The View from a Ten-Foot-Square Hut

     The title of Kano-no-Chomei’s Hojoki, an early thirteenth century work in cadenced prose rich in figures of speech, might be translated "writings from a ten foot square hut.” It belongs to the genre zuihitsu or "pen at will," suggesting something of an informal subjective essayistic sketchbook. The profound sonority of the opening words survives in the translation by Yasushiko Moriguchi and David Jenkins.


The flowing river
never stops
and yet the water
never stays
the same.

Foam floats
upon the pools
scattering, reforming,
never lingering long.

So it is with man
and all his dwelling places
here on earth.


     The rest is an explication, providing vivid images to reinforce this generalization. First, the author recounts numerous disasters that befell Kyoto during his lifetime: fire, flood, hurricane, disease, earthquake, and the human upheaval caused by the relocation of the capital to Fukuyama (now part of Kobe). The implication is that such cataclysms are particularly dramatic incidents of the constant instability that Buddhism teaches characterizes all things. Though Chomei had been a prominent official from an important family and had achieved success, for instance in placing his poems in the collection issued by the emperor himself, he had also suffered the sort of reversals common to the less aggressive or less fortunate in the highly competitive courtly society of Heian Japan. In his fifties, he became a monk and retired to a hermitage, eventually occupying the "ten foot square hut" of the title. Remarkably, his consciousness continued to turn upon itself, and even in the first portion of the essay, he looks directly at our common human portion, devoid of supernatural consolation, and at himself, and declares his uncertainty with candor, noting in an early passage:.


People die
and are born –
whenc e they came
and where they go,
I do not know.


     More dramatically, at the very conclusion, rather than suggesting his sage serenity, Chomei radically questions the trajectory of his life. He contemplates his own attachment to his shack and even asks himself, “Has your discerning mind/ just served to drive you mad." Suddenly this medieval East Asian writer seems very intimate and modern.
     In Moriguchi and Jenkins’ edition Chomei's prose has been broken up into scattered free verse phrases which seem almost justified by the ephemeral impressionistic tone of the content. Less happy, though less important, are Michael Hoffmann's illustrations meant to be reminiscent of sume-i. I confess, though, that these, as well as the wide open poetic style, seem designed to appeal to today's Western quasi-Buddhists and to me as one of them and thus I suppose it is that I write this essay. One may suspect, though, that both the editorially introduced verse form and the washy illustrations evolved at editorial meetings with the primary purpose of plumping the insubstantial book up to the point it could be perfect bound.
     In the moralizing middle portion the writer wonders how and where to live if one wishes peace. Here is the same philosophic ideal pursued in ancient Greece, wisdom defined as how to live a good life. The point about time’s unceasing Heraclitean flow is simple and straightforward, one of the most familiar topoi in East Asia as in Europe. The opening of the roughly contemporaneous Heike Monogatari which traces the warfare of the Taira and Minamoto clans, the very sort of struggle that upended Chomei’s world, uses a four-character expression from the (apparently Chinese) Humane King Sutra that became proverbial and which applies well: "the prosperous inevitably decline,”
     In this same section Chomei raises political complaints on behalf of the poor but his motive may be more personal disappointment than compassion for all sentient beings. His own career frustrations doubtless influenced his views which often seem to reflect more the jaundiced view of the disillusioned member of the higher echelons than a righteous crusader for justice. The author does not suggest any possible reform or solution. The ruling class’s oppression of the less powerful is merely an example of how life is fundamentally unfair, all but unlivable. Here is less a radical social justice critique than a recognition of suffering that leads as it did for Buddha to the quest for enlightenment
     Yet the author remains, after decades of meditation, suspended over the existential abyss. Among his dark thoughts, he declares his "heart is soaked in sin." In what way does he differ from a seventeenth century Puritan agonizing over the uncertain state of his soul? Perhaps less than we expect. If it seems less profound and poignant to imagine Jonathan Edwards wondering if he had lived a good life and admitting, "To these questions of mind/ there is no answer," it may be that we are selling Jonathan Edwards short.
     At any rate Hojoki provides contact with a view with which many today are sympathetic, though I have yet to hear of members of the ruling class living in a single room with a dirt floor. The fact that such renunciation did happen in China and in Japan is one measure of the sophistication of those cultures, and the fact that one such moderate ascetic felt no more confident about his pursuit of enlightenment than the reader may indicate that certain human problems are insoluble, though they reward such precise exploration as Chomei has left us. In his Hosshinshu, a book of stories of recluses, Chomei distinguishes the hijiri, the true holy men, from tonsiesha, those who aspire but in some degree fall short, as well as from the inja who withdraw from society but pursue art as semi-secular aesthetes rather than single-mindedly seeking enlightenment. If this last category proved to be the highest the author reached, surely the vast majority of his readers will be, if anything, even less ambitious, yet even a dilettante at both poetry and meditation may still admire the beauty and drama of the record of Chomei’s life.

