Pearls

 

     The charm of the pearl is its combination of the sensuality of an iridescent nacreous surface with the abstract Platonic perfection of a perfectly spherical form.  The minute ridges on its surface, while discernible to the eye only as a subtle shimmer, suggest the myriad phenomena of the world of experience, marvelously compacted, far smaller than a crystal ball, until it is capable of representing everything that is, like the universe just before the Big Bang or Borges’ “The Aleph.” 

     The rarity and aesthetic appeal of pearls led to their use as a figure of speech for anything of high value, and, in particular, words that are wise and beautiful.  In the King James version a passage in Job (28:18) declares wisdom to be preferable even to pearls, but scholarship has decided that this is in fact a reference to crystal.  In the Greek Testament, though, the pearl is repeatedly used, most notably perhaps in the parable of the “pearl of great price” (Matthew 13:46) signifying salvation or enlightenment, while non-metaphorical pearls are condemned as a sign of vicious luxury (as in I Timothy 2:9).  In a similar bipolar opposition, Revelation employs pearls first as adornments on the Whore of Babylon (17:4 18:12) and then as part of paradise’s décor, the well-known “pearly gates” (21:21).

     The “Hymn of the Pearl,” contained within the extra-canonical Gospel of Thomas describes a heroic quest for an Egyptian pearl signifying perfect wisdom that the seeker must snatch it from a threatening guardian serpent, the sort of dragon guarding treasure that appears in stories like those of Hercules, Jason, Beowulf, and Fafnir.  In Chinese lore the Fuzanglong watches over riches but particularly prizes a certain pearl as the most precious of things.  The hero of the “Hymn” succeeds in charming tfhe monster into sleep by “Chanting o’er him the Name of my Father, The Name of our Second, [my Brother], And [Name] of my Mother, the East-Queen”  (in the translation by G.R.S. Mead from The Hymn of the Robe of Glory: Echoes from the Gnosis).

     Connotations both of preciousness and of wicked arrogant wealth operate in a story told by Pliny the Elder around the same time as the “Hymn.”  In his Natural History (9.58) he says that Cleopatra wagered Antony that she could expend the fabulous sum of ten million sesterces in a single meal.   She succeeds by dissolving one of the two largest pearls in the world in vinegar and downing it, though the second is saved by Lucius Plancus, who declares Antony “defeated” (victus) in the bet, according to Pliny, an ill omen prefiguring his defeat by Octavianus.  The reader is aware, too, of Cleopatra’s suicide a short time after such sumptuous entertainments.  Pliny goes on to describe Romans who imitated Cleopatra’s grandly wasteful act.  In Caligula the gesture reached its epigone, when the emperor bedecked his horse Incitatus (the one he meant to make a consul) with pearls.  Here such ornaments are the extreme of luxury and conspicuous consumption. 

     In the lovely medieval poem called Pearl (Perle) the speaker laments his loss of a pearl, apparently identified with a deceased daughter, though the image’s associations remain fluid.  Through the polysemous subtleties of allegory, often mistaken for a reductive code, this pearl is at once a gem, a two-year-old, a grown woman, and anyone’s soul, and the perfection of paradise.  The exquisite charm of the pearl itself is detailed in one of the most well-structured and elaborately crafted poems of the late Middle Ages.  Every line of Pearl sings with rhymes, concatenations, and other more or less irregular forms of verbal music.

     This pearl, in female form but trailing associations with the highest human and spiritual values,  appears in a dream.  He plunges into the river that separates him from his “privy perle wythouten spot” only to be awakened by the “prince” of the other world, whereupon he can only praise God and accept for the present his loss with the consolation of an ultimately just divine order.  The poem’s tightly developed and subtle formulation presents the pearl as the lovely lost daughter and thus all the losses inevitable in all the ephemeral joys of the sublunary world while at the same time dialectically suggesting the eternal joys of things as they are, a perfect world order guaranteed by a loving creator. 

