Anais Nin - "A Spy in the House of Love"

I know very little about Anais Nin other than her fame for her journals, that her life involved many famous artists and writers, and that a couple collections of her erotica were published posthumously. I also can't remember what drew me to read A Spy in the House of Love when I was in my 20s. Perhaps it had something to do with my having come out a few years before and, being in the city, my first feelings of freedom related to this. The only other book of hers I've read is Delta of Venus, and I also saw Bells of Atlantis, a short experimental film from the fifties, directed by her husband, in which she reads one of her poems.

It's both easy and difficult to believe A Spy in the House of Love was written in 1954. On the one hand, for anyone to openly discuss aspects of sexuality that live well beyond the roles accepted in society (that's openly, not explicitly) without positioning it politically or for obvious media attention is very rare even today. On the other hand, the milieu of the novel is heavily steeped in the post-war bohemian world of blues, jazz, and modern art. Her writing and voice could easily be transplanted to today, but the artistic circle she moves in lacks the tepid angst or bloated self-consciousness of today's artiste.

I've come back this novel (or novella, perhaps?) several times over my life, as I never feel I fully grasp what Nin is getting at. Certainly there are themes of identity, but there is also an aspect of perception and how we view ourselves - even analyze ourselves - that is unique in modern literature I have read. Further, Nin seems to position Sabina as living 'life as art' (or, more accurately, 'sexual life as art') and this is woven into both the analysis of identity as well as the fevered flights of her sexual 'adventures'. Each time I come back to the novel I find something very different.

This time around, in the last sections of the book, the description of Jay's paintings at the night club are what resonated for me. It crystallized an idea developed throughout the novel that we are all made up of multiple versions of ourselves, created by our experiences. No one version can be selected to represent us, yet it's hard to pin down who we are without reference to all of them. Her view may possibly apply most (or mostly) to artists or creative people, who interact with the world in a specific way in the process of creation.

In Sabina's case, the multiple versions come to be through her experiences with her lovers. There are different aspects of herself that come to the surface with each one. Taking this to a logical extreme, it speaks to the importance of sexual identity and sexual exploration in truly understanding ourselves. More broadly, it suggests a way of looking at all our interpersonal relationships - sexual or otherwise. We show a different facet of ourselves to different people based on who they are and what they mean to us. This isn't a facade or a pretense; it's a legitimate but limited part of ourselves. A shard of us. Sabina's quest is to find a way to express her totality with one person or to be able to continually express all parts of herself (which requires more than one lover). It's an interesting way of depicting identity and interpersonal relations.

That said, the novel is kaleidoscopic enough to allow for many avenues of thought partially because it's not clear whether Nin has fully resolved her ideas or if she is still figuring them out as she's writing. Stylistically, the novel is inviting and crisp, barring one section with heavy-handed Freudisms and Nin becoming too 'talky' as a narrator in the last quarter of the novel. Otherwise, A Spy in the House of Love is a well-conceived, fascinating, and unique addition to a collection of modern literature. Temporally it fits with few of the modern writers I've covered on Zen Throw Down (e.g., Gide, Camus, Sartre), but intellectually it's definitely in the same vein. Written in the fifties, I classify it as part of a 'last gasp' of modernism before the 'idealism' of the Baby Boomers and 60's counterculture banged its rattle on the high chair.

Jaime Manrique - "Cervantes Street"

I learned about Jaime Manrique through an interview in BOMB magazine, and it was a great lead. He's a wonderful writer. Manrique's latest work is Cervantes Street, a historical novel built around the life of Miguel de Cervantes who authored Don Quixote. My recollections of Don Quixote are fuzzy, so it's not necessary to know the novel to understand Manrique's piece. That said, it sounds as if Manrique interpolated structure and/or actual content from Don Quixote into his novel.

While the book barely breaks 300 pages, it evokes its world nearly as well as (usually) long works of historical fiction. Like most historical fiction, the facts are merely a skeleton upon which the author invents a good yarn with imagined (though perhaps researched) detail, dialogue, and characterization. As such, I wish Manrique had done more to describe details of setting: what were people wearing, what was the ambiance of a room, what was the character of a town. Sometimes I felt myself wanting to visualize things more, but there were insufficient details in the narrative for me to do so. I almost wish Manrique had expanded the length of his work to provide more 'canvas' with which to further develop his story, setting, and characters.