Walking the Via Negativa

     The believer in nothing may find that nothing can be as substantial a deity as old Jehovah or bright Apollo. Though many sensibilities seek the warm (but sometimes frightening) anthropomorphic god provided by myth, others, miraculously, perhaps, find a secure foundation in a lack.
     For the spiritually inclined unbeliever to whom the deity of childhood is inconceivable and indeed who cannot even understand how any contemporary educated person can continue loyal to institutional religion, the data reporting mystical experience retain a different sort of truth value. There can be no denying experiences of unity with the divine throughout history and around the world. Apart from the mystics, some theologians have laid out a theoretical basis for a faithless faith. The skeptic will take particular interest in the apophatic tradition, the via negativa, which eschews positive assertions about god, describing the divine in terms of what the godhead is not and basing an authentic spirituality in what we do not know.
     Hinduism and Buddhism have been more hospitable to apophatic theology than Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. In Asia the phrase “neti, neti” (“not this or that”) is the definition of Brahman in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad and the Avadhuta Gita. [1] For the eighth century philosopher Adi Shankara the highest concept of the divine was Nirguna Brahma, a Brahma without qualities. In general Advaita (non-dualistic) schools of Vedanta and Jnana Yoga employ such language. Jainism, Buddhism, and Daoism, have in fact no god, though devotees have not been slow to invent quasi-divine figures such as the Jain Tirthankaras and the many godlings of popular Buddhism and Daoism. Though the Abrahamic religions are by comparison resistant to a truly agnostic theology, their more philosophic and mystical practitioners have regularly condemned anthropomorphism.
     Buddhism is notoriously receptive to agnostic or atheist ideas. When the Buddha was asked about the nature of the divine and the afterlife, he responded that one should attend no more to such matters than a man injured by a poisoned arrow need learn all the details about his attacker before tending to his wound.


And why are they undeclared by me? Because they are not connected with the goal, are not fundamental to the holy life. They do not lead to disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, calming, direct knowledge, self-awakening, Unbinding. That's why they are undeclared by me. [2]


     Likewise in the works of Nagarjuna, founder of the Madhyamika school of Buddhism, all phenomena, including acts of cognition, are empty. Even the deity is a sort of Kantian noumenon inaccessible to the human mind. The Aïguttara Nikàya and the Jataka stories both deny a personal all-powerful god. [3]
     Buddhism regularly teaches, in contrast to the notion of a savior, that one must not look for aid from some supernatural being. In the pursuit of Ultimate Reality one can depend only on individual effort.


By ourselves is evil done,
By ourselves we pain endure,
By ourselves we cease from wrong,
By ourselves become we pure.
No one saves us but ourselves.
No one can and no one may.
We ourselves must walk the path:
Buddhas only show the way. [4]


For Buddhism what is significant is ridding oneself (and for Mahayanists other sentient beings as well) of suffering. Inquiries about the afterlife, the eternity and infinity of the creation and other issues are dismissed as “the fourteen unanswerable questions” (though the numbers differs in different texts) which are fruitless to pursue. [5]
     The most significant source of apophatic theology in Christianity is pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, in particular his Divine Names and Mystical Theology. Dionysius built on his Platonic and neo-Platonic predecessors [6] when he concluded that the description of Ultimate Reality is impossible. For Dionysius the contemplation of God leads to “a divine silence, darkness, and unknowing.” The truths about God are "unspeakable and unknowable,” they surpass "our logical and intellective power and activity" Thus one may not predicate anything whatever of the deity without falling into error. Dionysius did make allowances for some scripturally based epithets and nodded to tradition, saying "we must praise the providence of divine dominion, the source of goods, [in terms taken] from all the things that are caused.” According to Dionysius human reasoning which takes place in time cannot access the divine, while what he called our “intellective” faculty can grasp truth in an instant. This sort of knowledge, similar to what Augustine called illumination and Boethius “intelligence” is capable of a vision of God.
     The notion that God may be apprehended in a transformative realization leads naturally to an openness to the experiential data of mystics: those who enter into union with it [God], "according to the ceasing of all intellectual activity, . . . praise it best of all by denying all beings of it.” [7]
     For Gregory of Nyssa, the fourth century bishop, a necessary consequence of the infinity of God is his belief that God, as limitless, is essentially incomprehensible to the limited minds of created beings. To him “every concept that comes from some comprehensible image, by an approximate understanding and by guessing at the Divine nature, constitutes a idol of God and does not proclaim God."
     This concept of the divine, with its close links to Plato and Proclus, was brought forward in a tradition including Maximus the Confessor and Johannes Scotus Eriugena to the high Middle Ages when it proved fundamental to the mystics of the fourteenth century such as Richard Rolle and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing. Later Meister Eckhart declared, citing Dionysius, “God is naught. Meaning that God is as incomprehensible as naught.” For him “the height of gnosis is to know in agnosia.” [9]
     Likewise, while popular Judaism can be thoroughly anthropomorphic, more sophisticated thinkers have outlined an apophatic deity as well. To Philo Judaeus the anthropomorphism of a literal reading of the Bible was impious as well as mistaken. He considered it manifestly absurd to ascribe to God purely human attributes. [10] His most distinguished successor was Maimonides who in his Guide for the Perplexed insists that “the negative attributes of God are the true attributes.” [11]
     This smattering of theologians of widely varying views is hardly meant to indicate that I accept the view of godhead proposed by any one of them or even that I fully understand their positions. Rather it is excellent evidence that I and perhaps you are not wholly idiosyncratic in the attempt to save spirituality from the supernatural. The experience of people as far back as records exist has included experiences of what Romain Rolland in a 1927 letter to Freud, called "oceanic feeling." [12] Whatever one may make of it, the records of such sensation s are clear and consistent throughout human culture. There can be no doubt that people, often using one of a variety of mind-altering techniques such as fasting and meditation, have through the cultivation of cosmos-connected consciousness, achieved an enviable level of serenity and satisfaction. These empirical data carry far more weight than the theories of thinkers seeking to justify such spiritual endeavors, yet they imply the need for each individual to pursue enlightenment anew. The words, even of Gautama Buddha, are, "like a man pointing a finger at the moon to show it to others who should follow the direction of the finger to look at the moon. If they look at the finger and mistake it for the moon, they lose sight of both the moon and the finger." [13] And this orientation to the lunar sphere, which is to say to the sublime, persists in spite of the fact that the liberated mind perceives the hollowness of all phenomena, “all construings, all excogitations, all I-making & mine-making & obsessions with conceit.” [14]



