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One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes--I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.
-- Frank O'Hara
View of Manhattan from the Smith/9th St. subway station (photo by Stacey Harwood)
I heard he sang a good song, I heard he had a style / And so I came to see him …/ He’d found my letters and read each one out loud…/ Telling my whole life … / Killing me softly …
– Killing me Softly with His Song, Roberta Flack (1973)
François Chaignaud’s dance performance Soufflette – that's “slap”, “blister” – whatever he means…
I got there, but late. Hurried into a blackness so complete I was sure a misstep would be the very first of my final, inevitable, long, painful plunge into Hell.
I dove into the first seat my hand could claw out of the obscurity, threw myself in, sat up straight as a prairie dog, hands on knees, and looked down on a flower-bedecked, human-crowded stage bathed in very bright white light.
What I was expecting as I sat attentive was something humorless: between a ribald take off on a Mafia funeral and a winking, nodding, transvestite Black Mass – “Camp”. But what Soufflette gave me was a brilliant, delicate, meta-portrait of visual and symbolic transgression. Through a Stonewall prequel.
In the bar just after the show, my friend Wan, whose gentle machinations had somehow overcome my firm intention not to see Chaignaud’s latest offering, asked me, cute little moon-face actually shiny with pleasure, if, after all, Soufflette wasn’t one of those sacred masses I’ve been on about lately?
Soufflette’s performance success is thanks in no small part to the Zen-master capacity of Carte Blanche, the Norway national contemporary dance troupe, to follow a choreographer’s thought to its essence, wherever that leads. This capacity was also on display last year at the Centre Pompidou with Bouchra Ouizgen’s Jerada during the Festival d’automne 2018.
But now that I’ve sat back and pondered, I think that Soufflette’s success was François Chaignaud alone, coming into his own, his ability to distill an essence.
That there is an essence isn’t easy for me to admit – until Soufflette, I’d never believed “camp” had an esthetic content. I do now.
To the Stonewall prequel.
Back when one could be a “notorious homosexual”, my eldest brother was. In those days, a favorite Saturday night amusement of the Columbus, Ohio, police was to go to a gay bar and beat the shit out of a patron or two, enjoy a little sweaty-palmed fear, maybe exact a blowjob on the sly. After a stint in the infantry in Vietnam, this customary amusement had come to seem unacceptable to my brother. Also, Steve had become what we used to call “nervous”, up-stress on ner and a bit explosive.
So, feeling he was both notoriously homosexual and too learned in sudden violence, Steve was more willing to complain. So, he had asked me to write angry letters about these police balls to everybody we could think of; in fact we’d started a little campaign. The dear fellow! He could hardly write a shopping list. That little failing, along with never, ever, being too drunk to fuck, had got him washed out of the college and sluiced into that old slop basin of the American dream, the army.
"I don't believe you have any notion of the pleasure that the arrival of the fourth volume of Hölderlin's collected works provided me. I had been waiting for it so long and so eagerly (you see, I had ordered the collected works in August(!) at a bookstore). Because of my excitement, I was almost incapable of doing anything else the entire day. I am now eagerly awaiting the sixth volume. After reading the Reich fragments, I must presume the sixth volume is also inordinately valuable. Another factor is that, at the moment, I need the broadest base imaginable for coming to terms with Hölderlin."
---Walter Benjamin, Letter to Gershom Scholem, December 23, 1917.
See Scott Thompson's chronology of Hölderlin's life. The picture of Hölderlin above is from 1792.
Here is part 7 of Holderlin's major poem "Bread and Wine":
But my friend, we have come too late. True, the gods are still alive
But somewhere high above us, in another world.
There they repeat themselves eternally, and don’t give a damn
If we live or die, so little do they care about us.
For a weak vessel cannot contain them. Only from time to time
Can humans bear the fullness of the gods. And therefore,
The life we know is a dream about them. But confusion
And sleep assist us, sorrow and night make us strong,
And soon heroes enough will emerge from the warlord’s cradle,
With hearts rivaling a god’s in courage.
In the meantime, I believe it is better to sleep than to live
Without friends, waiting without hope, not knowing the right
Thing to say or do -- and what, after all, is the use
And purpose of poets in an age of darkness?
Yet you say they are like the priests of the wine god,
Moving from place to place in the sacred night.
–- translated by David Lehman
1a) Which do you favor, the Rolling Stones or the Beatles, and why?
1b) Which do you prefer, Picasso or Matisse?
1c) Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas, or Thomas Alva Edison?
2) Do you consider yourself a fox or a hedgehog?
3) Does Pete Rose belong in the baseball Hall of Fame?
4) Which if any of the following American composers do you like: Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, and Elliott Carter?
5) What is your all-time favorite American movie?
6 a) Do you believe the bull market will continue for a) the S & P 500 and b) the NASDQ?
6 b) Which stock or mutual fund would you confidently recommend to a valued relative or friend?