The rivalry between the two men at the heart of the book never heats up in any overtly dramatic sense, and there is little actual contact between them. While this side-stepped some potential sparks, I think the point of the novel is less about the rivalry than to contrast the life of the luckless Cervantes with the privileged life of Luis, with the final fortunes of Sancho and what we know about Cervantes place in history providing the insight into what pays off in life. What was most enjoyable about Manrique's work is that the story, the rivalry of the two characters, and even the flow of the text matches what you might read by Dumas or Sienkiewicz or other masters of the form.  Manrique can't touch them for scope or depth of characterization, but he's got the goods and if he attempted something more ambitious in scope I have the feeling he might be able to pull it off.

Overall, the strength of the plot, the energy of the language, and the overall vibe of Cervantes Street ring very true and are fantastic to immerse oneself in. I'll likely pick up other works by Manrique.

Gustav Meyrink - "The Green Face" (1916)

I was not familiar with Gustav Meyrink when I added his novel The Green Face (Mike Mitchell, translator) to my late winter/early spring reading list (which as you can tell is stretching into late spring/early summer!). I added him for the same reason I added Joris-Karl Huysmans' Against Nature and Georges Rodenbach's Bruges-la-Morte. They are all works that I learned of while reading about artists of the time. They also seemed a bit obscure and were part of (or led up to) some of the artistic/literary movements of the early 20th Century.  In the case of The Green Face, the movement was German fantastic literature or occult fiction.

The plot and characters of The Green Face have an air of early 20th century spiritualists. You know, the people you sometimes see in movies set in the 20s: upper middle class intellectuals into seances and Egyptology. The characters in this book are drawn together by their various attempts to find spiritual knowledge or truth.

The main character, Fortunatus Hauberrisser, has come to Amsterdam amid a flood of people displaced by WWI, although he himself is quite well-off financially. While the war has ended, there is an aura of dread throughout the novel, a sense of an impending apocalypse. This dark foreshadowing for Europe is one of several recurring themes and it, as well the discussion the characters have about it, definitely speaks to the post-war angst that underpinned so much of the philosophy, literature, and art of the first third of the 20th Century.

In the first chapter of the novel, on a whim, Fortunatus enters a shop called Chidher Green's Hall of Riddles. During his visit - while in a semi-dream state - he encounters a man with a green face who launches him into a quest for spiritual understanding and knowledge. Meyrink's very clever first chapter uses the magic shop scene to lay out several other themes the author addresses in The Green Face: the way whim and chance play a role in spiritual searches and that the search for truth is a kind of 'hall of riddles' where nothing is as it seems. Another theme that emerges in the shop is laid out when a shopkeeper shows Fortunatus how to do a magic trick. Despite being shown, Fortunatus thinks "he would never be able to do the trick himself". Meyrink spends a great deal of time in the novel proposing that we must all come to truth ourselves.  It cannot be imparted or taught to us by others. That said, Meyrink recognizes that a word or idea from someone person can be useful - even illuminating - but only if it comes at the exact moment we need it and we are ready for it. Hence, preaching and proselytizing are a waste of time.

Meyrink's characters run the gamut of various forms of religious and spiritual belief, and Meyrink himself apparently dabbled in a wide variety of religious and occult thinking himself. One of his interests must have been Zen Buddhism, because there is a lot of Zen philosophy marbled throughout The Green Face. For example, his theme that each of us have to find truth for ourselves is a bit Zen philosophy.

There are many other examples. The character of Swammerdam describes his search as being about seeking and "inner voice" whose role is to provide "mental balance, the achieving of clarity, ...the way upwards, from insight through rational thought to knowledge through direct contemplation." Fortunatus (in chapter twelve) engages in sessions of what seems very close to zazen to achieve understanding that otherwise eludes him. Lastly, the notion of enlightenment is brought forward in chapter five, when the character Eva has a moment of illumination:

"It was as if a curtain had been rent in two, and Eva was blinded by the light of a new insight. Those last few words had told her more about the goal of human existence than all the religious systems in the world could have."

