Sir Thomas North’s The Moral Philosophy of Doni

     Though every inhabited area of the earth has produced indigenous narratives, storytellers have also enthusiastically borrowed the narratives of others as well, altering freely to their own taste. While Celtic lore contributed significantly to the European inventory of plotlines as did Classical and Biblical sources, many stories in European languages derive ultimately from much further afield. Narratives from South Asia often reached Europe after having passed through a series of intermediary translation into Persian, Arabic, and a variety of other languages.
     One of the most extraordinary instances of this cultural dissemination is the Panchatantra which, according to its translator Ryder, contains “the most widely known stories in the world,” [1]. Compiled from older sources in the third century BCE and reaching something like its current form perhaps five hundred years later, this work was enlarged and translated from Sanskrit to Pahlevi by the scholar Sir Thomas North called Berozias. The book subsequently appeared in versions in Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, then Spanish, and from Spanish into a broad range of other languages including a dozen European tongues as well as Turkish, Malay, and other unlikely tongues. It is therefore a veritable literary palimpsest in which the exotic and the familiar collide. Every story tells its own tale of significant reflections and refractions. [2]
     The most widespread English version on this cosmopolitan family tree is North’s The Moral Philosophy of Doni, a translation of an Italian rendering, itself translated from Spanish from a Latin version which derived from a Hebrew one, a translation of the Arabic of Al-Moqaffa, bringing one back to only a few removes from the original. Apart from this complexity, the text also employs frame-stories sufficiently elaborately that at times one is reading stories within stories, five or six removes from the initial narration.
     Sir Thomas North is a master stylist and rhetorician best known for his version of Plutarch (for which he worked from a French translation). [3] His prose, at times colloquial and natural, more often hypotactic and architectural, is regularly mellifluous and seasoned with obsolete, obscure, foreign, and half-Anglicized words, selected for the pleasure they give the cognoscenti. At times these learned usages appear side by side with vernacular, even slang, expressions.
     The title is altogether a misnomer, as moral philosophy is rather an excuse than the central point of the stories. They are told as entertainment, and the themes vary from moral to strategic to romantic. What sententiae do emerge are often ironic or conflicted. When the text is like wisdom literature it is ordinarily prudential rather than prescriptive, describing gambits that will work in the real world as opposed to idealistic principles.
     Beginning with classic folk-tales, nearly all of which boast numerous analogues in the Stith-Thompson Motif-Index, the complex history of transmission these stories have undergone and the framing patterns into which they have been ingeniously fitted make interpretation unusually subtle. Further, the inclusion of wood-cut illustrations, sometimes not created for the purpose of illustrating the story, contributes yet another layer of significance that enriches and alters what came before. A few brief examples of the issues raised by the first of these factors alone will provide some sense of the rich semiotic density of North’s text.
     I have earlier discussed the dramatic image of the human being suspended over the abyss from the Mahabharata (see my essay on the appearance of this image in Barlaam and Ioasaph). Though facing imminent death, the person enjoys the indulgence of honey that happens to be dripping nearby. In the Mahabharata the honey’s appeal is illusory or puerile, a simple function of the veil of maya; “though sweet to all creatures [it can], however, attract children only.” This Hindu attitude is echoed by a Christian one in Barlaam where it is the “deceptive” sweetness of the delights of this world that distract the individual from thoughts of eternity. Ignoring for a moment the unbearably harsh terms of existence, the human consciousness can experience a brief respite during which he can forget “quite in what terms of life he [and all the rest of us] stood,” until “sorrow struck him on the neck.” In North’s version, [4] the implication is altogether secular and yet at the same time even more sympathetic to suffering humanity. In the Moral Philosophy the honey is almost a merciful balm which “retaineth us and suffereth us not to know the dangers and troubles of this most miserable world and of our thrall and troubled life.” Though its basic distracting character reappears, here it functions not as a fraud to divert the person from more productive thoughts, but rather as a palliative to an otherwise intolerable life.
     Details are highlighted by their appearance and disappearance in successive versions of these stories, gaining additional suggestive power from the fact that some writer has felt the text improved by adding or removing them. For instance, in North’s “The Fox’s Tale of the Paragon of India and the Crab” [5] the crab is romantically motivated; she questions the bird’s motives to protect “a Tench that she loved well,” whereas in the Sanskrit source, the crab acts when she sees heaps of discarded bones from previous meals. There is no question of interspecies affection in India. Is North’s addition a remote reflection of the poetry of amour courtois?
     In the story of “The Ape Meddling in That He had no Skill” [6], the monkey pays the price for his presumption when his leg is caught in the log, and he is summarily dispatched by the woodcutter, a “churlish clown,” who “pash[es] his brains a-pieces” with a bat. In the far briefer telling of the Panchatantra, the simian catches his privates in the cleft of the log, and this is considered enough of a punchline. What happened next the reader does not learn.
     And so it goes. This book in its first incarnation was an encyclopedia of narrative purporting to some system, seeking to cover all significant situations of life through metaphoric fables. The successive transformations of the text through several millennia, across thousands of miles of widely varying languages and cultures, has only refined it and enhanced its inclusiveness. One of the most subtle and intricately coded books we have, I am delighted to say, is made up of stories most of which would delight any sensible three-year-old.




