Tag Archives: little bits and pieces

September 5, 2013 · 8:58 pm

“A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. The beak that grips her, she becomes.”–Adrienne Rich

Yes, my post today is about monsters.  Once again, monsters have solicited my attention (I actually went in search of some of the more literal ones, but more of that anon).  The first monster that I want to write about, however, is the monster of vanity.  As Adrienne Rich points out above, “a thinking woman” (which I like to believe I am) “sleeps with monsters.  The beak that grips her, she becomes.”  Having been gripped by the monster of wounded vanity (why is it, I asked myself, that so often when I write my little heart out fewer people read, and when I don’t write for a whole week, my stats go up?), in my injured pride I said, “Take a holiday from writing, you aren’t being appreciated anyway.”  (So as you see, from only being momentarily attacked by the vain impulse, I let it have its head and actually became that empty being for a week, one who could be writing but isn’t, out of a sort of misdirected, misbegotten spite.)

Then, I found yet another quote about monsters, also apropos of this situation:  as Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes said, “Imagination abandoned by Reason produces impossible monsters:  united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders.”  The fact of the matter is, I wasn’t being reasonable, but was indulging an overactive imagination.  What about the many times when I had written frequently, and been rewarded not only by readers on my stats, but also by “likes” and even more by comments in return?  So, even if sometimes people do seem to be reading more when I don’t write, they are at least reading, and my monstrous vanity should be restrained in its imaginative excesses by a dose of Reason, since I would like to be thought of as somewhat “artful” in my pursuit of literary topics and truths.  This is what I told myself, today when I checked my stats again and was once again puzzled, but decided to write anyway, because I have been busy off fighting game monsters for almost a week now, and felt it was time to stop sulking and do a post.  Maybe compare notes with others who’ve had the same experience?

As George Seferis (Giorgios Sefiriades) made clear in his speech for the Nobel Prize, “When, on the road to Thebes, Oedipus met the Sphinx, who asked him her riddle, his answer was:  Man.  This simple word destroyed the monster.  We have many monsters to destroy.  Let us think of Oedipus’ answer.”  So, it’s not necessary to be an absolute drudge in one’s keeping of a series of posts, only a thinking woman [I take it Sefiriades wouldn’t have excluded Woman from the universal expression “Man”] who says something when she has something to say, and leaves the readers to enjoy what’s there when and if they can get around to it, just as she posts when she can get around to it.  Without fancy excuse or offended rejoinder.  And if by being more a part of Humankind and admitting to some faults one can best slay them, then all to the better.

Finally in my pantheon of notable quotes for the day, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche had this to say about monsters and mirror images:  “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.  And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”  I have been playing (for at least the last five days, off and on) the Monsters’ Den:  Book of Dread follow-up game Monsters’ Den Chronicles.  It’s a new offshoot of the original game and has such weapons as vampiric swords and armor which suck your enemies’ health or power (or both, if you get a really prime piece of equipment), and “shadow” warriors on both sides, who mimic the abilities of the main characters or suborn their powers as their own.  Nietzsche wouldn’t have been amused (or would he?).  In this game, a misguided group of negative religionists have founded a dungeon that the player’s characters must go through, “defeating”–the word “killing” is rarely used–the enemy as best they can.  It’s not a matter of simply having a different religious preference (thank goodness for that, or who in their right mind would want to play it and incur the self-reproach of not being tolerant towards others’ beliefs?); it’s a matter of fighting “real-life” monsters like vampires, nightmares, banshees, ghouls, the general undead, and the acolytes, neophytes, and armored beings who keep them going.  That makes it safe for everyone’s conscience.  Certainly, however, the combative edge one needs to maintain means being ruthless, and many of the weapons and skill sets encourage this.

Why do I play, and what is the main thing I feel this game gives me?  Strategic lessons.  It’s not a multiple explosion, car wreck, violent blood spatter kind of game, but merely a game which occasionally has some imaginative visual effects of spells and potions and hits on enemy targets, and which sedately shows a small pile of bones like the ones on a pirate’s flag when you finally beat each enemy.  It requires careful thought and negotiations between various pieces of equipment you find/purchase in order to get the best “bang for your buck,” and you must constantly be on your guard and calculating the best means of balancing four characters’ differing skills and talents against any number of from one to six opponents of sometimes quite a superior number of “hit points” (life expectancy, potency, abilities).  I feel that my strategic thinking about what weapons to use in life has improved (whether we’re talking about words or tactics for living):  quick calculations of possibilities and potential outcomes is a skill like any other, and while some prefer to work crossword puzzles, I find this game more compelling (at least for now) than the crosswords I used to work so frequently.  And that’s my say (now, Nietzsche might think I’ve looked too long into the abyss and given it a chance to peer too deeply into me in return, but I don’t feel I’m a monster yet, if ever.  I’m extremely unlikely to assault anyone or act out in strange ways, as is the effect of some other sorts of computer games of the more violent variety, and as a really keen incentive, this dungeon system has a shopping emporium!  Could anything be more appealing to your average peaceable warrior than a chance to buy and sell equipment, potions, and miscellaneous items and upgrade all at the same time?).  Seriously, though, having fought my demons (even the vanity one) by taking a few days off and trying not to worry too much about stats (except the gaming kind) has given me a much needed breather from end-of-the-summer doldrums.  I do hope to continue to post regularly, but I thought a small dose of honesty wouldn’t come amiss, just in case you thought I had given up the ghost (let’s see, now, how many hit points does the average ghoul have….?).