Another example, in chapter six, comes from an epiphany Fortunatus has when he sees a beekeeper:

"...he realized how the world would glow anew with a magical radiance if he should ever manage to see all the things that habit and routine had robbed him of speech in a fresh light."

What this last quote refers to is the Zen idea that when we are not in touch with the moment, when we overthink and become lost in analysis and interpretation, our thinking is not clear but deluded. It feeds on itself and carries us off into confusions and concerns that we create in our own mind.

At the end of the book, the searches have intertwined and come to a head during an apocalypticse disaster that befalls Amsterdam. The entire city seems to go crazy, while supernatural storms tear it apart. Fortunatus, although it's not really clear to me how it happens, reaches some sort of understanding with himself in the middle of this. At that moment, he begins to see two worlds at once. One is the 'real world' and the other seems to be ancient Egypt. The final achievement or enlightenment Fortunatus reaches appears to be the ability to exists in both worlds - the 'real' and the spiritual - at one time. In some way this may be Meyrink's ultimate message.

As such, The Green Face is about the search for spiritual truth, both as a story and as a guidebook. Unfortunately, things get a bit arcane in the last several chapters and I admit I lost some comprehension of where Meyrink was going.  Despite the sharp increase in mystical mumbo-jumbo though, the novel remains engaging due to his truly cinematic and Dantean descriptions of the unraveling of Amsterdam. So the novel kept my interest, but it definitely demands effort and thought in figuring out what it's all supposed to add up to.

I admit that The Green Face took some time for me to get through, and the characters often got a bit talky. On the other hand, part of what slowed me down was my interest in parsing out the thinking of the characters. I found it fairly interesting because this is one of the few novels I know of that mixes the supernatural with a fully modern philosophical vantage point. I found it an interesting read and worthwhile to dig into and ponder over, and I'll probably investigate other works by Meyrink in the future.

PS: There is a fantastic line in chapter two where Fortunatus' friend Baron Pfeill is on one of his many monologues. He characterizes spiritual scholars of the (then) present day as having "thrown away the kernel and kept the husk". Here are some other memorable lines:

• "The feeble-minded think the flash is the important part of an explosion."
• "The difference between one person and another is greater than that between a person and a stone."
• "It is the ambiguity of language that separates us."
• "What is right is always the opposite of what the herd does."
• "I am not going to weedkill things in other people's gardens that won't die of their own accord, but in my own I can do as I like."
• "...it is better to pick a bitter fruit of your own choice, than to take another's advice and find a sweet one that is too high on the tree."
• "The valuable thing was not the completed painting, but the ability to paint."

Ben Ehrenreich - "Ether" (2011)

More literature by living people!  I first came into contact with Ehrenreich's writing in the pages of Bomb, which published his short story 'Boys' in its Fall 2012 issue. This story spoke to me in a way similar to Amy Herzog's 4000 Miles. There was no specific plot, but strong characters within interesting situations created what I call an emergent theme. An emergent theme happens when the scenes and/or plot of a story don't build in a direct manner to anything, but as a whole they convey something. Sort of like the joke about a Monet painting: up close (or in its integral parts) it's a big old mess, but when you view the painting as a whole it has meaning.

So I added Ehrenreich's novel Ether to my late winter/early spring reading list. Just finished it a week or so ago, and I was disappointed to find that the power of the short story was not to be found in this novel length work. The style and quality of writing is very much the same, but it feels as though Ehrenreich simply doesn't need a canvas as large as a novel despite the fact that, at 183 pages, Ether barely qualifies as a novel.

Too much of the book is spent introducing characters and jumping between their stories. This kaleidoscopic approach could be enthralling, except that Ehrenreich does not develop any of his characters at all for a good 100 pages. They remain two-dimensional vignettes without any sense of how they will fit together. Could this part of the point? I suppose, but it renders his novel uninteresting and directionless. If it is the point, he did not need 100 pages to convey it. In fact, the only reason I continued reading during the middle half of the novel was that I liked Ehrenreich's prose.

