Some weeks ago a reader served me a savory slab of language, much of which I don’t understand, by the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid:
“All is lithogenesis — or lochia,
Carpolite fruit of the forbidden tree,
Stones blacker than any in the Caaba,
Cream-coloured caen-stone, chatoyant pieces,
Celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige,
Glaucous, hoar, enfouldered, cyathiform,
Making mere faculae of the sun and moon,
I study you glout and gloss, but have
No cadrans to adjust you with, and turn again
From optik to haptik and like a blind man run
My fingers over you, arris by arris, burr by burr,
Slickensides, truité, rugas, foveoles, …”
In 12 lines my spell-check software fails to recognize 18 words, or 1.5 words per line. There’s a density to the language, a palpable pleasure in the arcane and archaic, that has more in common with Basil Bunting, say, than Hart Crane, to cite two contemporaries of MacDiarmid (born Christopher Murray Grieve, 1892-1878) who also relish the music of words. One can hardly imagine a style more in contrast to the thin gruel of most contemporary American poetry.
The lines above are from “On a Raised Beach.” My reader, Andrew MacGillivray, says MacDiarmid’s lines “amount almost to an incantation and make obsolete hackneyed allusions to haecceity. The words themselves have just as much haecceity as what they describe.” True enough, though I’m not certain how so useful an idea as haecceity, perfected by another Scotsman, Duns Scotus, can be judged “hackneyed.” The lines quoted include 12 words, not counting those unrecognized by the computer, new to me. “Cyathiform,” for instance, which means cup-shaped, slightly widened at the top. “Glout” is to pout or stare – related to “gloat.” “Cadrans” is an instrument used by gem cutters to measure the angles of stones. “Truité” I particularly like – “having a delicately crackled surface – applied to porcelain.” I recognized the phenomenon immediately – an effect of imperfection that heightens beauty --and another hole in my world is plugged.
Readers might object that such data-mining interferes with their enjoyment of poetry. They prefer to skate over words, not to stumble, and I can sympathize. I’ve been reading MacDiarmid’s Collected Poems (Macmillan, 1962) with mingled excitement, bafflement, boredom and disgust. He’s a wayward Scottish descendent of Pound – and a Communist. In 1935 he published Second Hymn to Lenin and Other Poems. The title poem includes these lines, written in part, like much of MacDiarmid’s work, in Scots dialect:
“Wi’ Lenin’s vision equal poet’s gift
And what unparalleled force was there!
Nocht in a’ literature wi’ that
Begins to compare.”
Odious stuff, a paean to a tyrant and mass murderer – and bad poetry. We can all think of writers who diluted, compromised or destroyed their gifts with politics and moral idiocy. It’s a shame with MacDiarmid, some of whose poems are gorgeous. He loved language, even though he sometimes debased. Consider “Stony Limits,” dedicated to the great English writer Charles Doughty whose Travels in Arabia Deserta and The Dawn in Britain I read at the urging of Guy Davenport. Here’s a sample of MacDiarmid’s elegy to Doughty:
“Let my first offering be these few pyroxenes twinned
On the orthopinacoid and hour-glass scheme,
Fine striae, microline cross-hatchings, and this wind
Blowing plumes of vapour forever it would seem
From cone after cone diminishing sterile and grey
In the distance; dun sands in ever-changing squalls;
Crush breccias and overthrusts; and such little array
Of Geology’s favourite fal-de-lals
And demolitions and entrenchments of weather
As any turn of my eyes brings together.”
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Saturday, November 14, 2009
`His Attention Has Become Prolonged'
“He reads,
He reads, until the chapel clock strikes five,
And suddenly discovers that the book,
Unevenly, gradually, and with difficulty,
Has all along been showing him its mind
(Like no one ever met at a dinner party),
And his attention has become prolonged
To the quiet passion with which he in return
Has given himself completely to the book.”
Seasoned readers will understand. Good books –books we reread and even buy, for ready access – are suffused with mind. We anthropomorphize them, turn them into neighbors, friends, family. I know many books smarter and significantly better company than many people I meet, at dinner parties and elsewhere.