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August 26, 2013 · 5:17 pm

Keeping myself off the road to hell with an “Ave atque vale”

As my more than useful, indeed precious, Dictionary of Foreign Phrases and Abbreviations tells me, I am following in Catullus’s footsteps if I take just a moment to say “ave atque vale” (hail and farewell).  Only, of course, as the book also says, the expression is “A Roman formula used at funerals when bidding farewell to the dead.”  So, this will tell you that though the sentiment is noble and arcane and resonant, it is not exactly “le mot juste” (the perfect expression) to use to my readers, for I hope they are all alive and kicking.    It would in fact be a “mauvaise plaisanterie,” or “bad taste in jesting.”  My joke is weak and slight, but I’m more obsessed with keeping myself off the road to hell (which as we know, is “paved with good intentions.”)  My good intentions originally were (as of a week or two ago) to keep up my posting schedule to make it a more frequent occurence than it has been lately.  But I’m finding this hard to do, partly because I’m in the middle of trying to read David Foster Wallace’s nearly 1000 pages novel Infinite Jest, not because I want to write a post on it (what a gargantuan task!), but just because.  If it weren’t for the crazy humor of the book which keeps me going, I would just throw up my hands and murmur in Latin (yes, at one point I was able to mutter in Latin) “Non omnia possumus omnes,” or as Virgil said in his Eclogues, “We cannot all do everything.”

Already, you are looking at this post, and if you are Italian, you are nodding wisely and saying to yourself, “Molto fumo e poco arrosto,” while if you are of the same mind but not Italian you are knowingly remarking “Much smoke and little roast meat,” or in more Shakespearean guise “Much ado about nothing.”  To which, in my desperation, I respond, again in my overwrought Latin passion for the clipped phrase, “Ex necessitate rei!” (“arising from the urgency of the case”).  After all, I would love to have something to say to you every day, and would willingly write a post a day as I originally started out doing, except that I can only read books, poems, plays, and short stories so fast, and as I’m sure you’re aware inspiration takes time, or to put it another way “Dal detto al fatto vi è un gran tratto”; but as many of my readers are English, French, or German speaking, perhaps I should just reveal again that this Italian expression means “It’s a long haul from words to deeds,” or to use the English turn of phrase, “There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip.”  I feel uninspired; I feel dry and non-creative (or again as my Italian-speaking friends would say, “Dalla rapa non si cava sangue” (“You cannot get blood out of a turnip”).

There is, of course some benefit to being far from heaven’s inspiring touch, and that’s that one doesn’t become disordered in one’s everyday arrangements in order to pander to one’s creative whims, one doesn’t participate in the occasional craziness of being too near Mount Olympus (I know by now you’re expecting something in another language than English, and I’d hate to disappoint you, so I’ll just say that this sentiment can be expressed more succinctly as “Procul a Jove, procul a fulmine”–“To be far from Jove is to be far from his thunder”).  This is why, when “Ave atque vale” popped into my head this morning as all I really felt like saying for the moment (not speaking to the dead, but revising the significance of the saying to say “hiya; goombye for now” to people who might be expecting me to be coherent and lucid today), I thought that it must be fortuitous that the phrase had popped into my head, and were I an ancient Roman, would have said “Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt,” or “The Fates lead the well-disposed; they drag the rebellious.”  Meaning that I would rather follow what tiny thread of inspiration had appeared than just come up with another “no post today, sorry,” which for some reason I don’t mind hearing from others when they have other obligations than posting, though I always feel different about saying it myself.

So, anyway, today I jumped into my post, determined to avoid the road to hell even in imagination, telling myself (and I don’t even speak German, but I swear I was thinking the exact thought):  “Wer gar zu viel bedenkt, wird wenig leisten.”  (What I actually said was, of course, “The man [or woman] who considers too long accomplishes little.”)  Therefore, taking a little while to type this post, I’ve told myself in relation to glancing through my little book to amuse and inform you a bit, “Sophois homilon kautos ekbese sophos,” as Menander said in his (Greek) Monostichs: “If you associate with the wise”–the book, not me–“you will become wise yourself.”  And now, my work of getting out a post today is done, though you may be a little disappointed at its flimsiness (“Was man nicht kann meiden, muss man willig leiden”:  “What can’t be cured must be endured,” at least if you’re German).  To end, I will leave you with this thought:  I’ve done, I can no more, because I hesitate “vouloir rompre l’anguille au genou,” as I rarely “attempt to break an eel on [my] knee,” or “attempt the impossible.”  Good day, I have said what I had to say, or to end in Spanish, “He dicho!”

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August 22, 2013 · 9:54 pm

A short post on an even shorter poem, and the resiliency of fleshly existence–Louise Bogan’s “The Alchemist”

As Louise Bogan both admits and examines in poem after poem, passion is a basic human need, an essential characteristic, the drive of the body (as it works out its contracts with spirit and mind) to survive and claim yet more and more territory.  As she writes in the later poem “Rhyme,” in speaking poetically to the ghost of a former lover, “What laid, I said,/My being waste?/’Twas your sweet flesh/With its sweet taste,–/.”  She progresses through the poem pointing verbally to the things which should be our meat and drink, such as the water of springs, or the bread we ingest.  She insists that “no fine body” “Should force all bread/And drink together,/Nor be both sun/And hidden weather.”  Her final conclusion to this poem, however, after she avows repeatedly the things that should content us with our lot, is “But once heart’s feast/You were to me.”  This is her usual emphasis on the things of the heart and flesh, which insist with us and have their own ways of forcing themselves into our awareness when we think we are most and best protected.