     A poem of disputed authorship in The Passionate Pilgrim uses very much the same comparison, calling a lady who died young a “bright orient pearl, alack, too timely shaded!” (132)  More certainly Shakespearean usage forms a semiotic pattern with considerably less focus and less assurance, though in the end the same bipolar opposition is implied.  The primary association of pearls with wealth and luxury appears a good many times, including the suggestion of the pomp and power of kingship in Henry V which mentions after crown and scepter “the intertissued robe of gold and pearl” (IV, 1, l. 271).  Pearls in Shakespeare are often a figure of human beauty as in the claim “Black men are pearls in beauteous ladies' eyes.” “But pearls are fair, and the old saying is,/Black men are pearls in beauteous ladies’ eyes.” (Two Gentlemen of Verona V, 2, 2062-3)

     Surely there is a sinister omen in the description of “pearly sweat, resembling dew of night” (Rape of Lucrece, 463) on Lucrece’s hands as she is admired, yet unknowing, by her attacker.  Pearls are often linked to the dead, as in Ariel’s song “Full fathom five thy father lies” in which bones are of coral and “Those are pearls that were his eyes” (Tempest I, 2, 562).  A similar vision informs Clarence’s frightening premonitory dream of “a thousand men that fishes gnawed upon” along with gold, jewels, and pearls of which “some lay in dead men's skulls”, (Richard III I, 4, ll. 26, 30)

     This ambiguity is everywhere in Shakespeare.  Cordelia’s tears are likened to pearls in Lear (IV, 3) as are Arthur’s in King John (II, 1).  In Two Gentlemen of Verona (V, 2) Proteus says that “Black men are pearls in beauteous ladies' eyes,” provoking Julia to say aside “'Tis true; such pearls as put out ladies' eyes,” which ostensibly refers to her closing her eyes to avoid the sight, though the undertones are more sinister.  And, of course, to his immense and instant regret Othello “threw a pearl away/ richer than all his tribe” (V, 2).

     The symbolism of pearls can appear in unlikely places.  Joe Hill’s song “The White Slave” employs the association with female beauty to lament the downfall of “one little girl, fair as a pearl” whose poverty leads her to a miserable and unhealthy life of prostitution.  “Same little girl, no more a pearl.”  Perhaps a similar sense of vulnerable beauty led to Janis Joplin’s being called Pearl. 

     The association of pearls with excellence in verbal practice (“pearls of wisdom,” “pearls before swine”) can survive in unlikely surroundings.  When I worked as librarian in a prison, one of the most popular volumes in the collection, so attractive it had to be kept behind the counter, only to be brought out and lent by special request.  The book, Pearls of Love by Ara John Movsesian, subtitled How to Write Love Letters and Love Poems, was a collection of little lyrical bits for prisoners to include in their letters to wives and lovers. 

     A. E. Housman, whose poetry can be achingly emotional, connected pearls with art in an image he found to correspond to his own experience.

"I think that the production of poetry, in its first stage, is less an active than a passive and involuntary process . . . I should call it a secretion; whether a natural secretion, like turpentine in the fir, or a morbid secretion, like the pearl in the oyster. I think that my own case, though I may not deal with the material so cleverly as the oyster does, is the latter; because I have seldom written poetry unless I was rather out of health, and the experience, though pleasurable, was generally agitating and exhausting."

         A.  E. Housman, “The Name and Nature of Poetry,”

     Housman is insightful enough to see beyond his view of his own case and include the possibility that for some the poetic secretion may be more “natural.”  With becoming wit and modesty, he suggests that poetry (or at least its inspiration) just comes to him uninvited, and that its coming into being is to him more a trial than a pleasure.  He nicely exploits the feeling of serendipity or even of grace that accompanies creation, while implying that the point is to eliminate an irritation in the mind just as the oyster combats a particle of sand in the intimate realm of the shell.  Perhaps the often difficult lives of artists provide evidence for the “morbidity” of the artistic sensibility.  Perhaps people who feel no contradictions produce no art.  The work of art might be conceived as the relic of a frustration, neurosis, or anxiety overcome and integrated into the self, not eliminated but mysteriously transformed.  Some will, or must, feel irresistibly the drive to make something like a pearl, round and mysterious, and beautiful, and just imperfect enough to be real. 

