Category Archives: A prose flourish

October 4, 2014 · 3:56 pm

The Tale of a Journey, and Its Ending (Back at Home)

Well, folks, I’ve recently returned from a trip with my immediate family to my and my brother’s undergraduate institution for fun, merriment, and one of those notable trips down Memory Lane, and though we had a great time going there, I have to report that Cornell University and the environs have changed considerably.  A lot of businesses which one thought would be there forever are no longer, and ones which remain have changed almost out of recognition, though sometimes for the better.  We eschewed the formal reunions and the organized trips and went where we remembered things being the best, the most interesting, or sometimes the most grueling (because of course since we had my young nephew with us, we had to impress him with tales of just how horrific things could be, as well as reassuring him that should he go there later, he would be able to surmount difficulties as well).  We started out the trip with breakfast near the beginning of our trip, and then met a good friend in another town later for lunch at a Belgian restaurant, which was a new cuisine for us.  Suffice it to say, it was excellent.  Then, we headed straight for Ithaca.  We got to our motel, and then went to an exceptional Thai restaurant down on The Commons (what the level ground is called downtown, which is not on one of the two mountainsides where Cornell University and Ithaca College are respectively located).  It was called Thai Basil, and was one of the best restaurants around of any kind.  Not only did they make special room for us on a very crowded night when we somewhat inconsiderately came by without a reservation, but the food and the ambience were outstanding.  The waitstaff was accomodating and very polite, coming by the table quite frequently to see what else we needed even though they were filled to capacity and clearly expecting many more.  It was a happy, happy time to end the first leg of our trip.

The next morning and day were the heart of our trip, as we toured around the campus and saw what had changed.  After taking the car around to show my nephew all the places my brother and I had lived (he came through 6 years after me), we parked it (though so booming and hearty, Ithaca is still a city where even up around the university it’s possible to find parking fairly quickly).  Then, I went (like a city dweller) to sit on the corner of College Ave. at Collegetown Bagels.  This is a place with a rich history, and one of the places that has changed much since our first exposure to it.  In the old days, there was no seating; you went into a large room and up to a counter where there were bins of numerous different kinds of bagels, and the man or woman behind the counter took your order and slathered whatever you’d chosen onto your bagel.  Someone rang you up at the register and you left.  Because I didn’t come from a bagel-conscious area, and I got to Ithaca back in the 1970’s, before bagels were popular all over the U.S., I’d never tasted one before; it was a real novelty, one which I hastened to introduce my family to when they came up to visit.  When my mother first tasted them years ago, she wasn’t impressed, being used to the softer bread products of our own hometown.  But in about six months or so, she was strangely longing to have one again.  And thus another cuisine touched our family.  Still, Collegetown Bagels has vastly expanded its operations in the time since even my brother was there after me.  The whole corner of College Ave. is now Collegetown Bagels, and they have tons of outdoor seating.  As well, the counter space is totally new (at least to me) with a complicated “filing-past” procedure of ordering, and beer choices, and a very innovative and ornate menu of items, as well as additional food and juice items of every sort that you could want.  So, I chose to sit and take in the pedestrian traffic and watch the crowds (and incidentally, save a table) for my mother, brother, and nephew, who were planning to hike down one of the several gorges–the motto?  “Ithaca is Gorges”–before having a late breakfast.  I had chosen a plain whole wheat bagel with butter, a bit of yoghurt, and a juice to wait for them with, and soon got into conversation with someone who’d been there when I was and had been in the town since.  He was able to tell me that sadly, some campus traditions no longer prevailed.  For example, dogs are no longer allowed to roam free on the Cornell campus (into the classrooms and etc., where before they were always good for a diversion from our studies); students no longer “borrow” lunch trays from the main dining halls to slide down the steep slope behind Uris Library in the snow anymore; and other such sad passings.  But when I queried as to why there were now such big nets underneath the bridges, he was able to reassure me that at least one unenviable tradition had changed for the better:  despairing students have been prevented from “gorging out” (jumping into the gorges in mostly successful and regrettable suicide attempts).  As well, when my family rejoined me for a late breakfast (and like a hobbit, I had a little something else to help fill up the spaces), they had to report that the gorge they had hiked up was perhaps a bit less scenic than before, because it had had to be paved along the side and reinforced due to a recent flood, which had washed some trees away.  We ate then moved on to tour the campus.

There were people waving to us from the bell tower of the library as the carillon concert began.  As if just to please my nephew (who had at his first sight of the campus up on the hill from a distance said that it reminded him of Harry Potter’s school Hogwarts), students were playing a non-levitational form of quidditch when we got to the Arts Quad.  We watched for a while, and then went round looking at the old buildings, noticing as well places where new constructions had been added (nothing’s ever totally the same way you left it, and I suppose that’s as it should be).  Nevertheless, I was dismayed to learn that the coffeehouse “The Temple of Zeus” in the English building of Goldwin Smith Hall is no longer there or perhaps not what it was, and I saw no happy outpouring of students from “The Green Dragon” in the Architecture and Fine Arts building of Sibley Hall, though that’s not to say they weren’t there at least lurking in spirit somewhere.  I was nostalgic for this area because it’s where I spent most of my time, as an English major in Goldwin Smith and as a dual Theatre major in Lincoln Hall.  But I have to be happy for the English majors that they are getting a new Humanities Building right next door, and the Theatre students now have a grand new performing arts center in Schwarz, which I saw when I was sitting having breakfast in the morning, as it was centrally located.

Next, we went to show my nephew where my brother and I had lived in our respective dorms on North Campus, and the North Campus Union, and other sights.  I, of course, was mournful to observe that the Pancake House–scene of many an early and riotous breakfast after a night of heavy carousing for me and my undergraduate friends–was no longer above the power house along another waterway, but we were rewarded with the sight of a baby blue egret perched on the dam fishing, so it wasn’t all bad.  Finally, we went back to the car and once again my nephew was rewarded in his hopes and ambitions:  earlier, when we had been driving past a sign on the road that said “Deer Crossing,” he had hoped to be able to see a deer.  Now, however, as we were parked just by someone’s backyard in hillside Ithaca, we saw a deer, an older female, standing quietly feeding on someone’s flower bed.  My brother pointed out the tumor which had unfortunately formed on her back knee joint.  She was not really afraid of us, but just kept a watchful eye out as we quietly started the car and pulled out.  We had our last group touring session of the day by going down to Lake Cayuga and sitting there in Stewart Park, under the willows.  It was very warm and yet breezy in a pleasant way; we in fact had good weather the entire weekend.  Next, my brother wanted to take my mother to see the falls at Taughhannock Park, so we went there.  I, however, had worn my weary legs out, so while the three of them hiked five miles in and five miles back out, I sat in the car park under a shade tree and watched all the young families and their kids and dogs coming to enjoy the lawns and water.  Finally, it was time to go out to dinner again, and man! were we ready for it this day!