It wasn’t just in her late poetry, however, that Bogan explored this conundrum.  In her early poem “The Alchemist,” she speaks of the way in which we often isolate ourselves and explore our capacities for self-discipline, and the sometime failure of the effort, which ends in a strange contradiction.  As she relates in the first stanza, she follows what she regarded as the “science” of purification, attempting to conquer the pain and confusion of love and its frequent aftermath, grief:

“I burned my life, that I might find/A passion wholly of the mind,/Thought divorced from eye and bone,/Ecstacy come to breath alone./I broke my life, to seek relief/From the flawed light of love and grief.”

As often happened when the historical alchemists tried to transmute lead to gold, however, at least those who were making a literal attempt and not those who were attempting a change of the soul or being, the poet finds that flesh is stubborn, and has a firm reality perhaps as noble but certainly as constant as the mind.  As she concludes in the second stanza:

“With mounting beat the utter fire/Charred existence and desire./It died low, ceased its sudden thresh./I had found unmysterious flesh–/Not the mind’s avid substance–still/Passionate beyound the will.”

Thus, even though the poet figure is attempting the alchemical transformation of the life into a “passion wholly of the mind,” the natural physical world (and its concommitant reality, the “flawed light of love and grief,”) is too powerful to allow of its being dismissed and transmuted into something too ethereal, unrooted, or perhaps only insubstantial to feed the basic wholeness of the human being, the healthy whole that should be left to exist and engage in the interplay of its parts.

Though Bogan often poetically regrets love affairs and warns of the tangled emotions which result from the attempt either to subdue love or to hold onto love, sometimes, that is “scheduled to depart,” she participates fully in the consciousness that love and passion and the life of the flesh are more than just basic human experiences; more, the awareness of love, she seems to suggest, is at the very least a human obligation.  We refuse the obligation to submit our hearts to some form of love at our peril, she suggests, even though it is likewise at our peril that we do so.  It’s love’s trap that Bogan writes about in this manner most often:  we are damned if we do, damned if we don’t, to put it in the common colloquial.  For myself, I’d rather suffer from a “sin of commission” (from doing something that might cause pain to myself and accidentally and coincidentally to another) than a “sin of omission” (refraining from action and staying in a cowardly manner within supposedly “safe” bounds where while nothing is risked, nothing is gained either).  What is your view of Louise Bogan’s trap of fleshly existence?  Are you more likely to risk something and regret later, if necessary, or are you a “cowardy custard,” who likes to play it safe?  (Though I have expressed my own views, there really is no right answer to this question–the term “cowardy custard” can best be retaliated against, if you are of the “play it safe” persuasion, by referring to people of my ilk as “dangerous dipshits,” or “incautious idiots,” or other terms of abuse.)  One thing we can all be sure of, though:  Louise Bogan saw the issue from both sides, and would have appreciated the traumas (and dramas) inherent in both our perspectives.

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August 16, 2013 · 9:03 pm

And now for something completely diabolical–The year without a summer (1816) and its monsters….

For the second time this summer, a reader and/or writing colleague has written something that struck a chord and gave me the subject for a post.  This time, it was my friend DJ (the writer of some fine fantasy/science fiction/historical stories), who is also a frequent contributor to my “comments” collection.  He implied that he didn’t see the attraction of vampires.  Now, I don’t know that I do either, but when I was a lot younger, Barnabas Collins on the television show “Dark Shadows” certainly had me going.  But Barnabas was what we regard now as a “typical” vampire, a sort of middle-aged, mysterious, tall, pale, and thin brunette with a forbidding manner and a compelling, hypnotic way with the ladies all the same.  He wasn’t a neophyte teenager or young adult with bulging muscles and sex, sex, sex oozing out of his every faithful word.  In other words, he wasn’t in any way related to Edward of “Twilight” fame.

But at one point, even that aristocratic middle-aged vampire was news, hard though it may be to believe.  And he had his genesis in an odd summer shared by some famous poets and their hangers-on during “the year without a summer,” 1816, when the weather in parts of Europe and North America was violently stormy, full of crop failures and famine, and ripe for tales of monsters and demons to be born.  The entire tale of that summer is longer, and you can find it elsewhere, for example in the background history of the tale of Frankenstein:  or, the Modern Prometheus, which had its genesis in the same famous group of writers.  Let me set the scene….

It’s 1816, at the Villa Diodati, on the wind-tossed, thundery, and lightning-struck shores of Lake Geneva.  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley has accompanied her new husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Claire Clairmont (Mary’s step-sister, who is pregnant with Lord Byron’s daughter Allegra) to visit Lord Byron (currently at work on “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”) and his personal physician John Polidori.  They are isolated by the weather and decide after reading some ghost stories (including William Beckford’s fantastic Oriental tale “Vathek”) to write ghost stories of their own.  When during this time Lord Byron reads aloud from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s scare-fest of a poem “Christabel,” the poet Shelley becomes so frightened and disorganized in his thinking as a result that he needs to rush from the room, and they find him in a near-hysterical state.  They go off separately to write.