1. p. 3 in the University of Chicago edition. Ryder goes on to say that, were the book called “the best collection of stories in the world, the assertion could hardly be disproved.”

2. This remarkable history led Theodor Benfey to compose one of the pioneering works of comparative literature in his 1859 edition.

3. He also translated Guevara's Reloj de Principes. North’s elegant periods influenced Lyly and other practitioners of Euphuism. Shakespeare’a debt to North’s Plutarch for his plays set in ancient Rome extends beyond information to copying phrases verbatim.

4. p, 241 “An Allegory of the World.”

5. p. 294 in Moral Philosophy, corresponding to Panchantantra I, 8.

6. p. 253.

Transformation of Convention

This is the beginning of my Transformation of Convention in the Medieval European Love Lyric. I hope to shed light on the problem of literary novelty by demonstrating that literary convention is used equally by those who employ recognizable convention and by those who defy, twist, or alter them. The establishment of a convention creates an instant potential for its repetition, but also for its inversion or twisting or omission. Two hundred years of Romantic criticism has obscured the fact that it is through convention and play with reader expectations that the semantic density of the literary text is enhanced.

Though this introduction is almost wholly theoretical, I am posting at the same time an example of the transformation I describe in the discussion of the English folk song “The Three Ravens.”


The dialectic between tradition and innovation in literature is little understood, though it stands at the heart of many critical disputes of the present day and has often been similarly important in past centuries. Very frequently the staging ground for the erection of literary barricades, the consistent centrality of the question is indeed more revealing than many of the positions partisans have taken up around it.

Harold Bloom when he speaks of the "anxiety of influence" as the major generative force as well as the major blocking force in literary production is unusually subtle in recognizing the complementary attraction and repulsion of the past, though the emotional weight which he assigns to either may be more historically or idiosyncratically limited than he admits. Such effective associations, though, are virtually universal when discussing literary convention. Critics, poets, and reading audiences have typically chosen a single alternative, championing either tradition or innovation with a passion that has been fruitful in terms of poetry, practical criticism, and connoisseurship, but which has shed little light finally on the construction of sound principles of literary theory. With sometimes eloquent error or partial vision, readers and writers have devalued one end or the other of the spectrum of conventionality and in doing so have misrepresented the text.

Highly conventional texts are demanded by the audiences for oral and popular genres. Whether one thinks of the preliterate forms of epic poetry or of the mystery or “romance” novel of modern mass culture (not to mention non-literary forms such as African sculpture or Christmas tree decoration), highly conventional adherence to tradition is demanded of the artist. One may trace the theoretical justification for such an insistence in “high art” through critics such as Pope, Arnold, and Curtius.
However, since Romanticism, the impulse to privilege the new has been dominant in educated circles. Writers otherwise as different as Wordsworth, Pound, and Shklovsky have elaborated both theory and practice around this preference.

While the contention has produced a healthy polemicism (it is, after all, the original “battle of the books”) and has formalized a convention of literary history itself manifested in concepts like the canon and the avant-garde, it has led also to distortions. While it has opened the possibility for new modes of reading and writing, it has also created confusion about the very nature of the aesthetic text.

Meanwhile, in critical discussion in general, where theoretical distinctions are often not finely drawn or closely examined, certain elements from each party's attitude may be conjoined in an unselfconscious manner. Thus, a critic may seek initially for sources and influences with the assumption that these provide the credentials for "importance" and the encoding of meaning, and then in direct commentary on the text write as though what really distinguishes a major work is originality, irony, and innovation. Such habits of critical reading can never address such fundamental questions as how to deal with partially conventional ideas and verbal patterns which twist and play upon familiar models without reproducing them; what links exist between convention and genre or convention and literary value; and what, in the end, constitutes a distinctly literary convention.

The mélange of theories and non-theories around the question of the aesthetics of convention has shaped the evaluation of entire genres and periods. For instance, Manly's celebrated essay on “Chaucer and the Rhetoricians” not only determined several generations’ view of the Latin rhetoricians but also did much to set the terms for the appreciation and evaluation of Chaucer’s poetry. The common dismissal of most Middle English romances as poor and derivative work in spite of their demonstrable popularity and cultural significance is only a particularly clear case of the usual treatment accorded oral and popular genres. The prejudice against highly conventional works, though, extends as well to certain highly learned forms such as neo-Latin and Hellenistic poetry.

The taste for convention as a self-justifying value is similarly strangely split between the most vulgar and the most sophisticated. Thus a reader of limericks will insist to the same extent as fanciers of fugues on a predetermined pattern and tone, and the writers of bumper stickers as more constrained than Elizabethan sonneteers in their choice of patterns for their wit.