At the junior high school where I’m working for the next month, during a lull when my student was collaborating on a story with another, I tried to finish rereading Transparent Things, a favorite among Nabokov’s novels, one I received as a present for Christmas 1972, one I was nudged by Nige into rereading:
“It seems a perfect condensate of Nabokov's genius, his late masterpiece, containing a hint at least of everything that makes him great, while striking out in what seems a novel and strange direction.”
The boys were getting louder, attracting attention, egging each other on with increasingly violent plotlines for their story, riffing on shards of Star Wars, H.P. Lovecraft (they loved saying “Cthulu”), Monty Python (“holy hand grenade of Antioch”) and what I took to be video games. I was irked, having reached that point late in Transparent Things when I was moved effortlessly by the narrative but dreading its imminent conclusion – a state, like life, sweet and tormenting. I had to step in because the boys, seated beside a rack of public-health pamphlets in the classroom, were working some of the titles into their story – “What I Really Mean When I Say No to Sex” and “Abstinence and Oral Sex.” The teacher was sweating and I couldn't finish the Nabokov until I returned home.
The lines quoted at the start of the post are from Thom Gunn’s “His Rooms in College” (from The Passages of Joy, 1982). The last three lines suggest the erotic pull a book can wield – “quiet passion,” “give himself completely.” Nabokov writes in Transparent Things:
“A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish. More in a moment.”
He reads, until the chapel clock strikes five,
And suddenly discovers that the book,
Unevenly, gradually, and with difficulty,
Has all along been showing him its mind
(Like no one ever met at a dinner party),
And his attention has become prolonged
To the quiet passion with which he in return
Has given himself completely to the book.”
Seasoned readers will understand. Good books –books we reread and even buy, for ready access – are suffused with mind. We anthropomorphize them, turn them into neighbors, friends, family. I know many books smarter and significantly better company than many people I meet, at dinner parties and elsewhere.
At the junior high school where I’m working for the next month, during a lull when my student was collaborating on a story with another, I tried to finish rereading Transparent Things, a favorite among Nabokov’s novels, one I received as a present for Christmas 1972, one I was nudged by Nige into rereading:
“It seems a perfect condensate of Nabokov's genius, his late masterpiece, containing a hint at least of everything that makes him great, while striking out in what seems a novel and strange direction.”
The boys were getting louder, attracting attention, egging each other on with increasingly violent plotlines for their story, riffing on shards of Star Wars, H.P. Lovecraft (they loved saying “Cthulu”), Monty Python (“holy hand grenade of Antioch”) and what I took to be video games. I was irked, having reached that point late in Transparent Things when I was moved effortlessly by the narrative but dreading its imminent conclusion – a state, like life, sweet and tormenting. I had to step in because the boys, seated beside a rack of public-health pamphlets in the classroom, were working some of the titles into their story – “What I Really Mean When I Say No to Sex” and “Abstinence and Oral Sex.” The teacher was sweating and I couldn't finish the Nabokov until I returned home.
The lines quoted at the start of the post are from Thom Gunn’s “His Rooms in College” (from The Passages of Joy, 1982). The last three lines suggest the erotic pull a book can wield – “quiet passion,” “give himself completely.” Nabokov writes in Transparent Things:
“A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish. More in a moment.”
Friday, November 13, 2009
`To Have Once Been a Brilliant Picture'
One of the essential joys of reading is the serendipitous encounter with a new word. This started for me in the seventh grade when I first studied Latin and found satisfaction in figuring out the etymologies of Latin-based English words – celerity, procrastination, sylvan, spelunker. It satisfied a puzzle-solving instinct but also amplified my sense of the resonance of language. I liked the idea of adding layers of meaning to sentences in a quiet way. Poets have done this for centuries – consider Milton, Hopkins and Hill.
I’m reading Monsignor Ronald Knox (1959), one of the few titles by Evelyn Waugh I had left unread. Earlier this year I read Knox’s masterpiece, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion (1950), and reread Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Knox Brothers (1977). Knox (1888-1957) named Waugh his literary executor and authorized his friend and fellow Catholic convert to write his biography. On page 40 of the first American edition of Waugh’s book, he described the days when Knox and his siblings lived at their Uncle Lindsey’s vicarage in Creeton:
“The village can be seen from the main railway-line and, so surveying it, Ronald later recorded in a newspaper article fond, quite commonplace memories of paddock, pony, beehives, a swing, a damson-tree [subspecies of the plum – from its fruit slivovitz is distilled], the stone where he sharpened his slate pencil, the peculiar delight of plucking the `night-caps’ [the calyx] off the eschscholtzias (a plant which early fascinated him by the complexity of its spelling); the drama of a man gored to death by a bull and of the inquest held in the village school after a railway accident.”
