A Stroll around Lake Bled

     As the visitor enters Slovenia from Italy, the landscape changes from Midwest-flat to wooded and mountainous. The town of Bled, not far from the capital Ljubljana, is in the Gorenjska or mountainous region, what under the Habsburgs was called the Upper Carniola.
     Though not agriculturally rich, this area came in many ways to represent Slovenia. In 1689 Janez Vajkard Valvasor (author also of the Three-Part Theater of Human Death) preserved over three thousand, five hundred pages of information about local culture and natural history in Die Ehre deß Hertzogthums Crain (The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola). A precise and scientific-minded observer, Valvasor’s indefatigable researches eventually exhausted his resources, and he was obliged to sell his castle, ending his life in poverty.
     During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Gorenskja dialect became the basis of standard Slovenian, and the region produced many important philologists and writers, including the poet France Prešeren a sonneteer and author of “Zdravljica” (“A Toast”) which was widely used as propaganda during the 1848 revolution against Austrian rule and has since been adopted as national anthem. His Krst pri Savici (Baptism on the Savica) which describes battles between pagan and Christian Slavs and the romance through which the pagan leader is converted is considered a brief national epic.
     During the nineteenth century nationalist movement, the Upper Carniolan folk costume was adopted as a national symbol, and even in the mid-twentieth century, the popular music of Slavko Avsenik and his brother came to dominate the Alpine and polka styles of Europe and the United States, making him one of the most popular roots artists in the world.
     A better stage set for such regional enthusiasm could hardly be imagined. We enjoyed a room on the shore of Lake Bled with perhaps the most enchanting view I have ever enjoyed. The snow-covered Julian Alps in the distance and the closer heavily forested hills, the clear ultra-blue lake fed from the Bohinj Glacier with its small island (the only island, one is told, in Slovenia) on which stands the frescoed Church of the Assumption, the sheer rock cliff on one shore with Bled Castle on top, all this forms a truly storybook picture, very nearly too perfect (like a fussily-tended Victorian home or two I have seen). An inviting path extends the four miles around the shore.
     Accessible from the center of Bled, the trail presents the most civilized experience of nature. Mute swans drift offshore, some with their wings slightly lifted in the most elegant manner, while ducks paddle nearby, and song-birds chirp, sing, and peep above. Now and then one passes an old villa, most converted to bed and breakfasts, but one in a highly romantic state of collapse, its roof disconsolate on an old tiled floor.
     The walker passes beneath St. Martin’s Church, a plain neo-Gothic church which is perfectly at home in the scene though it was built at the turn of the twentieth century. Here one might see Slavko Pengov’s Last Supper in which Judas Iscariot appears with the features of Vladimir Lenin. This satiric jab remained uncensored due to Tito’s differences with the Soviet Union, but Pengov’s renderings of heroic partisans adorning Tito’s home on the other side of the lake will strike the viewer as more doctrinaire Socialist Realism, though critics have inferred more heterodox opinions from details inserted by the pacifist artist. The building itself was originally constructed by German POWs, but is now the Hotel Vila Bled, with rooms booked far in advance. The Karađorđević kings who ruled the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes between the world wars were equally fond of Bled. When it comes to perks there seems to be little difference between monarchists and communists.
     Visiting the castle today one may admire the drawbridge, the solid Romanesque tower, courtyards on two levels, and a sheer drop down to the lakeside. Beneath its imposing presence, though, the walker’s thoughts turn to those who lived under its domination subject for over a thousand years to feudal extortion, paying tribute in produce and labor to the agents of the proprietors atop the hill. Perhaps the nobles were at times troubled by conscience, for we know that in 1004 the last of the Ottonian Holy Roman Emperors Henry II (later sainted) donated the territory to the bishop of Bled, Albuin of Brixen who appointed underlings to administer the lands. Portraits of Henry and his wife Kunigunde of Luxembourg adorn the old chapel with its trompe l’oeil ceiling. It may be that the prelates eventually tired of dealing with their tenants. We know that they leased it to the Kreigh family who continued to occupy it when the region came under Habsburg rule in 1278. Insurgent peasants sent complaints to their bishop and king several times in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and, finding no redress, attacked the stronghold more than once. One lord, Hartman Kreigh, was killed by angry farmers. Once order was restored, his wife Poliksena had cast a memorial bell of gold and silver, meaning to place it in the chapel on the island. On its way there, though, a storm overturned their boat and the bell sank to the bottom. It was never recovered, though legend says it may still be heard on occasion, ringing from the depths. It is unclear whether such spectral music would remind the listener of Hartman’s greatness or of his cruelty. Families of those who had rebelled were subject then to even greater levies to punish them for generations to come.
     In the mid-19th century the castle passed into the hands of venture capitalists hoping to make money with a hotel. Though tourism was rapidly growing, all the more after a health spa was established below, the castle’s value remained for the most part in the spectacle it presented. Under communism, of course, it was state-owned, as such a place should be, and today for €8 one may poke around. The management is today ambitiously entrepreneurial. For a fee someone will print the visitor’s name with the castle’s image on a parchment-like page, or a monk, wearing a robe which may have come from some order or perhaps from central casting, will draw off for him an overpriced bottle of wine. Couples can rent the spot for weddings and get not only the regal (or at least baronial) setting, but in addition a handful of people in vaguely Renaissance costume. And there’s a restaurant that can be recommended at least for its fine large danse macabre fresco and Garden of Eden scenes, all the more appealing for their unsophisticated draftsmanship.
     Proceeding on the trail on the lake’s edge, the walker passes the sizable and serious rowing center. International competitions are regularly held in this glorious spot. A short bit later comes a campground from which I heard the sounds of partying and singing in German. After this point there are few buildings until one has returned almost to the starting point. By this point of my visit, night had fallen, multiplying the delight of the scene now etherealized and mystified by obscurity. Images reminiscent of violence, oppression, spiritual aspiration, cupidity, vulgarity, beauty, and philosophy jostle against each other as they tend to do in this life. With the turning of the wheel of fortune, the borders threaten to blur between the lords and the luckless, the pious and the vicious, the lovely and the hideous. If the synthesis is elusive, the visitor has the option to stop thinking and retreat at this point into the considerable calories of a local specialty, the kremna rezina or cream slice whose generous layers of cream and custard are barely contained by a bit of puff pastry. After consuming only one, ratiocination tends to slow in the most comforting way.