By the time the characters started coming together and I understood what the character of the stranger was, I have to admit I was reading to get to the end. While my attention was not as acute as it should have been as a reader, this ultimately is the author's fault because he failed to set the proper pace. More importantly, I did not find much substance in the last third of the novel in terms of what Ehrenreich did with his premise. There was simply no pay-off to merit the long set-up.

The novel is peppered with interesting devices, such as the omnipresent TV cameras that suggest something about what Ehrenreich is dealing with in Ether. I also liked how the author made himself one of the characters and placed himself in discussions with one of the characters he created. Again, this related to the emergent theme. However, none of this - or the novel itself - ever really went anywhere especially interesting or powerful, and so these devices came off as gimmicks and not the evocative elements they could have been.

I still came away thinking Ehrenreich's a talented writer, as his craftsmanship is plain. However, such skill must be placed behind subject matter and characters that have greater depth or meaning. Otherwise, an author runs the risk of writing a long greeting card: nicely worded but ultimately not deep, relevant, or memorable.

Signs of Zealotry?

Okay. Just to forewarn you, this post could easily be filed under "Dude, really? Just chill out!"

I have learned a great deal from Zen Buddhism, and I love how it's impacted my outlook and the way I respond to things. However, there's a thin line between zeal and zealotry.  While reading Joris-Karl Huysmans' Against Nature (my current read), I questioned whether I was potentially showing signs of the latter.

sumi painting depicting nen

As usual (at least in my paperback books), as I read I was making notes in the margins. As I was reading a passage in chapter nine of Against Nature detailing the chaotic mood swings the main character, Des Esseintes, has within the illusionary world he has created for himself, I realized my notes were commenting on his state of mind by referencing the Zen concept of delusion. I was also thinking about him in terms of the famous sumi painting that reflects the concept of first, second, and third nen (see picture). Semi-translation: I was thinking about how Des Esseintes had backed so far away from direct perception of reality that he was lost entirely in delusion. Lost to the point of going a bit nuts.

It occurred to me this was not the first time I'd reacted to art, music, or literature from a Zen perspective. For example, one of the reasons I love Mark Rothko is because his paintings are like visually experiencing samadhi. My entry on Laura Nyro's song "Trees of the Ages" and my post on Zen Buddhism and Existentialism display the influence of Zen in my reactions to music and literature. I even asked myself: "Since there are schools of aesthetic criticism for feminists and socialists and objectivists, why not a school of Zen Buddhist literary or art criticism?"

That thought gave me pause. Do I really want my perceptions colored so deeply? Maybe I'm slowly turning into a 'born-again Zen Buddhist', someone who can't experience anything except through a narrow lens? In other words, was I becoming overzealous about things? As usual with thoughts like this that can't be answered in the moment you have them, I shrugged and pulled out my Scarlet O'Hara routine: 'I'll think about that tomorrow". Except I actually do think about it tomorrow! LOL!

Long story short, I think the definition of a zealot isn't that you let yourself be deeply influenced by something. A zealot is someone who is closed to abandoning what they believe in the light of evidence that it's wrong and, worse, who condemns anything that doesn't fit or agree with the truth they think they've found simply because it doesn't fit or agree. Since that's not what I'm doing, I'm okay.

That's a relief! Because I kinda like the idea of a school of Zen literary criticism!

Jean Moreas - 'The Symbolist Manifesto' (1886)

Jean Moreas

The next two books on my reading list are Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach and Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans. I was led to the books while reading an article in Apollo magazine (on of the art mags I subscribe to). I forget which article. Anyway since these are both Symbolist novels, I thought I would post The Symbolist Manifesto by Jean Moreas.

I didn't really know very much about Symbolism but, in getting to know more about it, I ran across this quote from French symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme: "Paint not the thing itself but the effect that it produces." As I've read more, I've sensed that Symbolism may have been one of the movements that ultimately launched the trajectory of modern art that fueled movements like Fauvism, Surrealism, Cubism, and Dada. The movement was embraced by novelists and poets, as well as artists and seems to embrace the decadent, the ornate, the wordy, and the imagination. The mythic image of Edgar Allen Poe is very much part of the Symbolist ethos.