1. See the Avadhuta Gita 1.25 and the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 2.3.6.

2. Majjhima Nikaya 63 MN 63, called the Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta.

3. Aïguttara Nikàya A.I.174, Jataka VI,208.

4. Dhammapada 165, here in Paul Carus’ translation.

5. Of course, many Buddhists reverted to the Hindu belief in reincarnation as well as to the apotheosis of Buddha and other figures.

6. See Timaeus 28c.

7. All references to pseudo-Dionysius may be found in Mystical Theology I, 1-3 and Divine Names cols. 585-588, and 593 and in Harrington and Corrigan’s article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

8. The Life of Moses; translation, intro. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson ; pref. by John Meyendorff , p. 81.

9. The Divine Being, Sermon XV.

10. De Confusione Linguarum, 27 [i. 425].

11. In Chapter 58.

12. Discussed by Freud in Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1929).

13. Surangama Sutra trans. by Charles Luk.

14. Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta: To Vacchagotta on Fire, translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.

Tristan Tzara, Poet of Manifestos

Numbers in parentheses refer to Tzara’s manifestos listed just following the essay. I used Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries translated by Barbara Wright from Riverrun Press, New York to avoid quoting in French and including translations. The originals are readily available.
Numbers in brackets indicate endnotes.


Tristan Tzara pioneered the development of the manifesto as a literary form, [1] a movement across movements that persisted throughout the twentieth century and, in a quieter form, into the present. To me his poetry and drama generally work best in performance. While on the printed page the appeal of much of his work is less apparent, his manifestos retain their lively and likable energy.

The invention of this new genre, as well as the reinvention of performance poetry, was, perhaps, natural given Dada’s profound and polemical skepticism. For Tzara, Arp, and others a fiercely radical questioning approaches nihilism like an asymptote, yet their political, aesthetic, and spiritual idealism remains always a flicker, peyrceptible to the discerning reader. In the realms of conceptual art, chance, and the privileged valuation of the ephemeral, Tzara’s early twentieth century pronouncements are groundbreaking.

To be sure, Tzara could not have been clearer about his manifestos being anti-manifestos. In his seminal “Dada Manifesto” he notes the paradox and readily admits his self-contradiction: “I am writing a manifesto and there is nothing I want, and yet I’m saying certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am against principles.” He later writes under the guise of Monsieur AA, the Antiphilosopher. Dada, he says, “doubts everything.” “Everything we look at,” he insists, “is false.” “We don’t accept any theories.” Dada is “a word that throws up ideas so they can be shot down.” (2)

Playing up the destructive potential of his position in dramatic form, he proclaims ”there is great negative, destructive work to be done.” Dada is “like a raging wind that rips up the clothes of clouds and prayers, we are preparing for the great spectacle of disaster, conflagration, and decomposition.” (2) Anticipating Jimi Hendrix, he calls for musicians to smash their instruments on stage. (3)[2] “Every act,” according to him, “is a cerebral revolver shot.” (6)

If nothing whatever can be known, making everyone an "idiot,” as Tzara calls himself and his readers alike (5), what then? If the poet is a mere “fart in a steam engine,” (7) what more can be said? Avoiding as Gorgias had done millennia before, the desolate and boring aporia that might result from a conviction that Truth is altogether inaccessible, Tzara turns to his own subjectivity. This is essential because, “a work of art is never beautiful, by decree, objectively, for everyone.” (3) Since every consciousness is unique, the individual must shed “the pursuit of I worship you.” (4) Authority, including Tzara’s authority, is illusory. Thus the manifesto reader must not be “led astray by Aaism,” (4) that is to say, by the very document he is reading. Tzara rejects the very possibility of discursive thought. Some explain, he says, while others learn, but both deceive themselves. Abolish both the teacher and the learner and you have dada. (7) He calls, in fact, for “NO MORE WORDS,” though he cannot avoid using words as he does so. (5)

Only by entering into his own mind can the poet make progress: “With the words I put down on paper I enter, solemnly, into myself” (6) Tzara refers to this inward turning as “selfkleptomania.” (7) To him he is simply making explicit what is inevitable in any case. As he says, one may try to write a manifesto, but “it’s your autobiography that you’re hatching under the belly of the flowering cerebellum.” (7)

The dominant result of this introspection is an extraordinary ebullience, irrational exuberance and high spirits arising from some unquestioned, unquestionable base in a pyrotechnic display of excited language. Delightful little verbal displays pop off here and there. He maintains, for example that art is to be identified not only with Dada, but equally with plesiosaurus or handkerchief. (3) He renews the reader’s subscription to “the celluloid love that creaks/ like metal gates” (4) The phrase “for the saxophone wears like a rose the assassination of the visceral car driver” occurs in the middle of a passage as scintillating and fast-moving as the world of subatomic particles. That passage ends “thus drummed the maize, the alarm and pellagra where the matches grow.” (6) At times, Tzara’s manifestos are so rich in this pure poetry that one feels as though one is eating bonbons. “Dada is a dog – a compass –the lining of the stomach – neither new nor a nude Japanese girl – a gasometer of jangled feelings.” (7) And so it goes, infused with wild unpredictable imagination and passionate enthusiasm.

