March 18, 2013 · 5:05 pm

“Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions.”–Nathaniel Hawthorne

Today, I don’t propose to belabor the point contained in the title of my post, only to illustrate it with a story (not one of Hawthorne’s, but of a later author’s) which I believe establishes the point quite clearly in a fictional mode.  As you may or may not be aware, the “illumination” of the “infernal regions” wasn’t looked upon entirely negatively in the Romantic period during which Hawthorne was writing, as is evidenced by the stories Hawthorne himself wrote, such as “Young Goodman Brown” and “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” in both of which a devilish figure or an evil experience causes a protagonist to have a greater awareness of self and what is contained in the complex self, as opposed to viewing himself or herself as the instigator only of good things and positive experiences.  Many a protagonist has viewed himself or herself in a naive light as being totally innocent, until some tempter or provocative experience comes along to change that view, and thus to make him or her aware of the dividedness of human reactions in daily life.  And since, like David Copperfield, we would choose if we could to view ourselves as the “heroes of our own lives,” this knowledge hits us hard.  It can be seen and has been seen in some stories and tales as the impetus toward further bad behavior, because the protagonist reasons that he or she is already lost and might as well (in Milton’s words) “reign in hell” rather than “serve in heaven.”  Thus, to the true believer in God, it is a point of some discomfort that the Devil often tells a lie by revealing part of the truth, making the total “revelation” seem more convincing by force of the fact that a substantial part of it seems or is true.  It takes a real saint to stick to the belief, when visited by the view of his or her shortcomings, that “it’s not over until it’s over,” because Heaven and Hell are both beyond the purview of the ordinary fallible human being.

The heroine in our story of today, however, is not feeling guilt or remorse; rather, in Kate Chopin’s short short story “The Story of an Hour,” Mrs. Mallard is cherishing to herself the knowledge that her sometimes beloved husband is dead in a railway accident, which is the news brought to her by her sister Josephine.  Josephine and the husband’s friend Richards are both there to break the news to Mrs. Mallard as gently as possible, because though young, she has a heart condition, and they are afraid the shock of her husband’s death will kill her.  The story does not immediately show its hand, however.  Mrs. Mallard goes to her room crying, and locks herself in, and the people below assume that she is overcome with grief.  But we are told that she feels some “thing that was approaching to possess her,” which is a moment of self-knowledge that she is fighting off.  Here, instead of grief, is what is passing in the first instance when we get a clue to the contrary:  “When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips.  She said it over and over under her breath:  ‘free, free, free!’  The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes.  They stayed keen and bright.  Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.  She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her.  A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial.  She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead.  But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely.  And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome….There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature.  A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.”  Thus, the word “illumination” is clearly used here as counter for what she experiences in her heart of hearts, and though Kate Chopin is often hailed as a feminist avatar, she is equally clearly fair-minded in that she says of the quality she describes here that both men and women may try to impose their wills on others, for “kind” or “cruel” motives.

The heroine exults a while longer in her room in private, and then comes to the door to her sister Josephine’s bidding, and walks downstairs with her, arm in arm, ready to receive the sympathy awaiting her and presumably ready to play the role of the grieving widow in some measure.  But at the very moment they meet Richards at the bottom of the stairs, something unexpected happens, to bring the story to a close in the manner of an O. Henry story or that of the “surprise ending”:  “Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey.  It was [Mrs. Mallard’s husband] Brently [] who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his gripsack and umbrella.  He had been far from the scene of accident, and did not even know there had been one.  He stood amazed at Josephine’s piercing cry; at Richards’ quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.  But Richards was too late.  When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease–of joy that kills.”  And at this point, it is important to remember that Mrs. Mallard does not die simply because her looked-for and projected freedom of future years has now received a knock in the head–she is also partly in joy to see her husband, just as her illumination would have predicted.  It is in fact a moment of “joy that kills,” and sudden surprise, and disappointment, and even her weak heart simply responding to too much stress.  It is in fact not only her “demon” of feeling subject to her husband, but also her “angel” of being astounded and glad to see him alive which, fighting a war in her weak physical bosom, kills her.

Thus, the “illuminating blaze of the infernal regions” is part and parcel of that mixture of emotions and states which are not “simply dark or bright.”  Hawthorne is making a counterintuitive claim that even a “dark” emotion, if taken in its pure state, is better than a mixed emotion, which involves the human being in so much turmoil that many a person will attempt to resolve the question to one extreme or the other in order not to be torn or suspended over the abyss between the two.  Is it any wonder that Kate Chopin, a Romantic by the tradition of the American fin de siècle in her own right, follows his insight and creates a heroine who loses her life in the devastating encounter of dark and bright?

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March 14, 2013 · 11:58 pm

A Partisan Post–Cats and the Contemplative Life….

Today’s post is a partisan one, purely dedicated to cats as the companions and instigators of contemplation.  There are three famous poems at least having to do with cats (and I’m sure that there are many more poems which feature cats, but these are three particularly thought of by religious men, so since we have recently had a new Pope in the news, my thoughts turned to churchly cats doing, however, what cats do with their usual skill).  I wanted to share these poems because I myself am a cat fan and cannot help wondering if perhaps we are to see a cat in the Vatican as we have seen dogs and cats in the White House.  I mean no disrespect by this curiosity; rather, I had a strange dream last night of a tabby cat sitting high in an ornate window sill like those of the famous Basilica and fixedly watching a pigeon, and I wondered if maybe, just maybe, the new Pope would be allowed a feline companion.  Or if he even wants one.  Who knows, he may be a dog or a canary man.  Of the three poems below, the first was written by an unknown Irish monk and found in St. Paul, Carinthia, Austria in the 9th century, and has been translated by several poets, including W. H. Auden, Eavan Boland, and Frank O’Connor (the rendition below is O’Connor’s).  The second poem was written by a religious fanatic who was periodically hospitalized but was a talented poet revered more after his death than during his lifetime, Christopher Smart, who lived from 1722-1771.  The third and last poem, from 1937, was written by Canadian Methodist clergyman, philosopher, and English professor E. J. Pratt, and perhaps views the cat with what many would regard as the most realism of the three poems, but which also clearly places the cat in the position of contemplative “muse.”  I will give these three poems in their entirety below, as each is past its first copyright expiration date and has appeared on the Internet elsewhere.  Thus, I am leaving the real work today to my readers and the respective cats, and hoping that even those who are not innate cat lovers as I am will enjoy the ingenuity of the poets concerned.

Poem #1–“Pangur Ban” (translated as “White Fuller,” which Frank O’Connor retitles “The Scholar and the Cat”):  “Each of us pursues his trade,/I and Pangur my comrade,/His whole fancy in the hunt/And mine for learning ardent./More than fame I love to be/Among my books and study,/Pangur does not grudge me it,/Content with his own merit./When a heavenly time! we are/In our small room together/Each of us has his own sport/And asks no greater comfort./While he sets his round sharp eye/On the wall of my study/I turn mine, though lost its edge,/On the great wall of knowledge./Now a mouse drops in his net/After some mighty onset/While into my bag I cram/Some difficult darksome problem./When a mouse comes to the kill/Pangur exults, a marvel!/I have when some secret’s won/My hour of exultation./Though we work for days and years/Neither the other hinders;/Each is competent and hence/Enjoys his skill in silence./Master of the death of mice,/He keeps in daily practice,/I too, making dark things clear,/Am of my trade a master.”