7) Do you believe that "it sucks" should be considered profane or a proper colloquial idiom?
8) If offered a hard drink, would you choose a generous shot of -- or cocktail based on -- bourbon, single-malt scotch, gin, or vodka?
9) What do you think of the way Ray Collins (Gittis) defeated Orson Welles (Kane) for the governorship in Citizen Kane?
10) Would you recite a poem, or song lyric, or prayer, or historical speech you know by heart?
11) Do you believe Freud is overrated or underrated?
12) Why do you think Operation Market Garden failed in World War II?
13) Do you prefer the mountains or the seaside for a summer retreat?
14) Should a reading knowledge of a foreign language be required of all high school students?
15) What's your favorite American monument?
16) Do you believe women are smarter than men?
17) Who's your favorite character in the Bible?
18) Did you enjoy high school? What was the high point?
19) Do you think the US got taken at Yalta?
20) Is Churchill one of the great heroes of the twentieth century or a villain?
21) Do you think The Noble Savage is a) a rock group, b) a slur, c) an idea articulated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (d) a cocktail concocted by John F. Kennedy's mixologist for the 1960 Inaugural party, or (e) the title of an essay by James Baldwin?
22 a) Did you know that Anderson Cooper makes 11 million dollars a year?
22 a) Is Erin Burnett underpaid? She makes only 3 million a year.
23) If you were a high school senior, and money was not an issue, which college would like ideally to attend?
24) Which car chase is more exciting, Steve McQueen's in Bullitt or Gene Hackman's in The French Connection?
25) Among signs of the times, do you prefer "humble brag" or "virtue signaling"?
to be continued -- DL
Does your mind keep getting fogged up? Yes, mine, too. The fog’s why I keep a “memento mori” on or around me. I recommend it. When a thick bank of the opaque, cold, humid stuff rolls out of the wild wood and into my carefully cultivated garden, I clutch my memento mori and feel slightly saner.
My memento reminds me to remember just exactly what I am, what my biology, years of psychoanalysis and honest on-the-spot self-assessment says of me and mine and what personal experience teaches me about the likelihood of unintended consequences no matter the choice of action made. Memento action may be slow, it may involve finishing a bottle when it’s not quite noon, it may involve discretely missing an appointment, but: “Some barbarian is waving my spear,” wrote the poet, “But I am here now, combing my hair.”
What is good in the private human sphere is often good in the public human sphere as well, so I would like, very humbly, to propose that humanity adopt the performance piece Consul & Meshie as its global memento mori, also as its sacred icon of the Age of Aquarius. Perhaps Facebook could permanently fund Antonia Baehr, Latifa Laâbissi and Nadia Lauro, the piece’s creators and performers and its set designer. Google could provide free, itinerant, self-performing holograms anytime its universal detectors pick up the words “Let’s…” , “I have an idea…” or “Seriously, though… if…” .
It was Nina Santes’ all-night, multi-part, multi-notion eco-feminism-inspired Fictions, une nuit en creation, that put Consul & Meshie in my way (social activist-artist Latifa Laâbissi’s controversial W.i.t.c.h.e.s., among other works) no doubt drew Santes’ attention in her programming decisions…) Fictions kicked off Santes’ 2019-20 stint as choreographer in residence at the Atelier de Paris-Carolyn. Her big night out, which also included a banquet, a cappella singing about death, a midnight walk in a wood seeded with dance vignettes, club dancing, mysteries, loud intimations of shamanism, art therapy and a comfy place to sack out, left me with Consul & Meshie lodged in the third eye, wondering about ecstasy, sacredness and dance. I recommend it.
The chimpanzees Meshie, whose “human-like” behavior – affectionate and self-conscious – and Consul, whose highly-publicized shows of “civilized” living – baths, stimulants, car driving and beds – were marvels of their times. Their stories, complemented by the visual, dramatic and emotional effectiveness of the Antonia Baehr, Latifa Laâbissi and Nadia Lauro piece and proof, if it were needed, of their intellectual and artistic integrity.
H.C. Raven, from 1921 until his death a Curator of Comparative Anatomy and a collector for American Museum of Natural History in New York, bought Meshie, a female, in 1930 during a visit to colonial Cameroun. There is a risibly Moses-in-the-bull-rushes air to his right-thinking contemporary narrative in the American Natural History Museums's Natural History: the purchase of white-scalped Meshie is clearly a rescue from darkest Africa's dusky hunters.
