
(François Cheng)

Empty hills, no on in sight,
only the sound of someone talking;
late sunlight enters the deep wood,
shining over the green moss again.
(Burton Watson, 1971)

Empty mountain: no man is seen,
But voices of men are heard.
Sun's reflection reaches into the woods
And shines upon the green moss.
(Wai-lim Yip, 1972)

A Problem on the Border

2011-06-13T05:38:00.000-07:00

When I first traveled abroad, I thought I was a bit more clever than others. Forty years ago many people used cash or traveler’s checks (or “cheques” as American Express would have it). In those distant days, even credit cards were uncommon, and I certainly had none. I obtained a letter of credit from the Northern Trust Company, my bank in Chicago, a document usually used by businessmen. In this way I would risk carrying no money and my savings could continue to bear interest in my absence. I then plagued banks throughout Europe and North Africa by showing up and requesting twenty or twenty-five dollars in the local currency. This worked well, we found, even in out of the way places.
We were proceeding across North Africa mostly by train. At that time, the Moroccan trains had four classes. The last of these was our inevitable choice and we rumbled across country in cars with backless wooden benches that reminded me of trains in old Western movies. Oujda was our last Moroccan town – we bought some Algerian money from a street hustler before boarding the train. The black market existed because the Algerian government currency was controlled; that is, it did not trade freely but was maintained at an artificial level by the government.
We had had some difficulty entering Algeria. My profession was listed as “editor” on the visa form, and the USA was uneasy with the Algerian National Liberation Front which had clear alliances to the Vietnamese one. After all, under Boumédienne, members of the Panther “international section” were guests there and, in a few months, Tim Leary would arrive to join them. I convinced the immigration people that I was harmless, and I was admitted to the land by someone who presumably understood that I would receive money through the banks’ approved pipelines.
In fact, I had no difficulty using the letter of credit in Algeria, and I retained all the documents and receipts accompanying the transactions. In Annaba we sought to buy tickets through to Tunis, but the clerk insisted that we have a bon de passage, while the issuing official, unfamiliar with letters of credit, wanted to see the more conventional document recording currency imported, changed, and carried out. Having imported no money – well, we had, in fact, but that was illicit unreported cash – we had never received this form.
We were stalemated. It did no good to point out that the immigration man’s principle would mean that we could never leave his country, a result desired by no party. He simply turned up the palms of his hands in impotence. He had the bureaucrat’s taste for asserting power when possible as well as the typical minor functionary’s fear of doing anything outside of standard operating procedure. He surely toadied to his superiors and thus had a reasonable expectation that his inferiors would do him the same courtesy.
We decided to head toward the border anyway. Early in the morning we took the train to Souk Ahras, built on the ruins of Tagaste, Augustine’s birthplace and a Roman municipium. There, in an office at the train station, we encountered the same obdurate official refusal to allow us to leave. The immigration officer had returned to his heaps of paperwork, and we were quietly discussing what might happen if we simply walked to the border when the chef de gare strolled by, resplendent in his perfectly pressed uniform. He wore decorations like a soldier’s and walked with military bearing.
Pleased to observe that something out of the ordinary was transpiring in his domain, he took an interest and summoned us into his office. He offered tea and we could see things were looking up. We passed a few pleasantries back and forth in our imperfect French and exchanged opinions on world events. We discussed the glories of Algeria and the virtues of the current regime. When I ventured to ask about our immediate circumstance, he sighed, as though such trivial matters were very nearly beneath his level of perception, signed the necessary paper, and pushed it toward us. Beyond the stage of relishing manipulation, he knew the meaning of noblesse oblige. As a big man, he demonstrated his power by patronage. Fortunately, that day, he chose to patronize us.

Flyin' with the Muse: Kirpal Gordon's Eros in Sanskrit

2011-05-01T06:42:00.000-07:00

Kirpal Gordon will perform at 4 p.m. on Saturday, August 13, 2011 as the Northeast Poetry Center’s Distinguished Visiting Poet at 7 West Street, Warwick. Award-winning saxophonist Claire Daly and her band will appear as well.
SPEAK-SPAKE-SPOKE is now available. See www.kirpalg.com.

Prose poetry, from Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Gertrude Stein, through Bly and Russell Edson, has tended toward the surreal and Kirpal Gordon’s Eros in Sanskrit (Leaping Dog Press) nods to that tradition (hearing, for instance “screams within glass jars” in “Hetaera Collects the Fragments of the Splintered Glass”). And Gordon is an unusually literate poet, with an authentically catholic education. Among the influences he explicitly acknowledges are Kabir, Rilke, Pound, and Kerouac, and he pays hommage as well to Duke Ellington and those noble Billies, Strayhorn and Holiday.
But the more significant aspects of the work are, what has become so difficult to be in this belated age, innovative. Even to readers of the littlest of magazines, this voice, this manner, this vision, is fresh. Poetry is surely the most densely significant form of language, and by this standard, Eros in Sanskrit, though printed as prose, is hyperpoetic. Fortunately, Gordon is immediately engaging, often charming (who could resist his address to the reader as “lover”?). In fact, his specialty has long been sitting on the ridgepole between dualities, yoking moist and dry, self and other, physical and spiritual, high and low culture.
To shift metaphors, he’s the old-time department store floorwalker, with a spiffy suit of language and a rhetorical figure in the buttonhole, and the man, like a manic Groucho, manages somehow to cover every floor at once: in “Puberty/Colonialism/Spring” he constructs a symbolic frame that conflates adolescent Oedipalism, anti-imperialism, and the old reverdie riff, adding data to each and casting the most suggestive nets of association among the three. Throughout the text mother metamorphoses to lover and then to destroyer as sparks of hard-won vision fly.
As I tend to do as well in Pound’s Cantos (or the oeuvre of W. S. Burroughs, for that matter), I find myself mining Gordon’s book for lyric fragments, often of such surpassing beauty that I lose interest in themes or overarching structure. Gordon, in fact, acknowledges classic imagism by troping on Pound in “How Paint Peels: Petals on a Wet White Wall,” but he justifies the play with his own coups in both melody and visual imagery. One can only think of Williams and Zukofsky when encountering such solidity: “on the oak deck he left behind him: pant of bloodhound, patter of cat paw.” (“Curved World”) Similarly, he stands up to the comparison with Under Milkwood suggested by this passage about a NYC childhood: “It seemed every clump of corner store had a watering hole with beefy barkeepers streaming with brogues, cursing like troopers in apron and tie among crumbling corduroy, quarter beer & pipesmoke blue-gray serving toothless stumble bums rum-soaked, shuffling shoeless in greatcoats.” He also is capable of tossing off a line that Cole Porter might have appreciated: “a young woman wears the look someone else already looked worn out in.” (“September in Venice Beach”) And the next moment the reader can only think of Gerard Manley Hopkins: “Sound manifests the world our maws mutter, shudder & spout at.” (“Eros & Sanskrit) One can only sigh in appreciation at the lyric lines concluding “She Walks on Water Street”: “Should she push past dusty daylights indigo end to your match meeting her cigarette, would her exhale dissolve your reflection, pulling you out of yourself – isn’t that what Venus rising over bridge lights already foretells?”
Gordon is serious, every spell he sings is meant as a cunning means with the end, as for the householder in the Lotus Sutra, of luring us as well as his own tender ass from the burning house of phenomenal reality.
He not only feels the heat, though; he sees the glorious light as well. Like a California gold-panner, he spots the eternal gleam in mundane phenomena, allowing him to invoke myth naturally and powerfully so that his classical references fit seamlessly with immediate experience in the same way that a good symbol will function as “realism.” And, though there are startling theophanies of Dionysos and Christ, it is most often the feminine embodied in Isis or Venus or Kora, that serves as his “other,” at once the goddess, the beloved, the world, the other half of self. “Coitus has turned the curved world inside out.” (“Curved World”). Plato, the troubadours, and the Bauls of Bengal who sing love-songs to Krishna have known something of the same dialectic.
But his route varies, obliging the reader to maintain a high alert as the author, for one instance, retools the Eden story to recount the sixties (in “Regarding Paradise”). In “Incident at Naoussa” Gordon no sooner manages to convey the charm of a most pleasant Greek town, when he turns the experience upside-down, to a via negativa, deriving its profundity not from observed detail, but from unsounded depths of ignorance and absence.
Gordon’s eros is not merely erotic and divine: his compassion for others animates the page and creates a politics born of the simplest of home-truths -- we are all in this together. “There are no signs of Indians,” another of Gordon’s sententiae, neatly erases itself as he (like Cooper, Melville, Twain, and all the other hip Americans) evokes the non-white “other” (who may be native American, African-American, or an incarnation of Mailer’s White Negro) in pursuit of an accurate survey and thus triangulate toward reality. The indigenous locals tell him America is “infecting [the Amazon River] first, then bleeding it dry,” and why? The guide “hugged the air around him & winked your country, she is mighty that way.” In a couple of gestures, the cat is out of the bag: the marginalized prophet, the blundering imperial giant, the dependent union of each with its enemy/remedy.
Like the pilgrim who, when asked by a merchant of Vanity Fair, “What will you buy,” responds, “I buy the truth,” Gordon knows that we are generally being suckered. For him the first layer of illusion, the acquisitive, is marked by “the division of labor, spread of wealth & demand of gender role.” (“Epilogue”) With venal temptation quelled, the lures of sensation may be, not defeated, but enlisted to speed this very contemporary pilgrim’s progress. He boldly spins out eloquent jive in “Letter in Lady Day Spring Tones”: “We told you slingin’ rhymes & tellin’ jokes/talkin’ about time served while sellin’ folks toasts could get you violated & now you’re waitin’ in Brooklyn County Detention waitin’ to get de-loused or pronounced brain dead en route to the Big House: scuffled (don’t say it snuffed out)/shuffled off to Buffalo/man . . .a deadbeat scheme of cosmic slop instead of a sweet sumpin sumpin nice & neat.”
Gordon’s themes reflect a vision informed by a Vedantist version of the perennial philosophy incarnated through precise takes on everyday America. He’s out to smash dualities from the get-go, and even his own insights get the head-knock treatment that just might lead to enlightenment. The overture poem “Eros and Sanskrit” hedges its bets like the wisest: “yes, no, both & neither.” “The bird is in the field as the field is in the bird.” The poetic project is to “sing & get sung” with a yoni/mouth and a lingam/tongue. Articulation of the world assumes such polarities; pronunciation of the language requires them. Gordon is well aware that they vanish in ecstasy: “Beyond a lunch pail Aristotle’s single pole/double throw switch there’s a human throttle which, when you embrace me please, we equal infinity.” (“Tree Mend Us”)
But there’s no need for clumsy paraphrase and halting reduction, because Gordon’s poetry is there: impassioned, erudite, melodically beautiful and complex and the man, like Bunyan’s Christian, sees the most astonishing sights and encounters the most potent frights and delights of this human flesh as he moves on, stepping ever closer to enlightenment. His own verse provides the redemptive denial to his prophet’s cry: Are
all the wild seeds gone? (“August in California’s Central Valley”) No one is more precise or more graceful in limning the “knots & blooms” of the heart. For a susceptible reader this volume offers a plenitude: “As for me I always hoped beauty might be enough” (“Beauty and Belief”). And Gordon is enough of a Platonist (or did he simply imbibe the brighter conceits of Augustinianism?) that those enamored of truth and love will find the categories dovetail here. Without a doubt it is Aphrodite’s doves at work. The reader can join the procession: “Let the trumpets sing: the naked god lives.” (“Life Size Remains”)
Like much of the most moving Greek and Chinese poetry (two traditions to which Gordon is attentive) his theme is the catch-22 of desire: the bound loveliness and evanescence of worldly things, including most prominently oneself. We can only rejoice and lament. Poetry excels at delineating contradictions, ambiguities, and ambivalences, and Gordon’s hand in Eros in Sanskrit is unerring as he constructs those little machines of words that recreate his moments of sublimity and then allow the reader access as well. There is always slippage in these transactions, as there is always transience in the apple of the world, but Gordon looks straight on in the face of loss, and makes of it a lovely melody.

N.B. A cd entitled SPEAK-SPAKE-SPOKE, not yet issued, accompanies the book. Listen to it before you read. Gordon, in concert with the gifted and swinging saxophonist Claire Daly and other musicians, has created what strikes my ears as the very best jazz/poetry collaboration of our generation. The music goes beyond accompaniment; the words beyond lyrics: they sing and dance together, and your mind will find itself following right along.