Poem #2–“For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry (excerpt, Jubilate Agno)”:  “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry./For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him./For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way./For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness./For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer./For he rolls upon prank to work it in./For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself./For this he performs in ten degrees./For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean./For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there./For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended./For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood./For fifthly he washes himself./For sixthly he rolls upon wash./For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat./For eighthly he rubs himself against a post./For ninthly he looks up for his instructions./For tenthly he goes in quest of food./For having consider’d God and himself he will consider his neighbour./For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness./For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance./For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying./For when his day’s work is done his business more properly begins./For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary./For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes./For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life./For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him./For he is of the tribe of Tiger./For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger./For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses./For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation./For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he’s a good Cat./For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon./For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit./For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt./For every family had one cat at least in the bag./For the English Cats are the best in Europe./For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped./For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly./For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature./For he is tenacious of his point./For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery./For he knows that God is his Saviour./For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest./For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion./For he is of the Lord’s poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually–Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat./For I bless the name of the Lord that Jeoffry is better./For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat./For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music./For he is docile and can learn certain things./For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation./For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment./For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive./For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command./For he can jump from an eminence into his master’s bosom./For he can catch the cork and toss it again./For he is hated by the hypocrite and the miser./For the former is afraid of detection./For the latter refuses the charge./For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business./For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly./For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services./For he killed the ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land./For his ears are so acute that they sting again./For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention./For by stroking of him I have found out electricity./For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire./For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast./For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements./For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer./For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped./For he can tread to all the measures upon the music./For he can swim for life./For he can creep.”

Poem #3–“The Prize Cat”:  “Pure blood domestic, guaranteed,/Soft-mannered, musical in purr,/The ribbon had declared the breed,/Gentility was in the fur./Such feline culture in the gads/No anger ever arched her back–/What distance since those velvet pads/Departed from the leopard’s track!/And when I mused how Time had thinned/The jungle strains within the cells,/How human hands had disciplined/Those prowling optic parallels;/I saw the generations pass/Along the reflex of a spring,/A bird had rustled in the grass,/The tab had caught it on the wing;/Behind the leap so furtive-wild/Was such ignition in the gleam,/I thought an Abyssinian child/Had cried out in the whitethroat’s scream.”

And there you have them, folks, three perspectives on the cat:  companionable, laudatory in the extreme, and finally taken wild with the wildness of the cat’s spring itself.  After having had a chance to read them again, I still reserve my own admiration for and right to admire the cat, but perhaps I should hesitate about the “election” of a cat as the ideal contemplative companion, tail twitching as it watches the pigeons in Rome–what do you think?

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March 12, 2013 · 4:42 pm

“The Sin Eater,” or Much Ado About Something, After All….

Recently, JM at thelivingnotebook provided a helpful reminder about how Freytag’s Pyramid demonstrates narrative and dramatic structures by diagram.  The diagram begins with exposition, then follows through with rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement.  This is by and large the structure that an overwhelming number of novels and plays and even some works of nonfiction follow, and we are probably all familiar with its rhythms, though we may never have heard of the terminology or the title before (though of course, it is often taught in beginning drama classes or in creative writing classes).  So used to this pattern can one get, in fact, that the continual frustration of it in a work of art can seem like a meandering lack of artistry, like in fact the sheep named “Virginia Woolf,” who wanders in and out of the scenery in Alice Thomas Ellis’s The Sin Eater nibbling the shrubbery, a sort of weird objective correlative for the plot, which often seems missing, to say the least.  Yet, I maintain that The Sin Eater turns out to be “much ado about something” after all, and here’s the course of my logic:

The novel is gossipy, without many events standing forward boldly as events; even the travel to the little tourist town of Llanelys in Wales that the family makes to the bedside of their dying father and the later cricket match against town visitors which they and the villagers play are overshadowed by the many, many conversations featured in the novel.  The family sits at table or elsewhere and argues and bickers an unconscionable number of times, and one keeps expecting to see a climax somewhere, or at least some rising action, developing from all the chatter.  Rose, who has married into the clan and who is Irish, not Welsh, manages all the hosting going on, and also controls a lot of the conversation by being as controversial as possible and continually contradicting the statements and preferences of her brother-in-law’s wife, Angela, an Englishwoman by birth who is very up-to-date and at the same time is more conventional even given her wanderings from the marital path than Rose is.  In fact, much of the tension of the novel, such as it is, is generated in the dialogues between the two women, Angela carrying on a flirtation with Edward, a visiting guest, to which her husband and son of the house Michael seems to be indifferent, Rose attempting to sabotage the flirtation and criticizing it constantly in backbiting asides.  Henry, Rose’s husband and Michael’s brother, is largely clueless, and the youngest member of the family, the young woman Ermyn, is beginning a study of the Bible and forming her own grotesque opinions about how modern reality and ancient text coincide.  The “sin eater” of the title is Phyllis, their hired help, who like Rose shares a belief in the occult, and who will probably be the one who eats the crumbs of the “funeral baked-meats” off the dead man’s chest when he dies, in order to consume away his sins with them, an old Welsh country tradition.  Her son Jack the Liar and his son Gomer, her idolized grandson, make up the rest of the household along with the Captain, the old man who is lying in bed near death.

That this Freytagian Pyramidal structure is not suited to The Sin Eater becomes glaringly obvious even by the middle of the book lengthwise, because there is no action being taken.  The cricket match, which occurs every year and should provide a crowd scene replete with action, seems to be organized almost as an afterthought, though with Rose’s usual careful spitefulness and deliberate attentions to the refreshments.  Meanwhile, Angela flirts with Edward, Edward gets drunk, people come and go, Michael ignores the flirtation, Henry makes inane and pointless comments, Rose repeatedly tries to incite others to anger, Ermyn, shut in by partial deafness, misreads cues and interprets the actions of others in line with her new study of the Bible, which in a humorous twist she hides in a copy of Country Life to read because she knows that the others will think Biblical study odd.  And Phyllis, in a power-grabbing dynamic perpetuated against the very family she works for, saves all the best tidbits for her grandson Gomer, and constantly plots against the family’s happiness, though until the end in a futile and repetitive way.