In the end, “Dada is our intensity.” Spectacle rules: “We are circus ringmasters.” “It’s still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colors” (6) the cosmos then becomes a marvel, “the spermatozoon ballet” (4), at which one can only look on in wonder.

Yet, Tzara sounds a word of warning. Significance is lurking in the shadows. “While we put on a show of being facile, we are actually seeking for the secret essence of things.” (1) Tzara’s pseudonym on top of a pseudonym for several of his manifestos is M. Antipyrine, a name suggesting a healing nostrum. The psycho-aesthetic-spiritual solution suggested by Tzara (and other Dada artists) has much in common with Zen Buddhism. [3]

Tzara’s pseudonym with its associations with the French word triste draws attention to the universal suffering that motivates the Buddhist search for enlightenment. [4] He repeats the line “You’re all going to die,” (7) as if this fact poses the essential problem of life. The solution to this problem is in both cases experiential rather than logical. Tzara insists that “logic is always false,” (2) a contention that, were it not so baldly stated, could be a portion of a Zen sutra. He speaks nearly explicitly about enlightenment: “We really know what we are talking about, because we have experienced the trembling and the awakening.” (7) Dada arises not from intellection but from living: Dada, Tzara says, is “the roar of contorted pains, the interweaving of contraries and of all contradictions, freaks, and irrelevancies: LIFE.”(3) The twentieth century artist recalls Nagarjuna and Advaitist Vedanta when he proclaims that dualities are a fraud, specifying “order=disorder; ego=non-ego; affirmation=negation.” (2) [5]

Finally, and most dramatically, Tzara agrees with the sages that we are really liberated all along, though unconscious of the fact. Nothing really changes with sublime knowledge. One returns at last to the point one had occupied all along. The “three laws” of God are “eating, making love, and shitting.” (6) The story is told of Baizhang Huaihai among others that, when asked how he pursued enlightenment, replied “When hungry, I eat; when tired, sleep.” Yet somehow, in both cases, everything is transfigured.


1. Monsieur Antipyrine’s Manifesto 1916
2. Dada Manifesto 1918
3. Unpretentious Proclamation 1919
4. Manifesto of Monsieur AA the Antiphilosopher
5. Tristan Tzara
6. Monsieur AA the Antiphilosopher Sends Us this Manifesto
7. Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love


Endnotes

1. The word manifesto had earlier been used for many political declarations such as Bolivar’s “Cartagena Manifesto,” Peel’s “Tamworth Manifesto,” and, most notably, Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century several anarchist manifestos appeared. Very likely the move from the social realm to the aesthetic was facilitated by the military analogy suggested by the term avant-garde.

2. Hendrix did this at Monterey in 1967, but he had been preceded by Jerry Lee Lewis destroying pianos in the 1950s as wel l as by Pete Townshend, Jeff Beck and others. In the realm of avant-garde art, Nam June Paik smashed a violin in 1962 as part of his "One for Violin Solo" and the gesture had become enough of a convention that a Destruction in Art Symposium was held in London in 1966 which involved a number of “destruction events.” Two years later a similar event was held in New York City. Oddly, Townshend had studied with Gustav Metzger who was the central figure in the London symposium.

3. I am hardly the first to note the similarities. See, for instance, Won Ko’s Buddhist Elements in Dada: A Comparison of Tristan Tzara, Takahashi Shinkichi and Their Fellow Poets.

4. In fact the name Tristan is Celtic meaning noise, and is not derived from the Latin tristis, though the association is prominent in Tristan and Iseult as well as with Tzara, who, according to Paul Cernat’s Avangarda românească și complexul periferiei: primul val, said that it was meant to recall the French phrase “triste âne tzara” ("sad donkey Tzara"). According to Serge Fauchereau's report (also recorded in Cernat), Colomba Voronca recalled Tzara’s explaining it as a play on the Romanian phrase trist în țară, meaning "sad in the country." In 1925 he legally changed his name from Samy Rosenstock to Tristan Tzara.

5. Tzara reinforces the point while incidentally anticipating Derridean deconstruction in section IV of 7.

Pindar’s Athlete in Pythian 8

This essay quotes the English translation edited by Diane Arnson Svarlien on the very useful Tufts Perseus website. Line numbers are in parentheses.