Though the Frankenstein tradition (author:  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley) is the most famous to come out of this group reading, both Lord Byron and John Polidori elect to write about vampires, with Polidori’s completed story being inspired by Lord Byron’s “Fragment of a Novel,” never completed.   Several important things happen as a result of this collaboration.   First, the vampire, which was merely a form of monster in European and pre-European folklore, something like the werewolf, begins to have human characteristics and traits, and a standard personality.  In his “Introduction,” Polidori attributes the legend to the Arabians and the Greeks originally, possibly a reason that the vampire’s “death” (and subsequent return to life) take place when a young friend, at first perplexed and then appalled by sensing that a former friend is a vampire, and the erstwhile noble friend–or should that be “fiend”?– are travelling in the East.  In both Byron’s unfinished story and Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” the seemingly cynical and yet dying nobleman makes the request of his young friend (in Polidori’s case, swears him to keep an oath) that he will not reveal the death for a certain amount of time.  In both stories, this is evidently intended to be a way of allowing the nobleman to come back to life and find a place in society again unimpeded, though that is only implied in Byron’s story and not written out.  In Polidori’s story as opposed to Byron’s, also, the connection of the vampire with night (and even with the moon, more traditionally associated with werewolves) is evident, as the nobleman asks to have his corpse exposed to the rays of the moon.  Both of the literarily famous vampires have strange burial requests, moreover, something that is carried over in the by now hackneyed notion of the vampire’s necessary tie to his coffin.  Even the name of one of the two original vampires owes something to other parts of literary history:  Lady Caroline Lamb, a former lover of Lord Byron’s, wrote the Gothic romance Glenarvon.  In it, she chose to put a Byronic figure named Lord Ruthven.  When Byron’s and Polidori’s stories were published, both were originally attributed to Byron, because not only was the author’s name of Polidori’s manuscript given as “Lord Ruthven,” but even the vampire in the tale was named “Lord Ruthven”!

So much for the background.  Do you know an aristocratic, cynical, not yet old but seemingly eternally young man or woman who frequents high life without seeming to gain much actual pleasure from party-going, though all the women (or men) in his or her life seem to be drawn thitherwards without being able to stop themselves?  Does this person go around at night a lot more than in the day?  In fact, when’s the last time you saw them during the day?  Do the victims of the opposite sex seem to wither away and die, and have strange marks on their necks that no one can account for?  (But they do look like bites, don’t they?  No, you’re being overly imaginative.)

If you’re the young hero, here’s what you’ve of course told yourself when you doubted your friend the nobleman, à la Byron from “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”:  “Yet must I think less wildly–I have thought/Too long and darkly, till my brain became,/In its own eddy boiling and o’erwrought,/A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame:/And thus, untaught in youth my heart to tame,/My springs of life were poisoned.  ‘Tis too late!/Yet am I changed; though still enough the same/In strength to bear what time can not abate,/And feed on bitter fruits without accusing Fate.”

And I think that could the “vampyre” speak from the heart, he would utter another stanza from that long poem, to explain his fall from grace:  “I have not loved the world, nor the world me;/I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bowed/To its idolatries a patient knee–/Nor coined my cheek to smiles–nor cried aloud/In worship of an echo; in the crowd/They could not deem me one of such; I stood/Among them, but not of them; in a shroud/Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still could/Had I not filed my mind, which thus itself subdued.”  (Standing “among them, but not of them” is in fact exactly how Polidori first paints the picture of his “vampyre,” one who is in an earlier poet’s words both “daungerous” and “digne,” that is “high and mighty” and “overly proud.”)

Finally, the fact that Byron was also working on “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” when he experimented with his vampirish “ghost story” is perhaps even indicated by a sort of cross-fertilization of topic and theme here.  For, unlike the proud nobleman, who continues the fatal course of holding himself apart from his fellows in a high-handed way, Byron in the very next stanza continues speaking of his character-narrator’s frame of mind:  “I have not loved the world, nor the world me–/But let us part fair foes/ I do believe,/Though I have found them not, that there may be/Words which are things,/hopes which will not deceive,/And virtues which are merciful nor weave/Snares for the failing:  I would also deem/O’er others’ griefs that some sincerely grieve;/That two, or one, are almost what they seem–/That goodness is no name, and happiness no dream.”  Perhaps having this in mind was what kept Byron himself from turning into a metaphorical “Lord Ruthven,” and certainly he went on in his next long poem “Don Juan” to parody the picture of the proud and distant Byronic hero who slays women’s hearts with a glance (never mind a bite), a sure sign of emotional health:  after all, when have you ever heard of a vampire making fun of himself?  (If Edward does it, be sure it’s only because he’s in his first reincarnation and still has time to get old and bitter–maybe we should look to Anne Rice for that chuckly innovation!)

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July 30, 2013 · 1:19 pm

Introducing Layla, Charles, and Jack–appearing as a trio here for the first time….