What happens at the end is after all the “kicker.”  For, the short-lived rising action, foreshortened even, arises just after the end of the cricket match near the end of the book, when the visiting hooligans are trashing the cricket field and refreshment tent at night, and the family have all gone home to the farm house.  Ermyn is sent out in the dark with a flashlight to look for a visitor’s purse, and she comes across Michael and Gomer having a sexual encounter in the dark in the bushes.  When Michael is startled and runs for the house, Gomer grabs Ermyn instead and attempts to rape her, in line with what she has been reading in the Bible about the visitor’s concubine in the land of the Benjamites.  A house visitor, one of the local gentry, comes along and rescues her, though she finds his heroic attitude humorous, and it’s unclear whether or not he manages actually to save her before she is violated.  By the next day, Gomer has gone into hiding elsewhere, and Ermyn is driven even further into herself, telling no one about what happened, not even Rose, whom she admires, when Rose has her come to help clean up the blood where the fight took place the night before.

The climax comes at the very end of the novel instead of earlier, and there is no denouement–instead, Ermyn sees Phyllis (apparently in revenge for what Ermyn now knows has been going on between Michael and Gomer before and for which Phyllis hates Michael) tampering with Michael’s car, but again says nothing.  Suddenly Rose announces that Gomer has been located, and that Henry has borrowed Michael’s car to take him and Jack (Phyllis’s son) to pick up Gomer.  Phyllis dashes out the door, too late to undo what she has done, with the emotional certainty that she has killed or maimed her own grandson and two others who were not guilty of offending her.  The novel ends with this climax:  “Phyllis was running as fast and as futilely as the wind from the sea.  Somewhere, in another world, someone was howling as the sin eaters of old must have howled, fleeing the houses of sorrow weighed down with strange sins.  Up on the hills the wind swept softly around the old church where the saint slept on undisturbed.”

I say, however, that Phyllis has the “emotional certainty” that she has killed or maimed three people, because the novel ends where it does and there is no active conclusion to it, but only the thematic one given in the text I’ve provided in the paragraph immediately above.  If there is certainty, it is in all the omens and magic words and reiterations of the word “bloody” which occur, the word “bloody” occurring in swearing contexts, but coming true in literal ones, and mentions of the “hounds of hell” and other old country traditions appearing repeatedly in Rose’s and in Ermyn’s thoughts.  Ermyn’s readings from the Bible also seem to have a literal component.  So, the novel ends with the climax; the only way in which the reader is not cheated of the dramatic element is in fact contained in the picture of Phyllis, trying unavailingly to catch up with the car before it leaves, taking Henry and her son Jack (instead of the miscreant Michael) to get Gomer, and not knowing at what point the brakes will fail, or the engine falter, or whatever she has perpetuated come about.  Thus, the novel is “much ado about something,” after all:  Phyllis has a lingering resentment against Michael from the beginning, which is never articulated except when she all-but-deliberately breaks a dish or gives Gomer the best of the food.  The family is taking from her family by the old droit du seigneur standards, in spite of the fact that they put up with her querulousness and cantankerousness.  It’s just that in this novel (and it turns out to be an exciting novel, after all), the real action is submerged beneath at least two or three layers of other realities:  1) the literal conversational reality, casual and fairly meaningless 2) the level at which Angela is attempting to start a relationship with Edward and Rose shows a desire to mock and frustrate her 3) the level at which Rose and Ermyn celebrate their different perspectives on life, the occult and the nascent Biblical.  All of these are levels which Alice Thomas Ellis, the mischievous novelist, flourishes in the reader’s face, being deliberately misleading until the very end of the book as to where the dramatic motivations and energies of the novel are going to finish up.  It is up to the discerning reader to allow himself or herself to be entertained and edified by the picture of dysfunctionality long enough to ask the important question:  “What is all the tension about?” and to reach that startling and evocative ending in which all becomes apparent.

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March 6, 2013 · 9:02 pm

Loving Half a Person, or, Love’s Complaints….

How often have you heard someone say the immortal (or rather significantly transient) words, “You know, I really love/like him/her, but sometimes his/her temper/pokiness/vanity/fastidiousness/false modesty/hairdo/stinginess/gregariousness/flightiness/shortness/slovenliness makes me angry/sad/amused/sick/etc.”?  It’s that old “I love that person, but…” disease.  And what it means is that one is trying to sort through someone else’s psyche and discard some annoying habit or quality that provokes or otherwise exasperates one, and keep only the “good” part or parts to cherish and foster.  We’ve all done it, even the most tolerant of us.

I’ve said that these words can be transient, but they can be transient in two senses, a positive and a negative.  The positive sense is one in which the words are uttered, accompanied by a sigh or swear words, and then shelved in the awareness that “no one is perfect, I love him/her anyway, I guess I should put up with it (after all, I have my own faults), there’s nothing I can do about it, I accept that life is just that way,” and so on and so forth.  These are the words and sentiments of those who like to think of themselves as realists, but who are perhaps even a tad optimistic in their outlook.  They think that what goes around comes around (in spite of the fact that sometimes it doesn’t, to judge by any newspaper’s headlines), and an ounce of toleration is worth a pound of bitching and griping in coming to grips with life’s unfairnesses.  These folks are the ones who by and large save at least themselves a lot of pain and emotional groping for a solution and avoid grief, because they go along their way with an amount of equanimity which sees them through the rough times and the uncertain fortunes of love and love’s qualms.  As the I Ching notes in one of its more tongue-in-cheek passages, love sends people up to the stars in joy and down to the depths of despair, and this variation in altitude is a matter of happiness or unhappiness, “left to the subjective opinion of the persons concerned.”  Since the oracle offers an opinion on almost everything else, this refusal to comment tells its own story.  Thus, having an even temper and an accepting frame of mind about life and its vagaries is decidedly an advantage.

The negative sense in which these words (“I love him/her, but…”) can be transient is that they can recur, time and time again, when what we are doing is not accepting a person’s foibles and traits, but instead have apparently forgotten in between times that these traits annoy us, and are instead complaining yet again about something which bothers us about this person.  This is what I’m referring to as “love’s complaints.”  But the source of love’s complaints goes even deeper:  it is that whereas we have fallen in love/like with a person’s “good” traits, we are trying to reject the traits which seem to us less “good.”  We are in fact loving half a person.  This puts us in the somewhat ludicrous position of the speaker in Monty Python’s song, who loves “Eric the Half a Bee,” a “hive employee” who lies “half-asleep upon my knee,” and whom the speaker is said to love “carnally…semi-carnally” (for of course it’s impossible to love something as small as a bee in any way whatsoever without making it a “half” or “semi” of something, once living, hence the crazy comedy of the song).

It’s perhaps stretching a point to suggest that making “half a person” is what we in fact risk doing when we describe someone’s characteristics to others or even in our own minds as less than satisfactory, but it’s nevertheless true that we do this.  We are not just criticizing, we are excluding.  We are saying that we only accept half of what is there, and sometimes when things go on long enough this way, we end up accepting even less than half, or rejecting the whole in an effort to attain wholeness of mind in our own psyche, where it’s often uncomfortable to exist in a half state.