     Apart from Classicists, who reads Pindar? And yet we have a generous share of his poetry though it is a small fraction of his collected works. Several factors may play a role apart from the general decay of interest in antiquity. Pindar depends on his readers’ familiarity with the immense web of mythology by which the Greeks and, indeed, all pre-modern people made sense of their world. Like most writers immersed in a living culture, he assumes that he need not narrate the stories of the gods and heroes but need only allude to them, often in fleeting and oblique references. Even the specialist may consult a reference now and then for names and stories that Pindar’s original audience knew from childhood. Footnotes and a Classical encyclopedia with a modicum of patience and rereading can remedy this defect for the motivated reader, but I suspect there is another way in which contemporary American culture has deviated from the ancient Greek’s that might interfere with our appreciation of his writing.
     Though American now has gymnasia springing up on every corner and joggers jostle each other in parks and roadsides, athletics had an even more prominent place in Thebes in the fifth century B.C.E. In part perhaps due to the need to be prepared for total mobilization in wartime, in part associated with a pervasive homoeroticism, and in part reflecting the pursuit of arête in all fields, athletics was celebrated by the Greeks. In my own youth we assumed that intellectuals and athletes were largely mutually exclusive categories, often antagonistic. Physical “education” has always seemed to me a contradiction, and university athletics a maddeningly unjustifiable distraction in higher education. Never in my adult life have I watched a sporting event. Yet I adore Pindar, most of whose surviving works are in praise of victors in competitive athletic contests. What did physical culture mean in the ancient world?
     For all today’s fashion for fitness, we are likely to be surprised when Socrates upbraids Epigenes for being out of shape. [1] Socrates cites many reasons in support of universal physical conditioning, noting first of all that a good citizen must always be prepared for war. Yet he does not stop there. He maintains that workouts lead to not only better health and longevity, but also to better cognitive function. Finally he notes that “it is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness before seeing what manner of man you may become by developing your bodily strength and beauty to their highest limit.” Here is an almost aesthetic argument: pride should lead to exercise from a desire to excel not in functional strength alone but in beauty as well and not merely the beauty of a buff physique, but that associated with fulfilling one’s potential.
     As a professional poet Pindar may have written his victory odes for the same reason that another gifted writer might compose soft drink jingles, because someone will pay for such a product. But, apart from effusive praise of the winners, their families and hometown, he includes a more elaborate and subtle version of the final justification offered by Socrates.
     According to Pindar, “with a willing mind” a person “may observe a certain harmony on every step of my way.” (66-7) That harmony is the experience of the deep order present in the kosmos which one may glimpse through excellence of any sort.
     The poem opens with an address to Hesychia, a personification of peace and serenity, associated with Aigina as a well-ruled thriving city. It may seem incongruous that a figure of peace should also be identified as “holding the supreme keys of counsels and of wars,” (3-4), but Hesychia is described as daughter of Justice, and justice, of course, requires enforcement and, at times, even coercion. The kind of calm Pindar has in mind is not empty, but rather a beautiful order of the sort the Greeks saw in the universe as a whole. The Greek word cosmos (κόσμος) fundamentally means well-organized, and has both moral and aesthetic dimensions, being used to indicate good behavior or morality and also beauty. Only when a system is properly ordered may it be quiet and calm.
     This peace may be threatened by forces represented in mythological terms by monsters and giants. In Pythian 8 these are Typhoeus and Porphyrion who are defeated by Zeus and Apollo respectively. The successful battle against these archaic forces of evil by gods associated with Hesychia is the theme of the first triad of the poem. The same Apollo that overcame disorder in the past welcomes the victor in the present day.
     The second triad praises the excellence of the rulers of Aigina, the Aiakidai, descendents of Aiakos, son of Aigina and Zeus and the origin of the family of the Meidulidai to which Aristomenes belonged. Aigina had a close relationship to the poet’s own city of Thebes and a disproportionate number of his odes are concerned with athletes from that island. Though mentioning other prominent athletes from Aigina, he turns in the epode from the heroic activities of these Aiginitans‎ in a rhetorical apophasis, saying he cannot linger on their greatness but can only speak of Aristomenes, “the nearest of all beautiful things,” and in this way “take flight” through art. At the end of the epode he makes a transition from Aigina to his own city of Thebes by mentioning the words of the prophet Amphiaraus who saw there “by nature the genuine spirit of the fathers is conspicuous in the sons.” (45-6)
     By lauding the deeds of Alcmaeon and Adrastus he not only provides a conventional if oblique compliment to Aristomenes, he also places the action of the athletic contest of the present in the context of the legendary past and places the living individuals in a lineage that includes Oedipus, and Laius, Labdacus, and Cadmus before him. These stories legitimize and transform the suffering and struggles of the present by placing them in perspective as inevitable and divinely ordained, an opportunity for heroes to realize their own heroism.
     Among the countless details of the mythic patterns that shape the poet’s view of the Theban wrestler’s victory are the circumstances of Amphiarus’ participation in the campaign of the epigonoi. The seer himself is a type like Achilles of fortitude in the face of an adverse destiny and his son Alkmaion’s qualities magnify the achievement of Aristomenes. Alkmaion is said to be the poet’s “neighbor” and “guardian” of his possessions as well as the source of prophetic oracles. (56-60) According to Diodorus Alkmaion was persuaded to participate in the attack against his first inclinations by his mother Eriphyle who had been bribed by Thersander with the necklace or, in some versions, the robe of Harmonia, objects which had already a history of cursing their owners. This incident, clearly a doublet of her earlier sending her husband into battle due to being offered the very same necklace by Polynices, casts an ambiguous light on harmony and order itself. Here harmony leads to deception and death and consequently to the violation of taboo when Alkmaion later kills his mother in revenge.
     The web of myth invoked by the poet connects with the present through innumerable other associations, introducing not only a rich and rounded vision, but one that highlights irreducible radical ambivalence. Yet he is altogether sincere in his invocation of Hesychia because arête is a refuge from the unwinnable game of life. One is uplifted through the practice of excellence by a miraculous afflatus. A parallel role is played by the phorminx or lyre in Pythian 1 whose music is said to bring calm and order even to the world of the gods.
     The redemptive power of developing one’s abilities “to the highest limit” is what Socrates recommended to Epigenes, saying that only in that way might he might see “what manner of man you may become.” And the motive is urgent. Buddha’s preaching pictured the unenlightened consciousness in this harsh world as a man whose house is burning or who has been struck by a poisoned arrow. Though Pindar does not use such dramatic images, he looks at life with open eyes and finds the human existential circumstance not merely threatening but approaching the unbearable. The problem inspires some the poet’s loftiest moralizing, familiar sententiae to be sure, but informed here by passion and depth. The conclusion of this poem celebrating human achievement focuses instead on human impotence.