The provenance of Consul, a male, is not known. An undated, unsourced newspaper article of the period relates his death in Berlin. Consul, the property of an American impresario called Frank Bostock, was said to be insured for £20,000. It seems likely that Bostock hid Consul’s actual death (which is estimated to be between 1904-08) so as not to compromise the draw of his Animal Arena performances. Other “Consuls” were seamlessly substituted into Bostock’s “intelligent monkey” show. Although investigation by the American Psychological Association in 1915 concluded there were indications of inchoate human-like qualities “such as sympathy”, the rest of Consul’s behavior was due to chimpanzee’s trainability and mimicry. The “marvelously suggestive” intelligence of Consul, then, is an almost perfect medium for demonstrating the projection of human mythologies and their underlying anxieties: "The very sight of it brings forth a grin from ear to ear…” – The Capricornian (Australia)
As then, is now. The very sight of Baehr and Laâbissi’s Consul & Meshie makes the uneasy spectator grin from ear to ear.
Set designer Nadia Lauro has created a set for Baehr and Laâbissi’s shines that is chock full of amusing visual innuendo. For instance, seeing these “monkeys” on a gigantic, elaborately upholstered upscale-hotel-style bed is surely funny. But it does beyond funny to wordless commentary. Lauro’s tasteless pile of gated-community display is upholstered in the moral equivalent of “Naugahyde”. “Naugahyde”, remember, is one of the first commercialized polymer artificial leathers – one of the first of examples of our era’s “delusional consumerism”. This is the belief that buying what you don’t want is just as good as buying the thing you are kept too poor to afford. It has choked the very oceans with plastic crap. Naugahyde’s lawsuit-proof all-media marketing suggested to urban boobs that Naugahyde’s stick-to-the-unnaturally-hot-ass sitting experience was just what the hide of the (darkest African?) “Nauga” naturally felt like. At the time, the owners of Naugahyde patents and factories said… nudge, nudge… that the… ahh, suggestion… of Naugahyde’s natural origin was just a harmless… haw-haw… joke.
But the performance is also packed with the well-timed tics and well-pointed allusions suggested by the histories, situations and conditions of Consul and Meshie. First off, Baehr and Laâbissi, who have taken care to project pendulous “native” breasts, turn on its head, then give a sharp twist to, the risible conceit that apes, baboons and chimpanzees are “almost human”. Their ridiculously inaccurate depiction of “monkeys” could not be more dramatically effective. Also, over the three-hour performance, the duo uses studied activity such as touching, embroidery, listening and learning situations to bring out the monkey in the hominid. Although the duo absolutely radiates that tight, vaguely paranoid self-absorption that characterizes humans, gestural timing subtly and surely recognizes then involves spectators.
In sum, there’s not an intellectual or artistic hair out of place in Consul & Meshie. They’ve left no doubt in my mind these monkeys are the enemy Pogo Possum also met. Join with me to make Consul & Meshie our global memento mori and epochal icon.
CONSUL & MESHIE – performance • 190 minutes • Concept & performance: Latifa Laâbissi, Antonia Baehr / Set: Nadia Lauro / Costumes: Antonia Baehr, Latifa Laâbissi and Nadia Lauro / Sound and lighting: Carola Caggiano • Théâtre de l’Aquarium, la Cartoucherie, 8 June 2019 • June Events 2019/Fictions une nuit en creation • Concept & general direction: Nina Santes
Antonia Baehr (Pact Zollverein) performance calendar / Cie Figure Project (Antonia Baehr, Latifa Laâbissi and Nadia Lauro) performance calendar / Nadia Lauro – scenographies / Nina Santes performance calendar
Latifa Laâbissi will present her new work White Dog 9-12 October 2019 for the Festival d’automne in Paris. Festival d'automne 2019 calendar
How much of what we tell ourselves, let alone what we write, is collaged from bits and pieces of so-called real life? Richard Hugo says, In a poem you make something up, say for example a town, but an imagined town is at least as real as an actual town. If it isn’t, you may be in the wrong business. Our triggering subjects, like our words, come from obsessions we must submit to, whatever the social cost. It can be hard. It can be worse 40 years from now if you feel you could have done it and didn’t.
This is my final day of blogging for Best American, and I’m deeply grateful for having been granted the opportunity to enter this space every workday for a week. To think about things, and to feel about things--to take that time and space--is such a pleasure. And it’s a good day to finish up, as tomorrow, there will be a joint 70th birthday party for me and for my friend David, a retired South African actor, director, and educator. If it doesn’t rain, we’ll have assembled 120 friends out on the lawn and copses and underneath the stands of pines and birches, here at the house I share with my wife and two shepherds, at the southern edge of the Vermont National Forest. If we’re lucky, we might even have a couple of foxes and possibly even a brown bear in attendance, along with several families of grosbeaks, cardinals, red-bellied woodpeckers, chipmunks, and all manner of finches.