In the realm of academic scholarship, a commentator may do nothing more than point out analogues, parallels, precedents, and imitations, especially in the more abstruse disciplines such as classics. An unreflecting mixture of attitudes is evident in a fine practical critic such as Peter Dronke when he first dignifies a text with a traditional background in order to obtain it a hearing and then insists on the free and spontaneous play discernible within the apparently highly determined form without sorting out what effects either sort of relation to tradition might have or examining how adherences and departures from audience expectations function and interrelate.
The fact is, of course, that every instance of language and certainly every literary artifact is at once conformist and nonconformist. If an utterance did not conform to prior patterns at all it would be incomprehensible, or — more likely -- it would be interpreted by readers who perceived a pattern of their own invention. The fact that every context
and occasion is different guarantees that there can be no two wholly identical utterances. But this does not eliminate the questions under discussion by putting all verbal texts into a single homogeneous category. Both relatively familiar and relatively unfamiliar language are forms of verbal technology which have been exploited in different ways by their practitioners and consumers. Some of the functions for texts require material closer to one end of the spectrum and some to the other.

To move toward a more precise definition of these mechanisms is the object of this study, but some outlines of the uses of the two extremes are well-known. The concept of verbal economy as used by Lord and Parry could be applied as well to eighteenth century nature poetry, say, though this genre is certainly not oral. (See Alfred Lord, The Singer of Tales, Chapter 4.) Nonetheless, if formulae and repeated phrases reoccur with lesser frequency in James Thomson than in the epic texts, they are considerably more common than in some other genres. Pattern-shattering individualist visions have gained greater currency since the eighteenth century, and today every poet is expected to speak with a unique voice. Even this recent emphasis on self-conscious rebellion, however is rendered problematic as the gestures of surrealism rapidly become clichés, and the new theory which had arisen on the cutting edge of critical thought degenerates or matures into a predictable reflex (the received, “right” reading).

The theory and practice of literature in the European Middle Ages provides particularly useful material for the investigation of the problem of convention. Although the frequently expressed respect for “auctoritas” is consistent with the assumption that medieval literature is predominantly stereotyped and thus most often of little literary value (a claim made with audacious irony by Eco in The Role of the Reader). it has also long been a received idea that modern lyric poetry may be traced back through the dolce stil novisti and the Minnesänger to the troubadours. Medieval vernacular love poetry is surely one of the most highly conventional bodies of texts imaginable with its limited lyrical and melodic repertoire and its frequently recurring dramatic scenarios and sentiments. Even the idea of romantic love which is sometimes described as an invention of the Old Occitanian poets has been amply shown by Lewis and Dronke and others to have world-wide distribution as well as classical and Christian antecedents in the European cultural sphere.

Nevertheless, there is also a strain of radical formal experimentation through its history which attracted Pound to Arnaut and Walther von der Vogelweide and which led Paul Blackburn to translate the Provençal verse into emphatically colloquial and loosely structured American idiom, indeed, the poets themselves often speak of singing “a new song” or of the need to say something never before said and all but inaccessible to language. It is the contention of this study that the conservative and revolutionary elements of early vernacular lyric poetry are not simultaneously present by chance. Rather, each enables the other.

The apparent contradiction is mediated by the peculiar nature of literary intertextuality. The relations between a given poetic line and other lines that resemble it (which may come either before or after it in time) are invariably productive of meaning, resulting in a greater capacity for information in each phrase as the words bear not only their immediate “literal” meaning, but also their meaning in relation to other similar passages. The significance the text would convey in isolation (in practice an impossibility) is compounded and enriched by its connections with other words, sentiments, movements, and eras. Such intertextuality is inevitably present, but it is even more prominent when poets learn from the masters of a previous generation, from canonical texts digested in school, or from a particular model adopted by the young artist.

A strong tradition, then, cannot fail to make the semantic code denser, more conflicted, and ambiguous, more interesting and poetically “true.” It “thickens the plot,” and the verbal play that results is a highly important aspect of poetic practice, often recognized and elucidated in specific passages, but rarely investigated in theory. As well as foregrounding the formal aspects of poetic language (as, in the simplest case, certain locutions will immediately signal the competent audience that a given text is, in fact, poetry), intertextuality allows for the expression of content which would otherwise be inexpressible. Were this not the case, literature would be indistinguishable from non-aesthetic texts in terms of semantic efficiency, and it would be justifiable only as entertainment. The creation of meaning that is not susceptible to prose paraphrase has characteristics of a game, but the object is neither simple mystification nor ornamentation. Rather, it is the only means of formulating specifically literary statements whose unique capabilities justify literature's claim to cognitive utility.

This is, of course, far from an original view. Indeed, if it is substantially correct, it could not be wholly original, any more than the figures of the poets. Concepts very close to those suggested above are prescribed in the major works of the leading literary theoreticians around the time of the first European vernacular love lyrics to have survived. These were the Latin rhetoricians, notably Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Matthew of Vendome, and John of Garland. Though sometimes maligned as authors of recipe-books for hacks, as guides for those whose poetry aspired only to be acceptable, they were, in fact, quite conscious that to genuinely cultivate the tradition it was necessary to prescribe both tradition and innovation. Their techniques for thus increasing the efficiency of the verbal code include the catalogues of tropes and recommended descriptive and narrative practices derived from respected ancient authorities, but, at the same time, they advised using these with changes, tricks, deviations, with the end in view of “rejuvenating” language (though the term is Geoffrey’s, the concept is common to all three). Even in the lists of tropes, which seemed to grow with each compilation and which became truly unwieldy by the Renaissance, even there, where the charge of empty decoration is most close to valid, they were attempting the systematization of poetry's technical toolchest. For the most part, their strategies required words to bear new shades of meaning and old formulae were turned to new uses.