“Eschscholtzias” reads like a railway accident of its own – a fatal collision between Latin and German. I understand Knox’s fascination – how unlikely and uneuphonious a word. A little online browsing cleared things up and made them interestingly more complicated. Eschscholtzia is a genus of papaveraceous plants (about 10 species) – that is, poppies, including Eschscholtzia californica, the California poppy and that state’s state flower.
The Teutonic echo issues from Johann Friedrich von Eschscholtz (1793-1831), a botanist, physician and zoologist of German ancestry born in the Estonian region of the Russian Empire. He explored the Pacific, Alaska, California, Brazil, Chile and both sides of the Bering Straits. His story, a rousing mixture of exploration and study, recalls Darwin’s (and perhaps Nabokov’s, in his lepidopteral mode), and I would love to read his biography. The nineteenth century seems generously populated with such people. Besides poppies, Eschscholtz lent his name to beetles, lizards and Eschscholtz Atoll in the Marshall Islands (renamed Bikini Atoll when the U.S. began testing nuclear weapons there in 1946).
Waugh and Knox remind us of Emerson’s claim in “The Poet”:
“The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”
“Fossil poetry,” yes, but also fossil history and fossil biography. Taking a word out for a walk is a crash course in paleontology.
I’m reading Monsignor Ronald Knox (1959), one of the few titles by Evelyn Waugh I had left unread. Earlier this year I read Knox’s masterpiece, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion (1950), and reread Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Knox Brothers (1977). Knox (1888-1957) named Waugh his literary executor and authorized his friend and fellow Catholic convert to write his biography. On page 40 of the first American edition of Waugh’s book, he described the days when Knox and his siblings lived at their Uncle Lindsey’s vicarage in Creeton:
“The village can be seen from the main railway-line and, so surveying it, Ronald later recorded in a newspaper article fond, quite commonplace memories of paddock, pony, beehives, a swing, a damson-tree [subspecies of the plum – from its fruit slivovitz is distilled], the stone where he sharpened his slate pencil, the peculiar delight of plucking the `night-caps’ [the calyx] off the eschscholtzias (a plant which early fascinated him by the complexity of its spelling); the drama of a man gored to death by a bull and of the inquest held in the village school after a railway accident.”
“Eschscholtzias” reads like a railway accident of its own – a fatal collision between Latin and German. I understand Knox’s fascination – how unlikely and uneuphonious a word. A little online browsing cleared things up and made them interestingly more complicated. Eschscholtzia is a genus of papaveraceous plants (about 10 species) – that is, poppies, including Eschscholtzia californica, the California poppy and that state’s state flower.
The Teutonic echo issues from Johann Friedrich von Eschscholtz (1793-1831), a botanist, physician and zoologist of German ancestry born in the Estonian region of the Russian Empire. He explored the Pacific, Alaska, California, Brazil, Chile and both sides of the Bering Straits. His story, a rousing mixture of exploration and study, recalls Darwin’s (and perhaps Nabokov’s, in his lepidopteral mode), and I would love to read his biography. The nineteenth century seems generously populated with such people. Besides poppies, Eschscholtz lent his name to beetles, lizards and Eschscholtz Atoll in the Marshall Islands (renamed Bikini Atoll when the U.S. began testing nuclear weapons there in 1946).
Waugh and Knox remind us of Emerson’s claim in “The Poet”:
“The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”
“Fossil poetry,” yes, but also fossil history and fossil biography. Taking a word out for a walk is a crash course in paleontology.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
`A Noble Part of the Joy of Life'
Q.: Why do we continue to read throughout our lives, even after long and intimate familiarity, Shakespeare, Chekhov and Proust?
A.: “I think there is no question that, on the whole, the artist we value most is the artist who tells us most about human life.”