Having entered my 70s, I’ve been thinking about May Sarton’s journals. Many years ago, I read At Seventy: A Journal, which Sarton published in 1982 (she died in 1995), and I found it both comforting and deeply mysterious (70 years old, good Lord!). I was all of 46, which seemed, you know, young. By 1982, May Sarton had published 42 novels, journals, memoirs and books of poetry. Her novels and poetry didn’t do much for me, but I felt that my day-to-day was pretty much out of control, and so I took to Sarton’s journals. About being in her seventies she said, “Partly, you are more in control of your life . . . There is much less anguish and self-doubt. You are . . . able to function freely and spontaneously, as yourself." Free and spontaneous functioning seemed a worthy ambition, if only one didn’t have to be 70 to achieve it.
It was my mom who collected everything Sarton wrote, and where I found Sarton’s books on side tables in the living room, in the bookcases, on the kitchen counter, beside the bed I slept in when, later, I visited. I even found Journal of a Solitude on my dad’s bedside table, underneath the Zane Greys (The Trail Driver; West of the Pecos; Riders of the Purple Sage) although, whether he put it there or, more likely, she, I’d have no way of knowing, having failed to ask him while he was alive. The journals struck me as unguarded, available in ways neither my mother or my father were, even though I recognized that Sarton wrote them for publication, and so there was always that public/private stance.
Why do many readers respond so strongly to her writing? "In the end," Sarton suggests, "what a writer communicates is a vision of life. With so much that is depressing and agonizing around us these days, I feel sorry for the young. It's a terrible world to be in. Therefore, somebody who can make them feel that life is worth living—just life in the sense of looking at the flowers or going out for a walk with your dog—this is to be treasured. There aren't many writers who do this, there really aren't." Virginia Woolf, whom she first met in 1937, was one. ("A pale pretty Shelley imitation American girl," Woolf wrote of Sarton, "who sat on the floor at my feet . . . ") "Now there you have a vision of life! . . . When one goes back to read her, it is pleasing to be in that vision of life again. I think it is rather rare.
Recently, a gothic fog, prolific rain, more rain, sheets of water washing down our mountain road, then his morning, almost quiet, and as usual, there are a few obscurities where clarity of plot might be. Somewhere up there they get excited about the possibility of contradictory beliefs, and we think, is there another kind?
Another summer solstice. Tonight, when it clears (as predicted) there we’ll have that showboat moon, enormous, vaporous, and beyond, three faint points of light. Mars? Venus? Neptune? Magi? Icy comets, alone and palely loitering? The death of outer planets is what happens to other planets, right?
Still, run for your lives isn’t bad advice to give some folk, Mark Twain might have said. Escape—release by havoc, ruin, liquidation, devastation, annihilation—we pause to draw a breath. Because our profound human aspiration is to avoid you know what, to believe that every extinction is only a prelude to resurgence and revival.
Self-fascinated, we are loathe to concede that we are not central to the cosmic scheme of things. Apocalypse, once tragic, suddenly reassures. Time and space are about our relation with the Big Guy. God, it turns out, doesn’t want to be lonely either. That’s why he lets us see the evanescent sparks of the Big Bang every time we turn on the TV, those faint lights tracing across the black screen just before it’s inner world bursts into color.
Where we've lived in the world gravitates toward the comfort of home, of being home, but it's always the slow ox-cart and the deep woods and the routine and the inadvertent sounds of everyday machinery, of birdcalls and of breathing and the soft pacing of a far-off wolf that mark our habits and habitats. It's what you hear above the immediate and magnified sloshing of the bath water and the drip of the faucets and incessant sparking of the stovetop igniters that matters. Like Frankie says, That golden sand, two sweethearts, and the summer wind.
I’ve never liked when sportswriters disdain great athletes playing past their prime, arrogantly asserting they should have quit before the sad decline.
Willie Mays was well past his prime at 40 when my father and I took my seven-year-old brother Philip to Shea Stadium on August 25 1971, so he could see one of the greatest players of all time. The Mets drew 16,000 fans over the season’s average for the game with the San Francisco Giants. Willie struck out three times in a row, but my brother got to see that swing, even if it wasn’t so sweet anymore. (He also saw Mays’s teammate Dave Kingman hit the side of the Giants' team bus, beyond the left-field bullpen.)
The following year, while batting .184, Willie was cast off to the Mets, returning to the city of his early grandeur, 21 years after turning his back on Vic Wertz and breaking Cleveland’s heart from 350 feet away.
In his final year, 1973, Willie Mays batted .211, which was 91 points lower than his career average. Sportswriter Bill Madden was among those to place Mays with “the many Hall of Famers who could never quite concede when it was time to quit,” lamenting “the everlasting image of a 42-year-old shell of former greatness, stumbling and falling down in the outfield in the 1973 World Series.”
I treasure Mays memories from the ’73 World Series: He got the first hit of the series, and, in his last at-bat ever, drove in the go-ahead run off Rollie Fingers in Game Two (and yes, he stumbled getting out of the box).
But the indelible moment gracing my memory for 46 years came when the umpire called out Bud Harrelson at the plate after a phantom tag. Willie was on-deck, and he anguished over a play that didn’t involve him for a team he barely knew.