A Library's Commonplaces and Curiosities

2011-05-01T06:15:00.000-07:00

I am afraid that my library will lose its animation no later than its owner. I am uniquely familiar not only with the contents, more or less, of these particular volumes, but with their meaning and history, what tale each tells of my taste and the history of the times. A box of old books is among the most valueless of objects. Yet, during its use, like one’s wardrobe, one’s pantry, or one’s bank records, the library sets forth the little that can remain of an individual consciousness in concrete form behind; it is like other human constructions, a precise and rich vein of data.
Traces of my library’s beginnings remain – but, wait, it has as well a prehistory, though for this earliest era the artifacts are oral, lost, or legendary. As a child I patronized libraries, and I remember to this day the nook where Walter R. Brooks’ Freddy the Pig books stood in my earliest library. Perhaps showing off a bit, I brought Herbert Zim’s child’s book of reptiles to kindergarten and described it as “my favorite book.” Natural history and Indian “lore” (as it was then called) were my favorite subjects apart from fiction. Calling myself a curator, I set up a little museum just inside my dormer window with every available exhibit carefully labeled: arrowhead, petrified wood, turtle shell, British penny. By later elementary school I had developed a taste for science fiction, particularly Judith Merrill’s annual anthologies and a good many less imaginative trips to Mars. (One work I encountered then and relished again only a few years ago is Karel Capek’s War with the Newts.) Detective fiction had its day as well, and I read a certain amount of popular fiction like Auntie Mame and On the Beach, but by my middle school years, my library consisted largely of collections of comics. I must have at one time owned twenty-five Pogo volumes. (This predilection ran smoothly into a collection of Jules Feiffer books starting with Sick, Sick, Sick.)
These have all been long discarded (though I continue to think Feiffer and, especially, Kelly are first-rate artists). My Pocket Library Poe (25¢) lingered until two years ago when I found a handsome Library of America Poe at a library used book sale and dumped the yellowed volume from which I had so relished “Hopfrog” and “The Masque of the Red Death.” Long gone was the Henrik Willem van Loon Story of Mankind (with his own odd line drawings) and the collection of American short stories that included Dorothy Parker’s “Big Blonde.” I must have discarded at some point the Signet edition of Joseph Gaer’s How the Great Religions Began from which I learned enough to decide to depict the legendary meeting of Lao Tzu and Confucius inside a shoebox when my sixth-grade teacher asked each student to picture a historic event.
Am I alone is thinking that, while I could discard either a few of my books or nearly all, I would find it very difficult to accept any loss between? Though I moved about a good deal, especially in my younger years, I often moved nothing but books and artworks, along with a few brooms and some old clothes. The only time I sacrificed a significant quantity of books was when heading to Nigeria to teach thirty years ago. At that time I shed not only the greater share of my library (including many books whose loss I later lamented) but also periodicals: Poetry magazine, Evergreen Reviews, a complete set of the first five years of the New York Review of Books. I am wise enough to confess that with Shakespeare and Homer and Chaucer and perhaps a copy of Middlemarch one could be worthily occupied for a good while. Though free of the wish to accumulate other possessions, I have not rid myself of the wish to read everything.
My voracity may have given my good parents pause during my teen years. Though quite frugal about most everything – I never saw the inside of a motel room until I was in high school as we always camped on vacation – they were extraordinarily permissive about books. My mother was a teacher and set a high value on education; my father, a businessman trained as a lawyer, understood, and my brother and I were given credit cards for Kroch’s and Brentano’s which then billed itself as “the world’s largest bookstore” but which went of business during the 90s. There the left half of spacious basement floor was devoted to quality paperbacks.
It was the golden age of literary paperbacks. As far as I was concerned, that basement held the glories of world culture. There were the Signets with splashy art and poor glue, the more substantial Anchor books with the marvelously well-designed covers (including some by Gorey), Alvin Lustig’s avant-garde black and white designs for New Directions. The habitual reader came to love as well the understatement of the old Penguins with their color-coded border that trusted to the title and a small and simple black and white image. (The same trust in their materials appeared in the Dolphins with the recognizable swoop of understated color and minimal art or the even sparer Scribner’s with only author and title.)
With every visit to Kroch’s I would return home with a stack to place at the head of my WWII surplus bunk bed. I often read simply from the top to the bottom of the stack. My habits have changed but little. Because I found them at the library book sale during a few days ago, the last three books I have read are Disraeli’s Sybil, Kafka’s Amerika, and Auden’s Forewords and Afterwords. (I have since picked Liu Hsieh’s The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons off my shelf where it had sat untouched for a decade, but that was chasing after a particular strain of information.) So my reading, like my life, has been desultory, a matter of blind reckoning, as I once termed it, and I can only make the most of it. I have almost never purchased new works, least of all abstruse works, always impossibly expensive. The topics that I studied most intently I know only from library volumes, but I know them none the less for that.
I promised the reader a few curiosities. Far from being a collector, I have very rarely bought new books at all. Limiting oneself not only to used but to cheap used imposes a salutary discipline on the reader, just as shopping for shirts in the Salvation Army, the buyer’s currency is not cash but taste. To wade through the heaps and keep vision fresh for the attractive is a skill.
Though no bibliophile I have happened on a few rarities, for the most part in thrift stores and emporia offering any book for a buck. I have all five of Paul Carroll’s Big Table journals, beginning with the one featuring Kerouac, Burroughs, and Dahlberg that was banned by the University of Chicago and their Review. (At one time these appeared now and then in Chicago used book stores and I used to buy them up and give them to people who would appreciate their art and historical importance.) I have a copy of Robert Creeley’s Jargon 33 chapbook A Form of Women (1959) in which the poet was generous enough to inscribe some kind words some decades after I had paid 75¢ for the book with the haunting cover. I have also the 1937 New Directions annual which I spotted in the Champaign-Urbana Salvation Army in 1965. It stood next to the 1938 edition, but my friend and fellow-writer Al Davis had his hands on that one. In a dusty Chicago shop, I spotted Kenneth Patchen’s An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air in a fine 1945 Untide Press limited edition and still it consorts with half a dozen or so of his books in the black and white New Directions covers. One of the few books that came to me new since childhood is the very fine Trianon Press facsimile of Blake’s Songs of Innocence. For Christmas of 1966 my parents asked what book they might buy me and this was my choice and I still protect it in the mailing box addressed to my student apartment.
What would even these curiosae mean to a new owner? They would undergo some metempsychosis, I suppose, as they did indeed when they arrived in my hands, some bearing among their leaves traces of earlier lives. And a wealth of palpable books! Their implications end not even in sleep.

Two Graffiti

2011-05-01T06:11:00.000-07:00

1.

AWE
SOME
BITCH

In spite of the gallery shows of Keith Haring, Banksy, and others, the vernacular manifestations of graffiti survive. Riding my bicycle under a nearby underpass, I saw the poem above. Apart from the setting – the underpass with its associations of underground and underworld -- and the basic black spray-paint medium, the work asserted its outlaw status by use of a taboo word. Though intellectuals are untroubled by other vulgarisms, the gender-based insult implied by “bitch” remains unacceptable and retains some shock value.
Taking the final epithet as an aggressive jab, one might read the phrase as a slightly misspelled sigh of disappointment for a love gone wrong, a sour grapes dismissal of the unobtained object of desire. Why are you depressed? “Aw, some bitch.” In this case the vague “some” implies that all women are the same.
However, much like the even more forbidden “nigger,” “bitch” has uses which are affectionate, even tender. (In addition it is used by the militant feminists of Bitch magazine.) In fact, the initial sound “aw,” rather than being a sad sigh, could mark admiration beyond words, a judgment affirmed by the completion “some” to make the most popular adjective of praise in our day: “awesome.” The harsh plosive and fricative of the concluding “bitch,” then, intensify, rather than reversing, this expression of wonder before his own encounter with the ewige Weibliche.
In the precise balance thus outlined between elevation and denigration of the woman and between joy and distress for the persona, this text exemplifies the tendency of poetry to suggest ambivalences, contractions, and dialectics.

2.

MOANS OF PASSION
LACK OF TRUST

LOVE ASUNDER
ABANDONMENT RAGE

The site for these lyrics was a freight car resting on a siding. Since the locomotive that intruded on Thoreau at Walden, railyards and trains have been antithetical to the beautiful though they were painted by Italian Futurists in the 20s. Railway equipment implies a gritty industrial setting with ponderous, unforgiving machinery associated with hobos and film noir dodges and chases.
The simple and direct narrative is clear in the spatial arrangement of the verses. The first pair of lines was painted on the front end of the car and the latter two on the back end at the same height, clearly constituting one unified work. The progression is linear from love to suspicion and then to breakup, both of the couple and the persona’s state of mind.
The initial “moan,” of course, though of ten used in a sexual context, may sound ominous as it more often denotes misery. Merriam Webster in fact defines all moans as arising from “pain and grief.” Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Black Snake Moan” is a lament for lost love.
Indeed the passion is instantly succeeded by distrust. In the spare economy of the text, the reader knows nothing of the specifics of the case. They cannot matter. The crisis occurs offstage or unrecorded and on the rear of the car the story continues: “love asunder.” Here one can only just barely imagine the wielder of a can of spray paint using the word asunder. One finds the word in Caedmon’s Genesis, and Chaucer’s Summoner says that “Freres and feendes be but litel asunder.” Its choice here is extraordinary and, by itself alone, lifts the diction to a lofty, almost dizzy, level.
The tumbling syllables of “abandonment” (one’s only clue to the nature of the separation) end with the single impotent syllable: “rage.”

How I was Hired to Teach in Nigeria

2011-05-01T06:06:00.000-07:00

Several decades back, Patricia and I responded to an advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle seeking professors for the Polytechnic University in Ibadan. We sent off curricula vitae and were pleased to receive an interview appointment for me at the Nigerian consulate. Showing up promptly at 8:30 a.m. as instructed, I found that all twenty-five scholars who had been granted interviews were told to arrive at the same time. We could at first not even all crowd into the office waiting room and for hours I and other candidates were obliged to loiter in the hallway outside. Halfway through the morning I gained access to space on a chair inside and could peruse the journals depicting sunny Nigeria on its way to prosperity through oil reserves and benevolent government. There was no break in the interviews for lunch, but I was more fortunate than some in that my surname, while past the alphabet’s middle, is not absolutely at the end.
At perhaps 1:30 p.m. I was called into a room somewhat less brightly lit than the space to which I had become habituated. I made out before me the figures of seven men, most wearing grand and exotic robes, though a few favored three-piece English suits. Once introduced to these dignitaries, I took the seat before them only to hear that there had been an error. There was no present opening for an English professor – what they wanted was Patricia teaching art.
Though it was a Friday, I arranged for her to see them on Saturday (with the advantage of a more precise appointment time). She impressed the august panel and was offered a position. I was told that I could certainly teach in a nearby secondary school, so I completed an application for the Nigerian civil service. We did the paperwork for visas and began to plan our sojourn in the tropics. The visas seemed unaccountably delayed. We were given ever receding dates and almost five months passed before we received a letter informing us that a wife’s receiving an appointment and taking it up accompanied by her husband was an unnatural arrangement to which they could be no party. Of course, had I been the one with a secure appointment, the hiring would have proceeded smoothly. As it was, the deal was off.
We were disappointed, having been studying the area for months in preparation, but we decided we could not pursue our West African destiny. We had, as it turned out, no need to do that, as it caught up with us perhaps eighteen months later when my application, having slowly percolated through endless layers of languid bureaucracy, resulted in my receiving a job offer as Education Officer 10.
Months after we had arrived in the Niger Delta, when Patricia’s position came through, she was not allowed to accept until I had submitted a letter (with the required witnesses and tax stamps requiring visits to perhaps three bureaucrats’ offices in two cities) giving my permission for her to work.

Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" as Structuralist Charm

2011-05-01T06:04:00.000-07:00

“All the world know the beauty of the beautiful and in doing this they have [the idea of] what ugliness is ... so it is that existence and non-existence give birth the one to [the idea of] the other." (from Legge's old version of ch. 2 of the author he called Lao Tzŭ)

As a metaphysical principle, of course, Lao Tzu's proposition may be tested against any phenomenon, but it has special relevance to the examination of literary texts. Literature has always excelled in dialectic. Often poetry arises in the tension between true and not true, between sweet and bitter. Metaphor always declares that the tenor both is and is not the vehicle (to use I. A. Richards’ terms). In a relatively recent restatement of this principle, Paul de Man identifies, as an essential characteristic of literature, “the self-reflecting mirror effect by means of which a work of fiction asserts, by its very existence, its separation from empirical reality.” Later, he suggests that even a critic structures his work “in terms of a series of dramatic events: reversals, repetitions, about-faces, and resolutions.”
These considerations illuminate a reading of Shelley in particularly useful ways — Shelley is, after all, a definitive type of the alienated self-conscious modern artist. His “Ode to the West Wind” is a programmatic statement and self-portrait, and both the program and the portrait are projected in antinomies so dynamic as to resemble an engine’s pulsing pistons, or, more accurately, the turning of a gyroscope.
One may begin to examine the oscillations with a common initial response to the poem’s tensions: the recognition of the wind as a quasi-divine animating pneuma which revivifies the poet and promises a future bloom of his faculties. To this system one may associate the suggestions of hymn-like entreaty (for the poet’s ego-driven desires), of revolution (for the fulfillment of society), and of apocalypse (for the collapse of dualities, a state beyond enlightenment).
Not far behind this reading, though, lurks its sinister counterpart: if spring is near, then a following winter is equally implied with every contrary discomfort and threat. Apart from the threats to the poet’s comfort from a winter of depression, suffering, repression, and ignorance (to follow the thematic registers noted above), the whole progression assumes a static cyclic quality against which the poet’s emotions, while poignant, are absurd. His descent is merely the low point on a psychic roll which, like the year and Sisyphus, will meaninglessly rise and fall. Similarly, in the Purana with which Zimmer begins his Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, Indra, the old divine monarch, is humbled and taught detachment by the vision of universes coming and going, “an innumerable host,” out of every pore of the body of Vishnu. How then to assert the self?
One may step one stage further back (the poem itself rings all these changes) and regard the repetitive ups and downs as exemplifying the soul of vitality itself, its rhythm or heartbeat, hence rendering any intensely experienced moments on its course self-validating. Then, however, the reader recalls that the poem's starting point is negative and, while balance is apparently present, autumn and sorrow are more potently present than their contraries, destroyer is mentioned before preserver, the seablooms tremble, etc.
To take this dance only one step further, the sense of exalted energy is undeniable. The wind is wakening. Pleasure is seen as torpor. Indeed, the poem itself is evidence of Shelley's poetic vitality, the gift for which he was praying. Thus the victory is inherent in the words on the page. As we hear in Oedipus (l. 896) the dancing of the chorus is itself evidence that the land is well-regulated.
The rhyme scheme and stanzaic organization support this movement as each tercet contains its own successor and opposite, unstable, impelling progress, and yet each stanza is finished off by a couplet which suggests settled balance. One feels neither the forward linear movement of a wholly stichic form nor the rounded volumes of a stanza’s completion. By almost being sonnets, yet not quite, the parts of the poem tease the reader and resist definition.
On a smaller scale the same dialectical cunning is apparent. Note, for instance, the pairing of ashes and sparks as an image, or of chained and tameless. Note the provocative “if” in the last line.
Acoustic elements are likewise active in structuring Shelley's engine of contraries. Initial “w” is a key sound, announced in the title and the strident first lines. These “w”s embody the wind and increase through the poem (as a matter of fact, the tabulator of lines with w’s in each ten lines of text will discover the following pattern: 1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5). Thus they first appear to represent a passage in time, a phenomenon with a distinct beginning and end, an entity free from the eternal recurrence. The words are carefully selected, though and strengthen the overall structure at the same time as they cast doubt on it. The next occurrences of the sound after the opening line are in “wintry” and “winged,” the first implying death and the second new life. The pair after these is “will” [“be a sepulcher”] and “waken,” again two wholly opposed aspects of the action of the wind.
The wind is the opposition, the tension, but in no harmonious sense. The dialectic is never resolved. Shelley experiences no place where the joy and pain of interpenetration cease; rather, by imagining such a place, he renders both joy and pain more acute. What might have been a lament on the conditions of human life or a panegyric to the cosmic design, becomes, though its beauty, a bit of magic warding off despair and psychic dissolution. The order of words, though only intensifying the agony of existence, strikes a redemptive pose. The tension of bipolar oppositions is at once foregrounded and ameliorated.

St. Joseph's Day at the Laguna Pueblo

2011-04-01T07:18:00.000-07:00

The Laguna Pueblo, located in New Mexico’s high desert, is a poor town. For every intact adobe home one or two are half collapsed. Stiff winds blow clouds of sandy dust. The mission church of St. Joseph built in 1699 (just after the Spaniards’ reconquest) is the most prominent building. When we arrived on the saint’s feast day mass had just begun. The floor of the long narrow church is pounded earth and straw. The side walls are decorated with geometric motifs signifying graves – here and there a small bird appears with a head of ripe grain. Supporting the roof are the massive vigas carried from a stand of ponderosa pine thirty-five miles away. We were told that if one were dropped on the way, it was abandoned and a new one cut. Between the beams branches of different colors are laid in a herringbone pattern. On the right wall a large and frightening painting represents purgatory. To the left of the altar hangs a representation of St. Joseph said to date from the church’s founding and behind the altar one could see the Trinity, St. Barbara, and others in Spanish/native style.
The French missionary priest Father Hilaire served mass in vestments ornamented with an eagle dancer, speaking mostly Keresan to the accompaniment of tribal drums. At the conclusion of the service he distributed freshly blessed scepters of office to tribal leaders (including young men holding the position of war chiefs). 0ne of the elder officials welcomed people to the feast, saying “if no one else offers you hospitality, you are welcome at my house. Everyone knows where it is, on the south side of the village.”
The priest handed a statue of St. Joseph to these men who then led a procession by a circuitous route to the dancing ground where it was installed in a pavilion ornamented with deer (or elk?) heads and bedecked with evergreen boughs. A few minutes later the dancers and musicians arrived. As a party of male drummers took up a position in the center, a long line of dancers circled the plaza led by two older men and followed by several hundred people, men and women, old and young. At the end came many children. Everyone participating in the ceremony had hands painted white, and all wore traditional clothing: the men and boys had fox (or coyote) skins hanging from their sashes behind, the females for the most part had their legs wrapped as we had seen in old photographs. Many dancers were shaking gourd rattles, and all carried sprigs of vegetation in each hand. They danced around the plaza again and again for perhaps forty-five minutes to drumbeats and song. Four or five senior men holding white painted branches kept everyone in the correct pace and place. At times the procession would pause and everyone would turn about where he or she stood.
Patricia was sitting next to a local woman who said that this first dance was a reenactment of the Pueblo peoples’ first migration to their present home territory. As the day wore on, we saw an eagle dance (with men wearing bird masks and great broad wings), buffalo dance (two men with bodies blackened and dark bison headdresses with horns, one white buffalo as well), deer dance (men in antlers, women in elaborate feather arrangements over their heads), and others, but we lost our original informant and asked no questions. At the start there had been far more dancers than spectators and very few outsiders. As the day progressed, at intervals there were in fact very few people simply watching, but the dances continued, one following another, always with drumming and singing in Keresan, no master of ceremonies, never a word, no applause. It was truly a community event.
Nearby vendors had set up booths selling crafts but also baseball caps and teeshirts (“Rez Hoops”) as well as food – tamales and burritos, fry bread and “Indian tacos” (fry bread with beans, onions, chiles, meat, etc.), lamb (“20,000 coyotes can’t be wrong”), the almost spherical loaves of the local bread cooked in the dome-like outdoor hornos we saw in some dusty yards. No alcohol anywhere, not even in the hands of those who stood at their doors watching; surely it was forbidden.
Though the day had started fair and clear, storm clouds arrived with a terrific wind that blew sandy dust into our eyes and obliged the vendors to hold the aluminum poles supporting their booths to keep them from blowing down. Rain fell as did the temperature. Route 40, the big east-west interstate by which we had come, was closed for miles in the snowstorm that followed.
Before we headed out, we took refuge from the rain (it had not yet cooled enough for snow) in the church where we came upon a nice fellow named Albert who played the flute, at the end pointing out where one might make donations to the church and adding, as he grinned and turned an embarrassed gaze toward the ground, in a barely discernable voice, “and I don’t mind taking a little tip myself.”

Transformation of Convention in Early Minnesang

2011-04-01T07:08:00.000-07:00

Convention has been often misunderstood as a static and reductive device; thus, highly conventional works are thought to lack originality or imagination. In fact, in my experience, convention simply increases the potential for semiotic density and precision. The aesthetic text is particularly useful for the articulation of oppositions, tensions, and problematic contradictions not unlike those Levi-Strauss found to underlie myth. Because it is more conflicted and ambiguous, this aesthetic exposition is more precise than other discourses, more true to lived experience.
The poetic convention always implies its opposite and a host of other variations. By creating expectations in the reader which then may be fulfilled or disappointed the author adds another level of significance and complexity. Convention can effectively summarize known meanings and then play with them, rendering art ever more efficient and exact, especially once a whole tradition has accumulated around a usage,
The debates over the status of what continue to be called by the useful name of courtly love have raged for decades. Why would such a privileging of the feminine have arisen in a patriarchal society? Do the texts reflect actual behavior at all? If not, what did it mean to voice sentiments at odds with accepted social practice?
“Aller wîbe wünne” by der von Kürenberc seems a wholly “courtly” lyric. The poet expresses extravagant praise for his beloved (as in the opening words “most beautiful of women”); he follows the codified behavior prescribed for genteel lovers (such as communicating through love notes); and he expresses a seemly doubt about his own worthiness.
In the same author’s “Ich stuont mir nehtint spâte” the first reversal of expectations one encounters is the feminine voice. Then the persona reflects back on the text itself as she hears the knight sing “in Kürenberges wise” [style]. What could he be singing but her praises? And her response is “er muoz mir diu land rumen,/ ald ich geniete mich sîn” ["He has to leave this land before I bring him to his knees"} He must depart, frustrating love, in order to achieve it. The knights’ reaction is instant compliance. He heads off to crusade or some other war, declaring that his leaving is due to the beloved. He understands that her demand arises from the fact that he is attractive to her (“hold”), though the consequence is that she must do without his love.
In other words, the poet’s adopting the woman’s perspective generates a flood of self-consciousness and the conclusion that the way to exalt their love is to prevent its being realized in the flesh, an idea similar to Jaufré’s amor de lonh. He provides a proof that his devotion is altogether free of self-interest and thus of the very highest quality, but at the sacrifice of the muddier business of actual physical love.
Kürenberc’s intentions seem even more complex when juxtaposed to another poem of his small surviving oeuvre. “Jô stuont ich nehtint spâte” provides an inversion of convention in numerous ways, thus balancing the picture of love. Even in summary resume these four lines have more twists than a Hollywood thriller. The contemplative, slightly melancholy mood set by the opening line is deflated by the woman's sexual aggression, the power of religion is invoked not to hallow an uplifting affection, but to condemn the man for frustrating the woman’s lust, and the conventional poetic image of the falcon is replaced by the unexpected comparison of the woman to a boar, a figure generally associated with martial ferocity! Each of these tropes on convention adds to, without replacing, the courtly picture of love.
It is in the light of such structural reversals as these that one must read the medieval attitude toward love (and toward poetry). Apparent self-contradictions or mélanges such as Andreas Capellanus’ book four, Chaucer’s retraction, or the highly complicated picture of love that emerges from narrative compilations such as Confessio Amantis or Romance of the Rose are in fact integrated, albeit complex, structures of meaning at once more “true” to the dizzying variety of human experience, more poetic and more entertaining than any straightforward and simple formulation could possibly be. The psychologist would consider such ambivalence to be, not inconsistent and thus unlikely, but definitively human.
The contrast need hardly be so dramatic. In the texts associated with the name of Dietmar von Aist, similar contradictions are implied rather than foregrounded.
For instance, in “Uf der linden obene” the nature introduction sketches a scene of generative joy. The poet’s heart responds in kind, in an almost mystic elevation, he is uplifted to a place he had earlier reached, a place presumably of favor with the beloved. This transport, though, can only be understood to suggest a current loss.
The delicately oblique ending, though too discreet to be an overt complaint, can only be construed as a confession of loss, all the more eloquent for its Germanic understatement: “die manent mich der gedanke vil die ich him zeiner frouwen hân." ["which brings much to mind the thoughts that I have of a woman"]. What, then, is the poet's relation with the natural scene? Clearly one of subdued envy, of opposition rather than delight in the “prettiness” which seems to govern the poem's opening.
The image of the falcon which in der von Kürenberc’s “Wîp unde vederspil” conveys semantic elements of training, obedience, and dominance, reappears in an altogether different light in Dietmar’s “Ez stuont ein frouwe alleine” where the falcon is an image of the uncontrollable, where choice belongs to the bird alone (the choice of a roost, “einen boum der ir gevalle,” corresponding to a lover), but the persona’s worry is explicitly directed not over the bird's unpredictable flight, but over other women's influence on him
(“owê wan lânt si mir mîn lieb?”).
Thus the earlier associations for the falcon have not vanished, but have merely sunk into a significant background role. It is now others whom the poet fears are “training” the bird; its independence was illusory from the start.
In this way the poet’s vision accumulates, just as lived experiences does, by observing data, paying equal attention to repeated patterns (what in literature would be meters, tropes, conventions of all sorts) and to deviations from those patterns. Each conveys information, and the complex sum of countless observations generates the individual’s consciousness. Art alone can provide a record, and in this record, as in Indian mythology every deity is accompanied by its counterpart of the opposite gender, every convention brings its opposite.
If a woman is most beautiful, might she be also in certain moments a fearsome beast? Is not the power of her beauty what allows her to cause such torment? Perhaps the “wild boar” is itself erotic in a new way, but that reaction might itself be trivialized as male fantasy, which might then in turn be viewed as an elegant, affectionate satire of male-female relations . . . And thus the wheel of semiosis turns. The poet’s task is to note the relevant psychic pitches and tighten the string of contradiction tautly enough that his lyre might sing.