I lifted this translation from the website Mutable Sound. As some of the sentences seem a little odd, I'm thinking this was either translated a long time ago or is simply a somewhat indifferent translation. But who cares? Stuff like this needs to be preserved in some form! Enjoy (I've included examples of Symbolist art throughout the post).

Gustave Moreau, Young Thracian Woman
Carrying the Head of Orpheus

The Symbolist Manifesto by Jean Moreas (translator: C. Liszt)

As with all arts, literature evolves: a cyclical evolution with strictly determined returns and which become more complicated of various modifications brought by the step of time and the confusion of circles. It would be superfluous to point out that every new progressive stage of art corresponds exactly to senile degeneration, at the ineluctable end of the immediately previous school. Two examples will be enough: Ronsard triumphs over the impotence of the last impressionists of Marot, Romanticism unfurls its royal flag on the classical debris badly kept by Casimir Delavigne and Steven de Jouy. It is because any demonstration of art succeeds inevitably in becoming impoverished, in exhausting itself; then, of copy in copy, simulation in simulation, what was full of sap and freshness becomes dried out and shriveled; what was the new and the unprompted becomes banal and commonplace.

So Romanticism, having sounded all the tumultuous warning bells of uprising, had its days of glory and battle, lost of its force and its favour, abdicated its heroic boldness, became ordered and classified, sceptical and full of common sense; in the honorable and mean-minded attempts of the Parnassians, Romanticism hoped for a false resurgence, only finally, such a monarch had to fall into senile decay, and in the end was only able to be dethroned for the naturalism in which one could grant seriously a value of protest only, legitimate but poorly advised, against the insipidity of some novelists then in fashion.

One waited for a new manifestation of art therefore, necessary, unavoidable. This manifestation, brooded for a long time, has just hatched. And every insignificant practical joke of the cheery-eyed press, all the anxieties of the serious critics, every bad mood of the surprised public in its sheepish carelessness, are only bringing about this actual evolution in french letters more and more every day, this evolution which impatient judges have noted to be, by an incredible antinomy, decadent. However, decadent literature is principally tough, stringy, timorous and servile: all the tragedies of Voltaire, for instance, are marked with these signs of decadence. And for what of these reproaches can be claimed as regards the new school? The abuse of pomp, strangeness of metaphor, a new vocabulary or harmony go together with colours and lines: characteristics of any revival.

We have already offered the name of symbolism as the only one able of indicating reasonably the actual tendencies of the creative mind in art. This name can be supported.

It was said at the beginning of this article that the developments of art offer cyclical extremely complicated differences: for example, to track the exact parentage of the new school we should go back to certain poems of Alfred de Vigny, and on up to Shakespeare, even mystical, even further. These issues would require a volume of reviews, saying that Charles Baudelaire therefore must be considered the true forerunner of the current movement, Mr. Stéphane Mallarmé subdivides the sense of mystery and the ineffable Mr. Paul Verlaine broke his honor in the cruel hindrances to poetry that the prestigious fingers of Mr Theodore de Banville had softened up before him. But the Supreme enchantment is not yet consummated: a persistent and jealous labor invites newcomers.

***

Enemy of education, declamation, wrong feelings, objective description, symbolist poetry tries to dress the Idea in a sensitive form which, however, would not be its sole purpose, but furthermore that, while serving to express the Idea in itself, would remain subjective. The Idea, in its turn, should not be allowed to be seen deprived of the sumptuous lounge robes of extraneous analogies; because the essential character of symbolic art consists in never approaching the concentrated kernel of the Idea in itself. So, in this art, the pictures of nature, the actions of human beings, all concrete phenomena would not themselves know how to manifest themselves; these are presented as the sensitive appearance destined to represent their esoteric affinity with primordial Ideas.

The accusation of obscurity that has been made as regards such aesthetics by readers with broken staffs is not surprising. But what do we make of this? The Pythian Odes of Pindar, Hamlet of Shakespeare, the Vita Nuova of Dante, the Second Faust of Goethe, the Temptation of Saint-Antoine of Flaubert were not they also taxed by ambiguity?