Pierce Penniless

Thanks are due to the Penguin English Library for reprinting a generous selection of Nashe in The Unfortunate Traveller and other works, edited and introduced by J. B. Steane. Page references in parentheses are to that edition. Numbers in brackets are endnotes.


     I, like many, had known Thomas Nashe only as the author of The Unfortunate Traveller, the picaresque [1] Elizabethan novel, so rich in violence that gratuitous suffering becomes a theme in itself. [2] This book has long been a favorite; it is so lively and colloquial, precise and opinionated, so full of antique humor and ebullient language. The same qualities are evident in his other works. Few today will take an interest in the controversies behind the partisan pamphleteering that made his name in his own time when he was hired, as were Lyly and Greene, to defend the Established Church against the attacks of reformers whose essays from underground presses used the name Martin Marprelate.
     Some things, however, have not changed in four hundred years. Having lived for decades below the poverty line, I found his Pierce Penniless, in which the writer complains of poetry and scholarship’s going unrewarded while “base men” prosper, more relevant to my own condition. “A scrivener,” he writes, is “better paid for an obligation, than a scholar for the best poem he can make,” and in general “those that deserve best” are “kept under by dunces.” (54-55) Frustrated and desperate, he prepares a “supplication” to the devil, through his representative, the Knight of the Post (a professional perjurer), seeking better treatment.
     On this pretext, Nashe constructs a panorama of the Seven Deadly Sins, all chatty and learned and poetic and effervescently witty, from which he feels free to diverge on the least excuse or none. Certain of these bypaths have attracted much interest, in particular, the concluding one in defense of the drama, in which theater is in general defended as the least harmful of the vices men pursue and thus deserving of toleration. Among the other excurses are a discussion of demonology which in its curious inquiry recalled Burton to me and an amusing account of national ethnic stereotypes: the “cunning, proud” Italian, the Frenchman “wholly proud of deceivable courtship,” the Danes “the most gross and senseless proud dolts.” (73-74)
     In contrast to a moralistic cataloguer of sins, Nashe is always an entertainer. On the whole he pursues the classic line of generating comedy in Frye’s low-mimetic mode. [3] In this inversion of tragic pity and fear, the reader at once is comforted by superiority to the sinners portrayed and mildly troubled that each is only an exaggeration of himself, and sometimes very little exaggerated.
     Nashe is brilliant at phrases and jokes and sudden scholarly citations. He is not as good at larger structures. Just as the incidents experienced by the picaro often lack a significant development one from another and may be shifted about like identical beads on a string (the same is true of classic Chinese novels like Water Margin), Nashe’s expositions are marvels of teeming activity. Only when the readers steps back to reconsider is it clear that he has wandered through the piece, going now this way and now that. Yet one fails to notice or, at any rate, to be disappointed because every moment was wholly absorbing and, in its modest way, rewarding. Katastases are delivered with the regularity of a stand-up comedian’s, though Nashe’s punch-lines are of the angry, biting kind, far closer the lacerated heart of Dean Swift than the cosmic belly laugh of Rabelais. The target shifts its targets in a play of depth from satire on an individual man to fashions and abuses of the powerful of his own day, and more generally to human failings in general and finally to the absurdity of life itself.
     Thus, he wisely chooses the schematic design of the deadly sins for Pierce Penniless, unable to resist a few accretions on the fore and aft ends. The topic, a common theme for homilies, provides an altogether medieval setting for this decidedly Renaissance work. Because the overall design is often loose, I shall focus on a single passage, chosen very nearly at random. Indeed, given the book’s nature, one can only pass from one rhetorical figure, one joke or citation, one wry partisan dart to the next.
     When Nashe, after discussing overeating, says he will “descend” to a “Complaint of Drunkenness,” the reader feels he is the average Christian being conducted like Dante on a tour of Hell. (104-105) But the topic is no sooner mentioned, than it is blamed on the Dutch whom English military forces had supported in 1585 against Habsburg rule. [4] In another few sentences, one set of foreigners is forgotten, and Nashe is blaming instead the social-climbing cavalier, a “frenchified” tipsy miles gloriosus. The moves from an individual focus to a national one to the universal is smooth and rapid enough to bring the reader along unquestioning.
     The imagery is vivid and realistic. Every term is multiplied in a sort of slightly dilute Euphuism. [5] A drunk is one who may be seen “wallowing in the streets" or “sleeping under the board.” “We” [that is, the proper people] would “spit at him.” But the image is yet insufficient – we would spit at him “as a toad” and call him a “swine.” Nashe spouts slang and vogue expressions to describe barroom activities: one must drink “super nagulum, carouse the hunter’s hoop, quaff upsey freze cross, with healths, gloves, mumps, frolics, and a thousand such domineering inventions.”
     The finale sentence, so grand a crescendo of rhetoric as to deserve quoting in whole, ends in a soft elegiac tone appropriate to all human folly. “Let him be indued with never so many virtues, and have as goodly proportion and favour as nature can bestow upon a man, yet if he be thirsty after his own destruction, and hath no joy or comfort but when he is drowning his soul in a gallon pot, that one beastly imperfection will utterly obscure all that is commendable in him, and all his good qualities sink like lead down to the bottom of his carousing cups, where they will lie like lees and dregs, dead and unregarded of any man.”
     Nashe is always bobbing in an ocean of words with neither beginning nor end, and so it is that he can conclude his work only by willfully dropping the curtain, both the curtain of his drama and that which conceals the author as Oz: “And so I break off this endless argument of speech abruptly.” (145)



