Friday, July 1, 2016
Horace I.21
Oh, sing Diana now, you tender girls,
and boys, you sing of Cynthus’ long-haired youth!
and of Latona, too, so loved
by Jupiter the strong.
What joy in streams and shady groves,
and all that flows with Algidus’ cold country streams,
the shade on Erymanthus,
the verdure of high Cragus’ woods!
You youths, exalt with praises Tempe’s valley too,
and Delos where Apollo had his birth, that god
whose shoulder bears a quiver
as well as brother Hermes’ lyre.
Away with war’s weeping and wretched famine too
and illness, too, drive off from us and from our king
to Persia or to Britain.
Your words and dancing make these flee.
This is my own translation. Though some poets have attempted quantitative verse in English (notably Spenser and Swinburne), to most ears, their effect is faint and ineffective. Like all before me who have attempted English accentual version s of Greek or Latin quantitative verse (indeed, like all translators), I have settled for something different (and less) than I find in the original. The gap is all the more painfully regrettable in view of the fact that Horace’s chief professional boast (in Odes III, 30) was his importation of Aeolic meters into Italian poetry. To know what that means one must learn to read the patterns of long and short vowels on what ancient prosody was built whether or not one knows Greek and Latin.
My own way is simpler and more well-trod. Indeed, my interest in this particular poem is largely thematic, so even a prose paraphrase would serve. If I have produced anything at all beyond that, I, for one, will deem the translation a success.
Though often an effect of “natural,” colloquial language is considered the polar opposite of artful and literary diction, Horace seems to me to resemble the troubadours in his exemplification of both ends of this spectrum in a single verse. With a tone very nearly as casual as in the Satires, Horace is nonetheless unfailingly decorous, elegant in his music, and purposeful in his word-placement.
Purely because it is so natural in English, I use a generally iambic pattern. Though I do not attempt to duplicate the meters of the original, I do preserve the number of syllables per line in the hope that this practice may transmit something of the poem’s general shape. In addition, I have usually, in spite of the contrast between a strongly inflected original and a weakly inflected target language, retained the content line by line. Though I know that the geographical references will be obscure to many and the mythological allusions to some, I prefer to leave these unchanged. Such proper names are, I think, critically important, even central to a poem like this, and the reader with sufficient interest to have a look at Horace at all will hardly be bothered by having to look up a thing or two.
Thursday, June 2, 2016
Notes and Inserts
I relish the weight of a book, the texture of its paper, the memories of passages associated with a particular place upon a physical page. These elements are, of course, adventitious to the text, though they may be welcome and even harmonious. Annotations by previous readers I find more often annoying than enlightening (though I once enjoyed perusing Northrup Frye’s copy of the Dionysiaca). Even my own notes, when made with an eye to classroom teaching rather than my own study, can get on my nerves. A great-grandfather of mine kept a diary in the margins of a Bible. This may sound like a vivid window to the nineteenth century, but most of the entries simply described the weather. Now and then a particularly memorable dinner – a pot roast, for example – is mentioned. Often the new reader can make little of the heart-felt inscriptions from generations before or the sales receipts used as bookmarks.
Yet other notes and inserted material can be a serendipitous pleasure even for the one who put them there. The crabbed and detailed notes with which I filled my copy of Dylan Thomas my first year at college retains nostalgic if not informative value. My undergraduate Greek textbook records the moment when a fellow scholar was called upon to construe a line and could manage only to stammer, “Man, there’s a whole lotta forms here.” In In the flyleaf of a French Rimbaud are scribbled Metro directions and addresses to destinations that no longer mean anything to me. In my Donald Keene anthology of Japanese literature is a New York Times article about Yukio Mishima’s death, not precisely appropriate, but provocative still and now hallowed and yellowed by age. In my Doubleday Anchor Sappho with the Greek originals and Willis Barnstone translations is a photo of a street sign in Oregon saying “Entering Sappho” and another of the Sappho café in the town of that name. More relevant is a broadsheet of a poem folded into a Ferlinghetti book.
For the purchaser of used books the challenge and reward of reading annotations and inserts are both heightened. On the endpapers and fly leaves of my copy of the Wilhelm I Ching, purchased in late sixties San Francisco, are numerous hexagrams and a few telephone numbers, but also two lists. One is concrete items, perhaps a shopping list: art supplies, truck, boots, sleeping bag. The other is more conceptual: yoga, hypnosis, Rubaiyat, Tarot pack, Brotherhood of Light. A more precise and succinct summary of the book’s context at the time could hardly be composed.
The most complete time capsule I have ever discovered, as edifying as most museum exhibits, lay inside the pages of a copy of the History of the American Working Class by Anthony Bimba. The biography of the author alone provides a significant narrative of American history. An immigrant worker from Lithuania, Bimba was a revolutionary activist in the Socialist Party’s Lithuanian Federation, getting arrested in 1918. He favored the Communist Party from its formation, though he was at times associated with alternative tendencies within the Party. In 1926 he was arrested in Massachusetts not only for sedition, but also for blasphemy, under a law dating from early Puritan days. He never lost his rebel spirit and proved uncooperative before the House Un-American Activities Committee only to find himself facing deportation in the early sixties, but the case was ultimately dropped.
Bimba’s book was published in 1927; my copy is a third printing dated 1934. Who might have bought the book in mid-Depression? The Comintern’s Third Period analysis led to Communist condemnation of all reformers, from liberals to Trotskyites, as “social fascists,” prior to Dimitrov’s declaration of the Popular Front in 1935, and Bimba accordingly fiercely rejects the New Deal as a whole and attacks other left groups such as the Socialist Party. The book closes with warnings of war due to the Nazis and the Japanese militarists.
As it happens the purchaser left the book full of papers and documents that detail his own identity and add detailed historical data to the text of the book itself. There is, for instance, a receipt for tuition at NYU bearing the payer’s name David Kaplan [1] and noting the payment of $47 in “fees” and $7 for athletics. Several inserted pages are covered with very small handwriting in pencil, what are surely class notes. It looks as though Mr. Kaplan was taking education courses and perhaps psychology as well.
A leaflet for a May Day rally in New York’s Union Square calls for “Young Workers and Students” “Negro and White” to “join the great parade.” Another, very likely from the same May Day invites people to evening “Communist celebrations” on Brooklyn and the Bronx. In answer to the question “why do we march” the leaflet mentions labor conditions and the threat of war, condemning Roosevelt right along with Father Coughlin and “the fascist labor-hater Hearst.”
Hearst is in fact the focus of a flyer for an “Anti-Hearst Meeting” sponsored by the NYU Anti-War Committee in February of 1935 featuring five professors as well as speakers from the Daily Worker and the Socialist Party. On the back in faint marks is discernable the legend “TipToe thru the Tulips with Me,” a song that had been popular since topping the chart for months in 1929. Another copy of the anti-Hearst announcement bears what looks like a list of pop songs: “When I’m in Your Arms,” “Never Was a Better Night for Making Love,” and “Nothing LIves Longer than Love,” concluding with “Old Man Rhythm,” from a 1935 movie of the same name with Betty Grable.
Another sheet has a detailed outline for an essay on mining engineering, doubtless work toward a research paper assignment in a composition class. Notes on education cover the back of a torn sheet bearing advertisements for four Brooklyn businesses suggesting the radical young student lived in Brooklyn.
