Notes on Recent Reading 37 (Waley, Wharton, London)

Yuan Mei: Eighteenth Century Chinese Poet (Waley)

     Waley never fails me. Indeed, all English-speaking readers who love Asian literature must be thankful for his labors. Though he acquired his knowledge of Chinese and Japanese languages under Laurence Binyon at the British Museum, cataloguing visual art, he eschewed academic posts and consistently wrote for that virtually extinct creature, the generally educated reader. He never visited China or Japan, but lived in Bloomsbury in London where he associated with literary figures rather than Sinologists. A friend of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, among others, he was as well an early admirer of Ronald Firbank, for whose first collected works he and Osbert Sitwell wrote an introduction. Ezra Pound recommended his work for the Little Review. His literary value has held up; while his translations are not the most scholarly, they are often the best choice especially for non-specialists.
     Yuan Mei was a poet, artist, and food writer -- a translation of his gastronomic classic Suiyuan Shidan is forthcoming this year as Recipes from the Garden of Contentment. He wrote as well a theoretical work on poetry, the Suiyuan shihua. A brilliant student at a young age, he even left a guide to scoring well on the imperial exams on the Confucian classics. He worked in several government posts of which Waley provides sufficient details that we do not wonder why he abandoned the civil service at the age of thirty-two to devote himself to art.
     Why do I feel such kinship with certain Chinese poets? Surely their participation in academic examinations on the classics is a part of what we share. Add to that the implied pathetic fallacy so widespread in traditional Chinese verse and part of today’s poetry in English since Waley’s first translations and the advent of the Imagists. Finally, there is a profound sympathy in world-view. Yuan Mei paid respects to Ch’an Buddhism while maintaining a position of unashamed hedonism, aesthetic and otherwise, as sufficient for everyday conduct. It is what might a few hundred years ago have been called a kind of natural religion. Simple though it be, such a position has been the refuge of more than one fine soul.
     Waley’s book is unfailingly entertaining and readable. It is astonishing what details about the poet’s life survive in documents and how smoothly and novelistically Waley uses them to frame the many lyrics included in this volume.


In Morocco (Wharton)

     Edith Wharton’s 1920 book describing a month touring Morocco, much of it devoted to Fes and Marrakech, is as engaging as one might expect. Wharton had lived in France for most of the previous decade and toured Morocco as a guest of the French Governor-General Lyautey (her fulsome praise for him cloys). As a dignitary she drove about in a French military vehicle and visited the residences of both French and local potentates where she sometimes participated in dinners served by slaves. She saw a good deal that an ordinary tourist would have missed, including the Saadian tombs and harems (the women she finds boring and a bit pathetic).
     Apart from the well-sketched vignettes of Moroccan life of the time, the book would make a case study in the apologetics of imperialism, as Wharton hasn’t a doubt that France arrived at the invitation of the North Africans and in fact saved them from themselves.
     Though this conviction would find fewer partisans today, many of her comments would be echoed by later visitors including myself. Her sense of having stepped far back in time is familiar even to today’s escorted tour customers, and her exposition of the country’s contradictions is illuminating, even when only half-informed. The phantasmagoria of Morocco is, of course, an illusion born of unfamiliarity, but it is no less intoxicating for that reason.


People of the Abyss (London)

     Jack London’s story of his descent into the city of London’s East End, masquerading with rough clothes to impersonate what he had in fact been only a few years before, an itinerant laborer, remains powerful today, over a hundred years later. London sleeps in sordid quarters when not in workhouses, eats in the filthiest coffee houses, and fraternizes with the urban proletariat at a time when many in the greatest empire of modern times were literally starving. Apart from his own observations and the tales told him by many a hard-working tradesman fallen on hard times, London responsibly provides much statistical documentation of the plight of the poor, though this is perhaps less useful to today’s reader. His transcriptions of dialect seem authentic and his righteous indignation is exemplary.
     The concrete particulars are necessary for a contemporary reader to realize how recently the great majority of the working class, not the lumpen or underclass, was in desperate straits in even the most developed capitalist economies. This book takes its place between Engels’ 1845 The Condition of the Working Class in England, London’s own The Road about tramping in the USA) and Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. London himself said, “No other book of mine took so much of my young heart and tears as that study of the economic degradation of the poor."
     London’s militance is inscribed in the text but not without a certain ambivalence as well. His distaste for the poor and for their wretched conditions is evident, but an even deeper contradiction, expressed in The Iron Heel as well, is his own Nietzschean preference for the strong and his almost eugenic conviction that the urban poor had in fact declined through devolution into something only just barely human.

Poetry 1968

I delivered this talk to a general audience at a 1993 conference observing the passing of twenty-five years since that annus mirabilis (or was it an annus horribilis?) 1968. The occasion encouraged a sociological swerve in the discussion. Fifty years have now passed. I could not resist revisions.