IWW

2011-04-01T07:04:00.000-07:00

Growing up in a suburb, before involvement with civil rights, student movement, youth movement, SDS, labor union activism, and demonstrating a few weeks ago at a rally in solidarity with Wisconsin public workers, I used to seek out the funky low-rent offices of Old Left organizations in Chicago. At the height of the Cold War for me the pleasures of the urban environment included conversations with radical activists, perhaps more properly labeled radical thinkers, their movements were at the time so marginal.
People of my generation or a few years older were to define the New Left in distinction from these organizations, but anyone who knew American history realized that each of these groups had been influential at critical moments of America’s past. The Socialist Labor Party was the very first revolutionary labor organization; the Socialist Party built support for such proposals as Social Security and unemployment insurance when the Democrats wouldn’t touch them; Communists were instrumental in CIO organizing during the 30s; Socialist Workers led the Minneapolis general strike of 1934. And in the late 50s and early 60s, in spite of shaky finances were and tiny memberships, they all survived in Chicago including, in offices over the Assyrian-American restaurant at 2422 North Halstead, the international headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World. While on the ground floor, old men with a language and culture unknown to most Midwesterners ate stewed lamb with rice and pickled cabbage or retired behind a curtain to gamble, in a suite of rooms above, among decades-old heaps of leaflets and stickers and books and pictures, were the remnants of the Wobblies, old men even then for the most part, who had fought the good fight for a truly just society.
I later knew people my own age who joined (as did some of our mentors such as David Dellinger and Noam Chomsky), but the hangers-on on Halstead Street were the original crew -- Carlos Cortez, the artist who had been born in 1923, stood out as the sole younger activist. Most of these guys had spent considerable time on the road, hopping boxcars and hitch-hiking in search of work. Most had spent time in jail as well, since the group was targeted by all levels of government from the day of its creation. Though they discussed their ailments and problems with social security (apart from being radicals, they tended to have irregular work histories), they also reminisced about the days when the workers’ commonwealth seemed on the horizon.
Most of the members of this revolutionary anarcho-syndicalist union, long featured on the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations, were advanced in age, as the group’s numbers (and the repression directed against them) had peaked around the time of WWI, but they retained the apocalyptic vision of a time when, in the words of “The Internationale” “le soleil brillera toujours, c'est la lutte finale . . .l'internationale sera le genre humain.” Seeking, in the words of the Wobbly preamble “to build the new society within the shell of the old,” they imagined a community of love while fighting in the streets for their rights.
They stood out not only from their class enemies, but also from other unions and socialists in the acceptance, from the very start, of women, foreigners, and blacks. Whereas the AFL had taken the route of organizing the elite workers, those whose highly developed skills, made them most difficult to replace with scabs, the IWW invited all, with a special warmth for those on the very bottom: itinerant workers, farm laborers, lumberjacks. Most had spent time on the road and in jail.
Even more than the utopian purity of their vision, the Wobblies had my affection and that of many of my generation because of their art. Apart from their posters and the music written by Joe Hill, T-Bone Slim, Ralph Chaplin and other contributors to the The Little Red Songbook, the group pioneered street art with their encounters with the Salvation Army and their distinctive adhesive mini-posters with slogans like “for more of the good things of life” and “slow down.”
Their actual membership never reached much past 100,000, oddly, not far from the membership of the Communist Party in the 40s or of SDS just before its collapse as a mass organization. They won some hard-fought strikes such as the Pressed Steel Car strike of 1909 and the Lawrence textile strike in 1912, but found it difficult to deal with negotiating contracts and building a bureaucratic union. After all, in the words of the preamble “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.”
May we remember the highest American traditions, those who worked for abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, labor unionism, and peace, and even earlier, the “levelers” who imagined equality and started the struggles that have allowed us to secure what comforts we have.