A closer examination of their work will establish the basis for an accurate understanding of the nature of convention in the Middle Ages, an understanding that will elucidate many of the questions commonly debated in critical discussion today. The practice they suggest is fully realized in the work of writers such as William IX and the early Minnesänger. It is no less evident in the medieval practice of prosody, in the use of such tropes as hyperbole, and in such topoi as the Natureingang. A rudimentary scheme of possible variations on the reverdie, for instance, might include these:


Spring is here, and I am in love.
Spring is here, and my love is even grander than nature.
Spring is here, yet I am loveless.
It is winter, yet my love keeps me warm.
It is winter, but I am chilled by lovelessness.


In fact, these formulae are highly simplified. The medieval poems provide all these options and a good many more with subtle elaborations, allusions, and contradictions, and the literary lineage continues through Eliot’s cruel April to the present. Each of those employing a convention do so not to replicate an earlier author, but to add a new layer of meaning to the palimpsest of language and to further refine the representation in words of human consciousness.

The Three Ravens

     “The Three Ravens” is one of the most well-known ballads in English tradition. The oldest text was published in 1611 in Melismata, Thomas Ravenscroft’s collection that preserved many otherwise ephemeral songs, where it is included in the “Country Pastimes” section next to a version of “Froggy Went A’Courtin’.” [1] The song is doubtless far older, however, and includes patently non-Christian elements. Its age is not its only mystery. One can only guess to what extent Ravenscroft may have, like Burns and Grimm, altered his informant’s text. The haunting charm the poem elicits in listeners and readers is in part due to a calculated semantic indeterminacy.

There were three rauens sat on a tree,
downe a downe, hay downe, hay downe,
There were three rauens sat on a tree,
with a downe,
There were three rauens sat on a tree,
They were as blacke as they might be.
With a downe, derrie, derrie, derrie, downe, downe.

The one of them said to his mate,
Where shall we our breakfast take?

Downe in yonder greene field,
There lies a Knight slain under his shield,

His hounds they lie downe at his feete,
So well they can their Master keepe,

His Hawkes they flie so eagerly,
There's no fowle dare him come nie

Downe there comes a fallow Doe,
As great with yong as she might goe,

She lift up his bloudy head,
And kist his wounds that were so red,

She got him up upon her backe,
And carried him to earthen lake,

She buried him before the prime,
She was dead her self ere euen-song time.

God send euery gentleman,
Such haukes, such hounds, and such a Leman.


     The ravens loom darkly over the opening scene. Though crows and ravens have acquired various associations, they belong most commonly and intimately to the battlefield and to death. The opening words of the Iliad evoke the horror of human suffering through the birds that feed on corpses. The Hindu Shani whose vehicle is a raven is younger brother of Yama, god of death. The birds are a momento mori, reminding all of a common end in dissolution, yet in this song they are unable to eat the flesh of the fallen knight. His hounds and hawks act as protective spirits, guarding his body until it can be safely removed [2] by the principal agent of his salvation, the faithful, pregnant doe. A good deal of discussion has centered on whether the doe, hounds, and hawks are pre-Christian deities, enchanted humans, or simply symbolic representation of a man’s lover and friends or underlings, but the question is immaterial. The poem is a poignant wish-fulfillment which presents ideals of love and devotion, suggesting that these ideals may ameliorate or even – as in Christian readings – transfigure the hard facts of mortality with which the scene opened. The closing lines imply both the desirability of such a victory over death and its uncertainty. Within the brief compass of the aesthetic text, the order of nature, the necessary linkage of death with life, of being eaten with eating, is suspended. The diner’s pleasure and satisfaction require the prey’s fear and horror, but within the poem the reader, in a simple instance of sympathetic magic, can feel, like the knight, exempted from death’s horrors, particularly if the song is done to a fetching melody.
     Scott, in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, reprints “The Three Ravens” noting as “a singular circumstance, that it should coincide so very nearly” with a song he had collected in his own day called “The Twa Corbies.” He describes it as, not a “copy,” but a “counterpart” of the older song.

The Twa Corbies
As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies making a mane;
The tane unto the t'other say,
“Where sall we gang and dine to-day?”
“In behint yon auld fail dyke,
“I wot there lies a new slain knight;
“And nae body kens that he lies there,
“But his hawk, his hound, and lady fair.
“His hound is to the hunting gane,
“His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
“His lady's ta'en another mate,
“So we may mak our dinner sweet.
“Ye'll sit on his white hause bane,
“And I'll pike out his bonny blue een:
"Wi' ae lock o' his gowden hair,
“We'll theek our nest when it grows bare.
“Mony a one for him makes mane,
“But nane sall ken whare he is gane:
“O'er his white banes, when they are bare,
“The wind sall blaw for evermair.”