[Henry James, “The Letters of Eugène Delacroix,” collected in The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts, ed. by John L. Sweeney, 1956]
Q.: Yet, so many books are divorced from human life, absorbed in fantasy or empty technique. Art and life seem to have parted ways.
A.: “The great divide in the perception of the beauty of life comes much more between the Renaissance and the modern period than between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The turnabout occurs at the point where art and life begin to diverge. It is the point where art begins to be no longer in the midst of life, as a noble part of the joy of life itself, but outside of life as something to be highly venerated, as something to turn to in moments of edification or rest.”
[Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, translated by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch, 1996]
Q.: That sounds like an insurmountable, historically determined dilemma. How can art be created “in the midst of life” and not become solipsistic or a mere transcription of reality?
“In general, writing is not a medium of expression, of expressing oneself, but an art of empathy – that is, entering into others. You can’t write novels, which I don’t read much anyway, because I don’t have a taste for them, unless the author manages to divide himself into several characters – a protagonist, an antagonist, or whatever they’re called. That’s elementary from my point of view and doesn’t require further explanation. It’s probably my lacking, because I don’t have that kind of reliable capacity for fantasizing, that kind of imagination. The ability to put oneself in the position of another person is very useful in life.”
[Zbigniew Herbert, “The Art of Empathy,” a 1986 interview from with Renata Gorczynski, collected in Polish Writers on Writing, ed.by Adam Zagajewski, 2007]
A.: “I think there is no question that, on the whole, the artist we value most is the artist who tells us most about human life.”
[Henry James, “The Letters of Eugène Delacroix,” collected in The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts, ed. by John L. Sweeney, 1956]
Q.: Yet, so many books are divorced from human life, absorbed in fantasy or empty technique. Art and life seem to have parted ways.
A.: “The great divide in the perception of the beauty of life comes much more between the Renaissance and the modern period than between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The turnabout occurs at the point where art and life begin to diverge. It is the point where art begins to be no longer in the midst of life, as a noble part of the joy of life itself, but outside of life as something to be highly venerated, as something to turn to in moments of edification or rest.”
[Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, translated by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch, 1996]
Q.: That sounds like an insurmountable, historically determined dilemma. How can art be created “in the midst of life” and not become solipsistic or a mere transcription of reality?
“In general, writing is not a medium of expression, of expressing oneself, but an art of empathy – that is, entering into others. You can’t write novels, which I don’t read much anyway, because I don’t have a taste for them, unless the author manages to divide himself into several characters – a protagonist, an antagonist, or whatever they’re called. That’s elementary from my point of view and doesn’t require further explanation. It’s probably my lacking, because I don’t have that kind of reliable capacity for fantasizing, that kind of imagination. The ability to put oneself in the position of another person is very useful in life.”
[Zbigniew Herbert, “The Art of Empathy,” a 1986 interview from with Renata Gorczynski, collected in Polish Writers on Writing, ed.by Adam Zagajewski, 2007]
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
`Terrain Where We Have Never Been'
A poet reads his work to a gathering of children, seven of whom ask questions. That’s the risky set-up in Herbert Morris’ “Reading to the Children” from his 1989 collection The Little Voices of the Pears. “Risky” because Kids + Poetry in the hands of most poets spells self-congratulation and enough cuteness to make Art Linkletter gag. Morris was a great poet and he turns the premise into a moving ars poetica. The first child asks “Are these poems yours?” and the speaker replies, in part:
“I say: Yes, these are poems I have written.
I could read no one else’s half so clearly,
with as much feeling, as I read you these;
that, more than anything, may be what I would
leave with you, feeling—music, of course, meaning,
certainly, but first feeling, feeling foremost.”
Readers familiar with Morris’ under-read work will recognize the truth of the emphasis on “feeling” – that is, emotions rendered unashamedly but in all their nuances (Morris never works in primary colors), in the manner of Henry James, whose spirit is nearly always present in Morris’ poems. In 1880, in his review of The Letters of Eugène Delacroix, James writes: “…in the arts, feeling is always meaning.” The second child asks “Where do you get ideas?” – about as tiresome a question as can be imagined -- and the poet answers respectfully:
“I am moving from darkness into darkness,
from mystery to deeper mystery;
what I see seems no plainer, seems no clearer,
the deeper I go, than it seemed, but rather
infinitely more complicated, darker.”