But the delight of mortals grows in a short time, and then it falls to the ground, shaken by an adverse thought. [95] Creatures of a day. What is someone? What is no one? Man is the dream of a shadow. (96)


This last phrase echoes the very language of the celebrated gatha in the Diamond Sutra.


All conditioned dharmas
Are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, shadows,
Like dew drops or a lightning flash.


     Hanging in a void, feet resting on nothing, one can yet feel a sort of liberation in the thrill of art, a kind of yogic focus in extraordinary athletic achievement, a thrill at acts of unusual wisdom, compassion, or courage. In celebrating the victor of a wrestling match, Pindar celebrates the human species, which in the face of mortality and suffering, nonetheless strives, and sometimes succeeds, in bathing in the “shining light” of Zeus, and, for a time at least, experiencing a “gentle lifetime.” By ignoring ESPN, perhaps I have failed to note that fans of NFL are, in their own way, seeking spiritual sustenance along with beer and chips. Pindar might have thought so.


1. Xenophon, Memorabilia of Socrates, 3.12.1 -13.

The Heart of the Blues

The text of "Love in Vain" follows.

     Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” immediately places the listener in the heart of the blues, lamenting in an artful manner and in that way transcending or at any rate accepting the pain of life. The title itself has a certain stately, slightly learned sound, as though it might have been found in a sonnet or a madrigal (an association I find also in “Careless Love” though that song is, I think, unknown prior to Buddy Bolden). “Vain” may well be derived from church usages, perhaps sermons on Ecclesiastes.
     The primary reference is eros; in the first stanza the persona’s lover is departing and he follows hopeless to the station, under her spell but unable to alter the fact of their separation. His feeling of helplessness and confusion is eloquently expressed in the line “Well, it's hard to tell, it's hard to tell, when all your love's in vain.” He sounds as though he were dazed from a concussion as well as lovelorn.
     Tension mounts in the second stanza when he establishes a valedictory eye contact in a final attempt to appeal for reconciliation. Yet the gesture only depresses him further: “Well, I was lonesome, I felt so lonesome, and I could not help but cry.”
     The song focuses on the lyric moment of the departure of the beloved on a train, yet this precise focus, like the pinhole opening of a camera oscura, provides a much broader view. The pain of love longing is generalized from sexual romance to suggest all suffering but, further, the fundamental anxiety of our species when contemplating the passage of time.
     The third and climactic stanza is most compact of all. The suffering of life has been compressed into the train’s lights, shrinking and shortly disappearing into the void, leaving the singer devastated and yet still singing. The red and blue lights come to signify the phantasmagoric world of everyday phenomenal reality passing as the river of time flows on unstoppable. The most essential formulation of the speaker’s existential woe is not a woman or other specific sources of pain, but rather the constant passage of time. The train’s vanishing lights represent the reality that is constantly slipping away from us, suggesting the same poignant feeling as a train’s distant whistle or, in Yuan drama, the cries of wild geese. In this way each of us will one day see the world itself receding.
     In the song’s coda the lover transcends language itself, adding moans and cries to the name of the beloved and ending by repeating the theme: “all my love’s in vain.” He howls like a beast or a madman. The only articulate utterance he can manage is the name of the loved one.
     Even in this final pit of despair, the tone is mournful but elegiac, implying strength and fortitude. In spite of the persona’s trials, he retains a certain self-possession suggested by the tight poetic form, with its fourteen syllable lines, the first pair of which repeats a concrete Image and the final line stating a subjective mood with uncompromising inevitable iambs. The rhythm insists, “what is, is right,” and the part of wisdom is submission. One may cry, but one may simultaneously sing.
     Thus suffering is transfigured by art, and the singer from Hazlehurst, Mississippi joins with the ancient Hebrew preacher (and the Buddha and a range of sages before and after) who with measured and melodious words look with open eyes and call out “Vanitas, vanitatum! All is vanity!”



LOVE IN VAIN

I followed her to the station with a suitcase in my hand. (2x)
Well, it's hard to tell, it's hard to tell, when all your love's in vain.

(chorus) All my love's in vain.

When the train rolled up to the station, I looked her in the eyes. (2x)
Well, I was lonesome, I felt so lonesome, and I could not help but cry.