Not for nothing, but Willie wasn’t the only player who had trouble with fly balls in the blinding sun. Here’s 30-year-old left-fielder Cleon Jones.
And by the way, Willie also stumbled in the outfield during the ’54 World Series—after making that magic catch and throw.
All this is in preface for a hypothetical question I’ve been trying to formulate for many years. This is the closest I’ve gotten:
If you could relive just one season of one major leaguer’s career, would you prefer to be Willie Mays in 1973, a shell of your former self (six home runs) but with a career’s worth of brilliant memories? Or would you choose, say, 23-year-old John Milner’s 1973 (23 homers), without a whole lot to remember, but a future to dream?
Everyone knows that stocks these days, especially US stocks, are overvalued. But picking a market top is no easy matter. David Aronson, former professor at Baruch College, now president of a research firm that develops methods to enhance stock market trading systems, says, "the process of topping out can take a really long period of time, evolving over a year or more."
Aronson demonstrated his credentials as a two-armed economist when he told Mark Hulbert of the Wall Street Journal that, on the one hand, only time will tell whether the coming top will precede a major bear market or something less dire, something of merely "intermediate-term significance." (See "The Myth of Stock-Market Tops," September 5, 2017, p. R1). On the other hand, Noodles acknowledged, the correction following the top could prove to be the so-called "valley of fear" preceding the renewal of a secular bull market.
Noodles? Admirers of Sergio Leone's masterpiece Once Upon a Time in America know that the character named David Aaronson, played by Robert de Niro (top left), bears the nickname "Noodles" from the time he and his buddy Maxie were the most notable personalities of a gang of Jewish teenagers in New York's Lower East Side in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Noodles remains "overweight" on emerging-market equities. as well as overweight in the old-fashioned sense, as befits a man of his mature years who has done his share of losing, done what he had to do and now finds it all so amusing to think he did all tha. "All that" includes knifing a vicious rival, for which act he serves time. He has fallen hopelessly in love with Deborah (played by Jennifer Connelly as a youth [top center] and by Elizabeth McGovern as a grown up [top right]). She is his one true love, yet, alas, he date rapes her in the back of a rented limousine. He has also smoked his share of opium with "Amapola" in his brain, cried in his sleep, carried on with Tuesday Weld, a decoy during a jewel heist, and teamed up with "Uncle" Maxie (James Woods) and buddies to smuggle booze during prohibition and run a fabulous speakeasy,
Thirty years have gone by in some remote upstate burg after his gang buddies are shot in one fatal last caper. During this time, and prior to mysterious letters that lead him to return to New York City and learn that he had been deceived and betrayed, David Aaronson has had the opportunity to make an independent study of stock market trends. In the book that made his academic reputation, Aaronson writes that "bottoms are easier to identify, in real time, than tops." When asked whether he had in mind either Jennifer Connelly or Elizabeth McGovern, Noodles just winked, whistling a few bars of Cole Porter's classic "You're the Top."
The take-away: Major bull market tops are a process, not an event. The long-term topping process may have begun without anyone taking note. Many people have shunned the market since the 2008-09 collapse. Only when they start buying stocks will we know for sure that the long-awaited end has come. Will there be a deeper than usual correction -- or a crash? How painful will it be? The jury is still out. Meanwhile when they ask me what the market will do tomorrow, I always say: it will go up and down. -- DL
originally posted September 8, 2017
If it begins in the quotidian, it ends in a place as peculiar and mystical as any Emily Dickinson, where, much like the dead, the speaker of the poem has its own business to do. And the poet owes it to the speaker to dissolve into the speaker, where the wild, peculiar, unexpected leaping takes place.
And so, that astonishing Brazilian poet Adelia Prado. Her first book in English, The Alphabet in the Park, stunned the world 29 years ago with its utter freshness and originality. (Both it and the new one, Ex-Voto, are translated from the Brazilian by Ellen Doré Watson.)
CHAMBERPOT
At midnight, José dos Reis
—my secret boyfriend—
comes to serenade me.
Papa coughs
and rattles the chamberpot.
Lord, how embarrassing—
his little waterfall,
collards in the garden
icy with dew and fear.
I make like a dead saint.
My heaven is gothic
and on fire.
Here’s a synthesizing and transformative imagination that is attuned to the details of the physical world while seeking realms beyond the visible, beyond what can be said but is well worth trying to say, 'spreading/ a strange, unutterable music' onto the page.
What you want from every poem is some kind of miracle. But of course you can't will the miracle to happen; you can't make a miracle happen by hard work or good works. But you want to be in the presence of the miracle when it happens, like that time at the Bay of Fundy when I hadn’t heard about it, no news or radio, and there was an eclipse of the sun happening right there, over the water, and like the Neanderthals without a weather report, there’s nothing to do but to recognize it for what it is, and accept it and leave it alone. Or establish a religion. Or paint it out of manganese and rust, and thus preserve that moment as a first entry in “The Book” to which we all aspire.