1. I use the term spite of the strictures of Nashe’s worthy editor McKerrow and his perceptive critic Hibbard to whom the term picaresque is inappropriate.

2. According to Steane the narrative is “a procession of cruelties” (31).

3. Frye was only following Aristotle here for whom comedy was “an imitation of inferior people,” though for Aristotle the economically and the morally low were closely associated. (Poetics 1449a32)

4. The support of the Dutch was part of the intermittent Anglo-Spanish War. Nashe had already named Philip of Spain “as Great an Enemy to mankind as the Devil.” (81)

5. The practice had been approved by medieval critics under the name amplificatio.

Moon Goin' Down [Charley Patton]

     Ellipsis is a device characteristic of folk song. Narrative, for instance, is omitted between exchanges of dialogue in classic English balladry. Sometimes the transmission process edits a song, with the audience assuming deleted information, though over time such changes can render the words obscure or alter their basic significance. Such decentering may enhance or enfeeble the lyric’s effect. Charley Patton’s “Moon Goin’ Down” [1] well illustrates the successful use of this elliptical style in the Delta blues.

Oh well, where were you now, baby,
Clarksdale mill burned down.
Oh well, where were you now, baby,
Clarksdale mill burned down.
I were way down Sunflower,
With my face all fulla frowns.

Lord, I think I heard the Helena whistle,
Helena whistle,
Helena whistle blow.
Lord, I ain’t gonna stop walkin’
Till I get in my rider’s door.