So, what’s the solution?  We either end up accepting, once again, that people and life are not whole and perfect (though perhaps someone’s being constantly consistent would eventually begin to plague us as much as inconsistent imperfections), and are in fact like Andrew Marvell’s bird, “[waving in their] plumes the various light,” or we fail of humanity ourselves, variable creatures that we are.  For, humanity itself, loving and complaining as it does, seeks itself in other people, and we too have quirks and inequalities that make us less than satisfactory.  The only way not to be half a person oneself, thus, is to attempt to the best of our ability to love and accept our lovers and friends as fully as possible, because it is only then that we allow ourselves to exist in our fullest being.  This is not just moralizing and being sweet, it is a necessity of daily living, unless one would want to be constantly dissatisfied and complaining about all the adversities and unfairnesses of life, which would be grim indeed.  For, it is through extending ourselves to love not half a person or half-people, but whole people, even if we do sometimes find ourselves making “love’s complaints,” that we keep from grousing all the time, and find occasion to cherish.

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March 3, 2013 · 6:30 pm

A. E. Housman’s “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff”–The Choice Between Allopathic and Homeopathic Medicine

There are times, not a few of them, when I have a great deal of difficulty in writing a post.  It’s not that I haven’t read scads of books that, with a little re-familiarization, I could comment upon.  It’s not even so much that it’s always a “dark and stormy” day.  And it’s not that I think that some people somewhere won’t be interested.  Sometimes, it’s just that I’m like Terence in A. E. Housman’s poem, “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff,” and am in a mental, moral, spiritual, or psychological slump, in a deep, dark hole, and can’t dig myself back out.  But today when I began to feel that way (and I haven’t been posting regularly as much as I ought lately), I decided to share with you just what I often do when I’m in a blue mood.  And this is the truth:  I turn to Housman’s poem.  It’s not that I necessarily take any part of the advice contained in it (and there are two different remedies propounded, one an allopathic or party-throwing solution, and the other a homeopathic or training-for-bad-days-ahead one).  [As you are no doubt aware, the original meaning of allopathy is a type of medication or treatment that runs counter to the illness, homeopathy is a type of medication or treatment that imitates or runs like to the illness.]  Even when I don’t take the advice, however, I get a lift from the rhythm and rhyme, and from the wit and insouciance and just plain poetry of Housman’s work.  Luckily, since it’s another poem that has a version whose original copyright has expired and which is published elsewhere on the Internet, I can share it here with you in its entirety.  It’s a little long, but my posts lately have been short, so as I analyze it (with your tolerance), I’ll take it apart and present the whole piece in order as it comes.

The poem begins with dialogue, presumably aimed at Terence by a friend or friends, after Terence has been gloomily poeticizing.  The friend even goes so far as to make fun of Terence (and this part always gives me a wry grin at some of my own sadder poetic offerings) by parodying his offerings in a made-up poem about a cow, adding a bucolic note to the proceedings:  “‘Terence, this is stupid stuff:/You eat your victuals fast enough;/There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear,/To see the rate you drink your beer./But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,/It gives a chap the belly-ache./The cow, the old cow, she is dead;/It sleeps well, the horned head:/We poor lads, ’tis our turn now/To hear such tunes as killed the cow./Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme/Your friends to death before their time/Moping melancholy mad:/Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.'”  The friend is not of course automatically right, but one can hear the pragmatic, practical voice of a born optimist, and the voice itself gives hope because it suggests that there is an alternative to the way our as-yet-unheard-from Terence sees things.

Another voice speaks now, though not in quotation marks, a sort of intermediate voice between the first voice and Terence.  This voice has yet another suggestion:  there’s always alcohol!  And we’ve already heard that Terence likes beer, in the first stanza.  This voice is in a sense partly Terence, yet not entirely, because Terence’s real justification and response come in the last two stanzas.  But now for this stanza in the intermediate voice first:  “Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,/There’s brisker pipes than poetry./Say, for what were hop-yards meant,/Or why was Burton built on Trent?/Oh many a peer of England brews/Livelier liquor than the Muse,/And malt does more than Milton can/To justify God’s ways to man./Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink/For fellows whom it hurts to think:/Look into the pewter pot/To see the world as the world’s not./And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:/The mischief is that ’twill not last./Oh I have been to Ludlow fair/And left my necktie God knows where,/And carried half-way home, or near,/Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:/Then the world seemed none so bad,/And I myself a sterling lad;/And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,/Happy till I woke again./Then I saw the morning sky:/Heigho, the tale was all a lie;/The world, it was the old world yet,/I was I, my things were wet,/And nothing now remained to do/But begin the game anew.”  The last two lines and one or two in the middle refer of course to some of the main drawbacks of alcohol, which are that it always requires to be renewed to be efficacious, and can leave one “mucky.”  Its effect, when it is working, is allopathic; that is, it works in opposition to the “illness” of reality by causing one “to see the world as the world’s not.”

Terence, however, comes into his own and manages to justify his apparently gloomy poetic tendencies in the last two stanzas.  He answers (though again, the poet does not put the lines in dialogue form):  “Therefore, since the world has still/Much good, but much less good than ill,/And while the sun and moon endure/Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,/I’d face it as a wise man would,/And train for ill and not for good./’Tis true, the stuff I brew for sale/Is not so brisk a brew as ale:/Out  of a stem that scored the hand/I wrung it in a weary land./But take it:  if the smack is sour,/The better for the embittered hour;/It should do good to heart and head/When your soul is in my soul’s stead;/And I will friend you, if I may,/In the dark and cloudy day.”  Thus here the “medicine” recommended by Terence is homeopathic; that is, it is the same sort of treatment as what happens in reality, in which “luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure.”

Terence’s final “proof” of the real superiority of his “poetry” comes in the final stanza, and is itself wry and caustic, though still in an unusually good-humored way:  “There was a king reigned in the East:/There, when kings will sit to feast,/They get their fill before they think/With poisoned meat and poisoned drink./He gathered all that springs to birth/From the many-venomed earth;/First a little, thence to more,/He sampled all her killing store;/And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,/Sate the king when healths went round./They put arsenic in his meat/And stared aghast to watch him eat;/They poured strychnine in his cup/And shook to see him drink it up;/They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:/Them it was their poison hurt./–I tell the tale that I heard told./Mithridates, he died old.”  And it is of course the king Mithridates that this tale is of, which Housman, in Terence’s voice, is using here as a metaphor for “training for ill and not for good.”  The advice is seemingly pessimistic (i.e., always expect the worst), yet the proof of the argument is in the fact that by poisoning himself Mithridates was not attempting to die, but in fact to live a long and healthy life.  There is thus a friendly, even funny, paradox contained in this poem, which the progression from the original objection to Terence and his “work” to his final answer has made apparent.