     Just as language according to Saussure is a system of difference, literary history proceeds by contradiction and dialectic. Tradition and innovation are complements rather than opposites. A static code would be robotized and empty of information whereas one wholly free of convention would be unintelligible. As anyone who has witnessed an English department meeting is aware, literary people are fond of tossing words about endlessly, but this does not mean their disputes are meaningless. Just like the ancient Greek contention between the water-drinking poets and their wine-drinking colleagues or the eighteenth-century battle of the books, the 1968 “culture clash” in poetry represented real differences in values, literary practice, and culture generally.
     In fact ten years before 1968 the partisan lines were already well-defined. The fact is notorious that the two most prominent anthologies of new poetry in English – the 1957 New Poets of England and America edited by Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson and Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry 1945-1960 – did not contain a single poet in common. So there was fierce controversy on strictly poetic turf, and the war of the anthologies defines the principal factions usefully and far more precisely than the labels formalist and anti-academic. Still, other oppositions occurred simultaneously. Within the boundaries of Allen’s collection, one might, for instance, imagine the scrimmage of the projectivists against practitioners of the deep image or the bicoastal competition between the boys from Artnews against the team from City Lights.
     On this occasion, though, I prefer to emphasize the intersections of the sociological with the literary and to highlight some works from that period that exemplify significant changes in the location of poetry in the fabric of American culture.
     Today as in the sixties most Americans consume poetry in the form of advertising copy. The clever writers who sell beer and detergents use every trick in the Renaissance manuals of rhetoric, and they doi gain their audience. The verbal magic of their technical skills, alas, is directed only at charming money from the consumer to the corporation, not a theme likely to generate soul-stirring and enduring texts. A few subgenres still persist with vigor: bumper stickers, internet memes, greeting cards, and the more extravagant varieties of slang. But poetry proper, the longtime honorific queen of the arts, is also the neglected step-daughter – without readership, without a context beyond the universities which continue to shelter a few queer cranks.
     In 1968 poetry was reaching new audiences and experiencing a miniature surge in popularity which, though never fully realized in new masterpieces, still carries momentum today in a thousand open readings in bars and coffee houses. This efflorescence did not emerge, though, from the heart of American poetic tradition alone, but was stimulated by social, political, and economic conditions and movements far outside the realm of the aesthetic.
     Several of the new popular artists and audiences were directly spawned by the political trends of the day. Protest rallies often included poets and musicians on the same stage with orators. In what was really a fainter echo of the proletarian art of the thirties, the sixties brought new art arose to make concrete the radical sentiments of the day: the new muralist movement ornamented some of the bleakest walls of American cities, Newsreel set out to chronicle the revolution on film, R. Diggs of Rip Off Press and Aaron Fagen of Rising Up Angry drew cartoons that were fierce as well as funny. There were even countries where the politicians were poets, a peculiar thought for Americans: Mao and Ho, Leopold Senghor of Senegal and Agostinho Neto in Angola. Protest poetry had been building, cultivated by Robert Bly who founded American Writers against the Vietnam War in 1966 and the following year held the first anti-war poetry reading and Old Leftist Walter Lowenfels whose anthology Where is Vietnam? appeared in 1967. Books like Ed Dorn and Gordon Brotherston’s Our Word: Guerilla Poems from Latin America not only were published, but enjoyed a certain popularity. Diane di Prima published the first of her self-dramatizing Revolutionary Letters. For a time, as a generation earlier, it seemed that writers and artists were united in opposition to an oppressive government.
     Black literary consciousness had already the tradition of the Harlem Renaissance and the thirties engagement with socialism. During the Depression Langston Hughes performed to the sound of jazz as well as composing in jazz-influenced verbal rhythms, and in the fifities black poets were welcomed in the counter-culture. Writers like Ted Joans, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), and Bob Kaufman read accompanied by small ensembles in bars, galleries, and coffee houses. On May 19 of 1968 (Malcolm X's birthday) Felipe Luciano, Gylan Kain and David Nelson formed The Last Poets in Marcus Garvey Park in East Harlem. That year Etheridge Knight went directly from prison to an appointment at the University of Pittsburgh on the strength of his Poems from Prison, and LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal came out with Black Fire, an anthology of African-American poetry which acknowledges, according to Neal’s “Afterword,” “History weighs down on all this literature,” and which thus seeks to represent , as Jones (Baraka) said in the “Foreward” “the striving of a nation coming back into focus.”
     The hip subculture, conceived at the time by some as the revolutionary youth movement, contributed to the radical critique of America. Though the Beat Generation was in fact a coterie of writers (Ginsberg liked to says it was simply himself and a few friends), by the late sixties it looked almost like a mass movement. The 1967 Human Be-in in San Francisco featured Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Snyder as well as Lenore Kandel who insisted on the vatic as well as the political role of poetry, saying “Poetry is never compromise. It is the manifestation of a vision, an illumination, an experience.” (Allen and Tallman 450) The Diggers publishing arm, the Communications Company, had already ceased printing by 1968, but their example spawned countless others. Paul Carroll, the Chicago poet who had come to some prominence when the University of Chicago refused to publish a number of the Chicago Review he had edited which featured William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac and he reacted by printing it himself as the first issue of Big Table, saw that his time had come and he published an anthology titled The Young American Poets which featured writers who had emerged after Allen’s anthology.
     Oral performance of poetry had, of course, been widespread throughout history, but with differing forms in different eras. Earlier generations of Americans had made celebrities of poets like James Whitcomb Riley, Amy Lowell, and Vachel Lindsay based on their live shows, but for the second half of the twentieth century the spoken word model (apart from university readings) was the Beat coffee house scene. By 1968 readings were proliferating across the country in a trend that continues to the extent that poetry may well be the most widely practiced art today.
     Considerably more influential than even the burgeoning hip movement was the evolution of popular music. In a general way the often sappy lyrics of fifties rock and roll, many of them written by Tin Pan Alley professionals, were replaced by more original, subtle, and inventive lyrics. Led in sales by Bob Dylan and the Beatles, much popular music came to be more artisanal than corporate, with every garage band playing originals, and millions of people who never would have read a poem consumed these oral texts with devotion and understanding. Instead of the Leiber and Stoller songs expressing teen-age frustrations with school (“Charley Brown”) and Parents (“Yackety-yak”), bands began to express youth culture with a more radical disaffection. The leading edge of this trend was perhaps embodied by John Sinclair and the MC5 and their White Panther Party (later the Rainbow people’s Party) who literally proposed a program of “rock and roll, dope, and fucking in the streets.” Even among the most popular artists, 1968 was the year of the release of the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” with its declarations “The time is right for a palace revolution” and “I’ll kill the king.” By contrast in 1968 the Beatles recorded “Revolution” which satirically maintained “if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao/ You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow.” (A few years later, in 1971 John Lennon was moved to announce a different reaction: “I really thought that love would save us all. But now I’m wearing a Chairman Mao badge, that’s where it’s at.” (Lennon Remembers) Meanwhile Mick Jagger was boasting that his father had been a working class Communist.
     The categories between the social, the political, and the artistic blur in Amiri Baraka’s comment on jazz: “The social consciousness displayed in that music . . . is more radical than sit-ins. We get to Feel-Ins, Know-Ins, Be-Ins.” (Black Music) In spite of the dated locutions, this might serve as a decent formulation of the Romantic definition of art.
     At the same time as poetry was influenced by the political and by popular art, experimental work continued in more purely artistic circles. The attacks on poetry written to order for New critical analysis continued on a variety of fronts: the confessional writers, the hip attempt to tap into pure consciousness, Bly’s “leaping poetry,” the search for the elusive breath unit, the exploration of oral literature by Snyder, Rothenburg, and others, to mention only a few.
     In terms of form itself the sixties represent a transition period during which the profoundly radical gestures which had originated earlier in the century when another war had estranged the artists and Dada had emerged were being integrated into established and academic journals, giving birth to a curiously sleek and prosperous avant-gardism. Before long, the very strategies which had been used to épater les bourgeoisie were receiving grants from major foundations founded by nineteenth century robber barons and even by the federal government without alarming an body except eventually in the nineties Jesse Helms and a few fundamentalists who had never before given a thought to art.
     Cage, MacLow, and Kaprow cultivated randomness and their attitudes were reflected in verse by writers like Ted Berrigan, Anselm Hollo, an d Lew Welch. The attempts to explode the text advanced, breaking first syntax (like Clark Coolidge) and proceeding to wholly non-verbal documents by people like Richard Kostelanetz very like to old-style Lautgedichte. Though such work was as much in a twentieth century tradition as it was experimental, it continued to attract practitioners in spite of its loss of the ability to surprise and shock.
     The concept of a “culture clash” moved from symbolic to physical described by Charles Simic in “On the Great Poets Brawl of 1968.” He recalls hostility to the old guard faction headed by longtime editor Henry Rago whom “lots of poets loathed” was sufficiently heated that fistfights erupted on the floor of the Stony Brook World Poetry Conference. Yet that same year Poetry published aging avant-gardists like Pablo Neruda, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, political radicals like Muriel Rukeyser, and hip authors like Gary Snyder, as well as experimentalists of various schools such as Gerard Malanga, Ted Berrigan, and Larry Eigner.
     The proliferation of community poetry readings and the relative rise in popularity of readings by well-known authors is a lasting if limited effect of the tendency that, while it was hardly new, grew considerably in the late sixties. As M.F.A. programs have sprouted on all sides, the general poetic literacy has fallen precipitately. The poetic energy that for a time in the sixties bled into popular culture in a range of fresh and exciting directions, has, it seems to me, produced little promise of new work in our own time. Revolutionary political lyrics in rare survivals seem as robotized as the forgotten proletarian poetry of the thirties, though ethnic identity, gay, and feminist themes are prominent in prize-winning manuscripts. A solid advance is evident in the emergence of ranks of significant black writers, but political protest seems most vigorous in rap. The counter-culture, arguably already spent by 1968 – the Haight had observed “the death of hippie” toward the end of 1967 – is to most a somewhat silly memory rather than a renaissance. Its innovative forms have been coopted and digested by the marketplace. The sometimes witty, elegant, and outrageous head comics, it seems, served only to pave the way for Beavis and Butthead, the montage methods of the wildest underground movies appear in advertisements for underwear, and popular music has long returned to being a commodity. For my money, the present question is not in what direction the avant-garde will turn, but whether an avant-garde is possible at all in the twenty-first century.