A red leaflet from the NYU chapter of the National Student League bears a call for an anti-war strike on April 12. This document notes rather confusingly that “we believe that any faculty member who has been outstanding in the fight for student rights should be allowed to speak” and yet “in the interests of the unity [sic], we whole-heartedly subscribe to the decision of the Anti-War Committee that there be no faculty speakers. On the verso of this sheet is the s through w section of a list of vocabulary words and their phonetic spellings, including some slightly out-of-the-way terms such as “truculent” and “virago” but also such simple words as “vineyard” and “wreath.”
An unlined page records Kaplan’s notes on what sounds like the elementary level of political lectures: “C. P. is exp. of class struggle.” Exponent? Experienced? What does the “of” suggest? Other notes are clearer, though equally terse: “a party of action,” “mass strikes,” “against militarism and imperialism.” On the other side of the same sheet are notes on left groups in America since “the war.”
On the edge of this May Day flyer is written, “Geoffrey Chaucer of Eng. John L. Lowes,” surely a reference to John Livingston Lowes’ book simply titled Chaucer which had come out in 1934. [2] It is a pleasure to reflect that the liberal education of the day included a close look at Middle English, perhaps a closer look than even English majors manage these days.
Near this academic memo are two more obscure notes. I believe their charm is best preserved without my communicating the speculations I cannot wholly suppress. One coyly asks (without a question mark), “Would you like to dip it in.” And a short distance away the student reminded himself (with the use if four sets of ditto marks), “never to dream, never to remember, never to forget.”
I enjoyed the alternations between university study and Marxist sympathies on the one hand and popular culture and romance on the other. One could only wonder what became of this bright young man, engaged in learning and social justice, very likely the child of immigrants, after he completed his studies at NYU.
Unlikely though the search seemed, I found an obituary for Mr. Kaplan. This was only possible because he had written his name including a middle initial “B.” on the top of his copy of The History of May Day, a 1932 pamphlet by Alexander Trachtenberg, the founder of International Publishers. He had completed college and left the city, though he didn’t stray far. He taught high school social studies for decades. Though I found no trace of later radicalism, as a teacher he was always active in his union and professional organizations often assuming positions of responsibility and leadership.
In the years since I bought this book, I have not read it. Perhaps I never will. Yet it could be that the notes and inserts sketch out an even more detailed portrait of the mid-1930s in America than Mr. Bimba provides in its text.
1. This is a pseudonym. The actual name was, like Kaplan, one common among European Jews.
2. Marchette Chute’s popular biography Geoffrey Chaucer of England did not come out until 1946. Lowes is best known for his exemplary source research in The Road to Xanadu.
Yet other notes and inserted material can be a serendipitous pleasure even for the one who put them there. The crabbed and detailed notes with which I filled my copy of Dylan Thomas my first year at college retains nostalgic if not informative value. My undergraduate Greek textbook records the moment when a fellow scholar was called upon to construe a line and could manage only to stammer, “Man, there’s a whole lotta forms here.” In In the flyleaf of a French Rimbaud are scribbled Metro directions and addresses to destinations that no longer mean anything to me. In my Donald Keene anthology of Japanese literature is a New York Times article about Yukio Mishima’s death, not precisely appropriate, but provocative still and now hallowed and yellowed by age. In my Doubleday Anchor Sappho with the Greek originals and Willis Barnstone translations is a photo of a street sign in Oregon saying “Entering Sappho” and another of the Sappho café in the town of that name. More relevant is a broadsheet of a poem folded into a Ferlinghetti book.
For the purchaser of used books the challenge and reward of reading annotations and inserts are both heightened. On the endpapers and fly leaves of my copy of the Wilhelm I Ching, purchased in late sixties San Francisco, are numerous hexagrams and a few telephone numbers, but also two lists. One is concrete items, perhaps a shopping list: art supplies, truck, boots, sleeping bag. The other is more conceptual: yoga, hypnosis, Rubaiyat, Tarot pack, Brotherhood of Light. A more precise and succinct summary of the book’s context at the time could hardly be composed.
The most complete time capsule I have ever discovered, as edifying as most museum exhibits, lay inside the pages of a copy of the History of the American Working Class by Anthony Bimba. The biography of the author alone provides a significant narrative of American history. An immigrant worker from Lithuania, Bimba was a revolutionary activist in the Socialist Party’s Lithuanian Federation, getting arrested in 1918. He favored the Communist Party from its formation, though he was at times associated with alternative tendencies within the Party. In 1926 he was arrested in Massachusetts not only for sedition, but also for blasphemy, under a law dating from early Puritan days. He never lost his rebel spirit and proved uncooperative before the House Un-American Activities Committee only to find himself facing deportation in the early sixties, but the case was ultimately dropped.
Bimba’s book was published in 1927; my copy is a third printing dated 1934. Who might have bought the book in mid-Depression? The Comintern’s Third Period analysis led to Communist condemnation of all reformers, from liberals to Trotskyites, as “social fascists,” prior to Dimitrov’s declaration of the Popular Front in 1935, and Bimba accordingly fiercely rejects the New Deal as a whole and attacks other left groups such as the Socialist Party. The book closes with warnings of war due to the Nazis and the Japanese militarists.
As it happens the purchaser left the book full of papers and documents that detail his own identity and add detailed historical data to the text of the book itself. There is, for instance, a receipt for tuition at NYU bearing the payer’s name David Kaplan [1] and noting the payment of $47 in “fees” and $7 for athletics. Several inserted pages are covered with very small handwriting in pencil, what are surely class notes. It looks as though Mr. Kaplan was taking education courses and perhaps psychology as well.
A leaflet for a May Day rally in New York’s Union Square calls for “Young Workers and Students” “Negro and White” to “join the great parade.” Another, very likely from the same May Day invites people to evening “Communist celebrations” on Brooklyn and the Bronx. In answer to the question “why do we march” the leaflet mentions labor conditions and the threat of war, condemning Roosevelt right along with Father Coughlin and “the fascist labor-hater Hearst.”
Hearst is in fact the focus of a flyer for an “Anti-Hearst Meeting” sponsored by the NYU Anti-War Committee in February of 1935 featuring five professors as well as speakers from the Daily Worker and the Socialist Party. On the back in faint marks is discernable the legend “TipToe thru the Tulips with Me,” a song that had been popular since topping the chart for months in 1929. Another copy of the anti-Hearst announcement bears what looks like a list of pop songs: “When I’m in Your Arms,” “Never Was a Better Night for Making Love,” and “Nothing LIves Longer than Love,” concluding with “Old Man Rhythm,” from a 1935 movie of the same name with Betty Grable.
Another sheet has a detailed outline for an essay on mining engineering, doubtless work toward a research paper assignment in a composition class. Notes on education cover the back of a torn sheet bearing advertisements for four Brooklyn businesses suggesting the radical young student lived in Brooklyn.
A red leaflet from the NYU chapter of the National Student League bears a call for an anti-war strike on April 12. This document notes rather confusingly that “we believe that any faculty member who has been outstanding in the fight for student rights should be allowed to speak” and yet “in the interests of the unity [sic], we whole-heartedly subscribe to the decision of the Anti-War Committee that there be no faculty speakers. On the verso of this sheet is the s through w section of a list of vocabulary words and their phonetic spellings, including some slightly out-of-the-way terms such as “truculent” and “virago” but also such simple words as “vineyard” and “wreath.”