For the precise translation of its synthesis, it is necessary for symbolism to take on an archetypal and complex style; of unpolluted terms, periods which brace themselves alternating with periods of undulating lapses, significant pleonasms, mysterious ellipses, outstanding anacoluthia, any audacious and multiform surplus; finally the good language – instituted and updated–, good and luxuriant and energetic french language from before Vaugelas and Boileau-Despréaux, the language of François Rabelais and Philippe de Commines, Villon, Ruteboeuf and so many other free writers hurling their acute language in the same manner as the Toxotes of Thrace hurled their snaky arrows.

Rhythm: the ancient metric enlivened; a chaos learnedly ordered; the rhyme illucescente and beaten as a buckler of gold and bronze, to rhymes of unintelligible fluidity; the alexandrine with numerous and mobile stopping; the job of first certain numbers – seven, nine, eleven, thirteen – bold in the various rhythmic combinations of which they are the price.

***

Here I ask the permission of you to act out my small INTERMEZZO drawn from a precious book: The Treaty of French Poetry, where Mr Theodore de Banville made to relentlessly incite, such the God of Claros, monstrous donkey ears on the head of many a Midas.

Attention!

John William Waterhouse, The Crystal Ball

The figures who speak in the room are:
A DETRACTOR OF The SYMBOLIC SCHOOL
MR THEODORE DE BANVILLE
ERATO

THE DETRACTOR. – oh! these decadent! What a grandiloquence! What a rigmarole! Our grand Molière was right when he said:

This style represents a vainglory which they call

Fate of good character and the truth.

THEODORE DE BANVILLE. – our grand Molière describes two evils towards which they themselves bring out as many good characters as possible. Of what good character? Of what truth? Apparent disorder, bright insanity, passionate grandiloquence are the truth of lyric poetry. To fall in the excess of figures and colour, the evil is not great and it is not thereabouts that our literature will perish. In the most poor days, when it expires undoubtedly, as for instance under the first Empire, it is not grandiloquence and abuse of the ornaments which kill it, it is the platitude. Taste and the natural are nice things surely less useful in poetry than they think. The Romeo and Juliet of Shakespeare is throughout written in a style as affected as that of the marquis of Mascarille; that of Ducis shines with the happiest and most natural simplicity.

THE DETRACTOR. – but the caesura, the caesura! They violate the caesura!!

THEODORE DE BANVILLE. – in his remarkable prosody published in 1844, Mr Wilhem Tenint establishes that Alexandrine poetry accepts twelve different combinations, on the basis of poetry with its caesura after the first syllable, to arrive at poetry which has its caesura after the eleventh syllable. It amounts to saying that in reality the caesura can be put after any syllable of Alexandrine poetry. Also, it establishes that it is acceptable to have poems with caesuras after the sixth, seventh, eighth, or ninth, or tenth syllables, of all manner of variety and diverse placement. Let us go further: let us dare to proclaim complete freedom and say that in these complex questions the ear decides alone. They perish always without ever having been too audacious but rather not having been audacious enough.

THE DETRACTOR. – terror! You do not respect the alternation of rhymes! You know, Mister, that the decadent dare to afford even gaps! even gaps!!

THEODORE DE BANVILLE. – gaps, the diphthong clearing up syllables in the poem, all other things which were forbidden and especially the facultative job of the masculine and female rhymes provides the poet of genius one thousand means to create delicate effects always various, unforeseen, and bottomless. But to use this complicated and learned poetry, genius and a musical ear is needed, while with the fixed rules, the most mediocre writers can, by obeying them truthfully, make, alas! fairly good poems! Who therefore earned anything in the regulation of poetry? The mediocre poets. Themselves!

THE DETRACTOR. – it seems to me however that the romantic revolution…

THEODORE DE BANVILLE. – Romanticism was an incomplete revolution. Whatever misfortune Victor Hugo, that victorious Hercules with his bloody hands, is not an absolute revolutionary. He let live a party of monsters who were his responsibility to exterminate with his arrows of fire!