My brother found us a wonderful Indian restaurant up on the hill on Eddy St., where though I was very sad to see that the magnificent Cabbagetown Café of vegetarian fame and excellence was no longer on a corner, I was amply requited with a fine Indian dinner.  I wish I could remember the exact name of the restaurant, but there were two Indian restaurants side by side, and my brother left us to choose one, and as they both looked very inviting and hospitable, I cannot recall which one we visited.  But both had a five-star rating, so if you happen to be visiting, we went to the one a little further down the hill of Eddy Street toward Martin Luther King St., and if you can’t find room there, maybe the one a little further just up the hill will have room for you.  Again, we were welcomed without a reservation, which was excellent, and the dinner moreover was absolutely first-rate.  We ended the evening by driving downtown to Purity Ice Cream, a favorite haunt of my brother’s in the old days, and my nephew was rendered replete with good fare and happy memories.

The next morning, we had to go, but we started out in a leisurely fashion and went to see some more falls at the bottom of another gorge (my brother is clearly training my nephew to be a vigorous fellow).  Then, we went to another fine restaurant (I know, it sounds like all we did was walk and eat!).  We had our breakfast at the Sunset Grill, which was up on one of the high hills of Ithaca, and from which we could see Cornell University sitting on another mountaintop at a distance.  It was several notches up from the average diner food, everything was pristine and clean and bright and cheery, they had an “endless cup of coffee,” and we got to eat out on their porch area, in the gorgeous morning air.  Now, it really was time to go.  We gassed up the car and headed back, stopping in the evening to have dinner at a restaurant just an hour from my brother’s house, where we were not let down either from all the fine fare we had already been served.  It was a “country style” restaurant, but though I’d had premonitions of everything being covered in cheap gravy and being served overboiled vegetables, that’s not what it was about at all.  It was instead just as fine a dining experience as all the rest, and concluded our trip in a perfect manner.

We drove to my brother’s house full of our experiences and adventures, and busy discussing the traditions which still seemed to be observed, and the things that had changed for the better or worse.  One thing is certain:  as one might expect (though older people like us never quite seem to get the gist of this the first time they encounter it, and need repeated exposures to this awareness to “get the picture”), the torch has been passed to a new generation, and they are happy with what they have in the main, just as we were happy with what we had, mostly.  And that’s all as it should be!  Heaven only knows what my nephew will see if and when he goes to Ithaca.  Or maybe he will break tradition and go somewhere else, where he will likely discover his own favorite things to expose his family to.  Only time will tell!  In the meantime, we had a great family outing, and yet another good experience of family bonding.  And after all, that’s what it was all about!

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September 25, 2014 · 6:50 pm

“School days, school days, dear ol’ Golden Rule days….”

There was a song current in my mother’s youth, now complete with anachronisms, the first verse of which went “School days, school days, dear ol’ Golden Rule days; Reading and writing and ‘rithmetic, taught to the tune of a hickory stick; I was your maid in calico, you were my bashful, barefoot beau; And you wrote on my slate, ‘I love you so!’/When we were a couple of kids.”  Of course, hickory sticks were replaced by paddles in my mother’s youth, and they were no longer using slates, but there was still some corporal punishment by teachers (now mostly and happily a thing of the past), and there is, was, and one hopes always will be youthful romances to tide us over until the long school day is through.

And though this is a song largely about those who are in school pre-university, this post is just by way of saying that I will in fact be away from posting at length for a few days, because I am going with my immediate family to visit my undergraduate alma mater.  I hope to have lots to write about when I get back; if I don’t have much of anything to write about the trip itself, I will I hope have a renewed spirit to return to my literary posting with.  Until then, have a great autumn!

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September 19, 2014 · 9:31 pm

Halloween, wolves, lights out!–and whimsy

Today, I am going to tell you the very brief, horrific (and admittedly whimsical) tale of a naughty little girl of my acquaintance and how she (for some time at least) lost the friendship of a near relative through a lie about wolves, radiators, and lights out! time.  If you suspect that I know that little girl a bit better than I am letting on, so be it (heaven forbid you should think it is actually myself I am talking about, though they do say that confession is good for the soul).

Cast your mind back to the early 1960’s, when little girls still wore puffy petticoats with short skirts over them, and either had to have pigtails and ponytails or Shirley Temple curls (made arduously, if not “natural,” by painstaking mothers using bobby pins, at least on school nights, when everyone the next day had to believe the curls were genuine).  Picture to yourself a weedy young imp who preferred to lie curled up with a good book all day, and hated being told to go outside and play (hey! that rhymes!).  This young person of the female persuasion only liked going out to play or even playing inside with dolls, for that matter, when one or the other of her female cousins were around to make the game interesting.

Of course, Halloween comes in the fall of the year, and at that time, vampires, spooks, and werewolves are in the juvenile mind in abundance, not only for trick-or-treat, but even after, to spice up daily conversation and slumber parties.  And, of course, to supply material for ghastly nightmares, which, once they’re over continue to supply a pleasurable frisson of fright, a harking back to horror.

Well, it so happened that this little girl had never acquired a fear of the dark.  She was afraid of many things, but unlike her female cousins, had never become afraid of the dark, or required a night-light to sleep.  But she was afraid of wolves.  Not just werewolves, but the real animal, which she’d never seen except in books, nor was likely to.  But her cousins slept with a night-light, because it was decreed that parents had different verdicts about what was the best way to deal with nightmares, and theirs had been known to give way more easily to the specific of waking only to find the light shining, and nothing wrong.

Now, our little girl, we’ll call her Beth (for nothing would induce me to reveal her true identity), abhorred a night-light.  She was proud of not needing one, and when she had an occasional fright in the night, she simply stumbled out of bed and went to her parents’ room for comfort and reassurance, or better yet, and more often, called out for the long-suffering (and perhaps overindulgent) parent(s) to come to her.  But one other thing that she was perhaps less rational about than even wolves was floor registers to radiator systems, the kind that have a few little slots in the floor that can be made to shut firmly by pushing the knob.  Doing so of course shut off the warm air flow to the room, but it at least produced a firm surface which didn’t show a long, mysterious floor passageway below it, leading off into who knew where.  Nevertheless, Beth had been warned to leave the floor vents open, and by and large she was a good child and not too terribly mischievous.  She did tell the occasional untruth when it was advisable in her view, but as she usually got found out and punished, it didn’t often strike her as a viable option.

There was one notable occasion, however, when Beth found it to be the sine qua non, the absolutely necessary element, to add comfort to her existence.  And this was when her cousin Bella came to stay the night.  Now Bella was about a year or two younger, and wasn’t used to being lied to by Beth, so she was unprepared for what happened when the two girls were left alone for the night.  Just as Bella had requested, there was a night-light burning to one side of the bedroom, and while Bella found this a fine method of reassurance in a strange place, Beth found it irksome and just knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink with it on.  She had been warned by her mother to leave the light burning if Bella wanted it on, as a mark of courtesy to her guest, yet since it was her bedroom they were sleeping in, in her nice warm bed, and everything was beckoning for an evening of confidences and strange stories in the dark, she just knew there must be some other way to arrange things to her satisfaction.