An unlined page records Kaplan’s notes on what sounds like the elementary level of political lectures: “C. P. is exp. of class struggle.” Exponent? Experienced? What does the “of” suggest? Other notes are clearer, though equally terse: “a party of action,” “mass strikes,” “against militarism and imperialism.” On the other side of the same sheet are notes on left groups in America since “the war.”
On the edge of this May Day flyer is written, “Geoffrey Chaucer of Eng. John L. Lowes,” surely a reference to John Livingston Lowes’ book simply titled Chaucer which had come out in 1934. [2] It is a pleasure to reflect that the liberal education of the day included a close look at Middle English, perhaps a closer look than even English majors manage these days.
Near this academic memo are two more obscure notes. I believe their charm is best preserved without my communicating the speculations I cannot wholly suppress. One coyly asks (without a question mark), “Would you like to dip it in.” And a short distance away the student reminded himself (with the use if four sets of ditto marks), “never to dream, never to remember, never to forget.”
I enjoyed the alternations between university study and Marxist sympathies on the one hand and popular culture and romance on the other. One could only wonder what became of this bright young man, engaged in learning and social justice, very likely the child of immigrants, after he completed his studies at NYU.
Unlikely though the search seemed, I found an obituary for Mr. Kaplan. This was only possible because he had written his name including a middle initial “B.” on the top of his copy of The History of May Day, a 1932 pamphlet by Alexander Trachtenberg, the founder of International Publishers. He had completed college and left the city, though he didn’t stray far. He taught high school social studies for decades. Though I found no trace of later radicalism, as a teacher he was always active in his union and professional organizations often assuming positions of responsibility and leadership.
In the years since I bought this book, I have not read it. Perhaps I never will. Yet it could be that the notes and inserts sketch out an even more detailed portrait of the mid-1930s in America than Mr. Bimba provides in its text.
1. This is a pseudonym. The actual name was, like Kaplan, one common among European Jews.
2. Marchette Chute’s popular biography Geoffrey Chaucer of England did not come out until 1946. Lowes is best known for his exemplary source research in The Road to Xanadu.
Drugs and Religion
Though not a review, the following essay is in part based on my reading of the remarkable volume by R. Gordon Wasson Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), part I, chapter 7. Wasson was the vice-president of J. P. Morgan as well as an important investigator of psychedelic substances. His 1957 Life magazine article in “Seeking the Magic Mushroom” about psilocybin experiences was ground-breaking.
Religion is universal. Around the globe during all eras, people have believed in the existence of invisible beings and unreachable realms. No sooner are supernatural beings conceived than they begin to have love affairs and rivalries with each other and with the human race. Though most of our conclusions are based on observed reality, in this one area one is told it is meritorious to accept the tenets current in one’s own area based on faith alone. Ultimately sophisticated philosophers – Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim alike -- may draw a vision of reality that sheds much of the accumulated mythological tradition or interprets it symbolically, but the base of belief in religious issues is clearly not fact-based as it is for all other sorts of knowledge. What can be the source of this odd phenomenon?
Burial customs indicate that belief in the unproven, in an afterlife for example, reaches deep into the Palaeolithic, probably all the way back to the invention of language which enables lies and the depiction of the unseen. An entire discipline developed based on methods of gaining access to the spiritual realm through alteration of consciousness. Those Aurignacian hunters crawled through lengthy dark chambers to do rituals by lamplight most likely to the hypnotic beat of music. Ascetic practices such as fasting and sleeplessness are common in both East and West. Prayer, meditation, chanting, and recitation serve much the same purposes. All of these techniques strive to break the ordinary assumptions that serve practical human survival needs, allowing the practitioner to reach possibilities otherwise inaccessible.
Among the tools people have used to pursue a connection with Ultimate Reality are what advocates like to call entheogens, meaning plants that seem to awaken the divine within. Their fundamental function is no different from that of the other methods of alteration of consciousness: to shake up the received ideas that habitually serve the individual daily practical ends and to allow for the development of a stronger connection to the cosmos. The shamanic hallucinogens used in Siberia and in the Americas and the cannabis used by Shaivite devotees fall into this category as does the bhang lassi consumed by masses at Shivaratri and the substances used by such modern groups as Rastfarianians, members of the Uniao do Vegetal, and the Native American Church. Those with a long history may seem more legitimate than such recent formations as the Temple of the True Inner Light, the Church of the Awakening, or the League for Spiritual Discovery in either its original or reborn version, but all use the same tool to alter consciousness.
Other human uses of psychoactive materials have also been widespread, of course. In every place and time, people have consumed mind-altering substances, sometimes as an anodyne to cope with suffering or as a euphoriant to enhance well-being, sometimes for therapeutic reasons. Use as an aid to spiritual growth is distinct from these practices.
The generalization that religious truths are by their very nature not amenable to logical demonstration is true all the more of mystical openings, so I would not attempt to defend the truth or even the value of the prayer, meditation, mortification of the flesh, or drugs. My aim is simply to place chemical methods on a par with the rest.
Culturally shaped expectations are critically important in all use of entheogens. A participant in a Sioux sweat lodge ceremony enters only after hearing the reports of others and systematic personal preparation. The event is under the guidance of an experienced leader. No less rigorous arrangements are customary among the traditional users of peyote, psilocybin, ayahuasca, or kava. Contemporary use of these substances by outsiders is frequently haphazardly careless, sometimes to the point of danger, but risk is virtually absent for those for whom what once were called psychedelics is normative.
In a sense such psychotropic substances are at the root of human spirituality. Without considering the significant scholarly disagreement as to exact dating, it is safe to say that the Sanskrit Vedas are the oldest religious writing associated with a surviving cult. The strength of the tradition is such that even today’s casual visitor cannot avoid encounter its manifestations at every turn in India. Staying by the Ganges in Varanasi across the lane from a sort of saddhus’ dormitory, I believe there were three Shiva lingams within fifty feet of my door, each the recipient of daily offerings. Holy men took up seats all along the river and through the night one could hear chanting and praying. From what wellsprings might such potent and longlasting effects arise?
R. Gordon Wasson suggests “that the whole of Indian mystical practice from the Upanişads through the more mechanical methods of yoga is merely an attempt to recapture the vision granted by the Soma plant” and this “the nature of that vision – and of that plant – underlies the whole of Indian religion.” And is Indian religion not a wellspring for much of the world with Buddhism spreading east and a thousand influences percolating through Persian and Indian lands to reach Europe both before and after Alexander had interviewed the gymnosophists. One need not entirely endorse Wasson’s enthusiasm for the amanita muscaria, but his thesis is a salutary correction to the moralists who consider the ingestion of entheogens to be an activity altogether different, and less admirable, than the practice of yoga or meditation. Are they not sister technologies, each aimed at assisting the mortal to glimpse a longer view?