Hello, readers!  I know, I know, I promised recently to do more frequent posts.  But this week, there is other business (read:  fun) on the agenda.  I have my niece and two nephews staying with me for a few days, and we are busy, busy, busy, in direct proportion to the fact that they are young, young, young (and very vibrant).  They have been to the library here to use the computers, had a near miss with accidentally getting a finger caught in a rolled up car window, gone swimming, watched part of “The Barber of Seville,” read lots of books (they are big readers, all three), drawn fearsome monsters which make my blood run cold (the boys) and a loveable kitty (Layla), eaten ice cream and had good meals, and taken car trips to places they’ve not seen before.

They want me to tell you they are beautiful (Layla), awesome (Charles), and epic (Jack), though were they to approach you in person they would probably be their somewhat shy and polite social selves with strangers and say “Yes, please” and “No, thank you.”  At this exact moment, Layla is reading and eating an apple, the boys are rough-housing in the middle of the floor (as usual, says Layla), and in short, we are getting ready for breakfast and another day.  Such is the life of childhood in the summer for our three young adventurers.

Later this week, I will post (when I have a chance to draw breath and get my older bones and brain into action), but for now I am living vicariously a life I had long ago, when summer was endless and every small event a major happening.  Have a great few days, and try to find an opportunity to share some time with your young people in summer activities:  it always repays the effort put forth.  Shadowoperator

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July 25, 2013 · 4:14 pm

If the light at the end of the tunnel goes out, or upon re-kindling the spark….

I start today’s post with a decided disadvantage, my short-term memory having decided to play an Alzheimer’s-like trick on me and “disappear” a key phrase I had planned for this post before I could write it down.  But the gist of my remarks was as follows:  when the light at the end of the tunnel goes out, re-kindling the spark of the torch that was there is an arduous and painful proceeding, and one that I was hoping to work through here, with my readers watching and waiting (however impatiently) for me to get to the point.  And then I forgot my line.

How many times, how many times, since appearing on stage in my first student play, have I had nightmares about not having learned my lines and being on stage speechless, or nervous fantasies about having learned the lines with great effort and apparent aplomb, but forgetting them the minute I step upon stage?  As you may have guessed, I’m suggesting that there is something God-given (and God-taken-away) about most inspiration:  you have a window of opportunity to nail the important words, and then shadows of other phrases and sentences and bugbear-like-clichés such as “the light at the end of the tunnel” and “re-kindling the spark” come along and drown out the really innovative and perhaps for-all-time original (maybe) thought you were trying to express.

As far as I can recall, the inspired remark had something to do with finding self-direction after a long period of following in a certain pre-determined path.  I was partly thinking of the long time I spent working on my doctorate, and the let-down and lull I felt after finishing/graduating, and the transition to my website and my renewed work on my novel sequence (published on this website).  I comfort myself with the reflection that so great a soul as Virginia Woolf went into a depressive decline at the end of each of her works, until she took up the next one.  But then I say, pragmatically to myself, “But I don’t want to end up walking into the lake with stones in my pockets, either.”  So I turn again to my reading lists.  It’s true, I have things to do.  And the things are activities that I have elected on my own to do, with no one putting me up to them or prompting me.  But lately, the traditionally acclaimed “spark” has died out a little, and I have felt slow and sluggish, and have blamed it on the weather, on overeating a summertime holiday diet, on not hearing from enough of you (and yes, there is that thrill of communication which has lately been attenuated or missing), on the summer being almost over, on the fact that I’m a year older (why should this matter any more this year than last?–it’s only one more year); in fact I have become a veritable deep resounding well of complaints and caveats, giving forth with my problems every time someone drops a penny in for luck.  Can’t you just hear the echo?

And lo!  At least one part of the mysterious meditation comes back:  the remark was one about “finding inner resourcefulness.”  My inner resourcefulness is what I am in search of, and what I feel is lacking at the moment.  For, it’s not merely a matter of self-direction, one has to be directed from some initial glowing hot coal-bed of creativity to one’s lava-like course down the mountainside called “the path of communication” to where others wait at the end of the course of the rich ash-bed and fertile soil (sorry about this really quite imperfect metaphor–it’s the best I could do with such an impeded “flow” of inspired thought).

“Inner resourcefulness” is the constant mystery, the be-all and end-all of writing and creativity in general, whose inner enemy is the famous “writer’s block” for writers and poets, whatever it may be for musicians, sculptors, and others of the artistic ilk.  How does one court one’s muse, if we should call it that, how appeal to that oracle to get it to trundle forth some truth, some gifted thought, something we can share with our audience, colleagues, and cohorts?  It puts one on the spot, as if one were Cordelia, one of King Lear’s daughters, being asked “[W]hat can you say to draw/A third more opulent than your sisters?”  Duh.  Dunno.  But Cordelia put it better, with the help of Shakespeare, paradoxically doing what she claims in the same words she cannot do, though Lear hears the paradox in simple denial terms, in terms of refusal to cooperate:  Cordelia says, “Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave/My heart into my mouth.”