Suddenly, it came to her in a flash of inspiration!  She’d share with Bella one of her own nightmares that had happened once or twice to trouble her own sleep; only, she’d pretend that it had really happened, and surely Bella couldn’t refuse to allow her to turn off the light then!  So, slowly and carefully, trying to suit her story to what Bella was likely to believe, Beth explained, with many a gesture and fearsome expression:

“Well, see, Bella, it’s not that I don’t want the light on; but at night, there’s a big, fat, mean ol’ wolf that comes up in the floor register, and if he can see us, he might eat us.  Or tear us up to pieces, and then eat us.  But if we have the lights all out, then he can’t even see where we are, and all we have to do is go to sleep, and he’ll leave us alone and go away.”

Bella’s eyes grew large.  “But won’t he hear us talking?” she asked, her voice shaking with the faithful tremors of the new convert, gullible but still with questions.  “Naw,” said Beth airily, “He never hears me when I sing to myself in the dark.”  “Well, then, won’t he smell us?” Bella persisted, not liking this strange mutated creature of frightful fairy tales at all.  “NO!  He doesn’t smell; something is wrong with his nose.”  “Well, can’t we just close the register and keep him out?”  This example of independent thinking, which moreover had all the marks of her own previous thoughts on the subject, riled Beth.  “NO!  Not unless you want to be a baby and freeze all night, without any heat.  I’m telling you, the only thing to do is to turn out the light.  And we’d better hurry, because I think I hear him coming now!”

Had Beth had time to think the matter through at leisure, before her parents had sprung the surprise on her that she was expected to endure a night-light all night, she might probably have thought of a better solution.  Because this one clearly had serious drawbacks, one of which was that Bella now wailed in a loud voice, “I want my mama!  I want my mama, and I want to go home!”  Why this lie?  Especially since no wolf or even any self-respecting werewolf was likely to come up through a floor register in a modern house at night?  Suffice it to say that this took place back in the 1960’s, when naughty children were still likely to be punished with at least a mild spanking, as well as having privileges taken away, and such methods were enough to reassure the erring Beth that whatever wolves lurked below the floorboards were best left unmentioned when company came.  Bella went home still frightened, though in a huff as well for a few weeks when she was assured that Beth had only been “telling a story,” as such matters were euphemistically called by the children’s doting grandmother.

And there ends this whimsical (and true) tale of the fall season, my second early contribution to the Halloween holiday which will come next month.  But you should know that if it’s ever a choice between being in the dark all night and managing to sleep, or sleeping with a light on in a room with a floor register, old memories have convinced me that the dark room is the best (and for good measure, I might even pile up extra blankets on the bed and shut the floor register as Bella suggested–after all, even a cousin who’s a ‘fraidy-cat can’t be all wrong!).

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September 14, 2014 · 6:06 pm

A (very) early post for Halloween–Does Edgar Allan Poe’s long poem “The Raven” have an adequate “objective correlative”?

Well, everybody in the continental U.S. seems to feel that fall weather is here early this year, that instead of having a blissfully warm autumn in September, we are already into October weather, and in some parts of the western mountain chains, it’s already snowed.  So now I’m going to celebrate Halloween a little bit earlier than I usually do, and do a sort of partial Halloween post, for fun and edification, mine as well as yours.  And since it’s officially a Halloween post, I’m going to make some of your worst dreams come true and involve T. S. Eliot’s theory of the “objective correlative,” a concept which has made the rounds more often and sometimes more drunkenly than Mrs. Murphy’s sousing poodle (a dog of fame in some quarters, mainly amongst fellow spirits at the bars).

Before beginning the fun of Poe, therefore, let’s suffer through a little literary theory.  The concept of the “objective correlative,” according to Wikipedia, comes originally from Washington Allston and his 1840 Lectures on Art.  You can find his explanation on Wikipedia in brief.  The modernist poet T. S. Eliot popularized the concept, however, in an essay called “Hamlet and His Problems,” and so it’s more important for the nonce (and for us too) to look at his essay.  Here are some quotes, also gleaned secondhand from Wikipedia:  “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”  Eliot felt that Hamlet was an artistic flop because Hamlet’s “strong emotions ‘exceeded the facts’ of the play, which is to say they were not supported by an ‘objective correlative.’  He acknowledged that such a circumstance is ‘something every person of sensibility has known’; but felt that in trying to represent it dramatically, ‘Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him.'”

Now let’s turn to Poe’s poetical excursion into his usual macabre fare, “The Raven.”  I’m sure most of you are familiar with at least some of the poem’s setting and probably have been jounced and bounced around by the alliteration and rhyme scheme a couple of times at least in reading.  The poem has a lot of alliteration and rhyme, including internal line rhymes, and a repetitive structure and refrain, which depends upon variations of the “Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore'” variety.  Just to refresh our memories, let’s look at how the poem starts out:

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,/Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,/While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,/As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door./'”‘Tis some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door–/Only this, and nothing more.”‘/Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,/And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor./Eagerly I wished the morrow;–vainly I had tried to borrow/From my books surcease of sorrow–sorrow for the lost Lenore–/For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore–/Nameless here for evermore.”

This fearing and questioning and apprehensive meditation goes on for four more sing-song stanzas, and then the speaker decides that it’s actually something at the window, and so goes to open it.  Here’s what happens when he does:

“Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,/In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore;/Not the least obeisance made he; not an instant stopped or stayed he;/But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door–/Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door–/Perched, and sat, and nothing more.”

Next, for seven or eight more stanzas, the human speaker persists in speculating about “the lost Lenore,” and whether he will see her again, and while his own soul answers “Nevermore,” he also persists in directing his loaded questions to the bird, who eerily answers, “Nevermore.”  Though the speaker is intelligent enough, and the circumstances possible enough, at least earlier in the poem, to consider that perhaps this is the only word the bird knows (“‘Doubtless,’ said I, ‘what it utters is its only stock and store….'”), he shows himself to be in tune with the bird’s apparent “predictions” to the extent that his questions are all shaped to fit this early form of “magic eight ball”:  for example, why doesn’t the speaker say something more cogent, like “Will I be alone for the rest of my life?” and thus “spike” the question to go his way?  Or, he could say, “Will I continue to be unhappy?”  Since the bird always replies “Nevermore,” the speaker could thus get a better prediction if he tried, but instead of this, he asks sad and negative questions which portray a depressive obsessive frame of mind.

Finally, the speaker becomes irate enough to tell the bird to leave, and of course the bird replies, “Nevermore.”  So far, the mysterious death of Lenore isn’t made enough of to function as an objective correlative, and just having a (possible pet, trained by somebody) raven peck at the window and fly in isn’t enough to act as an objective correlative either, by T. S. Eliot’s explanation of that phenomenon.  It’s not actually until the very last stanza (of the 1845 edition of the poem) that anything sufficiently supernatural or odd happens, which doesn’t rely on the human speaker’s rigging of the game by asking the “right” questions.  Here is that stanza:

“And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting/On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;/And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming,/And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;/And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor/Shall be lifted–nevermore!”