The drug personified as Soma was a significant deity in Vedic times. The Soma Mandala of the Rig Veda contains a hundred and fourteen hymns in praise of the marvelous substance. Its use was evidently brought to the Indian subcontinent by the Aryan invaders in the second millennium BCE. The same drug is praised as haoma in the Zoroastrian Avesta. When Zarathustra encounters haoma in Yasna 9 the personified drug is praised for his beauty and his role as the driver out of death. The use of this chemical followed the example of Yima in the Golden Age as well as a host of other heroes and legendary figures. “Praise be to thee, O Haoma, (for he makes the poor man's thoughts as great as any of the richest whomsoever.” (Avesta 10.13)
The Vedas describe soma as radiant and golden. It is compared to a bull (and, somewhat contradictorily) to an udder and to the sun. It is a single eye, and it is a navel. Identified with health, insight, and everlasting life, Soma is the most compelling deity in the Vedic pantheon.
Considerable dispute exists concerning the identity of this plant, whose preparation and consumption are described in some detail, though not always consistently. Scholars have suggested cannabis, amanita muscaria, psilocybin, ephedra, even opium and alcohol, as likely candidates, but the issue remains unresolved. Some recent authors have made the reasonable suggestion that the same term was used to refer to several plants, and thus could be only loosely defined a plant with ritual usage. What cannot be doubted is that this entheogen is one of the most significant elements of early Indian spirituality.
We have no objection to taking drugs to protect our physical health, yet, in spite of the example of self-experimenting researchers like Humphry Davy, William James, and Aldous Huxley, many frown upon their use as aids to philosophy or religion. All religions consist of symbolic systems of myth, narrative, lyric, pictorial and other arts that allow people to feel some grasp of the cosmic. Their efficacy in practice is evident as religion is coextensive with humanity for the last forty thousand years, yet it seems clear that the imagination must be jump-started by some alteration of consciousness, though this role is sometimes delegated to shamans, priests, or bikkhus. As the medically therapeutic potential of what once were called psychedelic drugs receives renewed interest, so should their spiritual and philosophic value.
Religion is universal. Around the globe during all eras, people have believed in the existence of invisible beings and unreachable realms. No sooner are supernatural beings conceived than they begin to have love affairs and rivalries with each other and with the human race. Though most of our conclusions are based on observed reality, in this one area one is told it is meritorious to accept the tenets current in one’s own area based on faith alone. Ultimately sophisticated philosophers – Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim alike -- may draw a vision of reality that sheds much of the accumulated mythological tradition or interprets it symbolically, but the base of belief in religious issues is clearly not fact-based as it is for all other sorts of knowledge. What can be the source of this odd phenomenon?
Burial customs indicate that belief in the unproven, in an afterlife for example, reaches deep into the Palaeolithic, probably all the way back to the invention of language which enables lies and the depiction of the unseen. An entire discipline developed based on methods of gaining access to the spiritual realm through alteration of consciousness. Those Aurignacian hunters crawled through lengthy dark chambers to do rituals by lamplight most likely to the hypnotic beat of music. Ascetic practices such as fasting and sleeplessness are common in both East and West. Prayer, meditation, chanting, and recitation serve much the same purposes. All of these techniques strive to break the ordinary assumptions that serve practical human survival needs, allowing the practitioner to reach possibilities otherwise inaccessible.
Among the tools people have used to pursue a connection with Ultimate Reality are what advocates like to call entheogens, meaning plants that seem to awaken the divine within. Their fundamental function is no different from that of the other methods of alteration of consciousness: to shake up the received ideas that habitually serve the individual daily practical ends and to allow for the development of a stronger connection to the cosmos. The shamanic hallucinogens used in Siberia and in the Americas and the cannabis used by Shaivite devotees fall into this category as does the bhang lassi consumed by masses at Shivaratri and the substances used by such modern groups as Rastfarianians, members of the Uniao do Vegetal, and the Native American Church. Those with a long history may seem more legitimate than such recent formations as the Temple of the True Inner Light, the Church of the Awakening, or the League for Spiritual Discovery in either its original or reborn version, but all use the same tool to alter consciousness.
Other human uses of psychoactive materials have also been widespread, of course. In every place and time, people have consumed mind-altering substances, sometimes as an anodyne to cope with suffering or as a euphoriant to enhance well-being, sometimes for therapeutic reasons. Use as an aid to spiritual growth is distinct from these practices.
The generalization that religious truths are by their very nature not amenable to logical demonstration is true all the more of mystical openings, so I would not attempt to defend the truth or even the value of the prayer, meditation, mortification of the flesh, or drugs. My aim is simply to place chemical methods on a par with the rest.
Culturally shaped expectations are critically important in all use of entheogens. A participant in a Sioux sweat lodge ceremony enters only after hearing the reports of others and systematic personal preparation. The event is under the guidance of an experienced leader. No less rigorous arrangements are customary among the traditional users of peyote, psilocybin, ayahuasca, or kava. Contemporary use of these substances by outsiders is frequently haphazardly careless, sometimes to the point of danger, but risk is virtually absent for those for whom what once were called psychedelics is normative.
In a sense such psychotropic substances are at the root of human spirituality. Without considering the significant scholarly disagreement as to exact dating, it is safe to say that the Sanskrit Vedas are the oldest religious writing associated with a surviving cult. The strength of the tradition is such that even today’s casual visitor cannot avoid encounter its manifestations at every turn in India. Staying by the Ganges in Varanasi across the lane from a sort of saddhus’ dormitory, I believe there were three Shiva lingams within fifty feet of my door, each the recipient of daily offerings. Holy men took up seats all along the river and through the night one could hear chanting and praying. From what wellsprings might such potent and longlasting effects arise?
R. Gordon Wasson suggests “that the whole of Indian mystical practice from the Upanişads through the more mechanical methods of yoga is merely an attempt to recapture the vision granted by the Soma plant” and this “the nature of that vision – and of that plant – underlies the whole of Indian religion.” And is Indian religion not a wellspring for much of the world with Buddhism spreading east and a thousand influences percolating through Persian and Indian lands to reach Europe both before and after Alexander had interviewed the gymnosophists. One need not entirely endorse Wasson’s enthusiasm for the amanita muscaria, but his thesis is a salutary correction to the moralists who consider the ingestion of entheogens to be an activity altogether different, and less admirable, than the practice of yoga or meditation. Are they not sister technologies, each aimed at assisting the mortal to glimpse a longer view?
The drug personified as Soma was a significant deity in Vedic times. The Soma Mandala of the Rig Veda contains a hundred and fourteen hymns in praise of the marvelous substance. Its use was evidently brought to the Indian subcontinent by the Aryan invaders in the second millennium BCE. The same drug is praised as haoma in the Zoroastrian Avesta. When Zarathustra encounters haoma in Yasna 9 the personified drug is praised for his beauty and his role as the driver out of death. The use of this chemical followed the example of Yima in the Golden Age as well as a host of other heroes and legendary figures. “Praise be to thee, O Haoma, (for he makes the poor man's thoughts as great as any of the richest whomsoever.” (Avesta 10.13)
The Vedas describe soma as radiant and golden. It is compared to a bull (and, somewhat contradictorily) to an udder and to the sun. It is a single eye, and it is a navel. Identified with health, insight, and everlasting life, Soma is the most compelling deity in the Vedic pantheon.
Considerable dispute exists concerning the identity of this plant, whose preparation and consumption are described in some detail, though not always consistently. Scholars have suggested cannabis, amanita muscaria, psilocybin, ephedra, even opium and alcohol, as likely candidates, but the issue remains unresolved. Some recent authors have made the reasonable suggestion that the same term was used to refer to several plants, and thus could be only loosely defined a plant with ritual usage. What cannot be doubted is that this entheogen is one of the most significant elements of early Indian spirituality.