The Formation of a Christian Rhetoric

2011-04-01T06:52:00.000-07:00

Surely one of the strongest of the historical categories that are employed, often with apologies, to organize a vision of the past is the opposition of the classical age to the medieval. While each interpenetrates the other with anticipations, vestiges, and continuities many of which are familiar, the moment of rupture retains a certain mystery. It is the purpose of this study to focus on the transmission of one important element of classical culture, the theory of rhetoric. St. Augustine, a pivotal figure in any account of European culture, set forth his ideas about rhetoric in a form at once undeniably derivative and definitely innovative. Since Augustine lived in a milieu only partially Christian, since he was educated along traditional classical lines and relished Latin drama, poetry, and oratory in his youth and yet developed into a bishop and one of the most important fathers of the church, his work is well-suited for a study of the processes by which the ancient world's culture became transformed into the medieval.
An examination of the reworking of Ciceronian rhetorical theory in Augustine's De Doctrina Christiana will specify the mode of appropriation of classical learning that Augustine practiced and which was to be decisively influential in the educational institutions of Europe for the next thousand years and beyond. Augustine by no means simply passed on the pagan precepts on eloquence as he had learned them. He correctly saw that, however technical, rhetorical teaching did not provide value-free aids that could equally serve any ideology. Nor, on the other hand, did he reject them altogether or simply overlay them with Christian coloring to make them acceptable. Rather he truly renewed and recast the concepts he had learned in his youth to make a genuinely Christian discipline.
Most typically, the process involves maintaining the Ciceronian categories while altering the value judgments associated with certain of them. While his changes are for the most part explicable in terms of the requirements of a Christian philosophical position, they also imply highly significant shifts in literary practice and criticism, and initiated trends in the writing and reading of literature that were to challenge and, in some instances, to supplant the older practices. Augustine's approach of “redeeming” the classics rather than writing them off as hopelessly corrupt must have been the result of a deliberate and difficult decision. An alternative reaction was readily available. Such writers as Tertullian, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Nazianzen exemplify the unqualified rejection of non-Christian culture that contended with an attitude like Augustine’s in the early days of the church. [1]
Augustine's creative restoration of vitality to a system that had been regarded as decayed into a pitiable senility long before his own time did not come about without conflict and contradiction. Every reader of the Confessions is familiar with the young man's saturation in linguistic and rhetorical studies. His love of Latin literature led him to identify with the emotions of fictive characters almost to the exclusion of his own feelings. [2] His attachments to drama, philosophy, and oratory were no less deep. Indeed, for the young Augustine the Bible deserved condemnation on the grounds of style alone. [3] Even his devotion to absolute values which began the quest that was to be fulfilled in his conversion arose from his study of Cicero's Hortensius. [4] Whereas he had previously devoured “libros eloquentiae” with an eye to his own future eminence and thus became as ventosus (“puffed-up”) in pride as the language of the most Asiatic of stylists. [5]
When he happened on Cicero’s work, though, he changed the motives and the focus of his study, declaring that he turned then to God, though conscious of loving only philosophy. He says quite pointedly (and with a fine sense of antithesis) that Cicero is commonly loved for his tongue and not for his heart, while he himself was interested in content only, and not at all in language at this point. [6] Having earlier thought he loved Hierius whom he had never met due to his reputation for eloquence, [7] he is later indoctrinated in the details of Christianity by Ambrose whose method is equally “literary” and who corrected his original notion about the poverty of style in the Bible by explaining how to interpret the Old Testament figuratively. [8] He continues in his later writings to make copious reference to classical texts and ideas, [9] and, moreover, his own style continues to make use of the technical repertory of devices fostered in him by his training. [10]
The tension between classical and Christian culture that defines much of the movement of Augustine's life is part of the very structure of De Doctrina Christiana. While the first three books are basically concerned with setting forth a system for reading the Bible with understanding, [11] the fourth assumes the task of constructing a Christian rhetoric so that the truths available by the methods of the previous books may be effectively communicated to others. It was clearly a difficult piece of work for Augustine — he wrote the first three books about thirty years before adding the fourth — and he clearly marks it off from the rest with a separate introduction. Having repented of his early preference of Cicero to the Bible, he finally was able to face the grounds for that taste and to attempt to lend sufficient “dignitas” to the Christian style that others may not be similarly misled. The book is explicitly modeled after the teaching of Cicero whom he “saves” for posterity by correcting. [12]
One of the central organizing principles of classical rhetoric as set forth in Cicero is the concept of the three styles or levels of discourse. [13] For Cicero the use of the three is dictated by considerations of propriety and indeed all three are not merely admissible for different occasions, [14] but all may be used in a single speech. [15] For Cicero, though, propriety is not the sole index of value, and there is unquestionably a hierarchy of worth associated with the three levels. The genus submissum is good but not great, [16] while the genus sublime is princeps. The ideal orator can use any level he likes, while a mediocre speaker may master the low and medium style but will be unable to attain the high. [17] The middle style is described by Cicero as temperate, and moderate, [18] as one would expect, but it also includes the genos antheeron which is brilliant, florid, and polished. [19] He identifies Gorgias, Thrasymachus, and Theodorus as practitioners of the middle style and regards epideixis [20] as its method. Its end is to charm [21] while the low style is good for teaching [22] and the high for oratory proper.
Part of the reason for his relegation of extreme stylists to the middle level is that the moral foundation of his thinking would not permit him to equate a sensational verbal texture with the expression of serious content. [23] He stigmatizes those Asiaticos who are servientes numero and thinks of their goals (placare, delectare) as inferior to the true orator’s (persuadere, perturbare). It is only a lesser speaker for Cicero who will consider a statement that is elegant alone worth saying rather than one which is true or likely as well as comely. Still, the nobility of the high style was not wholly dependent on logical development and ambitious content, as the mention of perturbare along with persuadere indicated. The high style is acer and ardens as well as gravis [24], suggesting the necessity for all three elements: truth, a serious topic, and manipulation of emotion by artificial literary devices.
Augustine begins rather similarly, finding a place for all three levels in his system, but the function he assigns to each and the valorization do not correspond to Cicero. The low Biblical style was his original reason for dismissing Christianity; in retrospect he called himself “puffed-up.” Having learned to find things of value in what seems at first humble and mean in the stories of the Old Testament, he applies the same viewpoint to the data of experience and realizes that everything has multiple meanings, being susceptible to allegory, anagogy, and ethics, as well as to literal understanding. Thus nothing is really trivial. [25] There can be no distinction of levels on the basis of content since explicit content does not exhaust real content.
The fundamental principle for Augustinian division is, however, based in Cicero, in the specific functions associated with each level. He agrees with Cicero that the low style is best for teaching where clarity is most required, but for Augustine teaching is not a preparation for acting a citizen's part in society, but a means of aiding the soul on its way to salvation. The middle style he associates with epideixis as Cicero had done, but for Augustine the laudes and vituperationes were meant to move the listener not to awe and appreciation alone, but to right action.
Fond as he was of fine language and yet constrained from celebrating it for its own sake, he was able to characterize the middle style as “temperate” in the moral as well as the technical sense. The high style troubled Augustine, and he accepts Cicero's definition of its goal as persuasion -- only for Cicero this was a matter of forcibly presenting a moving, convincing case while for Augustine it is a special resource to bring to bear on recalcitrant souls obdurate to any other/appeal. [26] He agrees with Cicero that all levels may be mixed, [27] and he ridicules those who care only to elaborate their style to absurd extremes. [28]
The most important distinctive elements of Augustine's rhetoric are the institution of truth-value as the primary criterion of worth, the denial of any inherent hierarchy in levels of discourse, and the readiness to interpret actively to construct the meaning
of the text rather than accepting its apparent meaning.
Brief treatment of a second point of comparison will reinforce these ideas. Cicero expounded the traditional threefold officia oratoris. To teach, to delight, and to convince seem for him to be strictly parallel in theory, [29] though in practice they tend toward an ascending series just as the three levels did. Thus the function docere is associated with the preliminary groundwork of the narratio [30], and delectare is useful mainly inasmuch as it facilitates persuadere. For Cicero the whole complex is valued as the quintessential human activity, marking off man from beast and making civilization possible. [31] The pleasure derived from listening to skillful speech is neither questioned nor is it given absolute value.
For Augustine the problem was different. Given the Bible as the only source of truth [32] and the godhead as the only object one may properly enjoy, [33] there is a clear role for teaching and even for persuading (for hardened cases), but enjoyment is suspect indeed. The first time Augustine mentions the officia oratoris, he suppresses pleasure. [34] Later he includes it in the same sort of defensive role allowed persuasion, to aid in the ministry toward souls who must be seduced to listen to appeals that are really in their own interest. But while the image of eating that succeeds this discussion seems to concede some amusement as acceptable for mortal men, the image of the gold and wooden keys returns the priorities squarely to truth-value again so that the beauty of words is almost like a Platonic myth which cunningly uses deceit to lead people to good paths they would not select alone. Thus, though “sober ears” should be universal, there is a godly as well as a diabolical use for beauty.
The Ciceronian orator is moral and philosophical, the finest representative of humanity and his facility in deploying the skills of the rhetorician is properly something of which he is proud. For Augustine the implied goal is invariably to turn others to God, and for that the most useful “office” is to teach. An examination of the pictures
of the ideal orator sketched by both writers will complete the distinction I have been developing between them.
The character of the ideal orator as defined by Cicero is a lofty one. The marvelous picture in De Oratore (I, 8, 30) suggests that oratory is quite simply the most excellent thing and discusses language as the precondition for social intercourse, for binding men to each other, and allowing each to assume the challenge of the responsibility for action. This is a much more radical claim than the familiar one that rhetoric prospers in democracies and suffers under autocracies. Cicero’s claim is nothing less than that language is what makes man possible. The rarity of the great orator in Cicero is not just a matter of the fact that advanced expertise requires mastering so many difficult
fields of study. Rather it seems a use of the decay of learning topos to symbolically emphasize the virtually unreachable grandeur of Cicero's ideal.
He frequently points out that the complete realization of the ideal does not exist, [38] but it is clearly a humanistic goal nonetheless. The rhetorician lays claim on realms of eternal value for Cicero because he is at once the highest sort of man (the most knowledgeable, the most artful, the most powerful), the source and protector of civilization (as a legislative and judicial functionary), and, in the capping argument, the orator has a special claim on the moral area of philosophy. [39] Cicero says, in fact, that this realm of judgment in the affairs of men, embracing both politics and ethics, is the only arena in which the orator may achieve real greatness. His preeminence in skills is a matter of degree (he must learn more than other people) except for this sole (but uniquely significant) qualitative distinction. His discipline is finest since it deals in values, and this is perhaps as close to a vision of the transcendence as Cicero can come.
The vocabulary that he uses to celebrate the high or sublime order of diction suggests that its place at the summit of his evaluative scheme relies on just that association with “the greatest of matters”: words like grandiloquent, [40] copiosus, amplus, and gravis [41] surely refer to the significant quality of the topics being discussed rather than to greater length or any specific stylistic features.
Far from entertaining such a glorified notion of the vocation of the orator, Augustine begins his treatise quite apologetically, with a defensive tone defining a defensive rhetoric. He justifies Book IV at its outset as a rhetoric that can protect against rhetoric, while still maintaining that he will not instruct in rhetoric per se, since it is not truth-oriented, but can equally serve truth and falsehood. He speaks in a condescending tone about the subject, commenting that anyone may rapidly learn the principles of the art, but he should not bother if he has any less trivial occupation. [42] At another point Augustine seems almost embarrassed by his professional ability to explicate rhetorical figures, [43] and he again defines his motive as wholly defensive.
God, of course, for Augustine replaces those social or moral ideals which informed Cicero's value system, but for Augustine God has a transfiguring effect on the rest of creation, for there can be no small matters to the man who views every earthly thing with reference to divinity and judgment. With the displacement of authority from the wise orator to the Bible, the speaker's role may seem to be demeaned since he is not himself originating truth. However, for Augustine the service of the most high is precisely what allows the speaker to attain true greatness rather than simply social approval. [44]
The model for this notion is the Biblical text which seems for the most part to use a low style, but which contains the most sacred revelations. Similarly the preacher may or may not appear to be a grand orator, but if he gain any success in his calling he will participate in a greatness of which Cicero had no idea. Thus, while the Christian orator may appear to fall below the standards set by others, in reality he rises above them.
The vocabulary I have used in reporting Augustine's ideas seems so specifically theistic that one should take care to recall that the moral absolute is implied as the ground of greatness in Cicero and that moral qualities have been regarded as an important element in the orator's training by writers such as Isocrates (though he is theoretically coy about this) and, most notably, Plato, whose language is often quite close to Augustine's and whose view of the absolute approaches the theistic. What is more novel in Augustine’s point of view is largely stylistic, though it has moral analogues. The celebration of the low style is a striking departure from classical standards and parallels Christianity's advocacy of virtues with the same names as the styles humilitas. the quality of being submissus. As a literary idea it has perhaps its fullest fruiting in practice with the realistic novel of the nineteenth century. [46] In a writer like Balzac, themes of the gravest nature were addressed with language and characters that strove to resemble the everyday. This would have been unthinkable to the ancients who, while they were willing to concede genre effects and satire to realism could not conceive of its supporting the greatest types of literature. [47]
The effects of Augustine's theory were no less revolutionary in terms of criticism. His hermeneutic method underlies most modern critical endeavors with their acceptance of multiple meanings and the willingness to infer apparently unlikely semantic implications in details of description or correspondences between texts. This, too/ had played little part in criticism before Augustine, but the ingenious medieval commentaries on Scripture that had seemed to some fantastically overwrought have been outdone by ever more aggressive uses of the text in recent criticism.
In accepting Cicero's categories and terminology but rejecting his value judgments associated with them, Augustine marked a radical philosophic discontinuity, but also defined new possibilities for literature the consequences of which have been far-reaching. Even without accepting Augustine as “godfather” to Flaubert and Balzac, say, it would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of his transformation of classical rhetoric. It was the single most important factor in assuring the role of the church as caretaker and, what is more, renewer of learning.
Without the implied imprimitur from Augustine it is questionable whether Priscian, Donatus, the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, and the Rhetorica ad Herennium could have exercised the hegemony they did over medieval writers, critics, and educators. The very fact that works such as the De Rhetorica quae Supersunt [48] were attached to his
name is testimony to his authority in questions of pedagogy and a correct approach to language. Furthermore, the style and ideas of his authentic works had prodigious progeny: Cassiodorus, Rabanus Maurus, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Hugh of St. Victor, and Peter Lombard are among those who refer directly to his rhetorical teachings, while his influence is implicit in nearly every treatise on poetics, rhetoric, education, and the arts of letter-writing and preaching throughout the Middle Ages. [49] In terms of curriculum and the eventual institution of universities with their emphasis, persisting virtually until this century, on Classical studies, Augustine is perhaps the most significant single figure in the history of education in Europe.

1. Another instructive example is Jerome whose great service in translating Scripture was possible due to a level of scholarship that made him liable to constant guilt and misgivings about his attachment to the charms of pagan authors.

2. Augustine, Confessions, edited by William Watts (London: Heinemann, 1912), Bk. I, Ch. 13.

3. Confessions, III, 5.

4. Confessions, III, 4.

5. See Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966) entry under ventosus for a series of examples of its usage as applied to both language and character.

6. Confessions, III, 4.

7. Confessions, IV, 14.

8. Confessions, V, 14.

9. Harald Hagendahl, Augustine and the Latin Classics (Goteborg: University Press, 1967) provides encyclopedic evidence for Augustine’s classical learning and his constant reference to classical authors in his work.

10. Sister Inviolata Barry, St. Augustine, the Orator (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America, 1924) exhaustively documents Augustine's use of rhetorical figures in his Sermones ad Populum.

11. It is well here to bear in mind the etymology of the word “doctrine.”

12. Confessions, III, 5.

13. Auerbach's Mimesis (Princeton, 1953) views European literature as a whole as a working out of the problematic posed by the system of the three levels.

14. Cicero, De Oratore, translated by E. Sutton and H. Rackham (London: Heinemann, 1979), Book III, 55, 212.

15. De Oratore, III, 45, 177.

16. Cicero, Orator, edited by H.M. Hubbell (London: Heinemann, 1942), 28, 98-99. It is this conventional limitation, of course, that initially made Augustine discount the Bible.

17. Orator, 29, 101.

18. Orator, 28, 98.

19. Orator, 27, 96.

20. Orator, 12, 38

21. Orator, 26, 91

22. Orator, 29, 102. Cicero uses his own Pro Caecina as an example of a "teaching" text in the low style.

23. Orator, 19, 65. The phrases quoted immediately following are also from this passage.

24. Orator, 28, 99.

25. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine (Indianapolis: Bobbs, Merrill Co., 1976), p. 143.

26. Doctrine, p. 145.

27. Doctrine, p. 158.

28. Doctrine, p. 138-9. He surely has the excesses of specific contemporary speakers in mind here.

29. De Oratore, II, 27, 115; II 28, 121; and II 77, 310 are among the places where the three are enumerated as apparent equals.

30. De Oratore, I, 53. 229; II, 27, 115.

31. De Oratore, I, 8, 33.

32. Doctrine, p. 122.

33. Doctrine, p. 10.

34. Doctrine, p. 121.

35. Doctrine, p. 135.

36. Doctrine, p, 130.

37. One might think here of the unabashed pride Cicero takes in his own powers. The boasting that had been sanctioned for the hero of the heroic age is here turned toward intellectual accomplishments.

38. De Oratore, I, 18, 78-81 and Orator 2, 7-8, 29, 101.

39. De Oratore, I, 15, 67-69.

40. Orator, 5. 20.

41. Orator, 28, 97.

42. Doctrine, p. 119.

43. Doctrine, p. 128.

44. Doctrine (p. 143) insists that the reaction of one's audience is irrelevant to the evaluation of the orator. The same contempt for the opinion of the crowd is evident in Plato's Phaedrus.

45. Doctrine, p. 123.

46. Compare the “trivial” status of classical mimes and romances.

47. It surely could not support epic or tragedy in the old sense. For a theoretician of this point of view see pseudo-Longinus’ (On the Sublime).

48. See J. Miller, M. Prosser, T. Benson, Readings in Medieval Rhetoric (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, l973), p. 6 for the fraudulent character of the attribution.

49. Further information on the influence of Augustine’s rhetorical teachings is available in Doctrine, p. xii, in Therese Sullivan, Doctrina Christiana, Liber Quartus (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1930), p. 41, and throughout Eugene Kevane's Augustine the Educator (Westminster [Maryland]: The Newman Press, 1964).

50. The fact that “rhetoric” is still taught as the basis of a liberal arts education (though the liberal arts themselves have precipitately declined) and that literature is still the primary object of its study are evidence for the continuing vitality of this tradition.