     After summoning his audience with an introductory “well,” Patton’s song begins with the fundamental blues note, a cry of unsatisfied desire. The singer is looking for his lady, calling out to her. Her absence is amplified by association with a catastrophic fire in Clarksdale. Perhaps she was in the doomed factory and is no longer alive. The mixture of tenses, while very likely a dialect usage, expresses anxiety and frustration as well as projecting the lovers’ separation from the past into the present in an almost cinematic way.
     Her answer seems for a moment cheerful. She was far from the deadly fire in a place called Sunflower, a name with the most positive associations. Only a moment later, however, she describes her face as “all fulla frowns.” Though we know nothing specific of her frustrations, they seem to mirror those of the singer.
     In the next verse the “Helena whistle” sounds a plaintive note of need, similar to the distant sound of wild geese in Chinese poetry. The whistle blows three times, with each repetition increasing the tone of tense melancholy. The singer declares that he will keep walking, evoking the image of life as a pilgrimage or a journey. Resolution arrives with the destination rhyme balancing “whistle blow”: viz. “my rider’s door.” This metaphor neatly invokes a world of experience through the implied term “easy rider,” [3] an illicit lover (as the courtly love couple too must be adulterous according the Andreas Capellanus). The lewd implication of his lover’s “door” jostles with fainter suggestions of the grave, the earth’s lid, and a final end of “walking.” On the realistic level, the words very naturally denote simple relief at returning home after a time on the road.
     The progress of images resembles what Pound through Fenollosa thought happened in Chinese poetry. After the initial statement of longing, the reader encounters the burned mill. The reader must connect the two even if it takes a challenging leap. Then follow the huge sunflower and the unhappy grimace. In the second stanza the sonic image of the whistle is succeeded by the walker and the arrival at the threshold. The relation between the parts is never explicit. The telegraphic lyrical style is, of course, reinforced by music and the artist’s powerful performing style, though these elements must remain untreated here.
     The moon of the title never appears in the lyric, yet it sets the tone precisely. The setting of the moon will plunge the world, already ill-lit, into deeper darkness. In Patton’s other recording with the same title, the “moon going’ down” is directly juxtaposed with a scene of the singer’s lover telling him “Lord, I don't want you hangin’ ‘round.” In the darkness of night the wayfarer may lose the road or be set upon, though in this alternative text he has the blessing of the North Star, a central image of freedom in spirituals. With this remnant of hope, unmentioned in the text above, the singer summons the spirit to make art of his pain and to imagine a better future once arrived in his “rider’s door” or in the equivalent “green house” of the second version.
     The use of a well-established corpus of phrases, lines, and songs in the Delta blues tradition, like similar material in more thoroughly oral cultures, allowed the poet to create more subtle and sophisticated works. Through sideways allusion, implication, and ellipsis, through signifying in fact, these poets created some of the most beautiful poems of the twentieth century.

1. Patton recorded another version using the same title. The text follows.

Aw, that moon has gone down, baby, North Star 'bout to shine
Aw, the moon goin' down, baby, North Star 'bout to shine
Rosetta Henry told me, "Lord, I don't want you hangin' 'round"

Oh well, where were you now, baby, Clarksdale mill burned down1?
Oh well, where were you now, babe, Clarksdale mill burned down?
(spoken: Boy, you know where I were)
"I were way down Sunflower with my face all full-a frowns"

They's a house over yonder, painted all over green
They's a house over yonder, painted all over green
(spoken: Boy, you know I know it's over there!)


2. This association existed as far back as the Shijing. Cf. also Du Fu’s “Climbing the Yue Yang Tower with Xia Shi-er,” Yuan dynasty play lyrics, and a great many other texts.

3. The significance of the term is suggested by Big Bill Broonzy’s claim to have heard early blues from a songster named See See Rider in 1908. Though the song of that title (with all its variations) has been done by a long list of singers, Ma Rainey’s 1924 recording is one of the most beautiful.


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.”

Eisenstein's Strike and the Problem of Realism

Most people in most times and places, have derived their identity from their agreements with others. This is the case with church-goers and patriots. Others create a sort of artificial fraternity with sports loyalties or ethnic identity. It is only in our belated post-Romantic era that differences tend to be more highly prized. In the eighties I knew a critic who championed Night of the Living Dead as the greatest modern movie, proud of his choice for its singularity. Even a conspicuously individualist twentieth century critic, however, can enjoy assenting in a common judgment. With just such a pleasure in aligning myself with a widespread opinion, I regard Sergei Eisenstein as a very great filmmaker indeed. The work of this intensely original and idiosyncratic artist under a system where the collective received official endorsement when opposed to the individual poses aesthetic problems as well as the personal ones Eisenstein spent his life negotiating.

I recently watched Strike for the first time in decades and found it as rewarding, frame by frame, as I had in the past. Above all else, Eisenstein is a great master of montage, the most purely cinematic of techniques. His dazzling sense of composition satisfies the viewer in nearly every shot. What other director provides his audience with such an array of fascinating faces, each photographed with light and angle cunningly arranged to display every expressive irregularity? If Ivan the Terrible is operatic in its grand spectacle, Strike is a dramatic, intricately worked sonata, in which waves of formal beauty succeed each other one after another.