We have no objection to taking drugs to protect our physical health, yet, in spite of the example of self-experimenting researchers like Humphry Davy, William James, and Aldous Huxley, many frown upon their use as aids to philosophy or religion. All religions consist of symbolic systems of myth, narrative, lyric, pictorial and other arts that allow people to feel some grasp of the cosmic. Their efficacy in practice is evident as religion is coextensive with humanity for the last forty thousand years, yet it seems clear that the imagination must be jump-started by some alteration of consciousness, though this role is sometimes delegated to shamans, priests, or bikkhus. As the medically therapeutic potential of what once were called psychedelic drugs receives renewed interest, so should their spiritual and philosophic value.
The Pleasures of the Familiar in Literature
I have been reading Cooper's The Spy, enjoying it, and wondering why. Cooper is certainly vulnerable to criticism yet even D. H. Lawrence whose scorn could be withering devoted two chapters to him (as he did to Hawthorne and Melville) and declared he loved the Leatherstocking books dearly. [1] Writers like Cooper and Scott (his most significant model) are sometimes today dismissed as children's authors, though it would be an odd twenty-first century child who would relish their prose. Other popular novelists such as Dickens can rise to true greatness through capacious imagination, sophisticated imagery, and melodious rhetoric. Even the rapidly produced best-sellers of Trollope are richer by far and, for all the author's acceptance of received ideas, develop more complex characters (though the scene be fuzzed by genial rose-colored glasses). What motive, then, beyond literary history and American nationality, attracts me to this author whose very writing career is said to be accidental?
Quite clearly Cooper's heroes are unalloyed in their heroism, his damsels fainting and compassionate, his villains irredeemable. The descriptions of nature are conventional and workmanlike, but, for all the desire to establish a distinctly American literature, never very individualized or memorable. His themes are utterly reductive. I would readily agree that the ambiguous and the mysterious define a particular realm for literature inaccessible to other forms of discourse, and that one function of art is to unsettle preconceptions and to suggest new insight. Innovation and novelty are surely essential to the development of fiction over time, and a beauty that makes the reader weak in the knees is a characteristic of the highest prose.
Yet these qualities are characteristic of only a portion of worthy fiction. Though the Romantic era and the Modernists celebrate novelty, art also seeks to transmit a culture's matured ideas, its preconceptions, if you will. For most readers a competence in a recognizable style is preferable to idiosyncrasy and obscurity. Familiarity is more appealing than originality which may strike the consumer as nothing but gratuitous obscurity. For millennia oral narrative was predominantly of the "conservative" sort, understood by everybody, and this remained true until very recent times in folk stories, religious stories, and legends. Under contemporary capitalist conditions most people consume mass art in movies, television shows, best-selling novels, comic books and the like, all of them highly conventional forms. Surely hundreds of Americans could retell the story of Breaking Bad for one who might know about Harvey Birch, the double agent of the American Revolution. Yet the fan of HBO and the admirer of Cooper have a great deal in common despite their separation in time. The student of literature, in particular the literary theoretician, can ill afford to ignore the bulk of fiction to focus only on the elite transgressors and code-breakers.
Lawrence was typical of many artists since the Romantic era in his rejection of the typical. To him the social consensus is inevitably a lie. Thus to him Cooper is that thing despicable because conformist and conventional, a “gentleman.” He describes Cooper's work as “a wish-fulfilment” and the author as “a correct, clock- work man,” who “stayed very safe inside the old skin.” Lawrence, of course, was a Modern, one of those whose entire program is rebellious and contrarian. Such values are neither the whole of art nor necessarily characteristic of the finest works.
A great many texts confirm readers' expectations not because of the audience's lesser intellectual powers but because in this way they fulfill a function of art at least as important as the criticism of assumptions, the laying bare of contradictions, irrationalities, and mysteries, and the forging of new literary techniques. Indeed, the concentration of prestige on works that strive for the new and contentiously condemn the ordinary has led to the marginalization of literature itself in contemporary society. Though I am a lifelong admirer of Rimbaud, Pound, and the Dadaists, I realize that they are grouped around one end of the spectrum and that literature as a whole comprehends the entire range from conventional to unconventional. If Cooper has a low reputation among such of the Mandarins as have not specialized in the study of his work, the fact is due to the fact that his work is located rather far toward the less currently fashionable side of the spectrum.
There is a pleasure to hearing the relation of what one already thinks one knows. All works are a mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar, and the more conventional are more clear and easily read, their comparative predictability and simplicity requiring less mental work. Just as in relation to physical exercise, one would scarcely care for either constant languor or constant exertion. The traveler may relish new sights and contacts, but most people prefer those the friends and scenes they have seen countless times best of all, and in all eras the most widely read works have relied heavily on convention.
Furthermore, there is an unquestionable aesthetic pleasure in iteration itself. One may be delighted by the unexpected, but in life and in art, the deep pleasures of the familiar are far more common. Listeners prefer mediocre musical works with repetitions, themes and variations, to the most sophisticated modern non-repeating compositions. People applaud the mere appearance of a favorite character in television situation comedies because they know what will follow. In a sense they are cheering for their own competence. Popular art, oral narrative, religious ritual, and the like all appeal specifically because of their familiarity. We never entirely lose the child's welcoming reception of the words "once upon a time." It is a promise of what will follow including, in modern times at least, a satisfying happy ending, implying that all is right with the world. Lawrence would have sneered.
The pleasure in formal iteration is paralleled by a similar pleasure in having one's opinions confirmed by a story’s themes. The values and worldview of a culture are codified and transmitted through art that stresses what many have in common. In oral cultures through Homer stories regularly suggest the ideas on which all agree. Perhaps the most dramatic expression of this fact is n religious scriptures, accepted as absolutely true and taught to every successive generation.
Though associating with those of similar views is a universal habit, its opposite occurs as well in modern culture: the enjoyment of peculiar or perverse ideas which the reader does not in fact share. This taste is the basis of the popularity of the antihero in the modern era and the celebration of bizarre yet talented artists such as Artaud and Burroughs.
Even if one does not share the author's opinions, the mere fact of encountering easily decoded values persists. A non-Christian may read George Herbert or even Aquinas and enjoy knowing an odd doctrine such as the Trinity without in the least believing in its truth. I love decoding familiar iconography in Christian and Hindu more than encountering enigmas. Though my values are not those of Dr. Johnson, I savor his sympathetically.
What does this mean in practice? Cooper's prose style, though it displays the elaborate syntax and lengthy periods characteristic of the educated Latinate mode of the day, has very few figures of speech apart from a few so conventional as to be barely perceptible. His writing has, in fact, little individuality; indeed, a unique or unexpected turn of phrase would be out of place.
Characters have few traits, but those few are constantly repeated. This Wharton père is invariably concerned about his estate and, secondarily, about his daughters. The girls' lovers are exemplars of honor, manliness, and courtesy. Caesar is always the loyal servant except for those occasions when he is rattled or superstitious. Birch is never mentioned without making a point of his enigmatic behavior. One learns nothing new or surprising about any following an initial appearance.