Such humility in a writer is daunting, particularly in an age when poets and novelists are forever pontificating in public about the rigors of their self-imposed craft. Morris’ poems often hover around a mystery or absence – again, like James’s fiction. Even their origin, he implies, is a mystery to their creator. To the fourth child, who asks, “What makes poems poems?” he reiterates the theme of authorial mystery:
“We begin in ignorance, move through darkness
into the darkness, end in ignorance.
Poems are that, precisely: expeditions
mapping terrain where we have never been,
the landscape of the country of our blindness.”
As Dencombe tells Doctor Hugh in James’ great story “The Middle Years”: “`We work in the dark--we do what we can--we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.’” Morris wouldn't use a word like “madness.” It’s too melodramatic, and in this case he out-scruples the Master. Morris sometimes seems in awe of the privilege he has been given to write poetry. In “Making, Knowing and Judging,” an essay collected in The Dyer’s Hand, Auden, another admirer of James ("Master of nuance and scruple"), writes:
“Whatever its actual content and overt interest, every poem is rooted in imaginative awe. Poetry can do a hundred and one things, delight, sadden, disturb, amuse, instruct – it may express every possible shade of emotion, and describe every conceivable kind of event, but there is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being and for happening.”
“I say: Yes, these are poems I have written.
I could read no one else’s half so clearly,
with as much feeling, as I read you these;
that, more than anything, may be what I would
leave with you, feeling—music, of course, meaning,
certainly, but first feeling, feeling foremost.”
Readers familiar with Morris’ under-read work will recognize the truth of the emphasis on “feeling” – that is, emotions rendered unashamedly but in all their nuances (Morris never works in primary colors), in the manner of Henry James, whose spirit is nearly always present in Morris’ poems. In 1880, in his review of The Letters of Eugène Delacroix, James writes: “…in the arts, feeling is always meaning.” The second child asks “Where do you get ideas?” – about as tiresome a question as can be imagined -- and the poet answers respectfully:
“I am moving from darkness into darkness,
from mystery to deeper mystery;
what I see seems no plainer, seems no clearer,
the deeper I go, than it seemed, but rather
infinitely more complicated, darker.”
Such humility in a writer is daunting, particularly in an age when poets and novelists are forever pontificating in public about the rigors of their self-imposed craft. Morris’ poems often hover around a mystery or absence – again, like James’s fiction. Even their origin, he implies, is a mystery to their creator. To the fourth child, who asks, “What makes poems poems?” he reiterates the theme of authorial mystery:
“We begin in ignorance, move through darkness
into the darkness, end in ignorance.
Poems are that, precisely: expeditions
mapping terrain where we have never been,
the landscape of the country of our blindness.”
As Dencombe tells Doctor Hugh in James’ great story “The Middle Years”: “`We work in the dark--we do what we can--we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.’” Morris wouldn't use a word like “madness.” It’s too melodramatic, and in this case he out-scruples the Master. Morris sometimes seems in awe of the privilege he has been given to write poetry. In “Making, Knowing and Judging,” an essay collected in The Dyer’s Hand, Auden, another admirer of James ("Master of nuance and scruple"), writes:
“Whatever its actual content and overt interest, every poem is rooted in imaginative awe. Poetry can do a hundred and one things, delight, sadden, disturb, amuse, instruct – it may express every possible shade of emotion, and describe every conceivable kind of event, but there is only one thing that all poetry must do; it must praise all it can for being and for happening.”
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
`The Unteachable'
First-period high-school biology. Dawn-dark outside. The teacher lectures on enzymes and writes on the board a definition of “denatured”:
“When the shape of an enzyme (or protein) changes, preventing the protein/enzyme from carrying out its job.”
My student, whom I have just met, talks endlessly about body building, protein supplements and not having a girlfriend because he’s fat. He’s not fat but walks like Walter Brennan, the result of pulling a muscle in his lower back while lifting weights over the weekend. “I look like an old grandpa,” he says, again and again. His tongue protrudes as he writes and he carries hard candy in the pockets of his hooded sweat shirt.