The Greeks Meet the Yogis

I collect here most of the significant references to ancient Indian philosophers in Greek authors. Rather than proposing new ideas about these encounters, my goal is simply to bring these records together for the convenience of the general reader and to provide suggestions for further reading. I realize my title sounds flippant with its overgeneralized “yogis,” but I am little worse in this way than my Greek authorities.



     Knowledge of India in the West was, until the last few hundred years, fragmentary and often fabulous.  Even when a European writer did speak of the East, Asia, or the Orient it was most often with the Near East in mind.  The 1785 publication of the Bhagavad Gita by Charles Wilkins marked the first translation directly from a Sanskrit text into a European language. [1]  Still, as some find they have a wandering and a curious disposition, there have been contacts, including trade, between Europe and South Asia since ancient times.
     It is likely that Herodotus had heard something of Indian sadhus when he wrote “there are other Indians, again, who kill no living creature, nor sow, nor are wont to have houses; they eat grass, and they have a grain growing naturally from the earth in its calyx, about the size of a millet-seed, which they gather with the calyx and roast and eat.  When any one of them falls sick he goes into the desert and lies there, none regarding whether he be sick or die.” [2]
     More or less reliable accounts of meetings between ancient Greeks and Indians are recorded in historical and geographical treatises in both Greek and Sanskrit.  Some Greeks were actively curious about the new philosophies they encountered and sought out and questioned those considered wise men among the Indians.  More speculatively, Indian thought appears to have influenced some Greek philosophers, particularly Pythagoreans, Cynics, Skeptics, and Neo-Platonists.
     The practices of Indian ascetics impressed many outsiders, most of all those of a similar sensibility.   Philostratus quotes the Neopythagorean Apollonius of Tyana as saying “I saw Indian Brahmans living upon the earth and yet not on it, and fortified without fortifications, and possessing nothing, yet having the riches of all men.”  Apollonius indeed thought their wisdom surpassed that of the Greeks, saying somewhat gnomically, “I consider that your lore is profounder and much more divine than our own; and if I add nothing to my present stock of knowledge while I am with you, I shall at least have learned that I have nothing more to learn.” [3]
     Doubtless the most substantial report of India was the Indika of Megasthenes who had been an ambassador sent by Seleucus, one of Alexander’s Diadochi, to Chandragupta Maurya’s court in Pataliputra.  The book is lost, but portions are preserved by Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Pliny, and Arrian. Megasthenes accepts fantastic tales such as mouthless people, those with their feet backward, and others with great ears extending to the ground in which they wrap themselves to sleep.  He is, however, quite clear about the distinction between brahmins and sramaṇas, or ascetics. With the casual cosmopolitanism of the Greeks, who considered that divinity was universally the same, followers of Shiva are called Dionysians and those of Vishnu followers of Zeus. [4]  The Greeks themselves were probably ignorant of Indian sects, and the thinkers they encountered may have been Buddhists, Hindus, or Jains, and all three groups might have been called Brahmins or gymnosophists.
     In his life of Alexander Plutarch relates a story of the king’s own interaction with such sages. He had been wounded by an arrow while fighting the Malli in the Punjab. Blaming religious leaders for fomenting rebellion against him, he suppressed the resistance violently, including killing numerous holy men. Plutarch’s narration takes the form of a folktale.  Alexander summons ten gymnosophists and poses them difficult questions.  He threatens to kill them if they answer poorly but appoints one of their own number as judge. [5]
     They acquit themselves well, and the general import of the anecdote is simply to establish their credentials as wise men.  Some resemble riddles with a pleasantly unexpected answer, such as the question as to which animal is the most cunning, to which the response was “that which man has not discovered.”  The Greeks likely admired the forthrightness and attachment to virtue of the man who, when asked why he had supported Sabbas’ revolt, replied “Because I wished him either to live nobly or to die nobly.” Several of the answers seemed to be common sententiae such when declaring that the most loved man would be he that is most powerful, yet does not inspire fear.
     Perhaps the most subtle answers are those that to undermine dualities.  When asked whether the earth or the sea produced larger animals, the gymnosophist answered that earth did, since the sea was but a part of the earth.  Thus the apparent opposites are folded together harmonically. Similarly, the responses seem to harmonize life and death, day and night, god and man, while making no reference to the philosophic or theological underpinnings of their attitudes.
     The story ends with three turns of a fine dialectical wit.  “The judge declared that they had answered one worse than another."  Alexander says that, for delivering such an opinion, he must be the first to die, whereupon the sage responds, “That cannot be, O King,” said the judge, “unless thou falsely saidst that thou wouldst put to death first him who answered worst.”  Pleased, Alexander then pardons the lot and sends them off laden with gifts.  Thus the gymnosophist surprises the reader by, in effect, condemning his colleagues; Alexander turns the tables once more by saying that he must be executed; and finally, the gymnosophist uses the king’s own words to provide a happy ending.
     Arrian paraphrasing Megasthenes, tells that the Indians indicate no sign of respect but only stamped their feet when he appeared.  When asked the meaning of their action, they did not hesitate to chasten the conqueror’s ambition.  “King Alexander, every man can possess only so much of the earth’ surface as this we are standing on.  You are but human like the rest of us, save that you are always busy and up to no good, traveling so many miles from your home, a nuisance to yourself and to others.  Ah well! You will soon be dead, and then you will own just as much of this earth as will suffice to bury you.” [6]
     It was not the end, apparently, of Alexander’s inquiries.  Having heard that the very wisest remain in their hermitages, he sends Onesicritus, a Cynic and follower of Diogenes, [7] to interview these wisest if the wise. The one reputed wisest of all, Dandamis would have nothing to do with the Greeks, asking only “Why did Alexander make such a long journey hither?”  Onesicritus sought then to interview another of the gymnosophists, Calanus, only to find him unwilling to speak until the Greek removed his clothes to match the Indian’s state of undress.  Calanus did accompany the Greeks for some time, though he took ill and, realizing his death was approaching asked that a funeral pyre be built whereupon he calmly reclined to be burnt. [8]
     The Indian philosophers impressed not only pagans, but Jews and Christians as well.  Philo Judaeus, the Jewish neoplatonist, who sought to harmonize Jewish and Hellenistic thought by interpreting both symbolically, observes with admirable cosmopolitanism, “And among the Indians there is the class of the gymnosophists, who . . .make their whole existence a sort of lesson in virtue.” [9]
     According to Eusebius an Indian asked Socrates about his philosophy and when he answered that he studied human life, “the Indian laughed at him, and said that no one could comprehend things human, if he were ignorant of things divine.” He does not record Socrates’ response, but he does treat Socrates as a righteous if non-Christian theist, superior to the materialist Greek thinkers.  He approvingly notes that Plato sought to make “the divine” the basis for his thought.” [10]
     Clement of Alexandria, with more understanding than many an orthodox Christian divine since, said with regard to pagan philosophers “all [peoples], in my opinion, are illuminated by the dawn of Light.”  His ethnocentrism destabilized by attachment to Christianity, he argues that much of Greek philosophy was derived from “barbarians,” including Jews, Egyptians, and others. He mentions Buddhists as well. [11]
     Indians clearly had acquired a reputation for asceticism, non-materialism, and utter devotion to philosophy.  It is less evident that the specific tenets of Indian religio-philosophic thought influenced Greek writers, though Indian influence has been traced by some scholars as early as pre-Socratics. [12]   With evidence varying from the highly speculative to the highly likely, scholars have discerned South Asian concepts in a number of schools of later Greek thought.
     Pythagoreanism with its teaching of reincarnation and vegetarianism seems obviously reminiscent of similar Hindu and Buddhist doctrines.  Apollonius thought that the philosophers of the East has a Pythagorean air about them. [13]  According to Philostratus’ account the Indians specifically claimed to have influenced Pythagoreanism.
     Plotinus, according to Porphyry’s biography, wished to study with the Persian magi and the Indian gymnosophists.  The neoplatonic monad Nous has seemed to many to resemble the Atman of Advaita thought. [14] Plotinus had set out to study he teaching of the Persian and Indian sages, but the military expedition of Gordian III with whom he traveled, proved a failure and he did not reach India proper, though he may have met with Indian philosophers.
     Some see Indian influence in Diogenes whose ascetic practices were rare in pre-Christian Greece [15], though Pythagoreans and others had advocated simple, if not ascetic, life. Diogenes famously met Alexander – the encounter is one of the most well-known anecdotes of antiquity – and Diogenes’ disciple Onesicritus was selected to by the king to investigate the gymnosophists, perhaps due to a similarity of thought.
     Probably the best case for Indian influence is that of Pyrrho of Elis’s Skepticism.  Not only is Pyrrho known to have traveled to the East and conferred with philosophers there; he is also reported to have had a sort of conversion experience. “This led him to adopt a most noble philosophy, to quote Ascanius of Abdera, taking the form of agnosticism and suspension of judgement. He denied that anything was honourable or dishonourable, just or unjust. And so, universally, he held that there is nothing really existent, but custom and convention govern human action; for no single thing is in itself any more this than that.” Upon his return to Greece his radically skeptical teachings included a virtual duplication of the quadrilemma that had been used for centuries by Sanskrit thinkers. [16] The Buddhist concept of avyakrta or insoluble problems according to Buddha is comparable as well, though Pyrrho’s skepticism is more thorough.
     By the third century of the Christian era Hippolytus of Rome included the Brahmins in his Refutation of All Heresies. [17]  He says, oddly, perhaps referring to mantras, that “to them the Deity is Discourse.”  Yet he also more or less accurately describes the austerities of the “Brachmans.”  Though Westerners only gained access to reliable texts of the Sanskrit masterpieces in the nineteenth century, many hundreds of years earlier Europeans had caught sight of glints and shadows of philosophical and spiritual systems from the other side of the world. In spite of imperfect transmission such news from other cultures exercised an outsize influence even in ancient times, suggesting a broader sense of what it is to be human, opening the possibility of new directions and fertilizing European thought.