My reaction to this poem is usually to feel quite sing-songy and happy for a while after I read it, not only due to a certain affection for some forms of old-fashioned rhyming verse, but also due to my admiration for the craftsmanship of it.  When we see something well-done, even on occasions when we require to be persuaded of the perspective contained therein or even if we don’t entirely agree with it, yet we appreciate the skill with which the writer or poet put it forward.  So, the next time you find yourself in a mood to kick a can at the world and say, “To hell with it all, I’m sick of it,” have a look at Housman’s poem:  he not only won’t lie to you about finding happiness, he’ll tell you what to do with whatever share of gloom comes your way.  In a way, the poem itself is a “dose” of the “poisonous” meat and drink Mithridates took, a dose of homeopathic medicine from the storehouse of Housman. [His collection of poems entitled A Shropshire Lad had the original title The Poems of Terence Hearsay, thus hinting that Terence is a persona of Housman himself, though he was actually from Worcestershire, and used Shropshire in his poems only because of certain associations he had with the area.]

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March 1, 2013 · 5:14 pm

Milan Kundera’s “Let the Old Dead Make Way for the Young Dead” and the Pulse of Humanity–“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin””

“Let the Old Dead Make Way for the Young Dead” is a story in which two people who have known each other in the Biblical sense once in the past meet up again “in a small Czech town,” and have to try to decide whether or not to make love again, fifteen years later.  They each have something operating as an impediment, a true enough picture of what I have called in my title “the pulse of humanity.”  Each is haunted by a sense of personal failure, the man because he is poor, has no Communist party status, has not done much in his life, and has had little or no success with attractive or alluring women, the woman because she is fifteen years older than he and has in the meantime been made to feel even older by a son who wants her to “act her age” (i.e., who is putting her determinedly in the past with his memories of his father).  In the more immediate sense, she has inadvertently allowed her husband’s grave lease to lapse and his corpse to be disposed of, which she knows her grown son will blame her for.  Not a promising scenario for a hot romance, is it?

And yet there is a sense of human desperation constant in the story, a sense of two people, each reaching out for something from the past with which to shore up the uncertain and unappealing future.  At first when they meet on the street, the man, who is now around thirty-five, doesn’t recognize the woman, who was thirty-five to his twenty when they made love the first time.  She is upset because the man at the cemetery refused to admit her claim about her husband’s right to the space and put it to her in concise terms that “the old dead ought to make room for the young dead.”  She is tired and footsore and depressed at no longer knowing anyone in town, so she accepts her former acquaintance’s invitation to come up to his bachelor apartment for coffee or tea.  This is her reasoning, for at first though she thinks of him as a former lover, there is no desire for him in her mind:  “She could wash her hands in his bathroom and then sit in his soft armchair (her legs ached), look around his room, and listen to the boiling water bubbling away behind the screen which separated the kitchen nook from the room.”  (This is stated indirectly from her point of view, but unless she is remembering his room from the past–and we are told he has only been living here seven years, so only the furnishings could be the same–she cannot know ahead of time exactly what she will find there.  She is in fact postulating the appearance of his room, fantasizing in a way, and she turns out to be fairly correct in her surmise.)

He in his turn is obsessed with his thinning hair and the future bald spot which he often spends time looking at in the mirror.  He has been married in the time they have been apart, was faithful, and has been divorced for seven years, and because he cannot afford to date accomplished women, and the town is deficient of eligible women in any case, he has largely been celibate, or has slept with immature women who seemed “stupid” to him.  When he asks her about her presence in the town, she tells him that she and her son come every year to her husband’s grave on All Soul’s Day, but she omits to reveal to him her unfortunate failure to hold onto the grave, as if it were a physical fault she were ashamed of; this is pertinent because the two of them are so otherwise obsessed with their physical appearances in relation to the possibility of again making love.  He notices her aging, and knows too that he will not continue to find her attractive, but at the same time “he saw the delicate movement of her hand with which she refused the offer of cognac [and] he realized that this charm, this magic, this grace, which had enraptured him, was still the same in her, though hidden beneath the mask of old age, and was in itself still attractive….”   He begins to tell her his pessimistic thoughts, only of course “he was silent about the bald spot that was beginning to appear (it was just like her silence about the canceled grave).  On the other hand, the vision of the bald spot was transubstantiated into quasi-philosophical maxims to the effect that time passes more quickly than man is able to live, and that life is terrible, because everything in it is necessarily doomed to extinction.  He voiced these and similar maxims, to which he awaited a sympathetic response….”  Instead, she tells him that it is “superficial” talk and that she doesn’t like to hear it.

Suddenly, however, he breaches the gap between them by reaching across and stroking her hand.  He begins to remember the first time they made love fifteen years before, when “she absolutely defied his imagination” not due to her deficits but to his own.  He also remembers that at the time she had whispered something to him which he had neglected to ask her about when he didn’t hear it correctly, and now there is no chance to recover it; as well, at the time she was the sexual aggressor, and now he is, and she is reluctant to be with him, is in fact very reluctant.  At the time he had been a callow youth, and had made love to her in the dark, and the time is now unrecoverable, because now she looks different, and he will never be able to see her again as she once was.  There is of course shallow thinking going on in both of them, but also honest thought, because he and she both know that he will feel the disgust all men feel at a physically imperfect woman (and though this seems like yet another narrow and unfair picture of both men and women alike when taken in the abstract, in the story it rings true, it is a true remark, because it is part of the truth of what these two characters have between them, part of the human reality they are grasping at willy-nilly which they both have need to fear will at some point elude them).

The pertinence of All Soul’s Day suddenly comes to the foreground when the narrative tells us that part of the reason she doesn’t want to give in to his lovemaking in the present-day situation is because she knows that her previous appearance fifteen years before has been a “memorial” to him, a memorial to beauty and sexuality.  He keeps telling her “don’t fight me” and “there’s no need to fight me” when he strokes her hand and tries to touch her, and she wars with the memory of her son’s attempts to age her so that he himself can become sexually more mature with the women in his own life, because he is unable to allow his mother to be an attractive woman to someone nearer her own age.  The significance of a memorial in this story thus becomes important because in the present tense, the woman finally allows the man to make love to her, and as we are told, “Evening was still a long way off.  This time the room was full of light.”  These lovely final lines make the point that as long as we have any bloom of life on us at all, death is still far enough away for love and life to intervene between us and the doom of time we all face, thus “evening” is “still a long way off.”  Finally, “this time the room was full of light” means not only that in a mature love affair we see our need for what it is and are no longer able to deceive ourselves about what we are doing, but also that our memorials to the past become of less moment and we are full of the “light” of the present, and able to show generosity and love in a complete and fulfilling way.  Thus, in terms of memorials, in this story “the old dead” (the memorials of the past) have made way for a present which, because the two lovers have no future together in a permanent sense, will shortly become “the young dead.”  Yet in showing the common “pulse of humanity,” this story is about hope, love, and eternal youth, and not about age and despair.

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February 27, 2013 · 5:45 pm

“Misery loves company”–or, the downside of suffering alone and apart….