He works with another boy on a laptop to finish a quiz on lactase and lactose. The other kid does all the work and my student is smooth enough to leave his partner feeling the effort has been equitable. After class, I ask if he understands the material and knows what proteins and enzymes are. “Naaaah,” he says. “My back really hurts.”
In “As Expected” (collected in The Passages of Joy, 1982) Thom Gunn writes:
“…if the unteachable
can teach themselves, it follows
they can be taught by others.”
I hope so.
“When the shape of an enzyme (or protein) changes, preventing the protein/enzyme from carrying out its job.”
My student, whom I have just met, talks endlessly about body building, protein supplements and not having a girlfriend because he’s fat. He’s not fat but walks like Walter Brennan, the result of pulling a muscle in his lower back while lifting weights over the weekend. “I look like an old grandpa,” he says, again and again. His tongue protrudes as he writes and he carries hard candy in the pockets of his hooded sweat shirt.
He works with another boy on a laptop to finish a quiz on lactase and lactose. The other kid does all the work and my student is smooth enough to leave his partner feeling the effort has been equitable. After class, I ask if he understands the material and knows what proteins and enzymes are. “Naaaah,” he says. “My back really hurts.”
In “As Expected” (collected in The Passages of Joy, 1982) Thom Gunn writes:
“…if the unteachable
can teach themselves, it follows
they can be taught by others.”
I hope so.
Monday, November 09, 2009
`The Black Dogs of Resentment Worry Less'
Surely the most benign drunk in the history of letters was Charles Lamb. Serious drinkers unpredictably alternate nastiness and charm – think of Berryman and Cheever. Alcohol is a stimulant and depressant, lubricant and corrosive. It’s said that if alcohol were discovered for the first time today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration wouldn’t approve it. Lamb, despite bouts of madness, his sister’s murder of their mother, and his guardianship of Mary Lamb until his death, seems never to have been less than charming, though alcohol is everywhere in the essays and letters. Their author, unlike his childhood friend Coleridge, somehow maintained a moral and emotional balance despite over-indulgence. In “Table-Talk,” in a very different context, Lamb writes: “The vices of some men are magnificent.” This seems to have been true for Lamb, though “magnificent” overstates the case for a writer so mild and modest.
On Sept. 24, 1802, Lamb wrote to his friend Thomas Manning. The letter begins with a typically amusing Lamb digression on the subject of travel:
“A strong desire seized me of visiting remote regions. My first impulse was to go and see Paris. It was a trivial objection to my aspiring mind that I did not understand a word of the language, since I certainly intend some time in my life to see Paris, and equally certainly never intend to learn the language; therefore that could be no objection.”
Three unparagraphed pages later, at the end of his missive, Lamb gets around to his letter’s essential subject, the one most dreaded by a drinker – sobriety:
“My habits are changing, I think,--i.e., from drunk to sober. Whether I shall be happier or not, remains to be proved. I shall certainly be more happy in a morning; but whether I shall not sacrifice the fat and the marrow and the kidneys,--i.e., the night,--glorious, care-drowning night, that heals all our wrongs, pours wine into our mortifications, changes the scene from indifferent and flat to bright and brilliant? O Manning, if I should have formed a diabolical resolution, by the time you come to England, of not admitting any spirituous liquors into my house, will you be my guest on such shameworthy terms? Is life, with such limitations, worth trying? The truth is, that my liquors bring a nest of friendly harpies about my house, who consume me. This is a pitiful tale to be read at St. Gothard; but it is just now nearest my heart.”
Have dread and antic wit ever so mingled? He poses the drunk’s ultimate question --“Is life, with such limitations, worth trying?” -- and undercuts it with mock-self-pity and horror: “friendly harpies.” Few things require so much mental labor and physical dedication as self-destructive drinking. For a poetic rendering of sobriety in a more hopeful light consider “Early Autumn” by Kenneth Fields (from Classic Rough News, 2005):
“It’s been three years today, who would have guessed it?
Without a drink and happy! Unobsessed,
The black dogs of resentment worry less
At me, their chief contention, their old bone.
Whoever held me like a glass of wine
Now holds me like a sound I scarcely hear . . .
Whoever brought me down now lifts me up,
Whoever. . . . I am taken by a wind
`From the round earth’s imagined corners’ now
Into a calm I’ve never felt before.