So, try as I might to “heave my heart into my mouth,” there are some things that remain inarticulate and inexplicable, such as my tendency since about the winter to post less frequently.  Of course, I can give you an excuse, a rationale, an explanation (not quite the same things as reasons, real reasons having a bit more muscle and “bite” to them):  I’ve gone through already a lot of the books I was interested in posting about, and I’m slowed down because I need to read more books to get them under my belt and comment on them.  But this is a “shadow-boxing” sort of reason, because the books I’ve read in my life are innumerable to my own memory, and the ones I could still say something intelligent about are, one trusts, quite a few, had I enthusiasm.  And now we get to the point, perhaps:  I’ve lost some enthusiasm for attempting to craft the well-written literary article, and it’s not because it’s not great fun, or because I don’t think it worthwhile.  It’s because, perhaps, other things in life which I can’t express are beginning to take their toll on my spirit; my daily life is dragging me down.

Yet, just as I express this quibble (and it’s larger than a “quibble,” but I’m trying the rhetorical move of understatement to cut it to size), I feel a certain free flow in my heart, and a desire to say something else:  perhaps the answer is that I have expressed my feeling now, and can go on from there.  Perhaps (following advice I’ve heard from others) the answer is not merely to express the feeling, then, but to insist with myself that I go ahead and post on something more frequently than I have been, even if it’s only an “other than literary days” post like today’s, when I would rather be writing about literature.  Just to keep my hand in.

The downside of this plan?  Why, that you, my loyal readers, may after a while decide that I’m not much fun anymore, and may decide to stop following my site “if all she’s going to do is babble about something other than books.”  For, the undeclared purpose of my site is to write books, to publish my books, and most often predominantly to feature the poems, stories, and books of other writers to whom I feel I owe literary debts.  Yet, I ask myself, is not even such a humble entity as this very self-focused and possibly therefore boring post a type of literary endeavor?  Isn’t reaching out to you and to the great ether beyond us all a sort of creative event?  I do hope you’ll think so, because I have decided to try to post on some topic or other more frequently, though I still hope my posts will feature my thoughts and inspirations more often than not in terms of how they are demonstrated in books and other works of literary merit or concern.  But I can’t promise not to “babble” now and then–I’ve accepted the minute glow at the end of the tunnel as the faith of a tiny spark, and am willing to try this way to re-kindle it:  I hope you’ll make the trip with me, commenting or not, as you see fit, but at least reading.  Who knows, maybe I’ll hit upon something that helps you find your own feet again when you’ve lost your balance temporarily:  and what more can any of us ask of literature or writing endeavors than that they restore to us some of what we lose through the vicissitudes of life?  Such grand aspirations!  But we all need some large hopes to carry us through the day.  Join me, won’t you? and if you can use my odd brand of curative powers, so much the better!

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July 14, 2013 · 4:05 pm

What do the philosopher-historian Herodotus and Zippy the Pinhead have in common?

Here I am yet again on a Sunday morning in the summer, sitting inside in the air conditioning and wishing I could open the windows instead.  And it’s not because it’s so hot where I am that I can’t:  but it’s so humid that the moisture in the air makes it seem hotter than it actually is, and so I sit here, thinking about doing a free-style post just for enjoyment’s sake, and wanting to open the windows so that I can hear the sounds of pleasure and excitement drifting up from the sidewalks below where people are passing in their Sunday-funday haze.

Don’t get me wrong, the sun is shining, and the birds are chirping, and there’s no rain in the immediate forecast.  But the air conditioning goes on, relentless fake atmosphere blowing down in my face from the air vents above.  Still, I have decided to go ahead and follow Herodotus’s implicit advice in his remark from Histories, bk. II, ch. 173:  “If a man insisted always on being serious, and never allowed himself a bit of fun and relaxation, he would go mad or become unstable without knowing it.”  Though you may already think I’m unstable without knowing it, because I don’t know it, it’s not a problem.  So, this post is just for fun and games, no serious endeavors intended.  Now that I’ve declared my purpose, however, I’m left with my guests on my hands (you, my audience) and no precise plan of action for how to forge ahead on this fun-expedition.

It’s true, I’ve been slacking off for quite some time now, when I used to post almost every other day.  But just now, I’m engaged in following the somewhat slow and sedate pace of Mrs. Gaskell’s The Cranford Chronicles and am at the section where Miss Matty goes over all the old family letters she’s been saving, and burns them so that no one will desecrate the memories contained in them by reading them when she’s gone.  Frankly, she might as well not have bothered:  the subjects of the letters are tame, and even the narrator reading with her (who is an unnamed friend) clearly finds them so.  It’s rather like Andy Warhol’s eight hour movie about sleeping for eight hours:  I don’t understand why we have actually to experience the reality in order to know that the letters are such as only an old maid in a backward English village would think it necessary to burn.  But having declared my purpose of becoming better educated and covering one if not two of Mrs. Gaskell’s gargantuan novels (at this rate, I don’t know if I’ll ever get through Wives and Daughters as well), I’m committed to my purpose.  I will finish at least this book about Cranford.

“So where’s the fun?” I hear you ask.  “All you’re doing is complaining about the air conditioning and Mrs. Gaskell, and dragging in Andy Warhol to make the whole a little more titillating.  We demand to know, where’s the fun?”  I can see that just as Mrs. Gaskell and Dickens and other writers of the nineteenth century had audiences who expected good value for their money in the way of long, often prosy, and (let me say it again) long narratives which wouldn’t too much offend their Victorian sensibilities (or would at least mitigate the minor scandals contained in their pages by carefully calculated build-up to the surprises and an adequate degree of moralizing in some trusted character’s voice or other), so my own long-suffering audience is wondering where all this is leading, and asking how it can be to fun, since it’s not usually considered fun just to listen to a blogger complain about something he or she finds annoying.  Unless, of course, he or she is a sterling performer, a regular stand-up comedian, which at this precise moment at least I am not.