This morning is an ugly, rainy, windy (and in some locations) snowy and slushy day.  We’re due for one, right?  I mean, in the area I’m writing from, we’ve had three days or so of sunshiny though chilly weather, when even if it wasn’t particularly nice to go outside, it was pleasant to look through the window at sunbeams dancing across old snow mounds, dirty though they were.  So, you’d think I’d face a seasonably rotten day with equanimity, wouldn’t you?  Only, it’s been almost a week now since I’ve posted, and I have been feeling worse and worse every day because I’ve been stalling and kibbutzing and trying to get around it somehow, anyhow, reading book after book and having little or nothing to contribute about any of them.  It’s as if the weather gods had said to me, “Okay, you don’t appreciate it and make use of it when we send you good weather, so here’s what you deserve for goofing off!  Something more in line with your frame of mind!”  The most I could pat myself on the back for was that I hadn’t brought anyone else’s mood down measurably, at least not as far as I knew.

I had placed a call to a friend the other day, and not finding him in had left a message that was short, informative, and as cheerful as I could make it under the circumstances of not having anything really good to share that would distinguish it.  I like to say happy things to my friends, as do we all, but sometimes we just don’t have the umph! or the good news to do so, and it’s a toss-up amongst whether or not we will be good friends and say what is really on our minds (sad parts and all, in true honesty), support their possible down moods, or whether we will go all sweetness-and-light and try to pretend that nothing is wrong.  You notice, of course, that it sometimes seems to be a choice between being honest and being supportive of someone else’s good mood, or at least that’s the way some people interpret it when they quote John Ray’s nostrum “Misery loves company.”  For, here’s the thing:  we don’t really bring anyone else’s mood down by telling them how lousy we’re feeling, at least not if they are true and good friends.  The fly-by-nights we can do without.  In actual fact, it makes someone feel needed and helpful to be able to reassure us that the good weather will come again, that we are not alone, that they too are feeling overcome by the weather, the neighbors, the political climate, the gods.  It’s just that we need to take turns, and touch base with each other too when we are both feeling lousy, not shutting ourselves off to suffer alone and apart when the impulse is to do so, but instead making contact with our part of the human community and letting it know what we’re going through.

Luckily, today I got a call back from my friend, and he was having a bad day today, as was I, and even though I would have much preferred to hear that his day was good, “misery loves company” was true in the sense that I was very, very glad to hear from my friend in spite of his down mood.  Because, after all, it was an honest tribute to my sharing what I could share, which was my certainty that this bad weather can’t last forever, that my friend’s sunny mood will once again return, and that his quips and witticisms will once again resurface to brighten the sad times I have when I’m alone and apart in my suffering.  And that’s why misery loves company–it doesn’t matter so much whether the company is able to be reassuring or is feeling low as well, though a lift is always nice; just the knowledge that two are commiserating instead of one standing alone is a real help, and after all, there are people all over this area who are experiencing the same sort of day as we are, and they too may encounter me and we may share sad soul sayings and perspectives, thus broadening the community of people fighting against a lousy day.  So if you are having a lousy day today, or bad weather, or bad luck, don’t crawl into a hole and lick your wounds:  share your troubles with a friend and give him or her the opportunity to brighten things up for you–by doing so, you may be making that person’s day brighter too!

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February 22, 2013 · 7:58 pm

“The Intimate Connection Between Seeing and Feeling”–A. S. Byatt’s “The Matisse Stories”

As the blurb commenter of A. S. Byatt’s The Matisse Stories says, “[E]ach of A. S. Byatt’s narratives is in some way inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse, [and] each is also about the intimate connection between seeing and feeling–about the ways in which a glance we meant to be casual may suddenly call forth the deepest reserves of our being.”  When one researches the works of Matisse, the two words that are most closely associated with him are draughtsmanship and color.  Draughtsmanship has special affinities to seeing line, just as color has special relationships to experiencing emotion.  In her series of three short stories relating to Matisse, A. S. Byatt pays tribute to draughtsmanship and color, not only by discussing things to do with Matisse and by making her characters interested in him as someone they themselves are either aware of as a cultural figure or want to follow as an inspiration, but also by embodying qualities of good fictional draughtsmanship and color in her stories themselves.

The first story, “Medusa’s Ankles,” follows the developing relationship of a middle-aged woman with her hairdresser Lucian, which is begun when she sees a Rosy Nude of Matisse’s used as an ornament in the hair salon and walks in on impulse.  Though the draughtsmanship of the story shows that the people in the salon are in reality constantly a disappointment to the patron’s attempts to develop a roseate view of life, her sense of emotional color overcomes the negative things she notices (for example, when the renovation of the salon goes through a less than sympathetic actual color scheme).  Thus in the first story, for a long stretch of the plot, the “line” of the story and the “color” are at odds, at war with each other in a creative way.

Because Lucian, in contrast with the stereotypical conversational habits of hairdressers, focuses on his own life story rather than on hers, the patron does not become involved with it, and is even mildly irritated by the relation of it, until Lucian dwells too long on his wife’s thick ankles, one of the petty things driving him into the arms of his girlfriend.  Then the patron realizes that she too is a middle-aged woman with thick ankles, and becomes irate and destructive, supposedly because she doesn’t like the way her hair is done (by an assistant that one time instead of by Lucian himself).  One sees that in the “line” of the story, Lucian has rejected the patron twice, not only in his “shadow plot” rejection of his own wife, but in this time passing her hair styling on to an assistant.  The “colors” of the salon, the delicate combinations of cream and pink which have given way to steel, “storm-grey” and black and white, are “clarified” out by her wrathful destruction of the salon, which resolves itself because Lucian says insurance will pay, and he’s getting out of the salon business anyway.  The final irony is of course that later at home the patron’s husband, who doesn’t normally notice her hair, comes out with an interesting remark:”‘You look different.  You’ve had your hair done.  I like it.  You look lovely.  It takes twenty years off you.  You should have it done more often.’  And he came over and kissed her on the shorn nape of her neck, quite as he used to do.”  At this point, though there is no longer a place for the patron to get her hair done unless she goes somewhere else, the line and the color of the story have otherwise reached a peaceful resolution.

The second story, “Art Work,” begins with a direct “quote” from Matisse in the sense that it is a word-picture of a Matisse painting, Le Silence habité des maisons, and is a domestic scene of a mother and child together over a book, under a “totem” picture on the wall.  But the story which follows is about the domestic life of two married artists with two children, and how they get along with Mrs. Sheba Brown, their housekeeper.  For she is the “totem” in their lives, and comes to dominate the scene in the way totems do.  All of the characters and objects in the story are described in language which strives to paint a verbal picture, replete with shapes and color words, even to what may seem, to a reader uninitiated to Byatt’s way of making points, a callous degree.  For example, with no outright emotional color words but with literal color words, Mrs. Brown’s bruises and discolorations at the hands of a man with whom she has been close are “painted.”  The distance in this relation is obviously meant to depict the distance the family keeps from involvement with Mrs. Brown, though their relations are friendly on the surface.  There are also many descriptions of the interiors of rooms, as if Matisse were himself observing.