1. Translations into French and German followed, and the book proved an influence on Romanticism. Blake celebrated its publication with a picture The Bramins, unfortunately now lost, which showed Wilkins and his Indian collaborators.

2. III, 100.

3. Philostratus 3.13 and 3.16. An early example, perhaps, of a late antique trend that persists today, the Westerner infatuated with “the wisdom of the East.”

4. See the account in Strabo XV, I, 39 ff.. Chandragupta himself married a Greek, daughter of Suluva. Bhavisya Purana edited by P. 18 According to the Pratisarga Parva , he “mixed the Buddhists and Yavanas [Greeks].” Other Greek embassies to India were led by Deimachus, ambassador to Bindusara, and Dionysius, ambassador to Ashoka. Ctesias was also the author of an Indika, but he relied on second-hand information, having himself gone no further than Persia.

5. Plutarch 65 ff. Curiously, the story finds its way into the Mishnah transformed into Alexander questioning the elders of the Negev. See Luitpold Wallach, “Alexander the Great and the Indian Gymnosophists in Hebrew Tradition,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research Vol. 11 (1941), pp. 47-83. He notes as well that a number of ancient Greek sources claim that Jews were descended from Indian philosophers. Plutarch had earlier noted (59) that Alexander did have many gymnosophists killed for their part in fomenting rebellion.

6. Arrian, Anabasis, VII.1.5 ff.

7. Though Onesicritus’ volume How Alexander was Educated (Πῶς Ἀλέξανδρος Ἤχθη) is lost, it was known to many ancient authors and seems to have combined much factual information with a measure of myth, legend, and good story.

8. Plutarch reports (69) that the same self-sacrifice was performed by “another Indian who was in the following of Caesar at Athens; and the ‘Indian's Tomb’ is shown there to this day.”

9. Quod omnis probus liber sit (Every Good Man is Free), 74. Philo specifically praises the judgement of Calanus in sections 92-93.

10. Praeparatio evangelico 11.8. The story in Aristocles is thought an attack on a materialist or at any rate humanistic Socrates perhaps from Pythagorean critics. Many early Christian regarded Socrates as something of a proto-Christian, for instance, Justin Martyr’s First Apology 46. Augustine says he was taught by the Platonists to seek spiritual truth. Confessions 7. 20.

11. Stromata 1.15 and 1.13. Eusebius likewise Preparatio evangelico 10.5 says that the Greeks owed their philosophy to barbarians.

12. See George P. Conger’s “Did India Influence Early Greek Philosophies?” in Philosophy East and West Vol. 2, No. 2 (Jul., 1952), pp. 102-12 and Thomas C. McEvilley’s The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. General treatments include K. Karttunen, India in Early Greek Literature.

13. Philostratus 3.13 and 3.19.

14. See Ananda Coomaraswamy Vedanta and Western Tradition, Bréhier’ La Philosophie de Plotin (1928), P.M. Gregorios (ed.), Neoplatonism and Indian Philosophy, R.B. Harris (ed.), Neoplatonism and Indian Philosophy. For an up-to-date survey, see Joachim Lacrosse’s “Plotinus, Porphyry, and India: A Re-Examination,” Le philosophoire 2014/1, No 41, and J.F. Staal, Advaita and Neoplatonism: a Critical Study in Comparative Philosophy. Coomaraswamy (see, for instance,) and others have noted the similarities between Plotinus' teachings to the Hindu school of Advaita Vedanta,. Though some have denied or downplayed Indian influence. See A. H. Armstrong’s The Architecture of the Intelligible Universe in the Philosophy of Plotinus: An Analytical and Historical Study.

15. See J. Romm, Dog Heads and Noble Savages: Cynicism before the Cynics.

16. Diogenes Laertius IX.61. See Christopher I. Beckwith Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia and E. Flintoff, “Pyrrho and India,” Phronesis 25 (1980), 88-108. The story of the gymnosophists’ answers to riddle-like questions was thought to be Skeptic by Philip R. Bosman in “The Gymnosophist Riddle Context (Berol. P. 13044): A Cynic Text?” in Richard Kalmin Migrating Tales: The Talmud's Narratives and Their Historical Context which also discusses various retellings of the story.

17. Ch. 21. Jean Filliozat with Jean Renou in L’Inde Classique argues that Hippolytus was familiar with the teachings of the Maitreya Upanishad. See "La doctrine brahmanique à Rome au IIIè siècle" in Les relations extérieures de l’Inde, vol. 2.

Archives of the First Majority Gallery

America’s susceptibility to celebrity extends even to the arts. We laud the famous to the skies while neglecting those who have never gained the spotlight. We gladly pay premium prices for concert seats to hear a performer we know by reputation and ignore first-rate regional talents. We turn in a literary journal to the names we recognize and never get around to the rest. In order to succeed in the arts one must be as clever about publicity as about one’s art. In this way most artists work in darkness and leave no trace. The merit of an aesthetic work does not entail its longevity.