When the train, it left the station, with two lights on behind. (2x)
The blue light was my blues; the red light was my mind.

Hoo-hoo, ooh, Willie Mae
Oh oh hey, hoo, Willie Mae
Hoo-hoo, ooh, eeh, oh woe
All my love's in vain


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.”

Notes on Recent Reading 34 (Hawthorne, Huncke, Bentley)

The House of Seven Gables (Hawthorne)

     Hawthorne took the Gothic novel toward sublimity with this Protestant New England tale in which the role the supernatural plays in the plot while essential is always secondary to the moralizing. The modern reader may find Phoebe a bit cloying in her sweetness and Judge Pyncheon too vicious, but the narrative is gripping, the roots in American history are deep and authentic, and the rhetoric is a pleasure. Hawthorne has the leisurely way of old novelists of lingering over the trees or the weather and yielding to distraction by village side scenes, but these pauses are virtually all lyrical, and they build together to an image system that reinforces the whole in a way that few novelists can achieve. Though Phoebe, Holgrave, Hepzibah enjoy a happy ending,, sweeping even Uncle Venner with them, their unmixed bliss might ring hollow after the earlier concentration on sin which has generated the curse that oppressed the Pyncheons for generations. Their suffering occurs in a context of a town regularly portrayed as venal, gossipy, and ruled by selfish hypocrites. The economic theme of the ruling class oppressing the poor governs the conflict between Pyncheon and Maule even if it is magically dissolved by marriage in the end. Hawthorne provides as good an answer as most to the question of how one may live in an irretrievably fallen world. D. H. Lawrence found a “diabolical undertone” in The Scarlet Letter, and he would doubtless have sniffed the same sulfur in the Pyncheons’ Salem, but in fact Hawthorne was neither of the devil’s party nor on the side of the institutional angels. He was caught between, a dilemma that describes most of us, and there his strength lies.


The Herbert Huncke Reader (Huncke)

     Though I have been fascinated by the possibilities in life and literature offered by the Beat writers since my adolescence, I had never read Huncke. Having just finished this sizable, anthology, I don’t feel unhappy about my long neglect. Huncke is no stylist. Ginsberg’s praise of his writing illustrates generosity to an old friend more than a literary judgement. Yet I am susceptible, as were the Beats when they met him, to his outsider charm. As junkie, thief, and sexual hustler he is as demi-mondaine as they come. And he doesn’t make it easy for his buddies, lovers, or readers; he is completely upfront about his readiness to rip off whoever was available when he needed cash without worrying about hurting friends or strangers. Still, in the life he led he accumulated countless stories and he is a decent story-teller, leaving his narratives so unembellished that they seem as though they must be true. Readers with a taste for the scene will relish these tales from a very real and genuinely dangerous edge of experience. I would not have cared to go straight through, but in small doses most of his sketches have their rewards. Those who are fascinated by the Beat scene will find a great deal here, even if much is unprocessed. I will doubtless retell such moments as Bill Burroughs’ first taste of opiates. (Huncke suspected Burroughs of being a narc and noted his Chesterfield overcoat, already fifteen years out of style.)


A Modern Tragedy (Bentley)

     Phyllis Bentley was a bestselling author in Britain (and did very well in the USA) from the thirties through the fifties. Much of her fiction was centered in her region, the West Riding of Yorkshire where the textile trade dominated the economy and the author’s father was a mill owner. This 1934 novel, basically a love story about inadequate love, is shadowed by the Depression, and Bentley, though conservative in her sympathies, reveals considerable insider detail about the manufacturing processes of the industrial firms that produced cloth and the class structure that supported the economy. Characters are clearly sorted into upper class, among which one finds “proper” operators with old-fashioned integrity and a sharp dealer who does not shrink from fraud; middle class, striving to rise while fearing a fall. The workers, who include a fiery radical union activist reminiscent of Peter Sellers’ Fred Kite in I’m All Right Jack, seem tacked on for the sake of completeness. The primary market for the book, of course, lay largely with the first two groups. While expressing distress at the suffering of the poor, for instance in Rosamond’s reaction to the hunger marchers, the novelist accepts the whole system and suggests that the left-wing Milner Schofield is an activist for reasons more psychological than political while the aged mill owner Henry Clay Crosland is morally exemplary. A few romances cross the upper and middle class lines; the workers are in this way neglected.
     I would not be as harsh as the Kirkus reviewer who, at the novel’s publication called it “weak in plot and unconvincing in characterization.” The prose is straightforward for the most part, ignoring the radical innovations in fiction that had appeared well before its publication. Bentley goes in more for moments of pathos or insight into character than for flights of rhetoric, but the story is well-designed with an opening scene that accumulates significance as the narrative proceeds. Walter’s descent into collusion with crime is quite believable, though I can’t swallow Tasker’s return to face prosecution. Not a bad read, this is the sort of book once called “middlebrow,” the sort that can still bring works of fiction to today’s market, glutted as it has become with self-help and glib celebrities.
     I suppose it is a sign of its lasting appeal that A Modern Tragedy survives in audiobooks today. Many critics seem to prefer Bentley’s earlier Inheritance.