Mrs. Brown has been with the family for more than ten years, and is firmly resented by the husband, Robin Dennison, because she straightens up his painting studio, and because she dresses in fantastic color combinations, which Robin, though he wants to imitate Matisse’s vivid colors, cannot appreciate.  The “kicker” to the story occurs when, after a gallery agent comes to look at Robin’s work and decides not to feature it, Mrs. Brown makes a play for her attention for her own knitted art works (made from the cast-off rags of the family’s clothes) and immediately gets an exhibition of her work.  It is thus she and not them who has kept the “history” of their family in her use of the clothes, which Debbie Dennison, the mother, is able to identify and remember the provenance of when she sees the bits and pieces used creatively at the gallery.  Mrs. Brown does, of course, find them another housekeeper, but her surprise dereliction of duty has had some unusual results.  For one thing, Debbie retreats from her profitable but spiritless magazine work to make wood-engravings for children’s books, her original love, and Robin, though just as angry at the new cleaning lady, experiences a rebirth as well.  The story ends with Debbie’s reaction to Robin’s new work, explained initially to her by Mrs. Stimpson, the new cleaning lady:  “‘It’s a picture of Kali the Destroyer.’  It is not right, thinks Debbie, that the black goddess should be a simplified travesty of Sheba Brown, that prolific weaver of bright webs.  But at the same time she recognises a new kind of loosed, slightly savage energy in Robin’s use of colour and movement.  ‘It’s got something,’ says Mrs. Stimpson pleasantly.  ‘I really do think it’s got something.’  Debbie has to agree.  It has indeed got something.”  Hence, it’s possible to see that in restoring both a certain “line” to the two artists in the Dennison family by causing them to re-visit their creative roots and also by giving them a certain “color” through her lesson to them of how they had failed, as a family, to know her well enough as a friend to be aware of her secretive art work, Mrs. Brown has been instrumental in a key art lesson from Matisse’s own palette.

In the third and most somber of the three stories, “The Chinese Lobster,” a Dean of Women, Dr. Himmelblau (“blue heaven,” a significant name if ever there was one!) and Peregrine Diss, an art professor, are meeting to discuss a suicidal problem student who has made a complaint of sexual harassment and intellectual neglect against the professor, her supervisor.  But as the title indicates, the real subject isn’t so much the student (though copious amounts of detail about the student, her life, her works, and her attitudes, as provided by her letter of complaint, are provided in the story as a sort of red herring); rather, the subject is the “meal” art provides us with, and what we can make of our lives when art fails us.  In a glass box at the front of the gourmet Chinese restaurant, there is a lobster, some crabs, and some scallops, all on display but not kept in salt water, which means they will gradually expire in agony.  Though this point is not made strongly at the beginning of the story, as the two academics have a leisurely lunch, Dr. Himmelblau remembers how a friend of her own after numerous suicide attempts succeeded and died, and it becomes obvious to her that Professor Diss knows something about suicide too, as she sees by the scars on his wrists.  So, they more or less make a mutual decision to let the really quite untalented student change supervisors, to someone whom they know will be sympathetic and will pass her, rather than be responsible for failing her and having on their hands a suicide attempt.  Their whole meal has been very artistic, and they have discussed Matisse, whom the student was studying for her work, but dominating the whole conversation is their mutual awareness that art fails to reach some people, even amongst those who consider themselves devotees.  As they finish the meal, however, something has happened.  Though Gerda Himmelblau has herself made some half-hearted attempts to end her life, we only find out about it near the end of the story when Perry Diss and she are getting ready to leave the table.  He has forged a bond with her when the two of them were previously seemingly at odds, and it is because they both know what can happen when there’s “a failure of imagination,” that is when someone fails adequately to think about how the people left behind will feel.  They part with no absolute assurance of any kind, either to each other, or to the reader from the authorial voice.  The scallops in the glass display box, we are told, have died, though the crabs and lobster are still alive.  “The lobster and the crabs are all still alive, all, more slowly, hissing their difficult air, bubbling, moving feet, feelers, glazing eyes.  Inside Gerda Himmelblau’s ribs and cranium she experiences, in a way, the pain of alien fish-flesh contracting inside an exo-skeleton.  She looks at the lobster and the crabs, taking accurate distant note of the loss of gloss, the attentuation of colour.”  It seems thus as if one is forced either to take matters in one’s own hands when in pain and end things, or to slowly and painfully expire while waiting life out, as the helpless shellfish in the display case are doing.  The story ends with Dr. Himmelblau kissing Diss on the cheek and the two of them parting amid assurances that somehow ring a little hollow, though they are now at one, not only on their problem with the student, but also on the questions of art and life.  The message delivered by the “line” and “color” of the predominant image of the title seems thus to be that art is not something which offers assurances, but instead is something which offers only itself, as Dr. Himmelblau realizes “cruelly, imperfectly, voluptuously, clearly.” This indeed is an encapsulization of “the intimate connection between seeing and feeling,” as the two characters stand before the glass display case and empathize both with each other and with the “alien fish-flesh.”  If there is a positive message, it is in their new relation to each other, their achieved understanding and empathy.

In many of her books and short stories, A. S. Byatt uses color language and spends quite a lot of time painting vivid images of people, rooms, inanimate objects, and natural surroundings.  She glories in the extravagances of vocabulary, and causes the attentive reader to visualize color and line with emotions at the ready, and to react imaginatively to the sensuous word-play and imagery.  In this book, she has excelled as usual with this technique, and has pointed openly to at least one of her own inspirations, Henri Matisse; she can easily rejoice in the title “the Matisse of prose writers.”

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February 20, 2013 · 5:39 pm

A Depressed (and Possibly Depressing) Midwinter Post, and How Not to Become Morose (I Write As If I Knew!)….

I know, it’s perfectly obvious, trite and sentimentally established and boring, even.  It’s midwinter.  The sun comes out for a few hours now and then in the temperate zone, and then gives up the ghost and retreats.  People are mostly bundled up; even though they may feel too warmly dressed for the particular day, they don’t want to be caught out later without adequate coverage, so they overdo it and take the chance of getting a cold from being too warmly dressed for the occasion.  My favorite iced coffee isn’t an option right now, because I’m not one of those hardy souls who drink it in all weathers, so I have to go for hot coffee or cocoa, just to keep warm.  People on the bus are all bundled up too, and for some reason are carrying more heavy burdens than they do in warmer weather, God knows why.  Or, maybe it’s just that we all look like a bunch of overburdened bears or hippopotami, or other ungainly animals, wrapped up as we are and carrying what we have to carry.

I did yesterday go for a bit of a walk after getting off the bus and running some admittedly enjoyment-filled errands and having lunch (I can’t pretend that there weren’t some bright spots in the day).  But the walk was marred (it’s winter, and I’m complaining) by the necessity to cross the street not just to get where I was going, but once, twice, thrice, four, five, I can’t remember how many times because the merchants and the homeowners had with only indifferent success or attention cleared their sidewalks of the snow.  Imagine it, the weather had even depressed them to the extent that they weren’t much concerned about being sued in case of falling accident by all the pedestrians who were keeping me company trying to get back and forth on the snowy sidewalks.