     “The Twa Corbies” clearly plays on the expectations created by “The Three Ravens.” The knight’s allies – hound, hawk, and lover – have abandoned his body, allowing access for the birds to enjoy a “dinner sweet.” While his life may be over, they are busy with their own domestic arrangements, and anticipate ornamenting their nest with his blond hair. Whereas the knight in the earlier poem was laid to rest in a reassuring ceremony, this one will lie alone, unknown, the wind whistling through his skeleton.
     This cynical, ironic puncturing of the sweet solace delivered in the “Ravens” version suggests an entirely harsh and materialistic world with no saving grace whatsoever. The mention of “hause bane,” a survival in dialect of the Old English banhus, evokes that earlier era’s stern stoicism in facing straight-on the all-but-unendurable facts of life. As Bryhtnoth says in the "Battle of Maldon," “Resolve be the firmer, heart more ardent, and spirit stronger, as our strength fails!” Here it is fortitude and a wry acceptance that redeems the human in the face of the ultimate certainty of defeat.
     Such a reversal is, however, by no means the only possible variation spawned by the song. In 1930 in Avery County, North Carolina Mellinger Edward Henry recorded Mary Franklin singing “The Three Black Crows.” [3]

There were three crows sat on a tree, Old Billy McGaw McGee!
There were three crows sat on a tree,
Old Billy McGaw McGee!
There were three crows sat on a tree,
And they were black as crows could be,
And they all flapped their wings and cried,
“Caw! Caw! Caw!”
And they all flapped their wings and cried,
“Caw! Caw! Caw!”
“What shall we have for bread to eat?” Old Billy McGaw McGee!
“On yonders hill there lies a horse.”
Old Billy McGaw McGee!
“We'll perch ourselves on his backbone,
And pick his eyes out one by one;"
And they all clapped their wings and cried,
“Caw! Caw! Caw!”
And they all clapped their wings and cried,
“Caw! Caw! Caw!”

     In this song the motif has become burlesque. [4] Though the birds still perch on the bones and pick out the eyes, the knight and his aides are absent. With their repeated caws and their manic wing-flapping, they seem slightly absurd. If the scene is still somewhat macabre, it is in the ridiculous manner of Addams or Gorey, more Bride of Frankenstein than the original. Mockery and laughter and averting the gaze from the more painful eventualities here provide relief from life’s pain. Considered in connection to the two earlier texts, the knight might be thought to be more powerfully present by being unmentioned, as though a human casualty would be too painful an image to evoke. In a sense, the knight’s disappearance is the most potent sign of how disturbing a specter he is. The silly nonsense song may bear the heaviest emotional freight. Is there not something chilling about that final “caw”?
     All these songs in their different ways testify to the human yearning for a peace all-but-unattainable in this world. Each with a distinctive tone and theme represents an aesthetic strategy to salve the psychic sores while providing entertainment to beguile the hour. Each employs the same conventional representation of the tragedy of mortality: a knight cut down in his prime, lying exposed and helpless in the first two, and conspicuously missing in the third.




1. “Three Blind Mice” may also owe its survival to its inclusion in this section of Ravenscroft’s book.

2. Similar to, for instance, the torngak of the Greenland Inuit.

3. Later published in Henry’s Folk Songs of the Southern Highlands.

4. Albert B. Friedman in his The Viking Book of Folk Ballads of the English-Speaking World attributes this song to the minstrel stage, but gives no details.