Curiously, Eisenstein’s formalism, which has brought such delight to cinephiles, would have been proof of its degenerate corruption for the Stalinist enforcers of Zhdanov-style socialist realism who oversaw his projects. Finding himself in the position of a medieval stained glass artist confined to Christian motifs, he, like they, produced work of captivating power. Though forbidden the pursuit of themes other than those prescribed by bureaucrats, he worked out his own dialectic between the generalizations of a vulgar Marxist vision and the myriad and unpredictable details of observed reality. The tension is encoded in the film’s casting, plotting, and montage.

The idea of “socialist realism,” while based in the precise and nuanced realism of Flaubert, Zola, and Balzac, avoided the chaos, ambiguity, and obscurity of experience in favor of simple didacticism. Thus, while insisting that the work was true to life in a way unprecedented in earlier art, Eisenstein substituted a flat morality tale for the complexity of life, all the while claiming to be more “real.” While the result is considerably more palatable than the brilliant Nazi films of Leni Riefenstahl, its plot-lines are as unconvincing as the “eight model plays” of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

For instance, Eisenstein’s fondness for selecting non-actors for many roles might seem to narrow the gap between the art work and observed reality. Instead of Hollywood-style stars, one sees “real people.” In practice, though, the director selected people who most strongly suggested stereotypes -- the strong young worker, the capitalist, the priest – as little “real” as glamorous actors. Again, the pretense of heightened realism leads in fact to stylized convention as tight as that of the commedia dell’arte.

The concluding massacre of the workers, unforgettably presented with slaughterhouse images, belies the “optimism” that was prescribed for socialist realism. The intertitle listing places where such repression had in fact occurred reinforces the fidelity to lived experience. Yet the viewer experiences the denouement as a tragic ritual, a sacrifice which expands the worker’s suicide earlier in the story and presents death as redemptive ritual, very much resembling the passion of Christ.

Is Strike realistic? Of course, a film is a series of images on cellulose acetate with virtually no resemblance to life, just as a novel is ink marks on two-dimensional pages. The degree of realistic illusion differs from one work to another, but it is always dialectic, conflicted, and ambiguous. In Eisenstein’s great film, the pretense of reproducing data from lived experience allowed the artist to produce great formalist works. (His colleague Dziga Vertov, with his kino pravda, illustrates one further possibility of the aesthetics, less monumental and dramatic, more lyrical and loose, of claiming to reproduce reality.) At the same time in America, one might note Dos Passos’ USA trilogy for its combination of modernist technique and representation of documentary truth. Art is always art; reality, reality. The implicit claim of realism is simply one of a variety of artistic techniques. The difference between realists and formalists resembles the medieval one between Realists and Nominalists, or one might trace it back to Plato and Aristotle. In the end, surely, both and neither are correct. Struggling with these oppositions is our truth. In Eisenstein’s case, the contradictions between style and content, worked out by an individual artist operating under a murderous philistine tyranny resulted in some of the world’s most memorable movies

Notes on Recent Reading 16 [Howells, Ford, Mann]

Literature and Life (Howells)

     I have a fondness for essays, the wandering of familiar pieces and the rhetoric of formal ones. I know, as Montaigne did, that every essay, whatever the topic, must express the consciousness of the author. Burton, Bacon, and Browne; Cowley, Addison and Steele, Hazlitt and the endearing Lamb, Pater, Pound, Woolf, Orwell, each has its charm. I had never before encountered, however, the essays of arch-Realist William Dean Howells.
     His travel writing resembles that of his friend Mark Twain, in its arch wit. Visiting Bermuda, he notes that the presence of those of African descent “burden” the whites with a “conundrum” and proceeds to exemplify this principle with an anecdote of three tourist ladies tormenting a gardener with their curious attentions. There is an essay on a dime museum and the show performed inside which is a marvel of weirdness in which a short drama involving dance is succeeded by a blackface performer who “went from one wild gayety to another,” followed by contortionists. We learn of this exhibition at second-hand – the author himself was too genteel to venture into such a place -- but his informant declares “Aren’t the arts one? How can you say that any art is higher than the others?” His essay on Spanish prisoners of war is a strong bit of anti-imperialist journalism. There is good criticism and a great deal of information about American taste and publishing by one of its most influential figures.
     My own copy of the book, one discarded from a university library, is a first edition including photographic and watercolor illustrations. One can see perhaps why it was culled – the pages were uncut until my reading. The writing is far fresher than the Victorian lettering on the cover.


The Fifth Queen (Ford)

     For most readers, Ford is known for his influence in Modernism through The English Review and as the author of the Parade’s End tetralogy. The Fifth Queen was followed by two sequels, Privy Seal and The Fifth Queen Crowned, portraying an almost suffocating atmosphere in the court of Henry VIII through the career of Katharine Howard. The intrigue rising from both personal and party maneuvering is constant and grave in its effects. Two parties struggle for influence – an old order aligned with Catholicism and the traditional learning the heroine has mastered opposed to a new and uncertain Renaissance alternative.
     Ford, who took style seriously indeed, chose to use a curious diction sprinkled with archaisms. Perhaps I have a high tolerance for affectation, but the language enhanced the novel for me. Though the work was called by Ford’s friend Conrad, “the swan song of historical romance,” its experimentalism may be suggested by the fact that William Gass is one of its fans.