THE DETRACTOR. – any renovation is madness! The simulation of Victor Hugo, here is the starting point of french poetry!

THEODORE DE BANVILLE. – when Hugo emancipated poetry, those who taught using his example had to think the poets to come would like him be free and only constrained by they themselves. But this has become for us a love of servitude which the new poets have copied and imitated in their envy for his forms, the combinations, the chalice, the further habits of Hugo, rather than endeavoring to find the new. That’s how, manufactured for the yoke, we fall again from one serfhood into another one. After the classical banality, there was the romantic banality, the banality of the chalice, the banality of sentences, the banality of rhymes; and the banality, that is to say the commonplace become a compulsive thing, in poetry as anywhere else, it is Death. Contrariwise, let us dare to live! and to live it is to sniff the air of the sky and not the breath of our neighbour, this neighbour he should be a God!

Scène II

(Invisible) ERATO. – your Treaty of French Poetry is a delightful, chief work Banville. But the young poets have some blood until with eyes battling against monsters they graze by the side of Nicolas Boileau; they claim you in the field of honour, and you are silent mister Banville!

THEODORE DE BANVILLE (dreamer). – curse! I would have failed in my duty of elder and of lyricist!

(The author of the Exiles pushes out a pitiful sigh and the intermezzo finishes.)

***

Prose – novels, news, stories, fancies, – evolves in a similar sense as does the poem. Elements, seemingly heterogeneous, coincide in that place: Stendhal brings the translucent psychology, Balzac the swelling vision, Flaubert the cadenzas of sentences in ample volutes. Mr Edmund de Goncourt his evocative modernist impressionism.

The comprehension of the symbolic novel is polymorphous: sometimes a unique figure moves in circles distorted by his clean hallucinations, his constitution; in this distortion lies the only reality. Beings in a mechanical gesture, in shaded silhouettes, fidget around the unique personage: these are to him only pretexts to feeling and to guess-work. This in itself is a tragic or farcical mask, of a humanity nevertheless perfect although rational. – sometimes the mob, superficially affected by the ensemble of ambient representations, itself borne along with these alternatives, these conflicts and stagnances towards acts which will abide in incompletion. By instants, individual wills manifest themselves; they earn, gather together, spread for a purpose which, attained or missed, disperses them in the primitive elements. – Sometimes mythical recalled fantasies, from ancient Démogorgôn through Bélial, from Kabires through Nigromans, appear sumptuously grouped on the rock of Caliban or by the forest of Titania in mixolydian modes of the barbitons and octocordes.

So contemptuous of the babyish method of naturalism, – Mr Zola, shone, was saved by his marvellous writer’s instinct – the symbolic novel – impressionism will build up its edifice of subjective perversion, based on this axiom: that art would not know how to search into the objective, what an extremely succinct and simple starting point.

Ferdinand Hodler, Night

Amy Herzog - '4000 Miles'

As mentioned in a prior post, I have assigned myself a reading list for the late winter early spring (maybe it just seems like late winter since we've hardly had any snow!). While I just finished a Zola novel, the official start is now. I have seven books stacked on my desk in order of length (starting with short stuff to build momentum). So my first read is very short, a play. Amy Herzog's 4000 Miles. I decided to add this after reading a conversation with Herzog in BOMB.

I've always found that reading drama is a bit dicey. It's a play; you're supposed to watch it be performed. You're not supposed to read it. Plus, I think I'm also below average at successfully reading drama. But anyway...

My first reaction after finishing the play was: "That's it?"  It seemed like nothing much happened. However, as the play simmered in my mind a bit, I started to realize what Herzog was doing. As it began to sink in, it made me think Herzog is a really good writer! Very adept at avoiding those cheesy melodramatic 'moments of truth' and yet still giving us the payoff such moments usually deliver.

As usual on this blog, I'll avoid saying too much about the plot since I hate to be a spoiler. However, what this play seems to be about is closing distances (hence the clever title) in relationships. The two central characters - Leo and his grandmother Vera - live very far apart from each other. He ends up crashing a her place after riding his bike across the country. At the start of the play, Vera has her dead husband's name on the buzzer and trades calls everyday with a neighbor she doesn't like to make sure neither dies and rots for three days before they are found. This is clearly a disconnected woman.