On the Ganges' Shore

     With even the most detailed directions, we could never have found our guesthouse on the Ganges’ shore by ourselves. A young worker from the Sita Guesthouse on the Chausadi Ghat where we had booked a room met us on the nearest street large enough to accommodate traffic other than on foot or hoof. (Plenty of motorbikes zoom through the narrow lanes, but they don’t really belong there.) We moved rapidly through one turning after another, passing a variety of little shrines, many Shaivite, with fresh offerings around the lingams. In a short time I gave up trying to set mnemonic markers so I could find my way back and simply followed my guide to the banks of the slow, dark, impassive Ganges.
     When we met the proprietor of the Sita, he proudly informed us that his late father had been a distinguished astrologer who boasted among his clients the actress Goldie Hawn. He ran off to fetch a scrapbook with photos confirming this connection to celebrity before showing us to our room. When we pointed out a few small insects in the bedding, he enthusiastically declared, “No problem, no problem at all!” and shouted orders at one of his workers who presently appeared with a spray can of insecticide which he applied liberally enough to create a noxious poisonous cloud. “There! Okay, now, no?” he confidently asked.
     Whether wisely or not, we accepted the room. It had a balcony over the river and a side view facing a dormitory for some faction of holy men. We were to see them at all hours doing domestic chores like washing clothes and cooking. It mattered little that our modern sink simply drained onto the floor, thus teaching the hand-washer to lean well forward in an effort to avoid splashing one’s trousers.
     Varanasi is without doubt a spiritual center of Hinduism, but I learned that does not necessarily lend to its appeal as a holiday destination. “Why would you go there?” an Indian-American friend had asked, “You go to Varanasi when it’s time to die.” The fact is that the burning ghats where cremations are performed leave most visitors surprised not to be more disturbed. Perhaps even the visiting skeptic is influenced by the general spectacle of religiosity, played out at all hours on every side. The constant crowds of saddhus, devotees bathing in and drinking the murky water, masseurs, yogis, both for hire and self-absorbed, diviners of various stripes (some sheltered in permanent little shaded seats to receive hopeful customers), pilgrims, musicians and chanters, apes and cattle, all create an otherworldly atmosphere in which any manifestation of mortality short of a ravening Kali with a girdle of skulls is likely to seem digestible, even one’s own poor vulnerability. Then there are the touts and beggars. Now and then a haunting flute melody would rise from the path along the river’s side. There was no telling whether the tune arose from an enlightened ascetic who had trekked down from the mountains or a hustler hoping to gather a few coins by selling cheap pipes.
     Even apart from the constant scene along the river’s edge, there was no lack of action. The rhesus macaques whom I had previously associated primarily with their beneficent role in the polio research of my childhood leaped from building to building seeking freshly offered edibles at the many shrines or a bit of tasty trash. On the rooftop restaurant of the Sita one worker stood by at all times with a stick to prevent the animals from snatching the dinners from in front of guests. After dark, we heard them thrashing around on our balcony.
     The tourist and the devotee alike can experience an epitome of the Ganges’ symbolic potential every evening at the Dasaswamedh Ghat where an elaborate ceremony is held, lasting perhaps an hour and a half, and featuring fire, incense, bells, juggling, chanting, a row of seven simultaneous officiants, and music in various tempos. In this spot Brahma himself is said to have performed the archaic ten horse sacrifice detailed in the Vedas and described in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The present-day ceremony, called the Ganga Aarti (Ganges Perfect Love) is a full-blown spectacle. As mendicants and holy men circulate, congregants clap their hands with the music; they pray; at times they raise their hands, fingers wide, and wave, looking like nothing so much as a Pentecostal service. People place votive candles in small boats of folded paper and set them floating in the river, so that, after a time, a veritable flood of luminous desire illuminates the water’s path downstream. Praise of Agni, the god of fire and twin of Indra, opens the first hymn of the Rig Veda. His transformative flames were considered to transmit sacrifices to the divine world, and the use of fire as a route to god flourishes here nightly.
     After a time the casual visitor to Varanasi may find the powerful odors of the city -- incense, cremation, excrement, cooking, sharp chemical scents and soft floral ones, charcoal and rot – to be too much, particularly in concert with the incessant cries, shouts, songs, and chants. Our own remedy was to catch a pedicab to Sarnath, on the city’s outskirts, the Deer Park which was the site of Buddha’s first sermon to the five bhikkhus. The pandaemonium of Varanasi vanishes in this airy and quiet area frequented only by monks and pilgrims. The visitor notices, though, that the hovels of the destitute still line the approaches to the temples, monasteries, and colleges, most of which are walled off and set back from the road, surrounded by green lawns and gardens. The fabulous mythology of the Hindu pantheon, the phantasmagoric sights of the holy city, the most potent of sights, sounds, and smells, all can seem in memory a lurid dream, though a dream dreamt only yesterday.

Economic Democracy

     I oppose merit pay for teachers in part because no system – certainly not multiple choice tests, principals’ judgments, or peer review – can be fair. But I have, as well, a deeper, more fundamental objection. I have never understood why one worker should be paid more than another.
     Surely, from our human perspective, since every individual is of unique and incalculable value, every person’s work shift, contributed toward the common store of goods and services, is an equal depletion of the worker’s time on earth. Why should one be compensated more than another? In this highly socialized society with the division of labor at such a height that a single product requires the contribution of thousands of workers we all must do some part to provide what we all consume.
     A critic may object that such a system would fly in the face of human nature and enable mediocrity in the workplace. This claim assumes the culturally-bound assumption that people are all greedy and motivated primarily by the ambition to climb atop their fellow-citizens. This is clearly not the case. For over nine-tenths of human history, our species has survived through “primitive communism.” Palaeolithic people shared whatever they caught or found with the entire group, including aged, ill, and handicapped individuals. The means of production (that is, nature itself) was communally owned. Any advantage that accrued to particularly productive individuals was symbolic: admission to an elite society, the right to wear prestigious ornaments, and the like.
     Even today many groups would find economic stratification ugly and immoral. Guatemalan peasants who do better than their neighbors will donate the excess to finance a fiesta (very like the potlatches of the old Northwest Coast). In the developed world Japanese and in Norwegians limit salary disparities; display of wealth is thought in poor taste. Far from being universal, American greed is exceptional.
     Furthermore, even in the heart of Babylon many Americans currently ignore the powerful ideological brainwashing that declares money to be the sole end of life. Have not we all known people whose work and home life is ordered not by cash but by values such as family, art, politics, charity, religion, or love of knowledge?
     As a matter of fact, far from distributing appropriate rewards, the current hierarchy rewards idleness at the expense of truly useful labor? Experience has taught me that salary and status are inversely related to productivity. Production workers in an auto plant are active throughout the shift doing the work of producing cars, while white collar employee invariably loaf a significant percentage of the day. Office work is often concerned with symbolic manipulation -- letters, reports, and meetings – many of which have no effect whatever. In the educational setting every schoolteacher is on stage constantly -- discerning, inventing, strategizing, and problem-solving – whereas every principal I have ever observed sought distractions to soothe the otiose hours. University professors do the research which is the unique role of higher education, while the administrators are rather like the custodians, necessary perhaps to maintain the operation, but in a decidedly supportive position, yet who receives the bigger checks? The same relation applies downward as upward. University adjuncts work harder and are paid less than regular faculty. During my brief spell in private industry, a textbook publisher, the work was done by editorial assistants while those in corner offices seemed to dream away the day. Head librarians gaze at Publisher’s Weekly while their underlings do the work of the institution. The administrative assistant is of most useful and least paid in the office. Big shots get endless perks and golden parachutes while the lowest paid workers do without any benefits at all and no thought of severance.
     Similarly, alienated and demanding work like physical labor or industrial production is little-rewarded, while engaging, satisfying work such as a physician’s gets the gold. Closer to the top of the capitalist food chain, the owner lives on profit, extracted from his employees’ surplus value, the wealth that they create but do not receive in pay. What the IRS calls “unearned income” is quite simply that; though they are coddled by the taxman, those who get dividends, interest, and rent are drones indeed, producing nothing whatsoever. Yet they are well-rewarded for their uselessness. In the affluent suburb of my childhood, my mother ruefully commented, “No one gets rich from income, they get rich from investments.” Meanwhile our clothes are made and our produce tended by people working in semi-feudal positions.
     The very most creative work is done by the low-paid (poets, artists, professors, scientists doing pure research). Einstein was on no payroll for his early work developing Relativity nor was Eliot when he wrote The Wasteland. It maligns our species to claim that people will only work to get ahead of their neighbors.
     Perhaps a half-century ago, it became possible for everyone in the world to live in abundance while cutting work hours dramatically. Already two percent of American farmers raise surpluses for all the rest of us. Factory output could be the same. The fact is that without waste we would need work only a brief time every day, freeing ourselves for the unalienated pursuit of individual interests. Instead people starve for lack, not of food, but of money. People fight wars over resources when plenty is available to all.
     Even in this utopian vision, there would doubtless be a few odd ducks who would resent economic democracy. Should someone feel the itch to have more than others, that person might work longer hours, sacrificing time for the sake of a number in a bank account. I suspect his associates would consider him no worse than slightly neurotic, but at any rate harmless. He would, at least, be unable to suck the life from others and despoil the planet as those of similar tastes do today.