The Shaft Scene in the Lascaux Caves in France. It’s one of the world’s most famous examples of ancient cave art, featuring a dying man and several animals. Researchers now say artwork might commemorate a comet strike around 15,200 BC. Animal symbols represent star constellations in the night sky.
It is the attempt to contextualize that which cannot be contextualized that makes things happen in Prado’s poem. It is in the way the poem fails to accomplish this contextualization—with what trusting relaxation of the reins—that it releases something, and that something is revealed, and there—whatever it is—is. Something discovered. This is where the poem’s power lies, where the pen longs to find itself, searching for what Wallace Stegner calls the angle of repose. [Where, at this angle, the material on the slope face is on the verge of sliding, but doesn’t quite.]
Poetry is show business, within italicized show. The showing exists in an unsteady balance, where energy is released in the incident of collapse\no collapse, and both the poet and the reader may simultaneously descry that moment the sail appears on the horizon.
I know, I know; there are perhaps more qualified others who argue, perhaps persuasively, for a Platonic balance within the poem, all of its elements combining just so. But I don’t buy it, and never have. Give me the heaven, gothic and on fire.
As promised yesterday, I’ve been thinking about this Emily Dickinson poem, about how it handles the unsayable, implies the unsaid:
Emily Dickinson - 978 (1864)
It bloomed and dropt, a Single Noon-
The Flower-distinct and Red-
I, passing, thought another Noon
Another in its stead
Will equal glow, and thought no More
But came another Day
To find the Species disappeared-
The Same Locality-
The Sun in place-no other fraud
On Nature's perfect Sum-
Had I but lingered Yesterday-
Was my retrieveless blame-
Much Flowers of this and further Zones
Have perished in my Hands
For seeking its Resemblance-
But unapproached it stands-
The single Flower of the Earth
That I, in passing by
Unconscious was-Great Nature's Face
Passed infinite by Me-
After posting the poem on my Facebook page, Ira Sadoff (the brilliant Ira Sadoff) and I have had a bit of an exchange about it:
Ira.
I hadn't remembered this, but I know she has written so many beautiful and secret poems waiting to be discovered. All that ambiguity in the syntax here, and sadness of course, in the temporal and loneliness:
Much Flowers of this and further Zones
Have perished in my Hands
For seeking its Resemblance-
.... and so much to make of that last line.
JL.
Thanks, Ira. It's dazzling, this poem. There is such a beautiful, and such a gradual, increase of degree in intensity in the poem. It begins in such human depths and dimensions, and line by line, stanza by stanza, as if the voice has infused itself with the manifold intensity of the storm, reaches heights of some spiritual nature, all of which crescendo into whatever it is that last line almost but not quite reveals, the only thing that can envelope the whole vision—one in which the voice refuses the notion that some things are beyond or above the human.
Ira.
Agree. The syntax of the last line makes that happen. So often when you hear people talk about Dickinson as a nature poet, I think Dickinson uses nature as a metaphor for some human angst. Here she tries to clear out a missed opportunity of grand proportions in the flower as an image that signals "further zones...." So moving!
Some, I’ve noticed, look to nail down what the flower “means,” noting especially the force and effect of that dramatic “perished in my hands.” Flowers as emblems of her passions and thoughts, some say. The poem itself as a playing out of “the invisibility and fragility of women in the partriarchal society.” Surely that, too.
But for my reading, it seems to me truest that those extraordinary discoveries expressing themselves in startling verbs and nouns signal the best a poet can do in working out – in approaching – what’s not only unsayable, but largely unknowable.
The passing infinite by of great nature’s face. That nearly mystical moment curates it’s own components by means of the fragment “Much Flowers of this and Further Zones.”
Further Zones, indeed. Those fragments descend to us like solitary outriders haunted by communion. Shimmering and brief, "eviscerated," as Emerson said, "of care," vulnerability is the mark of their existence. If they are the nuclei of a poem offered up in a state of pure potentiality and in search of conditions yet to be defined, they are like souls, neither touching nor mingling, never composing a full set.
We’re deposited inside the beauties of transition and isolation at once, and in her hands, we’re made to belong to a chronology of the instant, defined more by a passing infinite silence than by a need to define or express. What, after all, is more transient than the unsayable?
What’s unsaid scatters in all directions. What we don’t, or cannot say, or cannot fathom to say, to our mothers and fathers, our sons and daughters, our wives and husbands, our friends and colleagues, lingers just out of range, at it must be.
We live, after all, inside a dream, inexpressible as an indrawn breath.