Man of Straw (Der Untertan) Heinrich Mann

     It is difficult to avoid reading this book as prescient. Written in 1914, its hero is a perfect pre-Nazi Nazi. Seeking to submerge his wretched character in a great man, Diederich adores the Kaiser fully as much as the next generation was to idolize der Führer. The loutish young manufacturer is nasty in his anti-Semitism, if not yet violent and he tells his wife to follow the Kaiser’s formula and to restrict herself to “Kinder, Küche, Kirche.” His cowardice, selfishness, and hypocrisy are so consistent that the story makes salutary propaganda but thin fiction.
     Even the appreciative reader will understand why this commendable anti-fascist lives under the shadow of his brother’s reputation. Apart from this book, his novel Professor Unrat is the basis for von Sternberg’s great film The Blue Angel.

Dinner with Mrs. Pea

Having driven out of Chiang Mai, we arrived in an area of cultivated fields and small rural homes, along with some grander establishments that constituted a sort of very dilute suburbia. When we turned into Mrs. Pea’s drive, we were greeted by a two-year-old ambassador on the lookout for guests and then by Mrs. Pea herself. Her welcome was gracious indeed, warm yet aristocratic; her cordiality was sufficiently celebrated that she was familiarly known as “Sweet Pea” among her educated, English-speaking friends.

Her home was designed following the affluent variant of domestic Thai architecture. The rambling place was a series of rooms connected by spacious areas too large and irregular to be called hallways. Each child, though hers were now married or away at university, had a room. These living quarters were on stilts, creating a first floor, in this case walled in but undivided with the kitchen facilities in one corner.

She offered miang kham, an appetizer of small morsels – coconut, peanuts, possibly some bits of fish or shrimp, tiny fragments of ginger, lime and peppers which the diner wraps in a wild betel leaf and tops with a lime/fish sauce. “We used to have such a healthy diet, even for snacks” she lamented, “but dishes like this are less popular these days.” I recalled that she had asked that we not give her grandchild a lollipop. In this account of a dinner, I find myself omitting the dinner. I could hardly detail the fabulous meal she laid out: meat and seafood curries, vegetable dishes galore, a few legumes, rice, noodles, desserts.

With the well-being of a full belly, I headed upstairs to the home’s main floor. Mrs. Pea pointed out the shrine room with incense burning for the Buddha images. The room was empty except for the altar and, in an opposite corner, a cushion and a heap of books and magazines. “I like to go there to read,” she said. “It’s so peaceful.”

She lifted a small container from the altar. It was, she said, her great-grandfather’s ashes. He had been prison administrator at a time when he owed his appointment directly to the king who then gave him the name Unlimited Punishment, which must have impressed both him and the populace. She then displayed several long and sharp swords which doubtless made an impression beyond that of the appellation alone. I felt as though I were in the home of the descendant, at any rate, of a Lord High Executioner nearly as fabulous as Ko-Ko.

It was a dark night, the stars sharp and intense. Mrs. Pea had provided the party with a dozen or so sky lanterns (khom loi), paper structures with a flame attached to the bottom, burning wads of paraffin-soaked toilet paper and providing hot air, causing the boxy rice-paper lantern to float slowly aloft. In northern Thailand, they were originally a sort of offering to acquire Buddhist merit, but their enchanting beauty led to wider use. They are still used to envision one’s anxieties and cares wafting into the distance and disappearing. As they moved skyward, our lanterns looked now like a sort of drifting constellation, now like a school of luminous sea creatures in a lagoon of the mind. There was little wind, only enough to create a fascinating edge of uncertainty as the lights went up and up, just barely visible fifteen minutes after they had been released. After the ritual, it was difficult to believe that any viewer had not shed a worry or two at the least.

Thoughts on Mythology

These are notes from my recent talk on mythology at the Seligmann Center. I pass on my ideas in this raw form, without any attempt to work up an essay, in the belief that some of the ideas may be useful.


1
     The Greek word muthos in Homer has a broad meaning, fundamentally, anything delivered by word of mouth. The term came later to indicate conversation, counsel, the subject of speech, the matter, a purpose, a saying, a rumor; then a fiction or legend.