This stanza is truly weird:  the bird, without the mention of its being fed, or given water, or stirring from its place, is still there, apparently not having died or decayed.  The same seems to be proposed or at least implied of the man, who can’t really be imagined to have broken his concentration by getting up to get a sandwich or a Scotch and soda, and then come back.  Yes, in the last stanza I think we find a wee bit of an objective correlative in Eliot’s terms in the set of circumstances being what they are, the man’s enslavement to the bird’s malevolent spell, the neverendingness of his torment.

Now see, we had fun, didn’t we?  At least I did, and I hope you did too.  If not, comfort yourself with the reflection that your “torment” of reading this post has not been “neverending” (and I hope you’re not sitting in a dark room staring meaningly at your pet mynah bird, as I can’t answer for the consequences)!

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August 23, 2014 · 8:37 pm

“Don’t be such a tease, love; we don’t have forever!”–or, Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”

Have you ever wondered what was the best way to spur a potential lover to make the possible actual and real?  Have you ever tried to decide just which purveyor of public wisdom could give you a hint as to what to say?  Well, if you don’t mind reading a witty and rhetorically versatile 46-line poem from 1681 (or perhaps reading it together in a romantic setting with your chosen one), you might not have to look any further.  The Restoration poet Andrew Marvell put it excellently well in his short poem “To His Coy Mistress,” in which the word “mistress” represents only a potential sometimes, not necessarily an actual physical lover.  It may, in fact, be a woman whom one admires and addresses poems to, or it may be an actual mistress in the physical sense.  Yet, in this poem, the physical interaction doesn’t seem to have happened yet, which is the source of the lover-poet’s grievance.  Let’s give it a quick read, shall we?

“Had we but world enough, and time,/This coyness, lady, were no crime./We would sit down, and think which way/To walk, and pass our long love’s day./Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side/Shoudst rubies find; I by the tide/ Of Humber would complain.  I would/Love you ten years before the flood,/And you should, if you please, refuse/Till the conversion of the Jews./My vegetable love should grow/Vaster than empires and more slow;/An hundred years should go to praise/Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;/Two hundred to adore each breast,/But thirty thousand to the rest;/An age at least to every part,/And the last age should show your heart./For, lady, you deserve this state,/Nor would I love at lower rate./But at my back I always hear/Time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near;/And yonder all before us lie/Deserts of vast eternity./Thy beauty shall no more be found;/Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound/My echoing song; then worms shall try/That long-preserved virginity,/And your quaint honor turn to dust,/And into ashes all my lust:/The grave’s a fine and private place,/But none, I think, do there embrace./Now therefore, while the youthful hue/Sits on thy skin like morning glow,/And while thy willing soul transpires/At every pore with instant fires,/Now let us sport us while we may,/And now, like amorous birds of prey,/Rather at once our time devour/Than languish in his slow-chapped power./Let us roll all our strength and all/Our sweetness up into one ball,/And tear our pleasures with rough strife/Thorough the iron gates of life:/Thus, though we cannot make our sun/Stand still, yet we will make him run.”

This is quite a charming poem, but it would be foolish to ignore the definitely frank summary of what lies in the grave, also.  Let’s take the poem apart and explicate it in a standard way for a moment.  First, the lover points to the “clock” of their daily life and says that if they had time, only had time, that his mistress’s “coyness were no crime,” which is to say that 1) they don’t have time and 2) it is therefore a crime for her to be so coy.  Then using a rhetorical figure in which one says, “if such and such were the case, I would say so and so, but it clearly isn’t the case, so I’m not saying it,” he in fact does come up with a bit of the (hurried) and overdone praise which he assumes the lady is desiring before parting with her favors.  He therefore does say what she is wanting to hear, but says it in cagey brief form.  Just a few points in passing:  when he says that she would find rubies by the Ganges, he is using a standard symbol of virginity, rubies, and when he says that if only they had time, she could hold him off and barter and continue coy “until the conversion of the Jews,” he is speaking of an old-fashioned religious folk tradition which says that the Jews will convert at the end of recorded history.  Clearly, she cannot continue to deny the poet until then in actuality, because both will be dead by such an unimaginable time in the future.  He next says that if he could court her as she deserves, his “vegetable love” would progress very slowly, which is what she seems to want in holding him off.  This “vegetable” element is important because it was believed at the time that eating only vegetables was a way of curbing sensual appetites, and thus his “vegetable love” would have time to mature at a very slow pace.

Next, he tells her just how long he would spend on praising each part of her, but notice always the conditional tenses throughout the poem, those “had we [if we had],” “shoudst,” “should,” “would,” etc., all indicating in this case conditions contrary to fact.  He admits that she certainly deserves this amount of time for her praise (and of course he’s using the figure of hyperbole, or extended exaggeration, here), and that he would not love “at lower rate,” which suggests a slightly mercantile metaphor of exchange, his praise and adulation in exchange for her maidenhead, which is the subject of the next part of the poem.

First, he brings up the subject of time directly again, and tradition has it that when he says “But at my back I always hear/Time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near,” Marvell is expressing his awareness of the difference in their ages, he being a somewhat older man to her younger years and bloom of youth.  He in a sense makes a desperate but quite articulate, direct, frank, and sneaky attack upon her vanity and attempts to affect her by an account of graveyard rot, in what were for the time both metaphorical and well-known terms:  he says that when she is in the grave, no one will see her beauty and he won’t be there to praise it; worms will “try” (pierce) her “long-preserved virginity” (hymen, or maidenhead), and turn her “quaint honor” into dust, as well as “all [his] lust” (his penis and the rest of him) into ashes.  The term “quaint” at the time was a standard pun upon “cunt,” and so he is moving in for the bald and forthright rhetorical “kill shot,” trying to encourage her by a different and quite original plea to her vanity.

The rest is very obvious.  He praises her again for the “youthful hue” which “Sits on thy skin like morning glow,” and notes that her soul is willing, and she is as aching with passion as he (“every pore” has “instant fires”).  He suggests that like birds of prey they bolt the “food” of their love rather than letting time eke them out little by little.  In suggesting that they put their “sweetness” all into “one ball,” he is invoking a game image of the several different games like croquet that were played at the time, only their play is quite serious, because they are rolling this “ball” not through wickets, but “Thorough the iron gates of life.”  One alternate explanation is that the ball is a missile aimed at a city under fire, and the iron gates are the city walls.  As the hymen is torn in the initial act of love, so the lovers will “tear our pleasures with rough strife,” yet though there is an element of truthful roughness in the language, their pleasures are still seen as pleasures.  The reference to being unable to make the sun stand still is a reference to the myth of Zeus, the Greek father of the gods, who made the night remain for a week so that he could experience love with Alcmena, a mortal.  What this part of the poem in effect means is that though the lovers cannot do what Zeus did, they can make their sun “run,” that is, they can force the days and nights to pass quickly in their enjoyment of each other.