All the more do those who embrace counter-cultural ideals and eschew conventional markers of achievement prepare their own obscurity. Ted Joans was always just too hip for the mantle of fame while Allen Ginsberg found it fit him well. Patti Smith doggedly pursued every opportunity for advancement, so we can say her name today, while dozens of other punk poets are forgotten.

During the 1970s my wife Patricia Seaton, sometimes called “Ia,” was an exhibiting member of the First Majority Gallery in Berkeley, a pioneering all-female gallery in Berkeley. In a few decades the First Majority, has all but vanished from memory. Virtually nothing of its history is recorded online beyond its place in a few artists’ résumés and scans of old journals listing shows. Surely such grass-roots artistic formations have their own story to tell of the cultural history of our time. I record below some haphazardly surviving records concerning the group which were kept in increasingly battered cardboard boxes through all the artist’s travels and subsequent ventures. Having witnessed so very much of lesser importance preserved apparently forever in digital form, I list these documents here to record available details of one small and twisting tendril winding through the history of the age.

Reading the guest book comments for Patricia’s show, I am struck by the number of visitors who thought the work pointed important new directions. They felt the presence of something meaningful, beautiful, and novel in the arts. Decades later their enthusiasm cannot be recaptured, but it is possible to preserve a few fragmented traces of what once excited it.



Multiple copies exist of some documents.

call for submissions for two group shows during the summer of 1975 signed Ginger, Janet, Judith, Rosalie, and Sheila.

call for submissions for a group show inviting work “whether or not you consider yourself to be an artist,” on the theme of the Great Mother scheduled for April 24, signed “Rosalie, Sheila, Ia, Ginger, and Evelyn.”

call for submissions for a show on the theme “Illumination: words, pictures, & light” opening June 24, 1975.

letter dated June 18, 1975 signed Patricia Seaton indicating a wish to join the collective.

note accepting Seaton’s work for group show July 12, 1975.

“An Interior Landscape” Nov. 3-Dec. 7 (1975) poster with drawing by Ia and, following the title, the words “women’s environment . . .mental contours . . .collective art work.

“Spirits Clothed in Flesh” Jan. 27-Feb. 8 (1976) with drawing by Ia from a painted plate and, following the title, the words “paintings, drawings, ceramics, phantoms demonic & delicious."

“A Women’s Art Show” Oct. 1-Oct.31 (1975) with drawing perhaps by Janet Cannon-Unione including Virginia Atkin-Murray, Janet Cannon-Unione, Evelyn Hinde, Patricia Seaton, Sheila Seguin, Judith Sutliff, and Judy Todd.

Catalogue for “Spirits Clothed in Flesh” including three drawings by Ia.

press release for a slide lecture on “Patriarchal Mutilation of the Great Mother” by Lili Artel on September 18 and 25, 1975.

press release for “Spirits Clothed in Flesh” Jan. 27-Feb. 28 with remarks attributed to Euterpe of Chicago.

Women’s Art Center Newsletter, Winter 1976, with notice of Ia Seaton show, labeled gallery copy.

“The First Majority: Conversation with Sheila Seguin and Ginger Atkin,” four-page document citing a founding statement from February 1974 and list of the current collective members: Ginger Atkin, Rosalie Cassell, Evelyn Hinde, Patricia Seaton, Sheila Seguin, and Judy Todd. The document discusses the gallery and its vision, past shows, the current “Internal Landscape.”

announcement of an April 1 showing of tapes from “Just Us” and from International Women’s Video letters and of a program “Meet the First Majority” on April 25. Both are noted as “women only” events.

poster for the April 25 “Meet the First Majority” program, including “women only.”

poster for first show opening Feb. 15 with a group show including Virginia Atkin-Murray, Janet Cannon-Unione, Rosalie Cassell, Ellyn Rabinowitz, Diane Rusnak, Sheila Seguin, and Judith Sutliff.

poster for “Hindsight,” sculpture and environment by Evelyn Hinde with a drawing (by Hinde?) September 14-October 18 (1975?).

poster for “Bay Area Women: part 2” August 10-September 4, 1975 with unsigned drawing.

poster for “Ghost Images,” paintings, prints, and photos by Judith Sutliff with photo by Sutliff June 15-July 10.

poster for show featuring “The Drawings, Paintings, and Poems of Janet Cannon-Unione and Virginia Atkin-Murray with unsigned drawing.

poster for “Camilla Hall: her paintings, drawings, poetry” March 16-April 15 with drawing by Hall.
poster for Paintings and Sculpture by Sheila Seguin May 17-June 12.

poster for “Witch’s Retort” art by Rosalie Cassell and Judy Todd March 6-April 3, 1976 with unsigned drawing.

poster for the “Great Mother” show including Lina Allertons, Diane Rusnak, Pat Henshaw, Karen Berkan, Lougran O’Connor, Benita Mirabelli, Elizabeth Ennis, Maxene Galkin, January Nice, Leslie Markham, Nan Parry, Sara Sunstein, and Rossi Stewart, April 24-March 29, 1976.

poster for “Bay Area Women” July 12-August 7 with unsigned drawing.

poster for “Womanrise” Amazon art by Virginia Atkin, Dec. 23-Jan. 27 with drawing by Atkin.

poster for video evenings Feb. 9, March 11, and March 25 featuring the Just US Video Collective, the Iris Video Collective and CCAC Women’s Video, the latter two to admit women only.

poster for open poetry readings (women only) in the gallery starting April 9.

poster for lectures Sep. 2 by Evelyn Hinde on Käthe Kollowitz [sic], Sep. 18 Lili Artel in the Great Mother, and Sep. 25 Lili Artel on “Fragmentation of the Great Mother in Patriarchy.”

text of proposal to Berkeley City Government for grant, dated December 1975.

report to Berkeley Civic Arts Commission detailing programs in the First majority Gallery space, undated.

photocopy of new story “First Majority: more than just a gallery” September 1975.

press release following the gallery’s first show opening February 15, 1975, discussing the history of the project, two pages.

“The First Majority: Evolution of a Women’s Gallery in the East Bay” discussing the first show, February 15, 1975, copied from an unknown journal.

copy of article by Brenda Kahn from The Daily Californian February 25, 1975 “New Gall;eryto Shpwcase Women Artists Only.”

Calendar of First majority events for January through March showing numerous programs undocumented elsewhere.

unspecified: letter from Chico State professor asking for slides of “Octopus Woman” for a course on Women and the Arts, newspaper announcements of shows, visitor book with comments for “Spirits Clothed in Flesh,” six pages from what seems to be a gallery sitter’s book, list of Bay Area media outlets, poster for “Persona, a women’s art show" in the Berkeley Library.

“Preachin’ the Blues” (Son House)

I discuss here House’s 1930 recording, the text of which is appended. I have added also for comparison his 1965 version.