Notes on Recent Reading 17 (McCarthy, Chang, Snorri)

Venice Observed (McCarthy)

     Mary McCarthy’s book on Venice is clever, erudite, poetic, and alive with aesthetic judgments. Every reader must pay her attention when she begins her book with a series of pans of la Serenissima: Venice left Stendhal “cold,” to Herbert Spencer St. Mark’s was “barbaric” and the Doge’s Palace “dumpy” and “meaningless,” while D. H. Lawrence wrote of the “abhorrent green, slippery city.” Her treatment of painters is lively and entertaining – full of curious details such as the description of a grand life-size banquet scene designed by Sansovino and constructed by a druggist for the amusement of the French Henry III, this in the middle of a treatment of Veronese. Such grand artificiality is her theme, and she does the best job I know of the exploring the strange conundrum of the visitor who seeks a city’s essence in its “old town” which has no current use but to beguile the visitor’s gaze and to make of its populace touts and waiters if not worse.


Original Teachings of Ch’an Buddhism (Chang Chung-Yuan)

     I am not familiar with any other translation of Shi Daoyuan’s Jǐngdé Chuandenglu (Transmission of the Lamp), a thousand year old record of Zen masters, one of the most important documents of the tradition. The early chapters in which speculative philosophy of the Tiantai and Sanlun schools arising from the work of Nagarjuna seeks ever subtler ways of engaging Ultimate Reality will give any thinker a salutary workout. With this foundation, he is better prepared for the confounding narratives of Mazu Daoyi who valued direct experiential insight and sudden enlightenment over systematic meditative practices, and established a new and distinctly Chinese Buddhism, influential to the present day.
     The book is almost too rich. Who can absorb koan after koan, page after page, each seeking to crack the great nut of the true nature of things? A monk in traditional practice would ponder a single one for weeks. The seeker after Zen on the printed page can do no better than to read and reread and reread again.


Prose Edda (Snorri Sturluson)

     In spite of Wagner’s operas and creditable translation work by William Morris and Auden, and Ursula Dronke’s magisterial though incomplete edition of the Poetic Edda, the Germanic pantheon has suffered from Greco-Roman cultural privilege. The great legacies of the Northland are the sagas written in Iceland that so effectively blend magic and history, hyperbole and understatement, high courage and rank selfishness and the fragments of an encyclopedic mythological system in the Eddas.
     The Prose Edda, which I read in the unambitious Penguin rendering by Jesse Byock, resembles many other primary mythological texts in that it presents little systematic narration. As in Greek and Sanskrit myth, Odin and Thor, Loki and Balder, frost giants and black elves appear in discontinuous incidents or glancing references as often as in connected narratives. The awesome gap between human and divine familiar to followers of Abrahamic religions is absent here. Not only are various orders of being described – Loki, for instance, is neither divine nor human, Baldr is killed, Odin tricked, but, in addition, the whole house of the Aesir face Ragnarok, though the text tells us that beautiful places will remain after the cataclysm. Here is an apocalypse that could coexist with modern physics.
     Those who have attended open poetry readings will find likely the story in which poetry is transmitted with mead made with the body of Kvasir, consumed by Odin, and spit into vats for the use of humanity. Some, however, he happened to expel from his rear: “We call this the bad poets’ portion.”