2
     In contemporary literary use, it is a story not tied to an individual text. Mythology arises as a sort of collective narrative: a body of linked and particularly significant stories that express in symbolic order the world-view of a community. Myth is deeply involved not only with the earliest poetry, but also science, philosophy, religion, and history, in fact all the intellectual disciplines. The definitive authority myths claim is evident in the fact that they often concern the gods or other spiritual beings. Myths are often taken as literal history, though they are also used by writers in self-consciously symbolic ways. Myth fades into legend and other cultural material.

3
     Not every collective narrative is mythic. Historical events are shared by large numbers of people. They may resonate in mythic ways, but the presumptive loyalty is to real events. Jokes lack the vast implications of myths.

4
     I continue to find Northrup Frye’s classification useful.

1) superior in kind to people and to their environment: mythic
2) superior in degree to people and environment: romance
3) superior in degree to people but not to environment: high mimetic (a hero of epic or tragedy, Aristotle’s hero)
4) inferior to the reader or equal: low-mimetic, ironic (realism, comedy)

     Frye notes, “Looking over this table, we see that European fiction, over the last fifteen centuries has moved steadily down this list . . . Something of the same progression can be traced in Classical literature, too.”

5
     In The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art David Lewis-Williams analyzes cave paintings and posits a simultaneous birth of language, art, and religion. With the birth of signs came the ability to lie.

6
      Mythic references may be traditional (Homeric hymns, Elder Edda, anthropological texts), literary (Ovid, Shakespeare, Rothenburg), modern (Superman, cowboy hero, Jewish blood guilt, Lincoln), or idiosyncratic (Blake, Yeats, outsider art).

7
     In poetry mythological references may serve to universalize or create group identity (as in the many medieval romances which wither begin or end by invoking the blessing of Christ), to compress (as in Raleigh’s reference to Philomel implying a world of violence in a word), to ironize, (as in Joyce’s Ulysses or the Coens’ O Brother Where Art Thou), or to decorate (as in Herrick’s “Parcae” where Atropos charms rather than frightens).

8
     Approaches to the understanding of myth include:

1) Euhemerism regards myths as distorted accounts of real historical events. Herodotus in his reasonable way, has recourse to this explanation. (On the other hand some ritual theorists would agree with Frye (above), and hold the opposite view: that gods degenerate over the years into myth, then legend (with supernatural apparatus), appearing next as history and finally as comedy.

2) Mythology has often been viewed as a sort of allegory with the gods representing either natural phenomena or concepts. The 19th century Sanskritist Max Müller supported an allegorical theory of myth. Modern variations of this theme include Freudian, Jungian, or other psychological theories.

3) Myths have been viewed as solely functional, often a form of social control. A simple form of this approach would be the vulgar Marxist analyst to whom every myth comments on class relations, but Malinowski took much the same approach.

4) The structural theory states that myths are patterned after the human mind as well as human nature. Claude Levi-Strauss, makes the claim that “myth is language,” and stresses formal play with meaning arising only from contrasts within a pattern, not from individual elements.

5) According to the myth-ritual theory, the existence of myth is tied to ritual. In its most extreme form, this theory claims that myths arose to explain rituals. I am myself fond on the work of James Frazer and the Cambridge School.

6) Myth has been considered the human language for investigating the metaphysical. In this sense myth is much like religion, providing human’s most profound analysis of the cosmos.

7) Myth is a symbolic statement about reality. Each culture defines and defends its assumptions with myth. Myth tends toward the encyclopedic, offering seamless explanations and prescriptions for the significant passages of life.

9
     To test these ideas with texts, I followed with this brief anthology of poem’s mentioning Aphrodite.

from Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (my translation)

She went to Paphos -- Cyprus -- where her
aromatic altar and her temple stood,
and she went in and shut the shining doors. 60
The graces then anointed her with oil
such as blooms on bodies of the gods.
(The oil was sweet, ambrosial, smelled so fine!)
Then laughter-loving Aphrodite donned
fine clothes of golden fabric on her flesh. 65
She left sweet-smelling Cyprus then for Troy
(fast she flew and high, the clouds her road),
to spring-rich Ida, beast-land, came she then,
she went through hills right to his home and after her
came bright-eyed lions, fawning grey-furred wolves 70
and bears, fast leopards ravenous for deer,
and then her heart rejoiced at seeing them
and to their hearts she tossed hot lust; they paired
in twos and mated in the shade,


Thomas Wyatt (the first stanza of an untitled poem)

Though this port : and I thy servaunt true,
And thou thy self doist cast thy bemes from hye
From thy chieff howse, promising to renew
Both Joye and eke delite, behold yet how that I,
Bannisshed from my blisse, carefully do crye,
"Helpe now, Citherea, my lady dere,
"My ferefull trust," en vogant la galere.


from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis

Over one arm the lusty courser's rein
Under her other was the tender boy, 32
Who blush'd and pouted in a dull disdain,
With leaden appetite, unapt to toy;
She red and hot as coals of glowing fire
He red for shame, but frosty in desire. 36

The studded bridle on a ragged bough
Nimbly she fastens;—O! how quick is love:—
The steed is stalled up, and even now
To tie the rider she begins to prove: 40
Backward she push'd him, as she would be thrust,
And govern'd him in strength, though not in lust . . .