     Literature, indeed, art in general, is particularly effective in dealing with thematic material which is conflicted, ambivalent, paradoxical, and mysterious. This characteristic of poetic truth arises not from a valuation of obscurity for its own sake, but rather from the complexity of people’s own attitudes, particularly toward the subjects that matter most: love, death, and the divine. Self-contradictory codes flourish in poetry because binary oppositions are often reductive or false. An accurate answer is often "neither and both."
     Son House exemplifies in his life as well as his work the tension between the sacred and the secular in early Delta blues singers and in African-American culture more generally. Though in his youth he was a regular church-goer and generally an enthusiastic Christian, his ambivalence toward religion and its associated codes of morality emerged in periodic heavy drinking which resulted in his leaving the church for a time, though he later returned to become a deacon and then a preacher for several years. At the age of twenty-five, he was captivated upon hearing a friend play slide guitar, and, in what has been called a reverse conversion, he returned to the blues. [1] The lifestyle that resulted from his commitment to secular music led to his involvement in periodic fights and twice to his arrest for murder. [2]
     One of his most well-known tunes, “Preachin’ the Blues,” recorded for Paramount in two parts in 1930, expresses the bipolar opposition of sacred and secular in its paradoxical title as well as in House’s intense, strained vocal quality and the driving, if simple, accompaniment. The pressured vocalizations of the performance push against the limits of the artist’s virtuosity, piercing the border of intelligibility to heighten the tone and leaping thereby into the sublime beginning with the very first syllable, an extended “ohhh” that seems to rise from the depths.
     The pattern of these apparently “spontaneous overflows of powerful emotion” is highly symmetrical. The afflatus above the register of words is maintained through the second verse’s “mmm” sound, the heart-felt “yeah” of verses six and seven which links the last verse on side one and the first of side two, the first of which is supported by an “oh” and the second by a “whoa.” The final verse brings a unifying return to the “oh” from the abyss which opened the song.
     Similarly, House’s exclamations, replicating those that would arise from a Pentecostal congregation, “Lord God almighty” and “praise God almighty,” indicate a level of emotional excitement, though their piety is radically ambivalent, caught on the ridgepole of doubt that supports the entire song.
     The song opens with what might sound like a declaration of faith in church, the commitment of a sinner coming forward to be saved: “Oh, I'm gon' get me religion I'm gon' join the baptist church.” Yet ambiguity emerges immediately as the rhyme line turns to satire emphasized by the vocal waver about the word “have to” in the line “so I won’t have to work.” House thus ridicules the most respected member of the community at the same time as he implicitly rejects the work ethic embraced by “respectable” blacks. His listeners were familiar with jokes and stories based on men of the cloth whose minds were less on things of the spirit than on chicken dinners from the parishioners, if not the church ladies’ beds. [3]
     He then tightly conflates the sacred and the secular by announcing “Oh, I’m gonna preach these blues now“ and asking “I want everybody to shout,” as though they were in a church rather than a juke joint, the likely venue for the song’s performance. Just after saying he would accept religion, he begins to preach, but not from a gospel perspective, rather “I'm gonna preach these blues now,” suggesting the music might prove for him a sort of religion. He continues “I want everybody to shout” as though leading a fundamentalist worship service where the congregation is anything but passive.
     While this may seem to continue the mocking of men of the cloth by conducting a sort of black Protestant equivalent of a Black Mass, celebrating the opposite of Christian values, the last line of the second verse disappoints that expectation with an apparently sincere search for spiritual release, just as the rhyme-line of the first stanza upset the rhetoric of the very first verse. The poignant longing of the line is unmistakable, “I'm gonna do like a prisoner, I'm gon' roll my time on out.”
     The word prisoner here is profoundly ambiguous. On the one hand, an irreligious person might regard the rules of the church as a “prison.” For the observant when House compares himself to a prisoner, the term may recall St. Paul’s references to himself as “a prisoner of Jesus Christ.” [4] Paul was speaking of his being made a literal prisoner because of his righteousness alone, but also of his submissive commitment to Christian morality and values. Finally, behind these associations is the old sense of the body itself as a prison and life as a long incarceration. [5]
     “I'm gon' roll my time on out” surely means that the speaker will live his life, with all its restrictions and suffering, in such a way as to make it as easy as possible, while maintaining a neutrality about Christianity or loose living will be the greater aid toward that end.
     In the third verse the ambiguities continue as the singer, having resolved to “do his time” on earth as easily as possible, commences to seek the consolation of religion in an altogether conventional way. “In my room I bowed down to pray,” but his intentions are short-lived since “the blues come along and they blowed my spirit away.” The speaker is apparently passive, he is trying to do right, but the blues rear up, actively curtailing his devotions. The personification anticipates the phrase that occurs later: “the blues came walking like a man.” [6] What could he do with his spirit involuntarily dissipated and his soul in the grip of the blues?
     Simply to reinforce his case, the speaker goes on to insist “I'd'a had religion, Lord, this very day/ But the womens and the whiskey, well, they would not let me pray.” Again he blames an outside agency for overwhelming his good faith attempts to lead a Christian life. He proceeds to yearn for heaven and, for good measure, praises “God almighty,” but then reveals that his own paradise would be “a long, long happy home” populated by “all my women,” implying that eternal love-making rather than choral song would occupy his black angels. [7] He is holding tightly to both sides of the bipolar opposition, seeking salvation (which one might also call liberation or enlightenment) while at the same time affirming his incorrigible pursuit of pleasure.
     The singer readily confesses the egocentric basis of his earthly love, noting in the sixth verse, after a passionate “yeah,” an enthusiastic affirmation: “I love my baby just like I love myself.” Christ after all, asked neither more nor less. [8] House, however, is swift to add the aggressively possessive and quite unchristian sentiment: “if she don't have me she won't have nobody else.”
     On the second side of the record, “Preachin’ the Blues, Part 2” House elaborates the synthesis of the sacred and the secular, implying a new sort of blues which provides a vision entire and specific of blues as an experience potentially as profound and soul-satisfying as the church. As before, he begins by sounding as though he is conventionally pious: “I'm gon' fold my arms , I'm gonna kneel down in prayer.” The rhyme-line, though recoils on this meaning: “when I get up I'm gonna leave my preachin blues laying there.” Though the precise implication of this statement is mysterious, House again beings into creation through naming that odd hybrid, the preaching blues.
     A sort of theophany follows with the devotee’s communion with the supernatural. “I met the blues this morning, walking just like a man,” human because, of course, only sentient beings can get the blues. Rather than fleeing, the persona reaches out in fellowship to embrace his own suffering, saying “give me you right hand.”
     The knotty problem that motivates both the devout and those dedicated to the blues, the dilemma of suffering, is then resolved. The singer confidently states “there aint nothing now baby, Lord that's gon' worry my mind,” placing his lover and his god paratactically next to each other, as though he is addressing both at the same time. In a new state of blessedness, he says all is well, “I'm satisfied I got the longest line.”
     The last two stanzas, punctuated by the call to “praise God,” are filled with the resolution to continue in his practice of refusing to select either the sacred or the secular, but rather combining them into a synthesis better suited to his sensibility. Vowing “to stay on the job” and “preach these gospel blues,” he can not only lift up his own soul but can inspire a similar excited joy in his listeners.


Whoa, I'm gonna preach these blues now and choose my seat and sit down
When the spirit comes, I want you to jump straight up and down


     A primary weakness of the church is its hypocrisy. Believers and men of the cloth alike are expected to deny their own essential nature in order to be holy. The singer seeks to integrate spiritual growth with a more realistic assessment of what it is to be human in which both religion and sensuality have a part. Son House in this song testifies to the spiritual power of the blues, a power felt by many practitioners and listeners through the life of the genre. [9] The gravitas and passion he brings to the song lifts it far above satire of the failings of the church and its adherents into a search after a new synthesis of the sacred and the secular which might provide the individual with purpose and peace of mind more attuned to human nature than fundamentalist Christianity. If the tension is never resolved between sacred and secular that, too, reflects the singer’s (and perhaps the listener’s) lived experience.



1. Further biographical details may be found in Daniel Beaumont’s Preachin' the Blues; The Life and Times of Son House (Oxford, Oxford University Press: 2011).