Sound Poetry and Edith Sitwell’s Façade

Poetry may appeal primarily through description, wit, theme, or melody. Music is a characteristic of all poetry, though its tune may be harsh or pretty or even assertively absent. Ordinarily the sound adds the pleasure of beauty while refining and reinforcing the poem’s sense. Some poems, however, use little sound-value, while for others sound is prominent.


Pure sound poetry – Klangdichtung or bruitisme – has itself a considerable history. Much oral poetry in the indigenous cultures of the American Plains and the Australian outback consists of nonverbal sounds, often repeated over a period of time. Magic spells and religious formulae such as mantras exploit the same mysterious power. Orwell notes (in “Nonsense Poetry”) the appeal of lines in folksong even after their original sense has decayed to meaninglessness. Sound is sovereign in forms as varied as scat singing and speaking in tongues. At certain moments the characters in Greek tragedy explode with wild shrieks, while in Aristophanes strange collocations of sounds (such as the utterances of the chorus of frogs) amuse. The humorous value of semi-articulate utterance is obvious in poems by Christian Morgenstern, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and Hilaire Belloc.


As an avant-garde technique, sound poetry was championed by the Dadaists and Futurists, developed in various directions by later practitioners such as Henri Chopin, Bob Cobbing, and Michael McClure. When performed, such works can savor of spectacle and cast an incantatory power often lost on the page. But what can one identify as a classic of pure sound? Hugo Ball’s “Gadji beri bimba,” which was given a concert setting by Theodore Antoniou and later recorded by the Talking Heads’ David Byrne over an African beat, might be a candidate. It has, at any rate, little competition.


Many readers, though, would champion specific works of what might be called nonsense poetry or amphigouri , in which sound is the privileged element, and conventional syntax camouflages indeterminate, absurd, or rapidly shifting meaning. “Jabberwocky” would be way out front in a poll, I am certain, but my own money would be on the brilliant and delightful sequence Edith Sitwell called Façade. Though critics have sought systematic meaning and personal references in the poems, they strike me as abstract compositions aimed at producing enchanting patterns of sound while also sketching out, with great precision a series of tones or moods. In this the “entertainment,” as Sitwell termed it, resembles, to take a more modern and popular instance, the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in which the series of songs outlines not a narrative sequence but a catalogue of discrete emotional colors, arranged in a becoming succession. Either work is like an evening of elegant cabaret songs.


Though some of the poems were first published in her journal Wheels, the initial public performance in 1923 in which the performers, though on stage, were behind a curtain, and Dame Sitwell spoke through a Sengerphone, a large papier-mache megaphone, was of sufficient novelty to inspire hostile, if hasty, reviews. The author later described the general impression she made as “anything but peaceful. Never, I should think, was a larger and more imposing shower of brickbats hurled at any new work.” Noel Coward stalked out and later wrote a sketch called “The Swiss Family Whittlebot” satirizing the Sitwells. But such was the work’s appeal to unprejudiced ears that even the premiere attracted a good deal of appreciative comment. According to the London Illustrated News, the show “soon induced the audience to listen with breathless attention.”


Façade was first recorded in 1929, but the 1954 recording with Dame Edith herself performing with Peter Pears while Anthony Collins directs the English Opera Group Ensemble is the one to hear. (The work is also available in a version by Pamela Hunter. Kiri te Kanawa recorded three of the lyrics.)


These poems seem to me quite perfect. In each the satisfying music of the words is foregrounded, while sense hovers chimerically rather than being wholly absent. The texts are readily available, but I reprint one below for readers who do not know this singular work.


Hornpipe


Sailors come
To the drum
Out of Babylon;
Hobby-horses
Foam, the dumb
Sky rhinoceros-glum

Watched the courses of the breakers' rocking-horses and with Glaucis,
Lady Venus on the settee of the horsehair sea!
Where Lord Tennyson in laurels wrote a gloria free,
In a borealic iceberg came Victoria; she
Knew Prince Albert's tall memorial took the colours of the floreal
And the borealic iceberg; floating on they see
New-arisen Madam Venus for whose sake from far
Came the fat zebra'd emperor from Zanzibar
Where like golden bouquets lay far Asia, Africa, Cathay,
All laid before that shady lady by the fibroid Shah.
Captain Fracasse stout as any water-butt came, stood
With Sir Bacchus both a-drinking the black tarr'd grapes' blood
Plucked among the tartan leafage
By the furry wind whose grief age
Could not wither - like a squirrel with a gold star-nut.
Queen Victoria sitting shocked upon a rocking horse
Of a wave said to the Laureate, "This minx of course
Is as sharp as any lynx and blacker-deeper than the drinks and quite as
Hot as any Hottentot, without remorse!
For the minx,"
Said she,
"And the drinks,
You can see
Are hot as any hottentot and not the goods for me!"