'Fondling,' she saith, 'since I have hemm'd thee here
Within the circuit of this ivory pale,
I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale: 232
Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

'Within this limit is relief enough,
Sweet bottom-grass and high delightful plain, 236
Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough,
To shelter thee from tempest and from rain:
Then be my deer, since I am such a park; 239
No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark.'


A Hymn to Venus and Cupid (Herrick)

SEA-BORN goddess, let me be
By thy son thus grac'd and thee;
That whene'er I woo, I find
Virgins coy but not unkind.
Let me when I kiss a maid
Taste her lips so overlaid
With love's syrup, that I may,
In your temple when I pray,
Kiss the altar and confess
There's in love no bitterness.

Final stanza from Un Voyage à Cythère (Baudelaire)
On your isle, O Venus! I found upright only
A symbolic gallows from which hung my image...
O! Lord! give me the strength and the courage
To contemplate my body and soul without loathing!
Dans ton île, ô Vénus! je n'ai trouvé debout
Qu'un gibet symbolique où pendait mon image...
— Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage
De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégoût!

Venus Anadyomène (Rimbaud)

As from a green zinc coffin, a woman’s
Head with brown hair heavily pomaded
Emerges slowly and stupidly from an old bathtub,
With bald patches rather badly hidden;

Then the fat gray neck, broad shoulder-blades
Sticking out; a short back which curves in and bulges;
Then the roundness of the buttocks seems to take off;
The fat under the skin appears in slabs:

The spine is a bit red; and the whole thing has a smell
Strangely horrible; you notice especially
Odd details you’d have to see with a magnifying glass…

The buttocks bear two engraved words: CLARA VENUS;
—And that whole body moves and extends its broad rump
Hideously beautiful with an ulcer on the anus.

Comme d’un cercueil vert en fer blanc, une tête
De femme à cheveux bruns fortement pommadés
D’une vieille baignoire émerge, lente et bête,
Avec des déficits assez mal ravaudés;

Puis le col gras et gris, les larges omoplates
Qui saillent; le dos court qui rentre et qui ressort;
Puis les rondeurs des reins semblent prendre l’essor;
La graisse sous la peau paraît en feuilles plates:

L’échine est un peu rouge, et le tout sent un goût
Horrible étrangement; on remarque surtout
Des singularités qu’il faut voir à la loupe…

Les reins portent deux mots gravés: CLARA VENUS;
—Et tout ce corps remue et tend sa large croupe
Belle hideusement d’un ulcère à l’anus.


An autumn morning in Shokoku-ji (Snyder)

Last night watching the Pleiades,
Breath smoking in the moonlight,
Bitter memory like vomit
Choked my throat.
I unrolled a sleeping bag
On mats on the porch
Under thick autumn stars.
In dream you appeared
(Three times in nine years)
Wild, cold, and accusing.
I woke shamed and angry:
The pointless wars of the heart.
Almost dawn. Venus and Jupiter.
The first time I have
Ever seen them close.


Birth of Eventually Venus (MacLeish)

Cast up by the sea
By the seventh wave
Beyond the sea reach
In the rubble of weed and
Wet twig
The not yet amphibious
Animalcula
Gasps and wiggles on the beach
Gathering her long gold hair about her
And gazing with pure eyes
Upon the unknown world.

Venus Over the Desert (Williams)

If I do not sin, she said, you shall not
walk in long gowns down stone corridors.
There is no reprieve where there is no fall-
ing off. I lie in your beds all night, from
me you wake and go about your tasks. My flesh
clings to your bones. What use is holiness
unless it affirms my perfections, my breasts,
my thighs which you part, shaking, and my lips
the door to my pleasures? Sin, you call it,
but there cannot be cold unless the heat
has bred it, how can you know otherwise? Love
comfort me in the face of my defeats! Poor
monks, you think you are gentle but I tell you
you kill as sure as shot kills a bird flying.

The Death of Venus (also titled the Birth of Venus) (Creeley)

I dreamt her sensual proportions
had suffered sea-change,

that she was a porpoise
a sea-beast rising lucid from the mist.

The sound of waves killed speech
But there were gestures –

of my own, it was to call her closer,
of hers, she snorted and filled her lungs with water,

then sank, to the bottom,
and, looking down, clear it was, like crystal,

there I saw her.