2. He served several years at Parchman Farm the first time, but the second time, twenty-five years later, the charges were dropped.

3. In The ground-breaking Deep Down in the Jungle (p. 199) Roger D. Abrahams notes a precedent in Boccaccio when introducing jokes, which he describes as “legion,” on “the sexual promiscuity of the clergy”.

4. See Philemon I,9, Ephesians 4:1, etc. See also “slaves of God” (Romans 6:22). In the Eastern Orthodox Church, this term is used to refer to any Eastern Orthodox Christian. The Arabic name Abdullah (from عبد الله, ʿAbd Allāh) means "slave of God," as do the Hebrew name Obadiah (עובדיה), the German name Gottschalk, and the Sanskrit name Devadasa.

5. The trope appears around the world. See, for instance, Plato, Cratylus, 400c, Phaedo, 61e-62c, Gorgias, 493a, Phaedrus 250c, and Republic IX 586a. Leo III’s De Miseria Condicionis Humane (XIX) says straightforwardly “the body is the prison of the soul.”

6. These same words also appear in Robert Johnson’s song titled “Preachin’ Blues.”

7. Cf. Robert Nighthawk’s “Sweet Black Angel.” Or Lucille Bogan’s version “Black Angel Blues” Louis Lasky (“Teasin’ Brown Blues”), Charlie McCoy (“Last Time Blues”), and Blind Willie McTell (“Talking to Myself” and “Ticket Agent Blues”) are among those whose songs ask God to “send me an angel down.”

8. See Matthew 22:39, Mark 12:31, and Luke 12:27.

9. There are at least two albums titled Blues are my Religion (by Eric Culberson and Sonny Rhodes). For a scholarly iteration, see Jon Michael Spencer’s Blues and Evil. Cf. Ted Joans’ poem “Jazz is my Religion.”


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.”


Preachin’ the Blues
part 1 1930 version

Oh, I'm gon' get me religion I'm gon' join the baptist church
Oh, I'm gon' get me religion I'm gon' join the baptist church
I'm gon' be a baptist preacher and I sure won't have to work

Oh, I'm gonna preach these blues now, and I want everybody to shout
Mmm-mmm, I want everybody to shout
I'm gonna do like a prisoner, I'm gon' roll my time on out

Oh, in my room I bowed down to pray
Oh, up in my room I bowed down to pray
Then the blues come along and they blowed my spirit away

Oh, I'd'a had religion, Lord, this very day
Oh, I'd'a had religion, Lord, this very day
But the womens and whiskey, well, they would not let me pray

Oh, I wish I had me a heaven of my own,
(praise God almighty)
Yeah, heaven of my own,
Then I'd give all my women a long, long happy home

Yeah, I love my baby just like I love myself
Oh, just like I love myself
But if she don't have me she won't have nobody else.


part 2

Yeah, I'm gon' fold my arms , I'm gonna kneel down in prayer
Whoa, I fold my arms, gonna kneel down in prayer
When I get up I'm gonna leave my preachin blues laying there

Now I met the blues this morning, walking just like a man
Oh, walking just like a man
I said good morning blues, now give me you right hand

Now there aint nothing now baby, Lord that's gon' worry my mind
Oh, Lord that's gon' worry my mind
I'm satisfied I got the longest line

I got to stay on the job,I aint got no time to lose
Yeah, I aint got no time to lose
I swear to God, I got to preach these gospel blues

(Praise God almighty)

Oh, I'm gonna preach these blues and choose my seat and sit down
Whoa, I'm gonna preach these blues now and choose my seat and sit down
When the spirit comes, I want you to jump straight up and down



Preachin’ Blues (1965)

Yes, I'm gonna get me religion, I'm gonna join the Baptist Church.
Yes, I'm gonna get me religion, I'm gonna join the Baptist Church.
You know I wanna be a Baptist preacher, just so I won't have to work.

One deacon jumped up, and he began to grin.
One deacon jumped up, and he began to grin.
You know he said, "One thing, elder. I believe I'll go back to barrelhousin again."

One sister jumped up, and she began to shout.
One sister jumped up, and she began to shout.
"You know I'm glad this corn liquor's goin out."

Another deacon jumped up and said, "Why don't ya hush?"
Another deacon jumped up and said, "Why don't ya hush?"
"You know you drink corn liquor and your lie's a horrible stink."

One sister jumped up and she began to shout.
One sister jumped up and she began to shout.
"I believe I can tell ya'll what it's all about."

Another sister jumped up, she said, "Why don't ya hush?"
Another sister jumped up, she said, "Why don't ya hush?"
"You know he's abandoned, and you outta hush your fuss."

I was in the pulpit, I's jumpin up and down.
I was in the pulpit, I's jumpin up and down.
My sisters in the corner, they're hollerin Alabama bound.

Grabbed up my suitcase and I took off down the road.
Grabbed up my suitcase and I took off down the road.
I said, "Farewell church, may the good Lord bless your soul."
You know I wish I had a heaven of my own.
You know I wish I had a heaven of my own.
I'd give all my women a good ole happy home.

I'm gonna preach these blues and I'm gonna choose my seat and sit down.
I'm gonna preach these blues and I'm gonna choose my seat and sit down.
But, when the Spirit comes, I want you to

The Bloody Venus of Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander”

     Christopher Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander” is described in the 1593 entry in the Stationer’s Register as “an amourous poem.” While the adjective is apt, Marlowe’s depiction of erotic delights and dangers is strikingly ambivalent. The susceptible reader may find some passages such a richly brocaded fabric that the poet’s aim can only be beauty and pleasure alone, yet other passages betray a disturbing ambiguity. Marlowe suggests that the experience of love is ecstatic and portrays a sensual paradise in the intoxicating possibilities each lover’s body holds for then other, hardly less enthralling in contemplation than in possession, yet the mythological parallels he cites regularly entail deep suffering. The love of the poem is far from the ingenuous romance of Valentines or the hyperbolic praise of courtly love.

     Unsurprisingly, recent commentary has emphasized dark, ironic, and humorous elements of “Hero and Leander,” but two generations ago a leading scholar could describe the poem as “an unclouded celebration of youthful passion and fullness of physical life,” and “a pretty piece of paganism,” amounting in the end to a “rapturous exaltation of the senses.” [1]

     To another critic of that period the poem “puts aside for the moment the great issues of life and chooses an idyllic theme,” creating a “holiday mood,” “a new and lovely region” with “clear bright air,” “one of the purest things in Elizabethan literature.” This particular reading betrays its blind spots by making the claim that the poem contains “not an obscene word or degenerate description,” [2] though no reader in any era could miss the many double entendres or the repeated introduction of homoerotic content with no direct relation to the central story.

     The very first line calls the Hellespont “guilty of true love’s blood,” foreshadowing a tragic outcome, yet this is easily assimilated under the rubric of “star-crossed love,” the more poignantly affecting for its unhappy conclusion. The reader is likely to be given pause, however, a few lines later, upon discovering that upon Hero’s “kirtle blue” may be found “many a stain/ Made with the blood of wretched lovers slain.” (16-17) The syntax makes it obscure at first reading whether the blood is on Venus’ or on Hero’s garment, but of course the latter is an instance here of the former, so like that the mortal attracts divine love and outshine Nature herself.