The virtuosity of this poem I think I have indicated, and I believe it’s quite clear that this poem is a masterpiece of the “make much of time,” or “make hay while the sun shines” genre.  So, the next time you’re genuinely in a pickle and need a persuasive set of reasons as to why a lover should pay attention to your pleas, you could do worse than quote Andrew Marvell’s poem–you might succeed with such a master at your shoulder, and the worst that could happen to you is probably receiving an “Oooh, gross; how can you say that to me?” when you explain the graveyard bits!  Oh, well; maybe it just wasn’t “meant to be.”  At least you learned a great poem, and that’s something.

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August 6, 2014 · 5:05 pm

Leslye Walton’s “The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender”–A Tour de Force of Magical Realism

If I wrote to tell you today that The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender is the tale of a young woman named Ava who becomes the victim of a crime, you’d probably yawn a bit, stretch and sigh, and say “There are lots of stories of that kind out there–why should I read one more?”  But if I were to tell you that she had previously been mistaken as an angel by a whole Seattle neighborhood, perhaps you’d be a little more interested.  And if I then told you that this is because she had wings, maybe I’d have you hooked.  You’d say, perhaps, “Okay, then, I’ll read your crime story, and we’ll see just what this is really all about.”

Well, what it’s really all about, in the author Leslye Walton’s words, is this:  the story is “inspired by a particularly long sulk in a particularly cold rainstorm spent pondering the logic, or rather, lack thereof, in love–the ways we coax ourselves to love, to continue loving, to leave love behind.”  That sounds ordinary enough, doesn’t it?  But then, Walton tells us that sulking in the rain is the general way she herself, like a daffodil, can achieve beauty, and our attention is drawn away from logic and towards the whimsical.

As you might guess, the crime is only in a minor way what the story is “about.”  It’s a novel of magical realism, and passes continually to and fro between realistic descriptions and events and magical ones, in a nearly seamless flow that keeps one reading to see what miracle or odd happening will occur next.  Some realistic odd happenings or conditions, such as Ava’s twin brother Henry’s not being willing to speak most of the time, are explained by his seer-like state; his main vision of doom and disaster turns out to be verified, not only in the attack upon his sister Ava, but also in the more realistic natural world’s symptoms of global warming, first a drought and then a flood of rains, connected in this story with magical happenings as well.

To begin at the beginning, however, the connection between Ava Lavender’s non-functional wings and her ancestry is quite clear:  for at least a third of the novel, before we ever even meet her mother, we are in the equally magical world of her immediate forebears, her maternal great-grandfather Beauregard Roux, who moves his family to the New World and into his beloved “Manhatine,” followed by her grandmother Emilienne and her siblings René, Margaux, and Pierette.  The connection with both birds and ghosts is fairly constant throughout the novel also:  great-aunt Pierette, upon having fallen in love with an older man who liked bird-watching, turned herself into a canary, we are told.  And Emilienne, after her husband Connor Lavender moves her to Seattle, her siblings all having died, continues to see and converse with their ghosts in her new home.  As well, she sees the ghost of the little girl who previously lived in the house, one Fatima Inês, appearing along with theirs, particularly at crucial times in the novel.  In this sense, Ava’s connection with birds is not only a matter of heredity, but also of environment, because in Fatima Inês’s room, there are a host of doves who have mated with crows, leaving feathers everywhere.  As well, after Jack Griffith, the young erring father of Ava and Henry deserts her mother Viviane for another woman, the handyman Gabe, who lives in the house, becomes a sort of foster father to the children even though Viviane remains for a long time emotionally remote due to her unrequited love for Jack; Gabe hangs a feather mobile over Ava’s crib before she is born, which is rather as if yet another line of “inspiration” has occurred to make her part human, part bird.  Yet, her fondest wish is to be treated simply as a girl, and before the end of the novel, a young man, Rowe, brother to her friend Cardigan, seems to be the solution to this problem.

There is also the obsessed young Nathaniel Sorrows, however, a strange kind of religious fanatic who poses a threat to Ava’s desire to be ordinary, as he has an idolatrous fixation with her.  Though I won’t give away the very end of the novel, I should say that he is key to the resolution of the plot, and is disposed of plot-wise as well, just as the other odd characters have sometimes been.

Among some of the minor characters there is Wilhelmina, a native American woman with mystical powers who helps Emilienne run the family bakery, and Penelope, who does so as well.  And though it may not be usual to include a bakery as a character, as a magical sort of personality, the bakery is responsible for all the superlative tastes and good smells and wonderful pastries and breads that finally lure the townspeople away from their belief that Emilienne and Wilhelmina are both witches, and draw them in to enthusiastic support of the business.

Times of the year, seasons, solstices and equinoxes, are symbolically important in this story too; the summer solstice, for example, is Fatima’s anniversary of her birthdate, and the people of the town celebrate it as much for the one reason as for the other.  Other odd happenings include things from the very first of the book, when Mama Roux, Beauregard’s wife, is said to become transparent and disappear after he has (actually) mysteriously disappeared; this is not simply a symbolic book, however, and it’s not just that she becomes “transparent” and so forth in terms of personality.  By the way the event is recounted, it’s clear that it’s meant to be “real.”  Then, there is the man in Seattle who, after his wife leaves him, begins to dream her dreams; once again, though there is a symbolic element to this statement, it is also meant to be real, as real as it ever is in a work of magical realism.

Walton does show her rhetorical hand in her fiction here and there of course, and in direct statements that occur alongside the plotline rhetoric.  For example, about three-fourths of the way through the book, she speaks of the “malformed cousins of love,” “lust, narcissism, self-interest.”  When the children Ava and Henry, now in their teens, finally venture outside of the protective surroundings of their house on solstice, Walton has her narrator comment:  “..[C]hildren betray[] their parents by being their own people.”  Near the end of the novel, when grandmother Emilienne is sitting by the bed of the wounded Ava, she is said to think of “all the scars love’s victims carry.”  Still, the main tendency of the novel is to be whimsical, mysterious, magical, and thoroughly engaging, without that emotional drop that the reader often feels when the ending is not unrelievedly happy (and that’s a hint but not a spoiler).  It is, however, a quite spell-binding book, from start to finish, and I would encourage everyone interested in this type of fiction (and even those for whom it would be a first encounter with magical realism) to read it.  Who knows, maybe if you read it, your canary or parakeet will begin giving you significant looks before dropping a feather on your page and initiating an intellectual or poetic conversation!  At the very least, you will have experienced a gifted new writer’s début novel, and may be a bit more mystical, philosophical, or wise about the departures or desertions of loved ones and other machinations of fate.