Let’s just say that I wanted to reach out this morning to my readers without any precise purpose in mind, just to touch base, to let you know I’m still here (which probably won’t thrill everyone equally, but hell, we all have some disappointments in life), and to play little trills and pseudo-musical tricks with my writer’s voice, and to pass off the whole possibly unnerving experience by quoting Herodotus and calling it “fun.”  And now, it’s your turn:  I’ve just quoted Herodotus in his august and seriously-intended and solemn tones of advice, and you can retort with however much irony you see fit in the manner of Bill Griffith’s 1979 comic strip Zippy the Pinhead, “Are we having fun yet?”  I don’t know if you’re having fun or not, but as it’s a free-style post day, feel equally free to retaliate in kind with your own jokes, complaints about the weather, tales of boring reads, or whatever turns you on (as long as you don’t offend my too recently Victorian sensibilities by sneering at my attempts to read Mrs. Gaskell–I will become better educated, I will, I will!).   Enjoy your summer weekend, too–we don’t have many more of them left!  Shadowoperator

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May 10, 2013 · 10:05 pm

Taking a bit of a springtime break, and thanking loyal readers….

For the last two weeks or so, and upcoming at the end of the month of May, I wasn’t and won’t be blogging as frequently.  Though I hope to squeeze in another post or three before the last two weeks of May, or maybe even one just before June begins as well, I can’t predict just now exactly when I will be doing about the next four or so posts, except to say “sometime in May, please don’t forget about me, I’m still here.”  I feel especially grateful that so many readers (according to the stats page) have kept in touch with my blogsite and have been perhaps reading posts they previously missed or especially liked.

Why am I slacking off?  Call it spring fever, and catching up on a lot of reading, and having company, and travelling.  In short, I have a few other pursuits and endeavors keeping me busy during the merry month of May, and have to cry off my preferred frequency of blogging.  I hope to have some interesting things to write about when I return to blogging, especially some new reading material I’ve run across and some old favorites as well.  And I may have something to say about my travels, too.  Until then, please be patient:  like the man said, “I’ll be back.”

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April 11, 2013 · 8:25 pm

Robert Frost’s “Neither Out Far nor In Deep”–The Nature of Aspiration, Longing, Disappointment, and Fulfillment

Today, I had it in mind to share a poem by Robert Frost, “The Bearer of Evil Tidings.”  Unfortunately, this poem has no version which is in the public domain yet (i.e., which has been out for a sufficient period of time and can be found elsewhere on the Internet), and so my own sense of aspiration and longing to communicate both the poem and an analysis closely interwoven with it cannot be met.  Strangely and funnily enough, however, as I was searching the Frost poems that are quotable in full, I ran across another Frost poem which I find intriguing and worth commenting on, and so I wasn’t doomed to disappointment, but instead was able to fulfill at least some part of my desire to share a Frost poem today.  The title of the poem is “Neither Out Far nor In Deep,” and it appears in several other places on the Internet, but I want to quote it in full, so here goes:

“The people along the sand/All turn and look one way./They turn their back on the land./They look at the sea all day./As long as it takes to pass/A ship keeps raising its hull;/The wetter ground like glass/Reflects a standing gull./The land may vary more;/But wherever the truth may be–/The water comes ashore,/And the people look at the sea./They cannot look out far./They cannot look in deep./But when was that ever a bar/To any watch they keep?”

Some commentators on this poem (who can be found in other sites on the Internet) like to point out that the people who watch the sea and its horizon are deluded (are in fact “gulls” like the bird in the foreground, that is, “dupes”).  Others point to the finite nature of human achievement.  By contrast, I would like to point to the infinite nature of human aspiration, which persistently looks at that which seems opaque, or boundless, or impenetrable.  The received wisdom about this poem also seems to be that Frost is taunting or mocking the effort to see “out far” or “in deep,” but I’m not sure that’s really the point of the poem.  It may well be that he is in fact practicing a sort of self-mockery in titling his poem “Neither Out Far nor In Deep,” as if he was aware that his own view is shallower than that of those whom he is watching.  The mystery of the sea beckons, casts its external evidences forward (like ships and sand–the “wetter ground”–and the gull) and seems to frustrate or deliberately limit what can be seen.  Still, the humans insist on their view of the horizon and the water which “comes ashore” to such an extent that Frost, writing of them, does not say that they “turn their backs on the land” but rather that they “turn their back on the land,” as if they were all one body.