In terms of theme, as well, Cooper could hardly be simpler. The American revolutionaries are in the right, and Frances is more acute than her sister for her partisanship. Yet British and Americans alike may be honorable, may be in fact “gentlemen,” though it is the higher classes that possess most virtues in either case. The Cowboys and Skinners and Nancy Haynes are fair examples of the meanness of society's lower ranks.
Clever and rich as it may be, few people are likely ever to read Finnegan's Wake, whereas the more mildly innovative Portrait of the Artist will always find readers, recreational as well as academic. The disparity does not arise from the public's laziness, nor is the more elite work necessarily of higher value. Indeed, it is only though convention that many of the ends of literature are obtainable. If Cooper is to a considerable degree an imitator of earlier models, he is no different from artists of all times and places. The stigma attached to convention has been so magnified in the last few hundred years that it has come to seem self-evident and natural. Oral and popular literature have enjoyed a resurgence of serious consideration in recent decades. Perhaps the time has come to reconsider the second-rate status assigned to writers like Cooper.
1. References to Lawrence are to his masterful and entertaining Studies in Classic American Literature which, for all its foibles, I find to be virtually always on the mark.
2. The spy of the title is an exception. In his case, though, he is presumed to have only mercenary ends, and it is precisely the unlikeliness of his heroism that allows his subterfuge to succeed. George Washington who appears disguised and then overshadows the action like a deity is no perfect because his social status is so high.
Sunday, May 1, 2016
Epiphanies in Dubliners
I concur with the conventional literary historians who credit Chekhov and Joyce for developing the modern short story that does not rely on highly dramatic events but finds greater meaning in the depiction of something that looks like a typical tranche de vie. The stories in Joyce’s Dubliners not only lack remarkable characters and highly dramatic incidents, they are written in a finely crafted but generally ordinary, slightly elevated style mixed with colloquial dialogue with none of the idiosyncrasies of Ulysses (not to mention Finnegan’s Wake).
One might justify the presentation of open-ended narratives of what could pass for “ordinary” people by simply noting that a life is defined more by its mundane, oft-repeated routines than by the few dramatic intrusions of drama such as combat or crime. Yet this approach is not what Joyce had in mind. His own rationale was based on his ill-defined notion of “epiphanies,” or revelatory moments which may occur either during life crises or during days that seem outwardly unremarkable.
Joyce’s concept of epiphanies recurs in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegan’s Wake, as well as in a list he kept of such moments, but the fullest exposition occurs in Stephen Hero. There Stephen tells his friend Cranly that the artist must be ever watchful for “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.” To him the “spiritual eye’s is always “groping” “to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised.” With his Thomistic training, Stephen identifies “claritas” which is “quidditas” with the moment of epiphany. [1] The “thing which it is,” the whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.”
In this form the epiphany could be suggested by anything at all, just as Zen masters identify the Buddha indifferently with a staff, a flower, a hedge, or a shit-stick. Yet often readers discount the incidental details and seek an epiphany in a story’s climax (though the conflict may be primarily a psychomachia). Thus, to some a Joycean epiphany is a moment of unusual insight or realization, the turning point, perhaps, of a life. Even this second definition has two forms depending on whether the insight occurs for the character or for the reader.
Yet the notes in fact labeled “Epiphanies” and eventually published with Joyce’s Poems and Shorter Writings, while they are clearly raw material for his fiction [2], fit none of these three definitions well. Most of the moments he recorded in his list labeled are to some extent vague and confused, fragmentary and obscure, seemingly a far remove from claritas. Though Joyce made use of many of these brief notes to enhance his fiction’s verisimilitude, none indicate any revelation to the people observed.
This range of possible definitions might, however, all be suggested by stories in Dubliners. For a majority of the narratives, the characters experience no clear self-realization. Little occurs in “The Sisters.” The story is centered not in Father Flynn’s death itself but in the tone of unease, paralysis, and corruption. Surely the boys’ experience in “An Encounter,” while it doubtless struck them as odd, made little impact. “Araby” likewise might be a day little differing from the average in the protagonist’s life. Frustration over the bazaar seems only too routine to the protagonist. This daily repeated disappointment is in fact the theme. Nothing will change. “After the Race” is fundamentally a sketch of the absurdity of Jimmy’s social climbing. The dawning of the day is accompanied by no new realization on Jimmy’s part. For him even his remorse is already discounted, part of the price he will pay for what seems to him classy company. The two very unchivalric young men of "Two Gallants" are surely acting as they habitually do. The evening is representative rather than exceptional. In “Clay” the loveless Maria who sings “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls” is unchanged in her pitiful isolation, the church being her only solace against death. “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” describes habitually time-serving political operatives for whom this election is little different from those past and yet to come. The struggle of “A Mother” describes what is surely habitual behavior for Mrs. Kearny. In all of these, as in Becket, the lack of movement is the point. It is the very absence of an epiphany from the point of view of the characters that is significant. The reader may see their paralysis plainly, but for the participants the narrated episodes bring nothing new either in circumstances or in self-consciousness.
In others the story does retain something of a traditional narrative arc, including a dramatic crisis though still often without suggesting much potential of insight for the main characters. “The Boarding House,” for instance, represents a competition of venality, in which Mrs. Mooney ‘s self-interest wins out over Mr. Doran’s irresponsibility as Polly sits by passively. There is a decisive moment, albeit just after the story ends, implying a lifelong marriage marred from the start, but there is no indication that the view of any of the characters is broader or more accurate as a result. “A Little Cloud” depicts Chandler’s fecklessness, too shy to read poetry to his wife, and his envy of his more successful literary friend Gallaher. He does seem to have some measure of self-realization at the end when, Byron even having failed him in his attempt to kindle warmth from his wife and he bursts into tears at the end. Farrington in “Counterparts” seems as though he may have “hit bottom,” though the reader cannot tell whether this descent may have been repeated often in the past. At any rate the wretched clerk seems as gripped by his self-destructive patterns at the end as at the start. In “A Painful Case” Duffy nurses “unacted desire,” holding back from an affair only to regret it when his would-be lover dies, perhaps a suicide. Here one might guess that his reflections lead to some sort of reevaluation, though whether it is to be productive remains uncertain. The intervention of Kernan’s friends to bring him to a retreat in “Grace” carries no guarantee of change and the glimpse the reader has of it provides little basis for hope. The likeliest case for an epiphany in the sense of an awakening to self-knowledge is perhaps the poignant tale of "Eveline." When the title character falls back in fear and fails to follow her suitor abroad, she may perhaps know herself better, though only in defeat.
"The Dead" I believe to be in a class by itself, since it is longer, more complex, and concludes with a substantial interior monologue and a bravura rhetorical flourish. Gabriel, unlike most of the characters in Dubliners is clearly processing his thoughts, seeking equilibrium in the face of his wife’s lost love for another, while retaining generosity toward her, unlike most of the petty or weak characters of the other stories. In this story the main character and the reader find weighty meaning in events that, to a casual observer or outside of a work of literature), might seem unexceptional.
Yet surely for most readers to overwhelming impact of Dubliners has little to do with individual psychology or anyone’s insights. The strongest effect of the book is its tone. Virtually all of the characters are weak, selfish, incompetent, blinkered, depressed, caught in a meaningless repetition of activities that fails to exercise their abilities or humanity. The oppressive weight of the church and the British government merely add new layers to the purgatorial existence they have built for themselves. Joyce’s tone would be nihilistic in its lack of values were it not so deeply sympathetic to the city of the damned the reader encounters in Dubliners. The Magi were greeted with a glorious epiphany, but for Joyce that Christian confidence is lost, and the twentieth century epiphanies he offers are ragged epigones and hardly epiphanies at all.