Hippie

2011-04-01T06:41:00.000-07:00

Even now, at the head of the page, I find the word most annoying. Though I went to San Francisco in the summer of 1967, though for some months I actually lived at the corner of Haight and Ashbury (in an apartment, though I would not be surprised to meet someone who lived in the actual intersection), though I sport beads and a Paisley vest handmade by my lover in my first passport picture, though I remain profoundly influenced by ideas of “hip,” I cannot stand that diminutive term. (The word passed into common usage after Herb Caen began using it in his column in the San Francisco Chronicle. Caen had also invented the equally obnoxious and derisive “beatnik.”)
Not that “hippie” has no place. In my own memory, before I saw the word in print, I heard it used to describe young teens who aspired to be hip and were just becoming acquainted with the scene, not so different from the sort of person who might have been labeled a “teenybopper” in the context of musical taste. As such the word had a useful niche, but failed to describe the counter-culture in general. Despite my distaste for “hippie,” I had no good alternative. In the sixties “hip” served for some uses, though sounding slightly broad and old-fashioned. I do recall both both “freak” and “head” (referring, naturally, to “pothead”) having some currency, but neither seems really adequate.
Born in 1946, I grew up reading the Beats, attending Paul Carroll’s poetry series at Second City, seeking out Old Leftists, and learning about Dada. In university I participated in the literary magazine and attended performance events and shows staged by friends. In spite of loose talk about “the sixties,” during my senior year at an institution with tens of thousands of students, I felt I knew the local counterculture: far-out intellectuals, dopers, artists, radicals, anarchists, yogis, sandal-makers, and singers. Virtually everything innovative seemed linked to this crowd. Forward-thinking professors and faculty artists made alliances with the hip youth. Just as Kenneth Kenniston’s studies indicated that, for the most part, student protesters were the very same who had been at the top of their high school classes, many of those participating in middle and late 60s youth culture struck me as unusually thoughtful and productive. Why, even LSD trips were assimilated only through hours of analysis based in part on Scientific American articles and anthropology studies seen in the light of esoteric Buddhism. I was taken aback just a few years later when I heard of people dropping acid to go to a concert or party.
Thinking I knew the scene in my major Midwestern university, I was surprised and I believe I recoiled when in the spring of 1967, a crew of slightly younger celebrants tripped across the university quadrangle, blowing soap bubbles in celebration of Buddha’s birthday.
These new folks seemed to be violating canons of cool, while on the national scene, it was obvious that Peter Max was instantly kitsch, Tim Leary at best an entertaining con man, and, late in the day, cooptation seemed fully accomplished when Hair premiered, claiming to be a “tribal, love-rock musical.” Its tunes can now be heard in elevators while the really radical grass-roots theater has vanished to limbo along with underground movies. In 1967 when I made it to the Haight, the kids who liked rock and roll and smoking pot, however genial, had little in common with the people I had known at college who preferred electronic music, Tibetan folksong, or, at any rate, down and dirty blues. Only a few months later the Diggers, who ought to have known, were to proclaim the death of hippie on Haight Street.
Still, it certainly seemed as though the movement, however vaguely defined, had something to say about every area of life: not merely art and politics, but also interpersonal relations, cuisine, and living room design. How many apartments did I enter with a huge cable spool for coffee table, beaded curtains, and Indian bedspreads? I remember a slightly older poet’s reminiscences of San Francisco only a few years before I (and a horde of my cohort) hit town. He described how he and his friends would often get stoned and eat “phony-burgers,” made with supermarket hamburger buns, ketchup, onions, mustard, pickles, everything but the meat. A few years later no one would have dreamed of eating Wonder buns; every kitchen held brown rice and vegetables.
I won’t aim here to define hip beyond a few sketchy outlines. Hip is a form of twentieth century Romanticism, celebrating the unconscious, the natural, the ecstatic while striking a counter-cultural pose with bohemian habits and left politics. Hip participates in the double vision DuBois analyzed in African-Americans, also evident in kitsch, camp, and other modern forms of irony. Susan Sontag located the essence of camp in her 1964 essay as occurring in the gap “between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice,” in other words, between signifier and signified.
Authentic hipness requires the pose at least of a vision sharper and more piercing than others’. That’s what makes it so annoyingly elitist. One can always take irony around yet another turn. In contrast to this off-putting and esoteric claim, hippie was accessible to all, its wardrobe available not in military surplus or Salvation Army stores, each individual his own invention, but in standardized sets at Sears.

The Prima Etade of Literary Ambition: The Struggle to Overcome the Word in Petrarch’s Canzone 23

2011-03-01T07:07:00.000-08:00

Petrarch's Canzone 23 is a dizzying and dazzling tour de force of transformation. The reader is allowed no illusion of rest from the impelling dynamic of change as the narrative voice describes his passage through six corporeal forms. The poem’s extraordinary complexity derives not only from the fast-moving procession of embodiments of the speaking voice (and the way in which each of these alters and edits its classical antecedents), but also from the many cunning authorial comments which unsettle interpretations even as they suggest themselves. The poem is not best read, however, as an encyclopedic inventory of possibilities like certain epic, oracular, and visionary works — the world as a whole is not the subject for its categorizations, nor do I find love itself to be the central concern of the poem (even in the extremely generalized sense in which all human energy may be regarded as erotic), nor is it — except in a rather specific way — about the elusive definition of the ego.
The particular sort of self the poem does pursue is the poetic self, and the canzone is a self-reflexive commentary, a meditation on the nature of language and poetry, a work of theoretical criticism. It radically questions the validity of literature and explores the fundamentally doubled structure of language. The result in the end is not, though an answer that justifies the poem by placing it in a larger scheme, rather the result is the leap necessary to the “prima etade” of literary ambition, the engagement in struggle with the word which is poetry and which within literature can have no end and no victor.
This sounds, perhaps, extravagant, but the approach is hardly novel. Not only must every poem necessarily make critical statements about the nature of poetry and about previous poems, but the specific tradition of which Petrarch is an exemplar played explicitly from William of Aquitaine to Shakesoeare on the relationship between the poem and the lover. Moreover, Canzone 23 is full of references to speech, writing, and literary fame. Before examining these in detail, I would like to review three earlier critics’ comments on Petrarch which seem to me to approach increasingly close to the point of view I mean to set forth.
Burling in his introductory remarks broaches the possibility of a reading of the poem as criticism by identifying the theme as “the incomprehensible changeability of the self in love” and noting three points in the text at which the author is driven to, in effect, produce poetry within the narration. Further he notes that all the myths the poem recalls concern frustrated or disastrous speech or writing as well as deception or confusion over identity. Finally, he charts the basic antinomies governing the piece as follows: dismemberment vs. integration, death vs. poetic immortality, and sexual fear causing dumbness vs. poetic creation. His comments, however, in the brief scope of the preface, lead to no conclusion more precise than that Petrarch calls attention to the “psychologically relative, even suspect, origin of individual poems and thus of writing itself.”
John Preston Brenkman’s “Narcissus in the Text: Toward an Analysis of the Literary Subject in Ovid, Petrarch, and Yeats” examines Petrarch’s sonnets 45 and 46, mentioning poem 23 as well. In Ovid's telling of the Narcissus myth, Brenkman finds a commentary on the deceptive capacities of language. He locates the critical elements for this reading in the shapeshifting uncertainty of the story's central figures. If Narcissus partakes of some of Echo's qualities, and if the author is not wholly distinct from either, if these identities are unstable through the course of the poem, then all utterance may likewise be doubted.
In Brenkman’s view the confusion of identity so prominent in Petrarch further problematizes the status of the speaker. Suggesting that Petrarch undermines the distinction between body and image which is persistent if unstable in Ovid, he says that as Laura becomes less like Narcissus, the authorial voice resembles him more. Thus the sum of delusion remains always the same and the text “defines its own impasse as discourse” since it leaves no ground from which to judge reality, but only the patterns of appearances.
Marguerite Waller in Petrarch's Poetics and Literary History does a thorough and convincing job along similar lines including a substantial treatment of Canzone 23 with exceedingly insightful and suggestive close readings of several passages. For instance, she is at pains to point out that in the first six lines of the poem, Petrarch does not unambiguously identify love as the source of his difficulty. She also questions the reality of any primal state of “libertade” and of its attainability in the future. The laurel is at once himself and his beloved; he passes through changes and yet never leaves it. Waller would translate 1. 167 “nor for a new figure have I known how to leave” and would interpret it as indicating the poet's imprisonment within language. No medium other than words is available to him and so whatever metaphorical forms of his subject he produces, these “figure only that figural production” itself. “Petrarch undercuts the authority of an allegorical narrative reading, demonstrating that the first figure itself is generated in an equally figural and arbitrary structural moment: the poet becoming identical with the laurel/Laura is one dimension (that of the linguistic signifier or figure), but remaining absent or different from it in another (that of the allegorical or interpretive reading, or figural significance. In the effort to recover the self and to emerge from figural to performative discourse, he cannot be wholly successful, but “while losing the self he gains the sign. While escape from the narrative problematic is impossible, narrative itself becomes possible.
The sort of struggle Waller traces in the poem to make a perfectly signifying work and the partial failure that makes possible a partial victory is particularly likely in light of the place the poem occupies in Petrarch’s oeuvre. A marginal gloss in Petrarch’s hand identifies this poem as one of his earliest and the attempt to write the perfect poem may be seen as the young writer's attempt to work up his arrogance into the decision to write at all by means of the fantasy of success at writing the definitive poem. It is, then, in a way a tale of the birth of literary ambition as well as erotic emergence, and it tests the margins of both realms.
The pun between Laura and the laurel (as a literary prize) joins love of self and love of other. The writer paradoxically demonstrates love for himself and love for the whole world by devoting himself to his work, to his muse. Waller suspects there may be a pun, too, in the word penosa (l. 11; meaning “painful” but penna is pen or quill). She does not mention, though the intention is indisputable, the play between foglia (leaf) and foglio (sheet of paper) in 1. 40 or with the word piuma (feather or plumage but also quill pen) in 1. 51. Having covered himself with pages and pens successively, after dedicating himself to the pursuit of literature the poet then finds himself a stone.
In the serial progression of literary worth I am now delineating this is the withdrawal or descent into self that potentiates poetry. His next incarnation is as a fountain which brings inevitable associations of inspiration and productivity — I would say he has here crossed the stile into the precincts of art. While the penultimate form — the Echo-like stone and voice — raises new problems, it remains for the final transformation, the Actaeon-like stag to bring a dramatic resolution.
Before returning to these last two images of the poet, I would like to discuss the poem’s references to 1anguage and its conclusion. Though Petrarch gets his poem going by asserting that it is efficacious to reduce his pain and he brings the piece to a halt by lofting into the empyrean on poetical wings, the references between to words are almost
exclusively devoted to attesting their inadequacy, their failures. Already by 1. 11 everyone is said to be tired of his carrying on; in 1. 37 he declares wit and speech of no avail; in 52-62 his wailing is continuous only because it is ineffective. Getting directly to the point he tells his reader that his subject is beyond all speech (1. 71), that his pen cannot follow his will (1. 91). Pen and ink again disappoint expectation in 1. 100 and later he says that his words have the form of a lie (l. 156).
All of these negative comments, however, are contained between two which, as I have noted, testify on the contrary to the actual power of speech and of poetry. The last passage is at once highly conventional as a description of poetic flight and very suggestive of sexual realization. As an apotheosis of poetry, though, the poem it ends must be its justification. Further, the complaints about the shortcomings of poetry are stated only in lines of poetry and they thus have a divided content anyway since their very existence as words is evidence that the author trusts in their potency. Only if the reader should indeed find them tiresome and leave off reading long before the conclusion will they have failed, and Petrarch provides even for that case. Line 12 tells us that every valley conveys his complaints so the message is virtually inescapable.
The erotic double-bind is then accompanied or paralleled by a linguistic one. One way in which these profound ambivalences is traced is by the opposition of life and death. In stage one the “living man” is made a tree, clearly a decline in vitality, though not an absolute one. The process continues in form 2 when his hope, the internal essence of his being, is said to be dead. As a stone he is suspended between life and death and from this egg-like latency, he emerges in the fountain which in its exhilarated
flow requires no mention of death. As the Echo-like stone he calls death by name, but this is now an objectified death, outside himself. Unlike the earlier death, he is now able to name it and manipulate it verbally.
In the Actaeon-image of form 6, the situation would seem, to be a mortal one,
yet again here death is not mentioned. The poet has, in the process of the poem, not banished death, but he has made it a part of his system. After his poem is born, he entertains no illusions about the powers of language, but he understands its nature more fully and by that understanding he controls it. Although the crisis may seem to evaporate in the heavenly flight at the end, the image of fleeing the hounds is not by any means obliterated.
It is a dramatic and compelling moment near the end when the poet says that he is still fleeing the belling of the hounds. At once the reader recognizes the gravity of the situation as it is no longer recounted by a coolly detached voice sneaking elegantly of past travails (and the tone of mastery is important throughout the poem even in the parts that would be most anguished in some common-sense relation), but it speaks of its own present. It would be acceptable to most readers to comment that the sudden grip of panic that seizes the reader’s throat at this point may legitimately be said to indicate a continuation of this elastic present into the moment of the reading in a virtual reenactment of the event described.
But just who are these hounds and of what does their noise consist? And what are those woods from one to another of which the poet is driven? It would be a psychoanalytical reading unusually rich in self-contradiction even to begin to explicate them as emblems of passion, even a passion made up as much of ambition as lust. However, I believe they are more tellingly glossed as the meaning of language pursuing language itself. It is in this sense rather than as psychic impulses that they have outlived Pope Innocent’s hunting dogs and that they still live and pursue their quarry on the page today. They represent both the fund of energy animating language and the desperation that arises from its repeated failures. The tracks of their pursuit are evident throughout the poem.
Images of language as a two-fold structure are very old. In medieval books of rhetoric the most frequent form for this division is simply sound and sense. Words had always been recognized as arbitrary symbols and they had usually be admitted to be not wholly explicable. The bifurcation is reflected in Canzone 23 by a series of images of containment:

1. 20 “that within me” and “I the shell”
1. 24-26 the heart and "frozen thoughts"
1. 34 himself and his garment
1. 73 heart in his breast
1. 75 the beloved in a garment that makes her unrecognizable
1. 82 the poet and the stone
1. 95 heart and death all about
1. 106 the poet clothed in darkness

All of these images convey the sense of what is truly important, truly human contained within a more death-like outer husk which either prevents communication, deceives, or denies the importance of affect. The barrier is broken at least implicitly in all of these instances but surely the most startling and disturbing is the occult surgery the beloved performs in 1. 74. In the terms by which I have been explicating the poem each of the occasions catalogued indicates the doubled character of language which makes possible its deceit (cf . Hesiod and Umberto Eco), and this amazing violation of the boundaries suggests the possible revelation of meaning in language in sudden moments prepared by pain, though more the pain of painstaking craft than that of romantic agony.
If the outer layer in each of my containment images is that indifferent word which in its stubborn physicality seems altogether unresponsive to the demands placed upon it by human users, the withdrawal of the heart by the muse and indeed the very existence of Canzone 23 itself and its absorbing spell demonstrate that this husk is not a final one, that it may make possible an incubation from which a sort of new life can emerge.
The problematic of literary identity remains and the problematic of language itself: nothing can mean exactly what we would have it mean, language is not constructed to perform such a role. If it were a single verse could bring instant illumination to anyone and literary success on that order is impossible. Petrarch's interest may be in that which is (l. 71) “beyond writing,” but only if it provides him with the trajectory along which he wishes to aim, if it gives the excuse that makes him want to write. Though fated not to strike that transcendental target (and so far as the love theme itself goes, does even Norman Mailer still seek the transcendental orgasm?). Petrarch leaves behind a poem which in struggling against these limitations both comes to understand them and overcomes them only to encounter the same problems the next time he is is faced with a blank page.
In the passage following 1. 121 Petrarch suggests these ultimate pretensions with an analogy between the soul, God, and Laura. But the soul is accessible to others only through its outward form and its outward actions, the Lady through her person and the muse through concrete poems. Likewise the maker, whether divine or human, while never equivalent to his creation is pressed in it and the word, however inadequately it conveys meaning, appropriates that very inadequacy as part of its nature. The patterns of ambiguity and deceit that characterize language in general are just those elements that make literature. It is the distance between Actaeon and the hounds, between the word and its meaning, not the congruity of the two that makes poetry, but nonetheless the chase must go on. With the ceasing of the struggle would come the collapse of language.

Nova Academy

2011-03-01T07:06:00.001-08:00

For several years in the late seventies, I taught at Nova Academy in San Francisco’s Sunset district. The school had been founded by Merriam LaNova to educate high school age dancers attending the San Francisco Conservatory of Ballet. There the regimen was strict and old-fashioned. Lanova had, after all, danced with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. Her style was icy and stern. Her husband, though a cellist with the symphony, looked like a mobster. Leonide Massine came by on occasion to view my classes, and the Kronos Quartet sometimes practiced in an unused studio.
The school maintained the façade of an elite preparatory school. The principal always wore a three-piece suit. The older classrooms were decorated as though they were part of some old manor, landed by accident above an urban storefront. One featured a hunting mural on one wall, another had a huge fake fireplace, a third had a ceiling of painted panels that belonged in an Italian basilica.
The fact was, though, that, along with the dedicated dancers, Nova Academy, like other private schools, found itself accepting many students for a variety of reasons it would prefer not to admit. Some parents wanted their children in an all-white environment; other young scholars had encountered unpleasant disciplinary proceedings their parents were willing to pay to escape. Several foreign students had enrolled in preparation to applying to American universities. The dancers were, in fact, all but invisible in a larger crowd including drifter, misfits, and troublemakers.
This reality sometimes clashed with the high art pretensions of the dance world. Among the distinguished visitors was Kyra Nijinska, Vaslav’s daughter. Once a dancer with the Ballet Russe, she now painted mystic canvases, but now and then she would come to Nova to conduct a Flamenco class. I could hear the heavy heels stomping above my room. Her manners were odd, and, to the more vulgar students, exceedingly comical. If she perceived a mocking look, she would rise up in indignation and declare, “Do you know who I am? I am the daughter of the Grrreat Nijinsky!” Before long, the students, innocent of any idea of her father’s work (or her own) were greeting each other with this line, suitably exaggerated.
For some reason, the school seemed to define itself with reactionary tradition. Apart from the anti-Bolshevik feeling of the Russian émigré tradition, propaganda magazines from apartheid South Africa were among the few journals scattered about the office waiting area. The emphasis was, as the principle Michael Badenhausen reminded the students at morning assembly, self-discipline and hard work. But, alas, by mid-morning, the pink-faced principal was three sheets to the wind, sometimes literally lying on his office floor, passed out. If a parent came to consult him, the staff would have to think on their feet. He had been a Peace Corps volunteer in the bush of Upper Volta (as it was then called), and that experience was probably enough to explain his alcoholism, but it was not his only peccadillo. Once a well-built young friend of his appeared at the school, wearing skin-tight jeans with a chain belt and a motorcycle jacket with no shirt. Madam could hardly have approved, but for reasons best known to the two of them, she tolerated his behavior with maternal protectiveness.
Our pay was little more than welfare, less if one includes food stamps -- $325 a month when I began, then increased to $375. In the middle of my second year of service at Nova, I began to organize. I called the local teachers’ unions who, I must say, showed little solidarity. I set out to do it myself. “They can’t fire you,” I told my coworkers, “You’re protected by state and federal labor law.” Threatening a mid-year strike, we received Lanova’s signature on an agreement giving us $425 a month and a certain position for the coming year. Then, when the term ended in the spring, the entire faculty was fired. (Doubtless individuals the administration trusted who showed proper contrition might be allowed back.) I picketed the graduation exercises in my suit and then put down my sign to enter the hall and take my seat to applaud the graduates. I filed a complaint against the school with the California Labor Commission. It was the least I could do after leading my fellow-workers down a path that proved more dangerous than I had known.
After months had passed, I received notice of a hearing before an administrative judge. When I entered, the school’s attorney was just saying to the judge, “It’s frivolous, really,” and the judge, in an old-boy manner, responded with resignation, “Well, we must give him his day, anyway.” While I presented what seemed to me undeniable facts, their scurrilous lawyer proceeded to tell outlandish lies: that I was fired because of my obdurate gum-chewing, that Lanova would not have signed the agreement had I not been raising a fist over her in a menacing way. I was at the time young enough to be genuinely surprised at my adversary’s complete dishonesty. Needless to say, the hearing was decided against me, and, as it happened, about that time I received an offer to teach school in the Nigerian bush. Perhaps if I had prevailed over my San Francisco employer, I would never have seen the palace of the Oba of Benin nor would I have drunk palm wine from a calabash with a dozen drowned bees afloat. Doubtless, the time had come to move on.

Phoetics and Semantics in the Last Line of Beowulf

2011-03-01T06:59:00.000-08:00

Following Tolkien's bugle-cry in the thirties, the most general trend in Beowulf studies has doubtless been the approach to the poem itself as a successful artistic product. Subsequent critics have found one element of the poem after another to be significant in ways unsuspected by Ker. [1] I propose to contribute to this well-advanced trend not by demonstrating a new system of significance operating throughout the text, but by the detailed examination of a few lines with reference to their semantic and phonetic content. [2]
In general I think the relation between the two in poetry is similar to that between signifier and signified in language as a whole: that is, their association may be originally arbitrary, but it becomes meaningful once the correspondence is established, though the relation is always more aptly characterized as a pursuit of one by the other than as an equivalence. In an aesthetic text, moreover, such relations are legitimately read as highly determined and determining without any necessary implications regarding the intentions or the powers of the author. Indeed, an intentional effect unperceived by a given reader does not exist for that reader, and what seems to the reader to be designed functions for that reader as meaningful, whatever the writer’s intention.
In fact the significant relation between signifier and signified is constitutive of literature, and thus analysis of any sample of an accomplished poetic text will reveal what I find in the case of Beowulf, namely that most of the sound-sense ratios are indeed direct or inverse. In either case one may be said to reinforce the other. [3] (Those which do not serve such a relation may be considered unassimilated data with an unknown meaning or simply the random noise which inevitably accompanies any expression. [4])
I choose to examine the last sentence of the poem, lines 3178-3182, not because I expect any greater degree of artfulness in a rhetorical conclusion. Rather, I would claim that the same operation I undertake here might be done with equally good results in any other portion of the text. However this is not to say that the lines are uninfluenced by their placement within the poem as a whole. Even if the passage is found to declare itself the conclusion; indeed, even if it were known to be dense and more carefully “worked over” for that reason; it would not necessarily be more highly determined. [5]
The semantic content of the lines is clear and straightforward, more so in fact than much of the poem. Beowulf is dead, the poem that bears his name is in a sense already over. Lines 3178-3182 simply tell us that his people mourned for him as the best king on earth. The structure of the expression of this simple statement is not itself, however, simple. The semantic content may be described as doubly symmetrical in its presentation. The first hemistichs as a group have a unity balanced by that of the second hemistichs. Further, lines 3178-3179 are a group while 3181-3182 are another with 3180 as a transition.
The first half-lines possess a certain obvious continuity in that they may be read with no reference whatever to the second half-lines and the basic sense of the passage (indeed, its grammatical integrity, too) does not suffer. The second half-lines do reinforce and enrich that sense, but in no simple pattern of echoing what has just been said. 3178b and 3179b are largely synonymous as are 3181b and 3182b. The first pair names the mourners, the second names the qualities of their king, and the central one names their
linkage in the institution of monarchy. Thus the second half-lines restate in their periodic way the same idea stated in the first. The right side of the page may also be independently read though grammar and syntax suffer in the version of the story given there.
Turning to the other symmetrical axis, one notes that the first half of the passage contains the essential message “the people mourned for their king” while the second half explains his qualities which make clear why they mourned and what they said while mourning. The middle line 3180 is abstract, cleansed of specificity, saying only that people spoke of a king. It stands between the particulars concerning the people's mood and those of the king's nature. The first half of this pivotal line restates the content of the previous two lines and the second half foreshadows the last two.
The five lines as a whole might be thought to represent the entire poem in miniature, for surely Beowulf may be accurately described as a verbal memorial offered up to the dead leader. Thus the linguistic activity that concludes the poem is identical with the poem as a whole. In fact the very last word is an even more condensed epitome: lofgeornost. This is the only occurrence of the word in the entire text, almost as though it were reserved for this capping location. It suggests not only the nature of the poem itself
(praise invested with emotion) but also recalls the whole pattern of behavior that might elicit such praise and the centrality of the relation between lord and warriors which provides such a great share of the thematic meat throughout the text. [7]
Analysis of sound patterns is notoriously liable to slip over into super-subtlety, but I will here have space only to consider the most apparent of effects, those which will be most likely accepted as genuinely operative. The available data are set forth in these arrays:

vowel sounds

3178 a e o o o ea a eo e
3179 a o e y e eo e ea a
3180 ae o ae e ae e y u y i a
3181 a a i u o o ae u
3182 eo u i o o o eo o

consonant sounds

3178 sw b gn rn d n g t l d
3179 hl f d shr r h rthg e t s
3180 cw d nth t h w r w r ldc n ng
3181 m n m ld st ndm nthw r st
3182 l d ml th st nd 1 fg rn st

The following observations seem most important for these data:
1) Alliteration is stronger in 3181-3182 than in the other lines.
2) The open vowel sounds of the first hemistich are similar to those of the last.
3) 3178b provides a vowel pattern repeated in 3179b and then carried over and expanded in 3180a.
4) 3180 contains an abundance of sounds not found elsewhere, both vowels and consonant clusters
5) The superlative -st which ends each of the last four hemistichs had not occurred before.
6) The m's and n's of the last two lines are prefigured in the three n sounds of begnornodon.