Reading to her satisfies and keeps us from the dull ache of not knowing how otherwise to talk, how to fill in the silences, how to understand what’s said in them, the spaces between words, between thoughts. Being with her is like writing a poem, or in some ways, better, like those essential silences inside any piece of music. Tomorrow, I propose a poem by Emily Dickinson whose silence is about everything I have to say here, though rather more enigmatically. That silence, as you’ll see, is embedded, not so much within the words, but by way of syntax, and this time, by syntax, I mean the order of what’s unsaid. What’s essentially unsayable.
But that’s tomorrow. For now, back to her.
Her hearing all but gone now, we play and replay this set piece on the lee shore shore of Long Island Sound. A lakeless, oceanless, summer, through the windows the late peonies larded with pinks and reds, red, so fulsome you’d think them edible. Finches sing the trees to calmness, their heads tilted toward the sun. She can’t hear them. I ask her to say if she can hear me read, if not, we’ll do something else. But she can hear me fine, she says. By which she means, she can’t hear me at all.
Papery skin, deep blue, like a body-covering bruise. Perhaps she wants this time together, hearing someone gentle and loving, possibly this is her son, possibly, making low murmurs of an article she’s well past needing, and cannot hear anyway, and she knows I know, that thought would please her, and what pleases her, even if she can’t hear it, even if she doesn’t need to hear it, is as I said, the low hum of (whose?) voice, and the fact of this caring from somebody probably important to her, likely related, one of her sons? (“He calls me Mom,” she must be thinking. Then forgets.)
But she doesn’t want to trouble me with her doubt, any more than she wants to trouble me with the multiple insults of her failing body. When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions. Across the scarred table her hands flutter. The pain she describes in all of its parts to her nurses, but when with me, denies even the smallest discomfort. No, nothing hurts. Why do you ask?
I’m doing pretty well, considering I’m 88. She’s always with the 88. Mom, I say, you’re 95. No, that’s impossible! 95. Really? I’m not 88? You were. Now you’re 95. I was 7 when my best friend died. She lived downstairs. She caught something and died. Her mother told me. She gave me the doll, but I didn’t like dolls. I put it in a box. Thank you for coming. Have I already said that?
No, I tell her. And anyway, it’s nice to hear, I say, arranging in a red vase the shell pink roses I’ve brought for her, and setting the vase down on the table by her recliner.
Oh my, what beautiful tulips, she says Just beautiful. Very beautiful, Mom, who gave them to you. I don’t remember. Did my sister, your daughter, send them? Those are beautiful tulips, she says. I know, yes, very beautiful, and roses too. Which ones are the roses? All of them. They’re not tulips? They look just like tulips. They’re tulip-roses, Mom. An exotic kind of tulip. So beautiful, she says.
She closes me into the mind’s blue pacific room. She hardly knows me, or me, her. Each wedded to the stranger in ourselves, our hands in a shell pink, climateless light, wrapped inside the blue fire of the unsayable.
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1. Write that the subject of your choice, “as he [or she] recedes into history, seems more a product of his [or her] time than an agent of transformation.” This can be said of everyone except Napoleon, Jesus, and possibly Freud.
3. In high-minded discourse on philosophers and their quarrels, see if you can’t summarize the argument in 10 words or less, and conclude with an echo of The Godfather. Thus, “Plato had Socrates, Kojève had Hegel, Pop had Genco—look what I got: Saul Bellow.”
6. State the opposite of the prevailing consensus view, e.g., “Derrida was not really a deconstructionist.” Quote an unintelligible sentence from Judith Butler to buttress your argument.
>>>
For the other seventeen pointers, see the current issue of The American Scholar
The picture above is a detail from The Letter by Klavdy Stepanov (1893).
[Poetry is] a means of seeing invisible things and saying unspeakable things about them. – Howard Nemerov
I want to write this week about the flesh, about loss, and about my father’s passing at 4 am on October 3, 2010, about Freud and about the coming, vast celebratory party for my 70th birthday, to be thrown next Saturday of this very week by my sweet wife, with my own child in attendance, about my mother, now 95, who has lived a full and heroic life and cannot recognize me but smiles broadly when I read Mary Oliver to her.
About having a catch with my dad when I was a teenager and he in his early forties, about a book he gave me after my reading at a Madison, Wisconsin bookstore on February 29th 2009—the very day Canterbury Books went out of business (coincidence?). He’d asked me what book I wanted. Was it a biography of Velásquez, or possibly Goya, I can’t remember, which he had the clerk wrap, and that lies atop my desk, still in its wrapping paper, these 10 years later, that paper the sacristan of this mortal relic, a too, too solid metaphor.
From the ubiquitous floating epigraph to the ibids and op cits of scholarly writing, I am tempted, as always, to quote the famous, even though doing so feels self-indulgent, ingratiating, self-glorifying, pompous, pedantic, egoistic, boastful, and ultimately, too far to the side of original thinking and feeling to be worthy of full credit. But there’s also salve, if not salvation, in that quoting, and so I want both to poke fun at the practice of leveraging the words of others, and then to practice it. I would like, for example, to invite Oedipus and Kreon to repeat their ironic exchange in the Prologue to Oedipus Rex, an exchange that prompts any self-respecting psychoanalyst to reach for pad and pencil:
Oedipus. Tell me: Was Laios murdered in his house,
Or in the fields, or in some foreign country?