1. Though there was no direct influence, this notion is strikingly similar to the ”haeccittas” Gerard Manley Hopkins derived from Duns Scotus. Another parallel is Aldous Huxley’s report of his experience on mescaline of what, following Meister Eckhart’s usage, he calls “Istigkeit” or “Is-ness.”
2. See Ilaria Natali, “A Portrait of James Joyce’s Epiphanies as a Source Text,” Humanicus #6, 2011.
Every Reader's Hopkins
This is the seventh in my series meant to introduce or reintroduce major poets through presenting a few of their best-known works with some details of their lives but without footnotes.
Much poetry today in the USA is written in vernacular conversational American English. Recoiling with horror from rhetoric which had long been the science of the artful use of language, writers seek to sound like the guy next door. Those who employ highly stylized, “artificial” language are viewed with suspicion, though more thoroughly dehumanized word collections are acceptable in avant-garde contexts. Yet poetry has always been, among other things, about beautiful, melodious language, artfully distinguished from everyday usage. And few writers could construct verbal music like Gerard Manley Hopkins. His sprung rhythm worked quite wonderfully for him (though imitators fail) and his orthodox Catholicism glitters with sufficient mysticism to make it not just universal but exciting.
Born to an affluent, educated, and pious High Church Anglican family, Hopkins admired the pre-Raphaelites and studied art. Yet spirituality claimed always his first allegiance. Even in secondary school he pursued experiments in asceticism, on one occasion consuming no drink until he collapsed. While a classics student at Oxford he met Newman and converted to Roman Catholicism, eventually becoming a Jesuit.
Acceptance of Roman Catholic orthodoxy did not bring him resolution and the study of Ignatian discernment left him still conflicted. His poetry reflects his lifelong ambivalence, passionately embracing life yet feeling that self-denial is inherently superior. This contradiction led him to give up poetry for Lent, to destroy much of his poetry when he was ordained (declaring that he meant to write no more except by order of his superiors, and to ask that his largely unpublished body of work be burned after his death. The contradiction between his delight in the world and his aspiration to leave the physical behind reached crisis in his homosexuality, most clearly expressed in his youthful infatuation with Digby Dolben whom he had met at Eton.
One concept through which Hopkins sought to harmonize his joyful celebration of the creation with his taste for self-denial was “inscape,” a notion he derived from Duns Scotus' haecceity or “thisness.” Hopkins would have agreed with the author of the Gospel of Thomas whose Christ says “Split the stick and I am there” (not to mention Zen practitioners and others to whom a gaze sufficiently deep into any object will lead to the divine).
In “Pied Beauty,” a shortened (or curtal) sonnet, Hopkins focuses not on the unity but the variety in which he finds the numinous. His afflatus carries the reader with ease through his idiosyncratic syntax and insistent alliteration.
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Yet his sense of the presence of the divine did not bring Hopkins serenity. Toward the end of his rather short life, he suffered from ill health, his duties that seemed sometimes onerous, and he found himself living in a sort of exile in Dublin. Combined with his lifelong depressive tendency and the fierce inner conflicts in which it manifested, he experienced what since St. John of the Cross has been called “the dark night of the soul.” His “terrible sonnets” or “sonnets of desolation,” dramatize the suffering he felt at his failure to connect with God. He tastes the mood of the damned and confesses the “selfyeast” of original sin. The deity is “away;” his worst “scourge” is simply “to be.”
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
Hopkins was doubtless strikingly original, but few today feel as his first editor Robert Bridges did, a need to apologize for the poet’s “Oddity” and “Obscurity.” One need not enter into Hopkin’s elaborately devised and even more meticulously executed ideas on meter, derived in part from his knowledge of Old English and Classical poets, to relish his lines as pure sensual experiences. Stylistically unique they may remain, but their abstruseness generally vanishes with reading out loud while their music is thereby intensified.
The accent marks in “Spring and Fall” might seem mannered and recherché at first, but they lead the read to such melody that their role is clear to most readers.
Spring and Fall
to a young child
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Though this poem has little of the wondrously inventive descriptive imagery of “Pied Beauty” (apart from “wanwood leafmeal”), it has instead the eloquent elegance and simple profundity of sentiments like this passionate couplet:
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder.
And the concluding two lines are sufficiently pregnant that Christianity itself might be largely reconstructed as a commentary. Though Hopkins himself may have felt self-indulgent in his art and insufficiently devout in his spiritual practice, to most readers his work is profoundly satisfying in both its aesthetics and religion. In spite of, or perhaps because of, his racking himself with doubt, his work is outstanding in conveying the jouissance of both the pure beauty of sound and the mystical celebration of the world.
Much poetry today in the USA is written in vernacular conversational American English. Recoiling with horror from rhetoric which had long been the science of the artful use of language, writers seek to sound like the guy next door. Those who employ highly stylized, “artificial” language are viewed with suspicion, though more thoroughly dehumanized word collections are acceptable in avant-garde contexts. Yet poetry has always been, among other things, about beautiful, melodious language, artfully distinguished from everyday usage. And few writers could construct verbal music like Gerard Manley Hopkins. His sprung rhythm worked quite wonderfully for him (though imitators fail) and his orthodox Catholicism glitters with sufficient mysticism to make it not just universal but exciting.
Born to an affluent, educated, and pious High Church Anglican family, Hopkins admired the pre-Raphaelites and studied art. Yet spirituality claimed always his first allegiance. Even in secondary school he pursued experiments in asceticism, on one occasion consuming no drink until he collapsed. While a classics student at Oxford he met Newman and converted to Roman Catholicism, eventually becoming a Jesuit.
Acceptance of Roman Catholic orthodoxy did not bring him resolution and the study of Ignatian discernment left him still conflicted. His poetry reflects his lifelong ambivalence, passionately embracing life yet feeling that self-denial is inherently superior. This contradiction led him to give up poetry for Lent, to destroy much of his poetry when he was ordained (declaring that he meant to write no more except by order of his superiors, and to ask that his largely unpublished body of work be burned after his death. The contradiction between his delight in the world and his aspiration to leave the physical behind reached crisis in his homosexuality, most clearly expressed in his youthful infatuation with Digby Dolben whom he had met at Eton.
One concept through which Hopkins sought to harmonize his joyful celebration of the creation with his taste for self-denial was “inscape,” a notion he derived from Duns Scotus' haecceity or “thisness.” Hopkins would have agreed with the author of the Gospel of Thomas whose Christ says “Split the stick and I am there” (not to mention Zen practitioners and others to whom a gaze sufficiently deep into any object will lead to the divine).
In “Pied Beauty,” a shortened (or curtal) sonnet, Hopkins focuses not on the unity but the variety in which he finds the numinous. His afflatus carries the reader with ease through his idiosyncratic syntax and insistent alliteration.