But do you know what really bothers me?  I’m reading about five or six different books all at the same time now, yet not one of them inspires me enough for me to write a post on it.  Oh, maybe by the time I’m finished, I’ll be ready to write, but it’s hard enough even to keep reading.  My feet are propped up on the footrest of my lounge chair with a heating pad under them for comfort, and I have a cup of coffee close at hand, and I’ve done what I can to make phone contact with those at a distance who might be interested in how I’m doing (for of course, all winter complaining is self-centered).  And though it doesn’t make me feel better, there are many others who are worse off than I am, and who are having harder times right now and complaining about it less.  But not even their good example makes me want to stop kvetching and whinging about what is wrong with the day.  So, I ask myself (or was asking myself a good half hour ago, before I started this post), “What is the best way not to become morose when everything in the day itself seems to be militating against a cheerful attitude?”

At the risk of sounding extremely self-involved and egotistical (and egoistical, which is a different though just as noxious a thing), I must confess that I got the idea to re-read something I had enjoyed, not just something I’d enjoyed reading of someone else’s, but something of my own that I had enjoyed writing for you.  You, if you are honest, will admit that nothing quite makes you as cheerful as the sense of a job well done, and when it’s your own job, that sense is especially strong.  Oh, a good dose of Shakespeare or Milton would no doubt improve my psychic or moral outlook, but since it’s my rather more minor and less stately daily weather spirits which need lifting, I decided to be a bit less grand.

And that is all this is, really, some quite insignificant advice which I have to share with you, now that I have gone to my “read blog” function on this site and have looked back through the archives and pondered some of my previous offerings with an open mind.  I’ve said to myself about some of these offerings, “This is not bad.  Surely a person able to come up with this will eventually get her act together and come up with something which might entertain or enlighten a reader or two.”  And that’s what I really want to pass along today to you, my advice that if you really want to get your mid-winter blahs to go away so that you can continue to work profitably, you not only preach to yourself the sermon about good models to be derived from other writers, including those whose blogs you follow, but also look back over your own work for the high points of what you’ve done before.  I can attest to the fact that those of you at least whom I follow will find much there to make your own spirits rise and to continue to inspire your other readers.  And somehow, we will all of us get through this cold/rainy/snowy/glum/dim/lackluster winter together, by reference to what we have all achieved together, which is a writing and reading sense of community.

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February 17, 2013 · 5:01 pm

A Poem and a Meditation on Being an Individual, and On What “Read[s] Human and Exact.”

In searching for poems to write about this morning (and I was definitely in the mood to write about good poetry, having recently finished a longish bout with prose in having published a fifth novel), I was reading through my own favorite poems in a treasured Norton anthology and came across a poem by Robert Graves which has always struck me as particularly talented.  Luckily, since it has been in at least one published version since 1938 and has already been published in full on the Internet at least once, I can share the whole poem with you here without transgressing copyright laws.  Here is the poem:

The Devil’s Advice to Story-Tellers

“Lest men suspect your tale to be untrue,/Keep probability–some say–in view,/But my advice to story-tellers is:/Weigh out no gross of probabilities,/Nor yet make diligent transcriptions of/Known instances of virtue, crime or love./To forge a picture that will pass for true,/Do conscientiously what liars do–/Born liars, not the lesser sort that raid/The mouths of others for their stock-in-trade:/Assemble, first, all casual bits and scraps/That may shake down into a world perhaps;/People this world, by chance created so,/With random persons whom you do not know–/The teashop sort, or travellers in a train/Seen once, guessed idly at, not seen again;/Let the erratic course they steer surprise/Their own and your own and your readers’ eyes;/Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair)/Motive and end and moral in the air;/Nice contradiction between fact and fact/Will make the whole read human and exact.”

This is excellent compositional advice for prose, and I think of it every time I remember my maternal grandmother, who used the expression “telling a story” to mean “lying.”  She would look at me gravely during a particular moment of my stellar mendacity and say, “Now honey, are you sure you aren’t telling a story?”  It would always make me grin ruefully and would thus give the game away, but the dialectal expression itself was so apt and funny that I couldn’t help myself.  There were even one or two occasions when I was telling the truth and she almost didn’t believe me because of my typical reaction when she made her query.

So, now, what does this poem have to do with “being an individual”?  Just this:  I have recently discovered, thanks to a friendly and frequent commenter writing in, that there are at least three other Victoria Bennetts with writing aspirations, some in poetry and some in prose, and my feeling is that the mild adventure I’ve gone through in coping with this does indeed “read human and exact” even better than if I’d come up with a glorious lie about it.  I am probably the oldest of the Victoria Bennetts currently writing (I was 55 on my last birthday), arguably at least one of the best or at least most conventionally educated, and have had experience writing both poetry and prose.  Most of what I’ve written or at least what has been published is available on this site, though there is more to come if I live long enough.  Having said that, it’s now time for my big adventure:

Today, in trying to revise my “About the Author” page to contain my middle name (my full name is Victoria Leigh Bennett), I inadvertently eliminated the whole page instead of just the PDF of information, and so lost all of the kind and wonderful comments that were also stored on the page, along with the notices of awards people have from time to time nominated me for and at least one movie which a fellow blogger, JM at thelivingnotebook, was kind enough to send me for this weekend.  The movie is one I had copied down the link for, and I plan to watch it this weekend, the only time the movie is available, so at least that wasn’t totally lost, but I would have liked to have retained the other material as well.  But people do write in to the “About the Author” column from time to time, so I hope and trust that I will hear from people again there before all is said and done.

No, the real adventure was contained in finding out just how many other Victoria Bennetts there are around.  It is a particularly euphonious and stately name–don’t worry, I’m not complimenting myself–after all, I didn’t name myself–very Latinate, and though I respond to various nicknames, I have learned also to answer to my full name, which for some reason as one ages gets used more and more.  Now, I was used to the idea that there were Victoria Bennetts in home decorating, Victoria Bennetts who ran office companies, and various assorted other and sundry Victoria Bennetts who either bore the name from birth or had married into it as regards the last name.  But what I was really shocked to find was that there were several other WRITING Victoria Bennetts around.  On the advice of my commenter who informed me of one of these in particular, I found that just on one website there was a Victoria Alexander Bennett, a Victoria Louise Bennett, and yet another Victoria Bennett who, like me, had chosen not to use a middle name.

This was sobering indeed.  That there were so many of us (and doubtless more to come!) was very discouraging.  But then I thought:  if it doesn’t discourage me that there are so many people writing in general every year, and that I am in competition with all of them, then why should it bother me that there are several other Victoria Bennetts, who moreover don’t even all write the same sorts of things, to judge by my research?  And I also thought that after all, writers are very determined and tenacious when it comes to tracking down authors whom they want to read.  As long as no writers are copying the ideas of other writers explicitly and misusing them, there’s plenty of room for us all, surely.

And as to Robert Graves and his delightful, whimsical, mischievous, and diabolical little poem?  I’ve got news for him and his devil–though they may know how to write fiction so as to “make the whole read human and exact,” when it comes to reality and finding one’s own individual space, it’s like the man said:  you can’t make this stuff up!

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