Kreon. He said he planned to make a pilgrimage.
He did not come home again.
Oedipus. And was there no one,
No witness, no companion, to tell what happened?
Kreon. They were all killed but one, and he got away
So frightened that he could remember one thing only.
Which one of us lives without the sense of a guilty secret? Although, what the secret is about we do not know. (Cf. Jung on dreams, the dream world, a world of permissible psychosis, which we enter and re-enter, night after night.) Silence and the unsaid: the unsayable, really. That’s what I want to get at as this week goes on.
All in good time. For now, as an unnamed New Yorker staff writer (unnamed by Roger Angell in his memoir, This Old Man, All in Pieces) (Penguin Random House, NY 2016) says about Donald Barthelme: “When he was writing a lot, you had this sense that there was someone else sort of like you, living in your city, and saying things that meant something about your life. It was like having a companion in the world.” As if that vicarious companionship weren’t cold comfort enough, Angell continues: “And an older man, also a writer and contributor, said . . . ‘He always seemed to be writing about my trashiest thoughts and my night fears and my darkest secrets, but he understood them better than I did, and he seemed to find them sweeter and classier than I ever could. For a long time, I felt I was going to be all right as long as he was around and writing. Having him for a friend was the greatest compliment of my life’.”
Companions in this world, then. At 70, I am comforted by my own surrender to the words of the great others, and the words that somewhat lesser others have written about the great. Even if, at the end of the day, little of it is about us. The effort of conveying the uniqueness of our experiences (as I have often said to poets, “What’s so special about your fatal disease—make me experience it”) is an effort of exactness. To pit experience against the frailties of language, the frailties of language against experience. As Jeanette Winterson says somewhere, the poet has the poem, made of words, and the reader has the poem, made of words. But already you can sense the inadequacy of Winterson’s reduction, yes? You can already sense what’s carried within the silences, and what silence might say, and what it might not.
This week we welcome Jeffrey Levine as our guest author. Jeffrey is the author of three books of poetry: Rumor of Cortez, nominated for a 2006 Los Angeles Times Literary Award in Poetry, Mortal, Everlasting, which won the 2002 Transcontinental Poetry Prize, and most recently, At the Kinnegad Home for the Bewildered, (Salmon Press, 2019). Levine’s many poetry prizes include the Larry Levis Prize from the Missouri Review, the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, the Ekphrasis Poetry Prize (twice), and the American Literary Review poetry prize. In addition to his own writing, he is principal translator of Canto General, Pablo Neruda’s epic work of poetry. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Levine is founder, artistic director and publisher of Tupelo Press, an award-winning independent literary press located in the historic Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, and he also serves as director of the esteemed Tupelo Press Writing Conferences. Also an accomplished musician, Levine is a concert clarinetist, jazz guitarist and pianist.
Welcome, Jeffrey.
--sdl
My father, Paddy Winch (1905--1971), worked as the custodian of St. Thomas Aquinas elementary school in the Bronx, which this poem commemorates. He was a very generous and loving man, much beloved by his children and all who knew him. The photo shows him playing the banjo in 1958 in the house in Cahercrea, County Galway, Ireland, where my mother, Bridie Flynn, was born and raised. My parents were in Ireland that summer, their first trip back in almost 30 years. (Dublin cousins Noel Rogan and Martin Dawson are also seen in the photo.)
Custodian
for charlie fanning
_________________________________
I ran the shovel along the street,
a razor path through the sidewalk face,
snow lather parting for me, for my father,
our feet crunching in the city night.
We grabbed the garbage cans from school
and church and dragged them up the iron
stairs. I lugged burlap bags stuffed
with bingo cards, light as cream puffs.
We swept the auditorium with green sawdust
from huge drums. We hammered and drilled
in his workshop, where tools hung on pegboard,
their images silhouetted behind them
For instant identification and placement.
Once he sawed his index finger in half
on the power saw in a moment of inattention
in a life otherwise built of skill and care.
Once a year the Monsignor made him climb inside
the giant boiler and clean it out
with enormous pipe cleaners till he was black
with soot that took days to wash off.
Sonny boy, he called me, and laddie buck.
He always said just do your best.
We loved to watch him fall asleep
on the couch, Daily News over his face
Snores filling the apartment
with the music of rest well deserved.
His finger took years to heal enough
for him to play again but a black scar
Ran down its center. He’d give me a rub
with his unshaven face, rough as sandpaper.
He’d pretend he didn’t know me, scrubbed from
the tub, the lovely lie delighting me every time.
from Boy Drinkers (Hanging Loose Press, 2007)
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