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Yet his sense of the presence of the divine did not bring Hopkins serenity. Toward the end of his rather short life, he suffered from ill health, his duties that seemed sometimes onerous, and he found himself living in a sort of exile in Dublin. Combined with his lifelong depressive tendency and the fierce inner conflicts in which it manifested, he experienced what since St. John of the Cross has been called “the dark night of the soul.” His “terrible sonnets” or “sonnets of desolation,” dramatize the suffering he felt at his failure to connect with God. He tastes the mood of the damned and confesses the “selfyeast” of original sin. The deity is “away;” his worst “scourge” is simply “to be.”
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.
Hopkins was doubtless strikingly original, but few today feel as his first editor Robert Bridges did, a need to apologize for the poet’s “Oddity” and “Obscurity.” One need not enter into Hopkin’s elaborately devised and even more meticulously executed ideas on meter, derived in part from his knowledge of Old English and Classical poets, to relish his lines as pure sensual experiences. Stylistically unique they may remain, but their abstruseness generally vanishes with reading out loud while their music is thereby intensified.
The accent marks in “Spring and Fall” might seem mannered and recherché at first, but they lead the read to such melody that their role is clear to most readers.
Spring and Fall
to a young child
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Though this poem has little of the wondrously inventive descriptive imagery of “Pied Beauty” (apart from “wanwood leafmeal”), it has instead the eloquent elegance and simple profundity of sentiments like this passionate couplet:
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder.
And the concluding two lines are sufficiently pregnant that Christianity itself might be largely reconstructed as a commentary. Though Hopkins himself may have felt self-indulgent in his art and insufficiently devout in his spiritual practice, to most readers his work is profoundly satisfying in both its aesthetics and religion. In spite of, or perhaps because of, his racking himself with doubt, his work is outstanding in conveying the jouissance of both the pure beauty of sound and the mystical celebration of the world.
The Paraklausithyron Blues
Paraklausithyron, a “lament by the door,” is a topos in classical Greek and Latin poetry. Though a great deal of variation is apparent even in ancient examples, the typical early paraklausithyron in Asclepiades, Callimachus, Tibullus, and Horace was the complaint of a would-be lover, shut out from his beloved, often garlanded and drunk from a komos earlier in the evening. [1] Shorn of these specific cultural details, the motif of the exclusus amator is universal. Most love poetry speaks of love-longing, not of fulfilled desire. The literal dramatic situation of a man lingering outside the door of his love-object occurs in fact, and the frustrated wish to enter vividly expresses is a wish for emotional or intimate access. The convention appears in medieval Occitan poetry and modern American popular song. A particularly rich vein of paraklausithroi emerges from the distinctly American love poetry of the blues.
An analysis of the use of the paraklausithyron in blues lyrics has two significant implications. First, the wide distribution of the trope demonstrates the fact that many literary conventions from genre to specific devices such as rhetorical figures or images have arisen world-wide, even when no avenue of influence is plausible. People have hit upon the same verbal technologies to express the same human feelings.
Secondly, like all literary conventions, the paraklausithyron is far from static. It is in fact highly dynamic, transforming instantly into a panoply of possibilities. Indeed, in the earliest recorded use of the word [2], it is used to challenge Greek gender assumptions by asking why a female lover might not demonstrate “the height of a passionate affection” with such a song no less than a man. Plutarch’s question might be followed by another asking why the voice might not come from within, and a third suggesting that the voice might be either accepting or rejecting the other’s love. With this simple schema, three bipolar oppositions generate eight possibilities [3] based on the male/female, inside/outside, acceptance/rejection dualities.
As a matter of fact, virtually all of the theoretical possibilities in this array are found in early blues. [4] The locus classicus must be Perry Bradford’s 1928 “Keep A Knockin’ an You Can’t Get In” though enough earlier analogues exist to label the song traditional [5]. In this most popular group of versions the speaker is within, refusing access to the knocker. In several early versions including the popular recording by Louis Jordan (1939), the speaker refuses the caller admission due to being occupied with another lover. In Little Richard’s very popular 1957 cover, he therefore suggests “come back tomorrow night and try again.”
This is hardly the only form the paraklausithyron assumes in the blues. The male speaker inside may, as in the instances cited above, reject the woman as he does also in Marshall Owens “Try Me One More Time” (1932), Kokomo Arnold’s “Busy Bootin’” (1935) or “Your Ways and Actions” (1938) or Big Bill Broonzy’s “Skoodle Do Do” (1930). On the other hand, he may receive the knocker with open arms as in Smoky Harrison’s “Iggly Oggly” (1929) or Sammy Hill’s “Needin’ My Woman Blues” (1929).
The persona inside is female and may reject the man outside as in Anna Bell’s “Every Woman Blues” (1928). A woman in the same position may also welcome him as in Ethel Waters’ “Memphis Man” (1923) or Huddie Ledbetter’s “My Friend Blind Lemon” (1935). A woman outside is rejected in Lil Green’s “I’m Wasting My Time on You” (1942).
Many other variations may arise from the same convention. In Lonnie Clark’s “Broke Down Engine” (1929) the speaker complains in spite of being with his lover as his “yellow woman” knocks, causing him to exhort his companion to greater efforts on his behalf. In Blind Willy McTell’s 1931 version of the same song the speaker is knocking and this is merely one of a series of details indicating his depression. In “Hurry and Bring It Back Home” by Robert Hicks (Barbecue Bob) 1928 the knock at the door brings him the news of his lover’s departure. The list of variations is limited only by how tightly one defines the convention.
The blues use the same resources as other poetry and often resorts to similar conventions. The laments of a frustrated lover, excluded by his beloved have resounded around the globe and through the centuries. Just as language depends on a tension between what one has heard said by others and the unique content of every specific statement, poetry likewise is always a product of earlier poetry, though every utterance is new. The paraklausithyron was effectively employed by many artists who would have found nothing but mumbo-jumbo in the term just as Classicists would be unfamiliar with portions of the rural Southern vocabulary. Yet the early blues singers deployed the resources of language with a subtlety and expressive power equaling that of any Roman elegist, Provençal troubadour, or Elizabethan sonneteer.
1. See Asclepiades GP 11 HE = AP 564, Callimachus 64, Ovid Amores 1.6, Catallus 67, Horace Odes 3.10 and 3.26, Tibullus 1.2, Propertius 1.16, Ovid Amores 1.6.
2. Plutarch, Amatorius 8.
3. This is, of course, two to the third power.
4. For the most part I used again the excellent concordance of pre-war blues lyrics posted by Michael Taft at http://www.dylan61.se/michael%20taft,%20blues%20anthology.txt.WebConcordance/framconc.htm.
5. This song, recorded by James “Boodle It” Wiggins enjoyed considerable popularity though other versions, including one by Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band were recorded at about the same time. Earlier versions existed such as Miller and Lile’s “You Can’t Come in” (1921), Sylvester Weaver’s “I’m Busy and You Can’t Come In” (1924) and Irene Gibbons “You Can’t Come In” (1924). Stuart Berg Flexner cites a 1912 “Bawdyhouse Blues“ with the words “I hear you knockin', but you can't come in/ I got an all-night trick again.” (Listening To America, New York: Simon and Shuster: 1982, p. 454). Including the later variant titled “I Hear You Knockin’” attributed to Bartholomew and King, the song was recorded by many artists including Mississippi John Hurt, Louis Jordan, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, and The Everly Brothers.
This site includes a good many other essays treating blues songs as poetry. To see the others open the Index under the current month in the archive and consult section 5D “songs.”
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