Certain reinforcement of semantic patterns is obvious. The structure of the alliterative line insists that the second hemistichs are redundant of the first in a broad sense. A number of characteristics bind the last two lines and set apart the middle line. The semantic equivalence of 3178b and 3179b is underlined by their similar vowel patterns which then provide a transition into the turn of the central line. Not having analyzed sound patterns in the whole poem I have no evidence that the function of the end in epitomizing the whole is phonetically reproduced. The only really new element produced by the phonetic survey is the added impression of unity one gains in seeing the reminiscence of 3178a in 3182b. Much information remains in the arrays which might be called the “narrative” (because non-recurring) sound pattern.
This brief survey of sound and sense relation in a five line passage should emphasize yet again the sophistication and complexity of the poem's texture, though it does not imply any conclusion about the literacy or training of the poet. Indeed, conventions of style and of sentiment make density of signification at once more easily realized and more easily neglected. A poet working in a prescribed and artificial tradition may either flat-footedly supply his readers' expectations (and thus signify less) or, by a very minute distortion of those same expectations, he may signify more efficiently. In Beowulf the divided line, the alliterative pattern, the storehouse of phrases that belong to the heroic ethos are efficiently used to convey more, I think, in shorter compass than one would find to be the case with most contemporary poets not supplied with a closed tradition.

1. The implications of this for literary historical reconstruction may go in either direction. One might see in his artistry proof either of book-learning or of the oral tradition.

2. If I were to seek a more modern bugle-cry than Tolkiens, I might find it in Eco’s advocacy of the “semiotic civil rights” of ever smaller elements in the stuff of the work. (p. 268, A Theory of Semiotics [Bloomington: 1979]).

3. In the case of an inverse relationship the stakes would be raised a bit, and one would be justified in speaking of ambiguity, irony, and the metaphoric “lie.”

4. Alternatively, one might call this "meaningless" component the constitutive bearer of that desirable residue of mystery which allows the work to retain after interpretation its original quantum of aesthetic mana.

5. My opinion is the opposite, that more is likely to be encoded in a passage if the “purpose” of the passage is not apparent, though sometimes a high degree of motivation can allow the writer to deceive himself and the reader. I am thinking of such instances as Pound’s translations where he felt justified in doing as he pleased since he had an original as his excuse.

6. Normally in French romance the second half line will be more likely wholly conventional just as the rhyming line of a couplet (the second) will. The poet has license at first, but must obey his formal imperative after.

7. Lof by itself occurs only once also. It is applied in a sense similar to this in line 1536 (very nearly the midpoint of the poem) just before Beowulf fights Grendel's mother.

Nigerian Given Names and Road Mantras

2011-03-01T06:49:00.000-08:00

A few fragments of found poetry.

Nigerian Given Names

Many Nigerians have English given names. These sometimes recalled the ancients in simply noting the day of a child’s birth: Sunday (etc.). More often they expressed a kind of magic – names, for instance, that might aid a young person toward a good career: College, Engineer, or Editor. Often they would name desirable qualities: Famous, Clever, Moneymaker, Lucky, Goodluck, Pious, Blessing, Endurance, Innocent, Ebony, and Fidelity, for example. Some were a bit less clear in intention: John Bull, Didacus (and Philemon), Portuguese, Dried Meat (though “Pigmeat” is known in the American South), Whisky, Society. Some are vast: System and Empire. Our neighbor had a boy with an African name Vaki which was explained as meaning “Everything has its time.”

Road Mantras

(These are lines collected from the sides of cars and trucks in Nigeria. In spite of the small percentage of the population that owns cars, Nigeria has an extraordinarily high rate of serious traffic accidents.)

question of time
speak your words
nothing in my hands
don't mind
life is war
love
if men were god
truth is bitter
more days
my problem is not your problem
high life
o taste and see
not as you think
NO FACE
who knows tomorrow
see the work of god
let them say
no event -- no history
how shall we escape
are you god
princeless youth
OO-OO-OO

Vignettes of Sunny Nigeria

2011-03-01T06:48:00.000-08:00

Walking on a bush path, we entered the village of Urohpokpo and waved greetings to a woman under a burden of wood, startled to see exotic strangers. Almost instantly, everyone knew we were passing though. An excited, giggling woman rushed from a hut holding a leaflet. The crowd grew and filled with elated expectation. She thrust before us a Christian tract depicting a white Adam and Eve. By gestures she conveyed the notion that we resembled the pictured couple. General hilarity and assent ensues.

Tales of Bureaucracy

As the trimly marshaled troops perform their smart ceremonies before the Remembrance Arcade war memorial in Lagos and the band played “Auld Lang Syne,” I sat in a seventh floor office of the Independence Building. I had been there already three hours while an official surrounded by heaps of file amused himself by pasting an occasional addition into one or another. He tires of my presence and dismisses me. I make my way down the seven flights. Files are piled in every hallway and on the landings of the stairway. Some are strewn across the floor. The walls are markedly soiled in a dark band corresponding to where a person’s hand might reach. Have these walls ever been washed or repainted since the British left? The next day the same thing happens, only this time the bureaucrat explains, “The problem is we have reached the end of our number sequence for files and haven’t received authorization to begin at one again. You will have to wait.”

The kola nut ceremony in the Benin City Public Service Commission passed from the benign (“May you have prosperity and good health!”) to the slightly sinister (“May he who wishes to speak against you find his tongue will not move! May your enemies become blind and crippled!”). With every wish the economic planner behind the desk chanted his concord.

When we had first arrived in Benin City, we were housed at the Hotel Philomena, an unlikely huge and modern establishment on a dirt road. Though the building is altogether modern, it was constructed by the sloppiest of craftsmen. Ever mirror, every board is seriously askew. An observer from across the room can see that the marble steps are visibly off-kilter. Heaps of dust rest in every corner, red with laterite’s iron oxide. Even manufactured furniture looks screwy – the chairs and tables all wobble. Later, when repairs were being done in our Agbarho home, the principal, Mr. Elempe lingered, overseeing their work. “You needn’t stay,” I told him, “You must have more important work.” “I must stay,” he answered. “These men are paid so little, they will stop work the moment I leave. If you tell them to get back to it, they may or may not. They will work as long as I am here.”
The Philomena was doubtless costing the government a pretty penny, but such waste was trivial in the system – the fabulous rewards went to a few at the top and payouts to many “little men.” (Working the system from the bottom, Mr. Varghese, a colleague from Kerala, the only other non-African at the school, made it a practice to bring cold Cokes for the clerks in the file office of the Education Ministry. When he felt the need to tweak his records, he would avoid petitioning officials, instead going straight to the clerks to obtain his files and make whatever changes he wished himself.)
The hotel was spooky apart from its geometric irregularities. For some time the only other guest in its spacious halls was an Indian physician named Reddy. Every day he sat in the Health Ministry, as though waiting was the true job for which he had been hired. After lengthy and mysterious delays, we received assignments, but our friend kept up his daily vigil for six months before being sent to the hospital in Sapele. When we spoke to him some time later, he described his frustration at the theft of virtually all ordered supplies, including, drugs, before they reached the hospital. Patients’ families would have to purchase the goods, sometimes, the very same merchandise, in the markets and bring it to the hospital.
One he had I both had to obtain the signature of the assistant commissioner for education of what was then called Bendel State. We entered his Benin City office early and were seated outside his office. After an hour or so, we were invited in, yet he did not give us a signature for our forms, a formality really. We sat while he chatted on the telephone or wandered aimlessly about the room. At about 10 a.m. some chief who was his friend appeared with a six-pack of Guinness. The two of them drank while discussing soccer scores. After a few beers, the chief left. The Assistant Commissioner called his daughter. He put his feet up on the desk and Dr. Reddy and I looked at each other, unsure whether he had fallen asleep. Around noon he left for lunch. We couldn’t depart since we had no idea when he would be in the mood to sign our documents.
The Assistant Commissioner must have had a good lunch as he returned in an expansive mood, ready to engage us. We discussed politics and world events for some time, and he then signed our papers.
The time was perhaps 1:30 when we left. Outside the Ministry Dr. Reddy turned to me and commented, “Pleasant chap, wasn’t he? I enjoyed meeting him.” “How can you speak like that,” I responded, “when he kept us waiting most of a day?” “Oh, well, of course he did. You must understand, he had to show what a big man he was. He’s a bureaucrat, what do you expect?”

The post office in Ughelli is filled with silent loiterers. I cannot understand why they congregate here doing nothing at all. The postmaster reaches an annoying point in his paperwork, rises, and irritably orders them out. No one speaks or moves. Only a fe glance in the postmaster’s direction. He shouts again, tells them they must be gone. As a final gesture, he threatens to “take steps.” Still no response. He returns to his desk.

Poetry on the Loose

Index

Notes on Recent Reading 5 [Deeds of God in Rddhipur, Burney, Cooper]

Notes on Recent Reading 4 (Sarah Scott, Madam de La Fayette, Wharton]

Idea of Comedy

Two Lyrics on Death from Central America

Election Day in Chichicastenango

Food for the Gods

A Palm Wine Shack

Rereading the Classics [Rabelais]

Walkin' Blues [Son House]

Iowa Communards

Notes on Recent Reading 3 [Kipling, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Tao-te-ching]

Occupy Wall Street

The Pearl-Poet's Use of Link-Rhyme

Rereading the Classics [Burton]

Flash Reviews of Thirty African Novels

Voluntary Poverty

More Notes on Recent Reading

Piers Plowman and the Man in the Moon

Cookie Man

Down the Dirt Road Blues

Najibe’s Stories

A Conventional Ending in a Middle English Romance

An Appreciation of Theodore Roethke

Notes on Recent Reading [Melville, Greene, Whalen]

Poetry on the Loose

Two Parades

Distant Rhyme in Two Medieval English Lyrics

Some Anonymous Middle High German Lyrics

Notes on Liu Xie

Three Poems from Peru

Oedipus and the Meaning of Polysemy

Openings in the Middle English Romance

An Evening in Urubamba

Wordsworth Speaks German

How and Why to Signify or How to Make the Truth Dance

Two Passages from Marcus Aurelius

VISTA Trains Me

Chaucer's Version of the Myth of a Golden Age

Yet Two More Versions of Wang Wei

A Problem on the Border

Flyin' with the Muse: Kirpal Gordon's Eros in Sanskrit

A Library's Commonplaces and Curiosities

Two Graffiti

How I was Hired to Teach in Nigeria

Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" as Structuralist Charm

St. Joseph's Day at the Laguna Pueblo

Transformation of Convention in Early Minnesang

IWW

The Formation of a Christian Rhetoric

Hippie

The Prima Etade of Literary Ambition: The Struggle to Overcome the Word in Petrarch’s Canzone 23

Nova Academy

Phoetics and Semantics in the Last Line of Beowulf

Nigerian Given Names and Road Mantras

Vignettes of Sunny Nigeria