Notes on Recent Reading 20 [Rowe, Stevenson, Issa]

Jane Shore [Rowe]

     Nicholas Rowe had edited his acknowledged master Shakespeare, and he would perhaps not be surprised to hear that a modern reader finds his own play Jane Shore suffers by comparison. Rowe’s entire effect depends on the delicious spectacle of the set-upon lady, an appeal in vogue during his time as what the playwright called the “she-tragedy.”
     Shore’s public humiliation for promiscuity is only the most piquant instance of this commonplace yet slightly kinky taste, so common through world literature. Shore’s story is well-suited to a wheel of fortune theme as she had had, for a time, very nearly the power of a queen as well as having possessed what all regarded as extraordinary beauty and a sharp wit that led Edward to call her the “merriest” of his consorts. The plot is flat and simple in plot, the poetry thin in imagery, the sentiment almost wholly pathetic. Though words flow with energy, their moving streams are so shallow that they suggest nothing new in the course of the drama.
     In contrast to her depiction by Thomas More and Shakespeare (in Richard III), Rowe achieves his effect by treating her sympathetically, depicting her as genuinely repentant for her immorality and politically engaged in combating Richard’s usurpation of power.
     Rowe’s widow received a pension from George I in thanks for his translation of Lucan, which demonstrates that, in one way at least, that age was more civilized than our own.


The Master of Ballantrae [Stevenson]

     Were Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel a modern movie (it was originally serialized in Scribner’s and filmed at least twice), it might even be labeled a thriller. It may be a “Winter’s Tale” (as the subtitle has it) for its nearly constant suffering, relenting only to make more distinct a succession of plot turns that hold the reader until what some have considered the extravagance of the final twist. The book is highly reminiscent of Scott’s novels, full of Scotland, and concerns with nobility and morality, but Stevenson’s characters are more complex. The master himself possesses wicked charm and immense brio (temporarily even winning some affection from the dour narrator); Alison’s passion betrays her own best interests; and Henry, though the good man from the start, turns out only human as the constant pressure on his flawed virtue finally drives him into moral confusion and madness. All this serves an exciting story which from Scotland moves to colonial New York and finally, the wilds of the Adirondacks which the author knew well (as well as India, which he did not).
     The book maintains the old novelistic façade of a true story with supposed lengthy statements and relations from several of the characters as well as from our narrator, Mr. Mackellar. These have the effect of casting a slightly prismatic glow over the whole. Stevenson himself mentioned as a model not Scott but Frederick Marryat whose The Phantom Ship he had been reading. “Let us make a tale,” he recalled proposing to himself, “a story of many years and countries, of the sea and the land, savagery and civilisation; a story that shall have the same large features, and may be treated in the same summary elliptic method as the book you have been reading and admiring.”
     Whether one considers his method “summary” and “elliptical” or not, Stevenson was repeatedly capable of composing a ripping yarn. Some may think higher peaks exist on the fiction Parnassus, but few writers reach the heights Stevenson here achieved.
 

The Year of my Life (Oraga Hara) [Issa, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa]

     I confess to little sympathy for the haiku in English, but I relished both verses and prose in this little book, written in 1819, by the author who reinvigorated the form of which Basho was the recognized master. Kobayashi Issa, a lay Buddhist priest, wrote with a passion, often choosing “low” subjects such as insects. While his work struck some as unseemly in his own day, he is now regarded as one of the four great writers of haiku along with Basho, Buson, and Shiki.
     The little book defines its tone with its opening with story of the priest who greets the New Year with tears. The succeeding chapters relate autobiographical incidents along with odd stories and folklore yet all the prose aims toward accommodating the poet to the all-but-intolerable conditions of life.
     Issa compares what he calls the “thin thread of my life” to that of a tortured tree. In order to “get more experience writing haiku,” following the examples of Saigyo, Basho, and others, the poet sets out traveling with a beggar’s bag and bundle. He proceeds (in the haibun form, mixing prose and verse) to provide a curious succession of information which, while entertaining, supports this theme throughout.      In a pleasant mood, the poet and his friends seek to hear a strange “celestial music” of which they have heard. He speculates on the meaning of a children’s game involving killing frogs and recalls an earlier poet’s story of a frog who judged a poetry contest. A physician who kills coupling snakes finds he has brought impotence to his son who had “a huge mushroom-shaped thing between his legs.” Each topic is oddly entertaining while reinforcing a sense of the fragility and impenetrability of earthly life. Most powerfully, the pathetic story of the boy swept away by the stream in whose pockets were found flowers he was carrying to his parents, inspiring a moralizing passage which prepares the ground for death of the author’s beloved daughter later.
     The nineteenth century introducer rightly says that Issa’s verses “would tickle even Yama the great king of hell.”