It comes and goes. Outside, beneath my window,
Along the pavement, a young bird like a leaf
Flutters toward cover. I pray for the helplessness
Of birds, of cats, of foxes, and of wolves—
All of us in the game!—the hounds of autumn
Testing the air, the summer’s fading traces.”
“It comes and goes,” but Fields maintains sobriety for three years. The passage quoted in the fifth line is taken, appropriately (the theme is rebirth), from Donne’s seventh “Holy Sonnet”:
“At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, death, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space;
For, if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent, for that's as good
As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.”
Just to keep this perpetual motion machine rolling, Philip Jose Farmer used the fourth line of Donne’s sonnet as the title for his 1971 science-fiction novel To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971). By the early 19th century, Donne’s reputation had evaporated, but Coleridge was an enthusiastic admirer. As marginalia in Lamb's copy of Donne's poems, Coleridge wrote:
“To read Dryden, Pope &c, you need only count syllables; but to read Donne you must measure Time, & discover the Time of Each word by the Sense & Passion.”
On Sept. 24, 1802, Lamb wrote to his friend Thomas Manning. The letter begins with a typically amusing Lamb digression on the subject of travel:
“A strong desire seized me of visiting remote regions. My first impulse was to go and see Paris. It was a trivial objection to my aspiring mind that I did not understand a word of the language, since I certainly intend some time in my life to see Paris, and equally certainly never intend to learn the language; therefore that could be no objection.”
Three unparagraphed pages later, at the end of his missive, Lamb gets around to his letter’s essential subject, the one most dreaded by a drinker – sobriety:
“My habits are changing, I think,--i.e., from drunk to sober. Whether I shall be happier or not, remains to be proved. I shall certainly be more happy in a morning; but whether I shall not sacrifice the fat and the marrow and the kidneys,--i.e., the night,--glorious, care-drowning night, that heals all our wrongs, pours wine into our mortifications, changes the scene from indifferent and flat to bright and brilliant? O Manning, if I should have formed a diabolical resolution, by the time you come to England, of not admitting any spirituous liquors into my house, will you be my guest on such shameworthy terms? Is life, with such limitations, worth trying? The truth is, that my liquors bring a nest of friendly harpies about my house, who consume me. This is a pitiful tale to be read at St. Gothard; but it is just now nearest my heart.”
Have dread and antic wit ever so mingled? He poses the drunk’s ultimate question --“Is life, with such limitations, worth trying?” -- and undercuts it with mock-self-pity and horror: “friendly harpies.” Few things require so much mental labor and physical dedication as self-destructive drinking. For a poetic rendering of sobriety in a more hopeful light consider “Early Autumn” by Kenneth Fields (from Classic Rough News, 2005):
“It’s been three years today, who would have guessed it?
Without a drink and happy! Unobsessed,
The black dogs of resentment worry less
At me, their chief contention, their old bone.
Whoever held me like a glass of wine
Now holds me like a sound I scarcely hear . . .
Whoever brought me down now lifts me up,
Whoever. . . . I am taken by a wind
`From the round earth’s imagined corners’ now
Into a calm I’ve never felt before.
It comes and goes. Outside, beneath my window,
Along the pavement, a young bird like a leaf
Flutters toward cover. I pray for the helplessness
Of birds, of cats, of foxes, and of wolves—
All of us in the game!—the hounds of autumn
Testing the air, the summer’s fading traces.”
“It comes and goes,” but Fields maintains sobriety for three years. The passage quoted in the fifth line is taken, appropriately (the theme is rebirth), from Donne’s seventh “Holy Sonnet”:
“At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, death, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space;
For, if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent, for that's as good
As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.”
Just to keep this perpetual motion machine rolling, Philip Jose Farmer used the fourth line of Donne’s sonnet as the title for his 1971 science-fiction novel To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971). By the early 19th century, Donne’s reputation had evaporated, but Coleridge was an enthusiastic admirer. As marginalia in Lamb's copy of Donne's poems, Coleridge wrote:
“To read Dryden, Pope &c, you need only count syllables; but to read Donne you must measure Time, & discover the Time of Each word by the Sense & Passion.”
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