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July 17, 2014 · 4:05 pm

Arturo Perez-Reverte’s “Purity of Blood”–A swashbuckling fiction romancing about a lie

After having read Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s exciting and tumultuous novel The Club Dumas some time ago (it is a free-standing novel at this point, not a part of a series), I made up my mind that his other novels, all apparently written in the great tradition of the adventurous Dumas, must certainly be worth a read too.  What with one thing and another, however, I got distracted by other books and literary endeavors, and until I found a copy of his second Captain Alatriste novel, Purity of Blood, on a free shelf at the library, I blush to confess that I had more or less put the great romancer Pérez-Reverte out of my mind.

At first, I hesitated to read the book right away, because usually I am a stickler for doing things in a certain order, and I felt that unless I had already acquired or at least read his first eponymous novel in the series, Captain Alatriste, that I should not go on to the second.  But then, a friend assured me that the novels were linked mainly by internal references back and forth to the adventures in each, and each book was still easily readable as a stand-alone experience.  So in I leapt.  At first, I felt that I was drowning in a sea of Spanish names as Pérez-Reverte built up his world of characters, and I do not know enough Spanish history to be sure, but I suspect that some of the characters in the novel are references to actual poets, con men, and adventurers (other than the king and queen, who appear in cameo fashion, and are of course meant to refer to the real people).

The story is handled very well, and is related by a thirteen-year-old ward of sorts of Captain Alatriste, Íñigo Balboa, in turn with an anonymous omniscient narrator who tells things that happen in Balboa’s absence which he could only know about by being told about them afterwards (which we are free to think is the case if we want).  The story flows easily, but the narrative waters are constantly perturbed by the concept of “blood,” both in the amount of it that is (or is in danger of being) shed in petty quarrels and scrapes, and in the troubled history of Spain’s Inquisition period, when the concept of “pure blood” (a descent unmarked by having Jewish or Moorish “blood”) was supreme.  I say the concept was supreme, because as the narrator relates from a later period than his thirteen-year-old perspective–and it’s a point made gracefully and well by the rhetoric of events as well as by any rhetoric of declamation, which is kept at a minimum–the concept was all there actually was.  As is reiterated by what the characters know already as well as by what they find out, there is no such thing in their world as “pure blood” of any group or category (and our world has already confronted this truth again and again in history, enough to be equally sure, though there are those slow to admit this, and even violently inclined to aver the opposite).  People are people, we are all related through Adam and Eve (or through whatever “Ur” figures one chooses to prefer), and any claim to the contrary is a lie.

Romancing about the confrontation of the lie, however, adds another dimension to the dialogue.  For example, Pérez-Reverte does not make his positive characters earnest and totally well-intentioned purveyors of the truth, but erstwhile adventurers, scandalous poets, and scoundrels, all of whom have their own reasons for seeking the truth.  They are pitted against the evil characters mainly because they are sickened by hypocrisy and have other axes to grind, old grudges and claims and quarrels, and they even have some prejudices of their own against disadvantaged groups, though they do not make victims of these groups.  The strongest rhetorical ploy they use which features the question of blood descent in fact comes about because a young nun of Jewish ancestry and the young man, Íñigo Balboa, are in the clutches of the Inquisition, and they must find a way to free them.  The very fact that they are not high-flown ministers of justice and the truth but only ordinary culprits and swashbuckling adventurers of men who make use of the truth and come to think the better of the truth in spite of their own prejudices is more convincing in some fictional ways than if they had had totally good intentions themselves to start with.

Finally, there is the rhetoric of the book which cleverly allows the reader not only to participate in a vigorous and page-turning tale of derring-do, but also to feel superior to those benighted characters who persist in their errors to their own undoing.  That not all can be saved who should be and not all adequately punished who deserve it is an element of realism which Pérez-Reverte allows to creep into the novel; still, this one realistic gesture makes the otherwise a little fantastic fiction breathe life, and reinforces our awareness of just how unreal the world can become in actual fact when people allow a corrupt idea to lead them into action, and when they make victims of their fellow human beings according to a notion of division and superiority.

I have, of course, written some very serious words about this novel, as I think it deserves, but of course, another good reason to read it is because, quite simply, it’s fun, gripping, and full of wit and wizardry of blade and dagger.  After all, it’s not every day our serious lessons about life are accompanied by a generous dose of fantasy and play with history and historical figures.  And who better to deliver this combination than Arturo Pérez-Reverte?

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July 13, 2014 · 5:17 pm

Yusuf Idris’s “The Chair Carrier”–Symbolic double entendres from sentence to sentence

First, let me apologize for having been away for so long from posting.  I went away to a lovely lake, Lake Champlain, for the July 4th holiday, and some of me didn’t come back right away (mainly, my heart, which is in love with lakeshore trees and breezes in green leaves, and widely various birdsong in the forest, and good times with family and friends).  But I’m ready now to re-enter my daily life, and today’s post is on a short story of Yusuf Idris, a writing physician from Egypt.  The story is called “The Chair Carrier.”  This story, in fact, shows what the whole necessity for revolution and change in society is about, and it does so at the sentence level, symbolically.

Basically, the story is a sort of surreal one, and here is how it begins:  “You can believe it or not, but excuse me for saying that I saw him, met him, talked to him and observed the chair with my own eyes.  Thus I considered that I had been witness to a miracle.  But even more miraculous–indeed more disastrous–was that neither the man, the chair, nor the incident caused a single passer-by in Opera Square, in Gumhourriyya Street, or in Cairo–or maybe in the whole world–to come to a stop at that moment.”

The entire story is taken up with the speaker, a literate and prosperous person, trying to persuade the unread unfortunate chair carrier to lay his burden down (he has apparently been carrying that identical chair since before the time of the Pyramids, in search of the man whom he is to receive permission to put his burden aside from, “Uncle Ptah Ra”).  Already here, we have a sort of symbolic double entendre (but of the political and not the sexual kind)–the chair carrier is the same primitive man, unable to read or write, who has been around since time immemorial, the serf or slave of the more fortunate, bowing to their customs and insistences, respecting their whims.

Then, the speaker asks the man what he will do if he cannot find the man he seeks, only to find that he will continue to carry the chair, because it’s been “deposited in trust” with him.  The narrator tells us:  “Perhaps it was anger that made me say:  ‘Put it down.  Aren’t you fed up, man?  Aren’t you tired?  Throw it away, break it up, burn it.  Chairs are made to carry people, not for people to carry them.’  ‘I can’t.  Do you think I’m carrying it for fun?  I’m carrying it because that’s the way I earn my living.’….”  Even when the narrator assures the chair carrier that Uncle Ptah Ra is dead long ago, the chair carrier, in another symbolic passage, which is meant to show the nature of serfdom and servility and sheer desperation to be able to support oneself somehow, indicates that he cannot put it down with a “token of authorization” from “his successor, his deputy, from one of his descendants, from anyone with a token of authorization from him.”