Notes on Recent Reading 33 (Tourneur, Peacock, Greene)

The Atheist’s Tragedy (Tourneur)

     This play, the only dramatic work now credited to Cyril Tourneur, is generally mentioned in literary histories as an example of the revenge play or the tragedy of blood and indeed a number of corpses do accumulate in the course of the story. A ghost appears as in the Senecan precedent, but, unlike Hamlet’s father, Montferrers’ spirit counsels leaving retribution to providence, thus rendering his very appearance adventitious. Similarly, the principal villains, D’Amville and Levidulcia both repent when they realize their end is at hand. Indeed, without the former’s unlikely confession at the end, Charlmont would not have been saved. The author’s apparent orthodox Christianity contrasts with Marlowe’s heroes who at times suggest an atheism likely shared by the author. Nonetheless, Tourneur includes a caricatured hypocritical Puritan, Languebeau Snuffe, whose attempt to seduce Soquette is quite ridiculous.
     The blank verse is raggedy, with many hypometric lines unjustified by content and awkward transitions from prose to poetry within a single speech. Still, Tourneur is capable of some fine metaphors and clever double entendre-based comedy, the story summons up powerful back-brain emotions associated with sex and violence, and the plot could, I think, engage an audience with its action even today.


Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey (Peacock)
 
     The two works are published together by Everyman’s Library, the grand series which, like the Modern Library, provided literature tastefully presented and at the most modest price. They are still available, but, at prices like $18 a volume, they have lost much of their appeal to the impecunious.
     In Headlong Hall the first of Peacock’s conversation-based romans à clef, a group of guests gather at a country estate, each riding his own hobby horse. The vogues of 1815 are all satirized alike, providing an entertaining account of what people were then talking about. We encounter the perfectibilarian who thinks all things are evolving for the better and the deteriorationist who is convinced of the opposite while the “status-quo-ite” mediates between them. Among the other characters are critics, poets, a painter, a female novelist, a phrenologist, a landscape gardener, an appetitive divine, and a rough rendering of Coleridge in the person of Panscope. Though virtually nothing happens in the course of the narrative, the conversation is constant and amusingly interlarded with unusual words, arch footnotes, and unlikely classical quotations. They are considerably more fun than Peacock’s lyrics which the generous reader will find facile and good-natured. The story, such as it is, ends with the earlier general tone of geniality heightened by a round of prospective marriages that provides a cheery optimistic conclusion. Jenkison, the status-quo-ite, has the last word, saying, as the reader may imagine the author saying as well, “the scales of my philosophical balance remain eternally equiponderant.” The book’s appeal is doubtless to the bookish which is to say I enjoyed my second reading as much as I had my first.
     In Nightmare Abbey, Peacock has constructed a work both more shapely in general and more pointed in particulars. Here the story, and there is more of a story, centers on Scythrop, a version of Shelley caricatured to emphasize the brooding Sturm und Drang aspect of his sensibility. Other actors (perhaps more accurately called speakers) include Mr. Flosky, a devotee of German idealism like Coleridge, the Byronic Mr. Cypress who provides the opportunity to satirize passages from Childe Harold, the Manichaean Mr. Toobad (based on J. P. Newton), the Honourable Mr. Listless, a languid fop based on a school friend of Shelley. (That original, incidentally, just to show that reality may outdo imagination, was the extravagant dandy Sir Lumley Skeffington.) The plot involves Scythrop’s inability to choose between two lovers after his rejection by another. These have been associated with Harriet Grove, Harriet Westbrook, and Mary Godwin. An author lacking Peacock’s ethereally light touch would surely never have ventured to represent that progression of loves purely in fun. But Peacock’s own spokesman in Nightmare Abbey is the buoyant Mr. Hilary whose genial good humor is all but irresistible, making all partisanship somewhat absurd and suffering somehow beside the point.


Journey without Maps (Greene)

     In 1935 Graham Greene traveled for a month through the African bush, mostly in Liberia, in search of something like the prelapsarian world. The reader must surely be impressed by the rigors of the trip: the lengthy daily hiking along faint or unmarked trails, the inhospitable climate, the numerous parasites and vermin (who knew that rural African huts typically contain families of rats?), and the very real threat of disease. In addition, he was managing a multi-tribal hired crew of thirty or so and, to top it off, now and then passed through areas ruled by authorities endowed with arbitrary power. The territory he crossed was literally unknown at the time – he notes that the U.S. Government map leaves the entire center of Liberia blank except for the single word: cannibals.
     Greene’s account is fascinating and well-written. He excels at imagistic lists and effective rhetorical effects, though his occasional use of non-African material works less well. Greene is particularly good at conveying the “seediness” of semi-civilized regions and the disagreeable details of life in the deep bush. He regularly expresses what might be called a “preferential option” for the traditional life which he portrays as, at any rate, more intense, direct, and, in some sense, real than the life to which he is accustomed. His accounts of African religion are generally sympathetic though he makes little effort to understand specific practices or beliefs. His fundamental rejection of exploitation, including the weird Liberian regime, led him to reject European colonialism as well as domestic tyranny. Surely his perspective is governed in part by the specter of world-wide depression and European fascism. In the end, though, the reader remembers his worn shoes, aching muscles, and the constant plagues such as “jiggers” that had to be extracted from beneath the toenails. He had a difficult time rationing his whisky to last until the trip’s end.
     His cousin, Barbara Greene, accompanied him on the trek. Her own account, published as Too Late to Turn Back, differs, I understand, in many details from his.