As one body thus the humans “look at the sea all day,” regardless of the land behind them which “may vary more.”  They clearly find something which makes up to them for the fact that “they cannot look out far” and “they cannot look in deep”–perhaps after all, Frost is not slighting the watchers at the shore, but is instead commenting on and commending to our attention the nature both of disappointment and fulfillment, and the difference between goal and process, between achievement and journey.  For, despite the fact that the sea seemingly limits our abilities to penetrate its meaning, still the goal and the achievement of doing so may not be the correct things for us to be focusing on.  Perhaps instead we are meant to be focusing on the process of the quest and the journey, of the seeking itself.  And thus, the people who sit and stare so fixedly at the sea are not necessarily the “dupes” of the view (and of Frost, one might add), but instead are doing what humans always do when faced with a limitless puzzle–continuing to ponder and question the conundrum in view, somehow secure in the “knowledge” that even if none of the present watchers manage to circumvent the enigma’s unending nature, yet there is more than enough of that nature there to supply generations to come with riddles which they can solve, not perhaps the ultimate riddle of existence, but smaller goals to achieve which all chip away at that riddle, piece by piece, adding more and more to the stock of human understanding.  And here, I’ve mixed Frost’s metaphor, by suggesting that the sea (a fluid, after all) is a solid something which can be chipped away at like a block of stone–I apologize to my critical readers for this figure, though of course I could switch my figure and say that Frost, in mentioning “the wetter ground like glass” means to foreground the sand as an objective correlative of sorts for what the sea itself endlessly washes back and forth, gradually itself eroding the solid earth beneath.

Finally, the nature of human faithfulness to “keeping watch” is perhaps also being commented upon, whether or not one sees it as commendable being a matter of individual interpretation:  “They cannot look out far./They cannot look in deep./But when was that ever a bar/To any watch they keep?” suggests other sorts of watches, such as religious vigils and death watches over deceased bodies or ill persons, and the victory of human perseverance in maintaining watches of these sorts.  For, who can look “out far” or “in deep” to the endless mystery of human life and death, and not wonder “wherever the truth may be?”  Whether “on the land” of our ordinary perspectives or “on the sea” of our more unusual views and speculations, we are both limited by our capacities and distinctly suited by our longings and aspirations to touch some small parts of the “infinite sea,” and find some sorts of fulfillment in the watches we keep.  Thus, though today I did not get to put before you the full text of “The Bearer of Evil Tidings,” I was able to find some measure of fulfillment and soften my own disappointment by putting before you yet another Frost poem, which I hope you have enjoyed.  A simple search of the author’s name and the title of the poem, listed together, will take you to various sites where other commentators have written on it.

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March 24, 2013 · 8:21 pm

Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.”–James Russell Lowell

The title of my post for today is basically a half-truth, and I don’t have a lot to say about it, but I wanted to call it to my readers’ attention because, quite often when we are bemoaning the fact that something is no longer as it was, we are told by well-meaning but possibly quite wrong-headed friends or family “You just see it that way now.  But don’t you remember at the time when I tried to get you to see it/them/the experience/the day in a positive light, you were full of gloom and doom, and dreaded meeting the persons involved/going to the event?”  That is, there is truth in the statement that once we have overcome a difficulty, the positive aspects of our experience are what we prefer to remember (always assuming that we are not born-again pessimists, who prefer to see things in a negative light anyway.  Or, we might be persons who prefer to remember both halves of an experience or another individual because we believe in the principle of balance).  It is questionable whether or not we can assume that things “always seem fairer” and as well we may argue that through the magic of memory and our ability to create repetition, the “tower” of memory and the past isn’t as “inaccessible” as one might assume from that fact that we look at time most often as something linear, and most often see the past as gone and done with.  In fact, James Russell Lowell’s assertion seems quite valid only from the perspective of the linear, and foregoes any association with living through one’s memories as a way of reanimating the past.  It’s as if he assumes that memory is only an old scrapbook, and our past a faded collection of photographs, which in his day was largely the way memory was thought of.

Of course, we know now (and this might at first seem to make his insistence on his point more justifiable) that memory is imprecise, and that witnesses to scenes are notoriously unreliable even when they are making their best effort to be accurate; yet this very imprecision is what is reassuring, when one thinks about it.  For it is in living through the memories we have, and reanimating them through the agency of this imprecision, that we create new things.  When we come face to face with others who lived through the same times or experiences, we may of course decide to argue as to whose analysis of the past situation is more accurate, and there may in fact be cases in which one person’s memories are wildly inaccurate, for example with those who have Alzheimers.  Yet in a situation in which both people can be assumed to have normal memories, it is part of the adventure of living and loving and part of the risk attached thereto that animates our being and keeps us vigorously discussing “what really did happen.”

Finally, why is it, in Lowell’s poetical figure, that “Longing” is the one in the “inaccessible tower of the past” beckoning?  Longing is what the beholder feels when someone or something else is beckoning–hence the poetical figure itself is askew.  For, Love or Memory or Experience or some other entity is what beckons that causes the person on the plain below–to expand the picture–to feel Longing. Thus my dissatisfaction with the entire image, and my feeling that Lowell was cheating poetically and relying on cheap sentiment at the same time.  May we all “look back” with impunity on good things, forget as far as possible negative things that cause us pain except to keep their lessons in mind in order to avoid repeating them, and not tell ourselves, as Lowell seems to be attempting to do here, that if only we were experiencing things in the present they wouldn’t “seem” as “fair”–Dammit, we know what we like and what has pleased us and displeased us, don’t we?  James Russell Lowell, let’s have no more palavering on the matter–you’re sounding more and more like a grim, dissatisfied type of customer who has nothing good to say about either the present or the past.  Time travel is only possible in our day and age with memory aiding–I say, let’s live it up, past, present, and based upon these two, future, with anticipation of more good things like others we have known fulfilling its role.  And that’s my not-very-intellectual-but-deeply-felt post for this first week of Spring 2013!

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