Even an outright command from the narrator, who is certainly of higher status, will not persuade the chair carrier that he has permission to put the chair down.  Then, suddenly the narrator notices “something that looked like an announcement or sign fixed to the front of the chair.  In actual fact, it was a piece of gazelle-hide with ancient writing on it, looking as though it was from the earliest copies of the Revealed Books.”  As it turns out, the writing says, “O chair carrier,/You have carried enough/And the time has come for you to be carried in a chair./This great chair,/The like of which has not been made,/Is for you alone./Carry it/And take it to your home./Put it in the place of honor/And seat yourself upon it your whole life long./And when you die./It shall belong to your sons.”  This too is highly symbolic, because of course any one individual chair carrier would in reality have been dead after one lifetime anyway, but this chair and this chair carrier symbolize something and someone forever a part of the human scene.  Note also that the poetry says that the chair is that “the like of which has not been made,” which seems to contradict the spirit of the rest of the lines, as if it could never happen.

When the narrator reads off this poetic scripture to the chair carrier, the narrator feels joy that at last his interlocutor can put down the chair, because initially overlooked by both of them, this sign gives the necessary permission without which the chair carrier refuses to do other than carry the chair.  But the narrator is unable to persuade the man, because as the chair carrier says of himself, he cannot read and does not therefore know for a fact that that is what the sign says:  he has no “token of authorization,” and can only accept the reading the narrator has done for him if the narrator has such a token.  The chair carrier becomes angry and says, “All I get from you people is obstruction.  Man, it’s a heavy load and the day’s scarcely long enough for making just the one round.”  He moves off, and leaves the perplexed narrator asking himself confused and bitter questions:

“I stood there at a loss, asking myself whether I shouldn’t catch him up and kill him and thus give vent to my exasperation.  Should I rush forward and topple the chair forcibly from his shoulders and make him take a rest?  Or should I content myself with the sensation of enraged irritation I had for him?  Or should I calm down and feel sorry for him?  Or should I blame myself for not knowing what the token of authorization was?”  In this series of questions, one can perceive a gradually diminishing element of violence and hostility, until finally the narrator turns the questions in toward himself, and supposes that he himself is ignorant or lacks a certain kind of understanding.  These questions in fact symbolically represent the different tactics human often take toward those less fortunate than themselves, those who are forced to live by different rules until at last they often accept their sorrowful lot and think that there is no other possible way for them to exist.  Here, the better educated and more fortunate narrator sounds to the chair carrier almost like an agent provocateur, with his suggestions which do not fit within the framework of possibilities that are allowable to the chair carrier.

Yusuf Idris, the author of this remarkable story, worked as a government health inspector in some of the poorest sections of Cairo.  This affected his social and political views, and gained him an audience for his works, while causing him also to be imprisoned a number of times.  He was finally able to leave medicine due to his popularity and concentrate solely on his writings.  What does not perhaps come across in translation (which has been done in this version by Denys Johnson-Davies) is the way in which Idris used spoken language in his compositions, producing his own individual style.  Though the story above is so entirely symbolic and speaks of a long history of oppressive regimes in the world, one can almost imagine the concerned government health inspector here in dialogue with one of his poorest patients, trying to persuade him to act for his health and set his burden aside for a time.  And while the chair carrier’s response is certainly grounds for pessimism, something which the narrator noted at the beginning as “disastrous” is the fact that the little scene provoked no response at all from those surrounding them in the street.  This suggests the reaction Idris wants us as readers to have, possibly, and seems to indicate that our role is at least to be witnesses, and concerned witnesses as that, if we are not strong and capable enough to be changers of the scene.  For, enough witnesses to an injustice can eventually provoke change, and after all is said and done, this clever and very short short story is made to be a witness’s statement, and to cause change in at least our perceptions, which is of course the first step to enacting justice.

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June 21, 2014 · 4:31 pm

How much does God weigh?–Emily Dickinson and her quizzical answer

Today is a hot, sunny, beautiful day of summer, when the sky and the ocean are both full of blue ecstasy, and that makes it just right for a little ditty of a post on the natural world, so that I can return to it as soon as possible and leave the air conditioning and the computer to their own devices (yes, I’m getting lazy in the summer heat, you guessed it).  So, I chose a short three-stanza poem by Emily Dickinson, who is the perfect poet when images from nature come into question, as so many in her huge corpus of short poems have images and a figurative lexicon drawn from nature and its seasonal languages, even when the subject is death, or the departure from the world of nature.  This poem (#632 of her poems), however, includes some of her homey domestic images as well, the images of a woman used to keeping house and dealing with household implements.  But the real “kicker” about this poem is the way it goes along so very, very simply only to hit us with a real conundrum of an image at the very end.  Here is how it goes:

“The Brain–is wider than the Sky–/For–put them side by side–/The one the other will contain/With ease–and You–beside–/

The Brain is deeper than the sea–/For–hold them–Blue to Blue–/The one the other will absorb–/As Sponges–Buckets–do–/

The Brain is just the weight of God–/For–heft them–Pound for Pound–/And they will differ–if they do–As Syllable from Sound–”

There is something a bit sly and even coy about the way she leads us into her   transcendent world, which while using simple everyday images, sensations, and experiences makes such astounding transitions to experiences beyond this world.  She starts easily enough, by observing that the brain can contain both the image of the sky and the experience of seeing it, as well as the self.  “Well, okay, Emily D.,” one is bound to say, “I think we can accept that for starters.”  Then, she passes on to another apparently limitless thing the senses encounter, which curiously enough is less big than the sky, when it seems that it might otherwise be more poetically ordinary to start with the smaller of the two items (the sea) and build up in the next stanza to the larger (the sky).  But then, we find that her quirkiness or perhaps odd sense of humor has assigned a color to the brain (she says of the brain and the sea “hold them–Blue to Blue–” which means to compare the two “blue” items).  This makes us forget for the moment our previous quibble about relative sizes of infinite or quite large things, and leaves us, bemused, to go on to the last stanza.

Here, in the last stanza, Dickinson is asking us to perform another and even more daunting task, really quite impossible even for the believer in God, and certainly more than impossible for the questioner or doubter.  Not that it’s been easy up until now:  so far, we’ve put the brain and the sky side by side, we’ve held the brain and the sea up to each other for comparison, at least mentally, and been asked to imagine the brain soaking up the sea as a sponge would a bucket of liquid.  Now, we are being asked to “heft” the brain and God, to judge whether or not she is just when she suggests that they are of a similar “weight” and “differ–if they do–” and here the problem comes in.  Now, we are no longer being asked to judge of something which can at least be visualized with a great deal of imagination:  now we have to guess what the difference might be, if there is any, between “syllable” and “sound.”  The one is presumably the visual or physical or mental notation of the second, which proposes a more sophisticated relationship than between the items in the other two stanzas.  If one reads the items in order and assumes that the brain is the “syllable” and God the “sound” (and there is really no assurance that this is the correct “formula,” except that “sound” seems slightly more mysterious, as God would probably be thought to be), then the first, the brain, records or notates the second, God, and the second is the fulfillment of the first.  But it’s a stretch.