     Indeed, the reader very shortly learns details of Venus’ own blood guilt. Her temple, called “Venus’ glass,” (I, 142) is ornamented with depictions of love among the immortals, but these are not tender scenes of affection, but rather “riots, incest, rapes.” (I, 144) The mythological models for erotic behavior include Danae (imprisoned, then victim of rape and attempted murder), Ganymede (abducted), Danae (abducted), Mars (the adulterer), and Sylvanus (whose lover Cyparissus died of grief). [3] Here turtle-doves are quite properly not admired but rather sacrificed, (I, 158) and their blood must come to mind when Hero calls herself a sacrifice to Leander. (II, 48)

     With considerable wit, Marlowe takes pains to ensure that a sinister subtext underlies even what might seem at first glance a conventional compliment.[4] In the description of Leander, for instance, the poet praises the youth: “His body was as straight as Circe’s wand.” (I, 61) Yet the reader thinks more of the fate of Odysseus’ men, transformed to beasts, than of good posture. [5] Immediately following a reference to Leander’s being like “delicious meat” (I, 63) to Jove, his neck is said to surpass “the white of Pelops’ shoulder” (I, 65) whose body was in fact served up in sacrifice. The mention of Pelops suggests the whole multi-generational tragedy of Tantalus and the Atreidai. [6]

     Even a god like Neptune is not merely embarrassed but feels “malice” due to his infatuation with Leander. (II, 208) His own ambivalence causes him to call back his mace thus wounding himself. (II, 213) The digression on Mercury is filled with examples of mortals who came to grief through love entanglements: Ixion, Tantalus, Sisyphus, and Peleus. Leander’s love “is not full of pity (as men say)/ But deaf and cruel where he means to prey.” (II, 287-288) Hero, for her part, is figured as a siren (I, 105) or a terrible harpy (II, 270), a threat to potential lovers.

     This ambivalent or conflicted view of human eroticism, combining the most sublime delights and the most agonized suffering, new life and its complement death, introduced enough cognitive dissonance to render it nearly invisible to early critics. This complex, puzzle-like picture of love is aesthetically pleasing after the manner of a riddle with a similar reader satisfaction once the sense in its nonsense emerges. The fact is that love is compounded of ego and unselfishness, aggression and vulnerability, with immense potential for both violence and tenderness. Evidence is available in the ordinary transactions of life as well as in extreme dramatic phenomena such as sado-masochist fetishes and domestic assaults. With scintillating courtly wit, including a barrage of learned references, Marlowe constructs a picture of two lovers, neither more naïve at the outset nor more doomed in the sequel than his readers. Love may rule the world, but Marlowe leaves no doubt that this means pain and suffering as well as bliss.



1. Douglas Bush, in Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English, p. 33, 125, and 133. Wordsworth had called Keats’ Endymion “a pretty piece of paganism.” The view persisted. Paul Cubeta’s “Marlowe’s Poet in hero and Leander” in College English Vol. 26, No. 7 (Apr., 1965), pp. 500-505 declares “the central purpose of Marlowe’s poem to be “the celebration of erotic rapture.”

2. Paul H. Kocher, Christopher Marlowe : a study of his thought, learning, and character, p. 313, 294, and 514.

3. The only image which does not necessarily reflect coercion or deception is that of Iris. Since Marlowe has her tumbling with Jove in a cloud, he likely imagined her as ravished. (I, 150)

4. The similar partially submerged use of the reference to Philomel in Raleigh’s “The Nymphs Reply to the Shepherd” indicates that such sly use of allusion was well-established.

5. Circe had become by the Middle Ages a type of a deceptive seducer who leads men astray. See, for instance, Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, 1361-1362.

6. Other relevant aspects of Pelops’ myth include his love relationship with Neptune (or Poseidon, see Pindar, Ist Olympian, 71) and his perilous courtship of Hippodamia, who had killed eighteen earlier suitors.

Notes on Recent Reading 36 (Norris, Rexroth and Laughlin, Sand)

The Pit (Norris)

     Might one write a good novel about the financial markets? Bonfire of the Vanities doesn’t make it, but Norris made a decent attempt with The Pit in 1903. Envisioned as the middle work of a trilogy following a crop of wheat from production through sale to consumption (hardly a promising theme), the story concerns Curtis Jadwin who initially eschews speculation but who is eventually seduced and finally ruined by it. His devotion to his wife, the much-admired Laura Dearborn, is gradually eroded by his addiction to the pursuit of the biggest of deals, cornering the market. (One recalls, of course, that the book was written in the time of anti-trust agitation.) Laura, on the other hand, is self-absorbed, far less mutual in the relationship of her marriage than her sister Page in hers to Landry Court. In fact, the married love themes coexist with the business and economic one without any real attempt toward synthesis or harmony. The conclusion is unconvincing, facile, and abrupt, as Jadwin, while ruined, sets off cheerfully to begin anew, sadder but wiser.
     Norris’ naturalist themes are apparent in his description of the commodities market as a great independent being in the coils of which humans are helpless. In the narrative, both Jadwin’s attempts to corner the market and his attempts at self-restraint are equivalent to challenging nature itself. As elsewhere in Norris, the world of business is contrasted to that of art, and his artist here Sheldon Corthell, charms the ladies and makes insightful observations from the sidelines. Though the book, which appeared after the author’s death, was widely reviewed and generally applauded, I would concur with those critics who find it weaker than the gritty lower depths of McTeague or the Cinemascope Western grandeur of The Octopus.


Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (Rexroth, Laughlin)

     Having valued Rexroth’s poetry, translations, and criticism for my entire life, indeed, having modeled some of my own studies after his own, I was perhaps over-sensitive to the more personal of these communications. While I was rewarded by finding Rexroth’s customarily knowledgeable and acute critical judgments on nearly every page (the Norton edition edited by Lee Bartlett is, if anything, excessively annotated), I was also put off by my man’s constant badgering, pushing repeatedly for more publications, scolding Laughlin for his refusal to completely discount the writers whom Rexroth calls academic, attacking him for his wealth while always trying to get a bit more of it out of him. In spite of the perils of irascibility and self-pity for those of us who deliberately chose poverty and the counter-culture, I salute Rexroth in the end for his simultaneous principled dedication to the classics and the avant-garde. And his translations from the Chinese can be quite wonderful even if, as the reader of these letters learns, he was capable of translating really from Judith Gautier’s fin-de-siècle French while pretending to work from Chinese. (Characteristically, Laughlin generously notes that he eventually learned quite a few characters and could work to some extent from the original.) He probably knew as much as Pound did, and Pound’s Cathay contains some of the greatest poetry of the twentieth century. The prose in this volume is rarely distinguished, but the literary history and the off-hand critical comments make it essential even for those to whom the hip ideal is less appealing.


Lettres d’un Voyageur (Sand)

     George Sand’s book is at once a memoir, a travel book, and a novel. She passes from one genre to the next as she relates her experiences in Italy and France. Some passages are in fact from actual letters she wrote at the time, while others were composed later. Though there is not enough plot to make a steady story line, she describes her emotional and geographic peregrinations at the center of a love triangle with a poet – the original was Musset – and her physician. The capping detail to this generic conundrum is that parts of the book were first published in the Revue des Deux Mondes and the Revue de Paris. So these letters had a rather wide audience at the time of their publication. Perhaps the celebrity/romance/mystery aspect was significant in the book’s first readership who may have received it as a classier People magazine.
     Yet I am afraid that I feel as a French cookbook once said about a Provencal olive oil pastry touted as equally useful for pie crust, tarts, strudel, and pasta, “good for everything means good for nothing.” The incidents lack the principal desideratum of each sort of book: the structure of a novel, the detailed outward focus of a travel book, and the consistent fidelity to subjective experience of a memoir. The reader who may be satisfied with partial quotients of each will nonetheless find the book worth reading. Now no less than in her lifetime the author has a palpable charisma about her.