Perhaps the useful thing to end this post with is the observation that Dickinson, in many if not all of her poems (and yes, I do want to assure you that my curiosity was once pronounced enough to take me through the whole volume), likes to play “riddle me this” with images and concepts.  She finds in so many instances that the natural world speaks to her of what is beyond it, yet retains its own quiddity and essence, partaking of the “great beyond” without being any less literal and precious as what it is on earth.  Even the experiences of imagining death use homey and everyday images and pictures drawn from the natural world, because death is the great riddle of our existence, yet is a part of the natural world as well, and Dickinson was well acquainted with its appearance in nature.  And now that I have paid my tribute both to one of the greatest American poets of all time and to the lovely and perplexing world of nature that inspired her, I’ll quit writing, and go off to be inspired by the summer day myself (for so at least one always hopes to be).  Goodday to all my readers, and here’s hoping that even if you aren’t in the middle of summer where you are, that you find something in the natural world to make you happy today.

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June 14, 2014 · 7:27 pm

A Conflict of Worlds–Two traditions in Amrita Pritam’s story “The Weed”

Though there are narrated sections in Amrita Pritam’s short story “The Weed,” the real interior story is about a dialogue between traditions which takes place in the actual dialogue and in the happenings of the story.  As the educated narrator says at the very beginning–a sophisticated and more worldly woman known simply as “bibi,” a term of affection–“Angoori [the younger character] was the new bride of the old servant of my neighbor’s neighbor’s neighbor.”  “Bibi” takes care in her relation of events to establish that Angoori is a joyous and cheerful and attractive young woman recently married to a much older husband, and is very traditional in her beliefs and values.

For example, Angoori has been taught and apparently believes that it is sinful for a village woman like herself (but not a “city” woman, like the narrator) to know how to read.  She also believes that it is a great sin for a woman to fall in love with her husband except through the intervention of her father.  The acceptable tradition is that a girl child, when five or six, “adore[s] someone’s feet.”  In this, she is directed by her father’s wishes, because he has placed money and flowers at the man’s or boy’s feet.  In this way, it is decided whom the girl shall later marry.  The exceptions, those girls who have love affairs, are thought to have eaten of a mysterious “wild weed” that an intending man has placed in a sweet or paan and given them to eat.  Angoori has seen a girl in her village in such a situation, and she says that the girl sang sad songs a lot, and never combed her hair and acted otherwise oddly.  Angoori regards this as a very unfortunate situation, and is glad, apparently, that she is married to Prabhati, the old man who does not always live at her home because he is a servant and eats at his employers’ household.

Nevertheless, a few days later, the narrator finds Angoori in “a profoundly abstract mood,” and the younger woman asks to be taught to read, and to write her name.  Mark what happens next:  the narrator, Bibi, makes a guess that seems to be correct, that it is because Angoori wants to be able to write letters to someone, and to read letters back.  Instead of immediately agreeing as a friend of equal status would probably do if she knew how, Bibi asks her if she won’t be committing a sin in learning to read and write.  The girl refuses to answer, but when Bibi sees her later, she is singing a sad song, and nearly crying, as she had told Bibi the other girl in her village had done.  Bibi further intrudes and asks her if this was the song the girl in her village had sung, and she admits it.  She tries to force Angoori to sing the song to her, but on this point Angoori stands firm:  she will only recite the words.  The narrator further investigates in a logical, forceful manner, and finds that because Angoori’s husband does not eat at home, and the night watchman, Ram Tara, who has been taking tea with milk as a regular guest at Angoori’s and Prabhati’s house, as is the tradition, has been away on a visit, the girl has had not only not much food, but also not even any tea with milk.

Then the narrator Bibi remembers something else about Ram Tara:  [he was] “good-looking, quick-limbed, full of jokes.  He had a way of talking with smiles trembling faintly at the corner of his lips.”  Instead of just asking, as a person who thought of themselves as equal might do, whether or not Angoori was sad to be alone so much, or missed her friend Ram Tara, Bibi makes a particular kind of mischief by almost making a joke to herself of the girl’s village beliefs and traditions:  she asks her, in what seems a kindly but nevertheless mocking fashion, “Is it the weed?”  If the innocent and superstitious girl did not think so before, to have someone she regards as her intellectual superior ask her this sways her conviction on this point.  Far from being able to persuade herself away from her own unhappiness, she responds, “‘Curse on me!….I never took sweets from him…not a betel even…but tea….'”  We are told by the narrator, who seems to relish this point:  “She could not finish.  Her words were drowned in a fast stream of tears.”

In many ways, because this work shares certain tendencies with other 20th century modernist texts in which traditional, aboriginal, or village peoples are viewed supposedly objectively by a better educated person or persons (Edith Wharton’s novel Ethan Frome, with its frame story narrator, comes to mind), it has the tendency that makes of the village traditions and mannerisms something quaint or odd, something the character of higher status muses on with varying degrees of wonder, amusement, or curiosity.  Though these texts are not without a certain amount of compassion by and large, by this point in the 21st century even the compassion seems like a form of condescension, and as we can see in this story, even a writer like Pritam, who was clearly and solidly in the camp of those attempting to better conditions for poorer or less advantaged peoples in her native Punjab region, leaves the question of village autonomies unvisited.  While I really enjoyed the story, and felt sympathy was directed at Angoori, it’s a different matter to engineer empathy with Angoori.  This latter is more what late 20th century and early 21st century aims at, in contradistinction to and in rebellion against 20th century models of social reform and conscience.

So, to view this story from a later perspective than that in which it was written is to see highlighted not only the young girl Angoori, which I feel was the original intention of the piece, but to see also the somewhat downward-looking Bibi as a character as well, not simply as an empty tabula rasa or a quiet sounding board to receive the picture of Angoori.  This is why I call this story “a conflict of worlds, two traditions”:  whereas it is Angoori’s tradition to live simply within the bounds of her own village, and to obey its rules, it is also her tradition to respect the opinions and values of those who look down upon her from a superior social height, and to attempt to scale the heights of reading and writing, which have been posited to her as values she could espouse.  By contrast, the narrator Bibi is in her own way sophisticatedly naive, because she has too her own form of blindness in automatically assuming that it’s not simple loneliness but the love affair attributed by Angoori’s village traditions to “the wild weed” that the girl will claim as her dilemma.  The true kindliness is practiced by the author in showing these two characters face-to-face, two faces of what was once a part of India and what is now a part of Pakistan.  Amrita Pritam is clearly not the narrator, but is even one remove farther away, sharing with us a type of encounter which in all likelihood happens relatively frequently, whatever part of the world one is in.  Two forms of naiveté, two forms of sophistication, first contradicting each other then complementing each other, then cooperating with each other.  At the end of the story, it is clear that something else will happen, but what concerns us most has already been seen:  the women, working through the problem together, despite their other differences.  One will take care of the other if it is necessary, and one will make the other feel significant; and this, perhaps, is one of the fairer exchanges life offers.

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