Leo, on the other hand, seems to be breaking up with everyone in his life for one reason or another. In the middles of crossroads in his life, he decides to bike across the country (almost as if running away). In Scene Two, he professes that "if you approach people with love and trust you can count on getting the same things back from them". However, he approaches his grandmother as if he's a pest and seems more than a little wary of her. He uses his approach with absolute strangers but not his own grandmother.

4000 Miles is about closing these distances. It's very well done in that, like I said, it avoids any unrealistic and maudlin moments. On the other hand, I think I might have enjoyed to see and feel the transition a bit more in the characters. The scenes in the play are windows into the unexpectedly long visit that Leo has with Vera. You can see the progress the characters are making with each other and the way connection is forged. However, for me, it would have felt better to see and feel the relationship build as opposed to the scene-by-scene 'progress reports'. Now I imagine that much of that feeling is up to the actors to convey in their performances, which means Herzog gives her cast a lot of room to drive the emotional core of her story.

I enjoyed reading 4000 Miles and will probably re-read it at some point to deepen my grasp of what Herzog is dealing with. I'd would love to see it performed live or to see another play by Herzog (assuming this one has finished its run). Best of all, I feel as though I encountered something very subtle and natural in her approach to characterization and plot movement that feels very special and unique. Enjoyable to see such control and confidence and certainly something to learn from.

Thomas Mann - Death in Venice (1912)

Death in Venice is a short read, probably more a novella than a novel, but it is fascinating. I read the translation by Michael Henry Heim (pictured here) and found it beautifully rendered, though obviously I cannot comment on how 'faithfully' it was translated. I was attracted to this book because - again - it was written by a brilliant author (who happens to be gay) at the start of the last century.

The plot concerns a repressed older man named Gustav Aschenbach, a celebrated writer and leading thinker of his time.  Acting on a sudden impulse, Aschenbach travels in order to reinvigorate his interest in his latest writing project. He ends up in Venice, where he is dazzled by an extremely handsome teen-aged Polish boy named Tadzio. Aschenbach falls in love with Tadzio but also learns that there is a deadly cholera outbreak in Venice, which is being hushed up so as not to scare tourists away.

That's a spare plot but, as with most novels from this period, the real point is philosophical and interior. As the novel progresses and Aschenbach becomes more obsessed with Tadzio, he comprehends the immorality of his feelings but has little desire to curb them. As he learns more and more clearly how serious the cholera threat is, he never warns Tadzio or his parents to leave. I found this repulsive and certainly picked out the nasty parallel between the callous greed of the Venetians towards the tourists and Aschenbach's failure to warn the object of his feelings.

If you read no deeper than this, Death in Venice ends up being a tawdry story about a pedophile, complete with self-deluded justifications. However, this is the wrong way to interpret the story. First of all, I question whether Tadzio is real or just in Aschenbach's head. Second, even if Tadzio is real, I don't think Aschenbach's interest in him is truly sexual. Rather, Tadzio is a symbol for 'the ideal youth' Aschenbach missed in his own life and now regrets. For me, the Greek mythological imagery that peppers the text encourages this interpretation. At first, the passages use Greek imagery to describe how handsome Tadzio is (impossibly handsome really). Later this imagery transforms into a nightmarish bacchanal rite. Towards the very end of the book, it transforms again. As Aschenbach follows Tadzio and his family around Venice with the boy looking back to "make certain his admirer was still following him", I read it as a variation on the Orpheus myth with Aschenbach cast as Eurydice. Given that the cholera epidemic is in full rage, the fact Aschenbach loses sight of Tadzio here makes the metaphor fit and resonate. Finally, in the very last page Tadzio is portrayed as if he is a siren, and the ending certainly suggests his 'attractive power' has led to a fatal conclusion.

So what to make of all this? It feels as if Aschenbach (and by extension Mann who was a homosexual pretending to be straight and married) is musing over his youth and the lost potential it represents. Aschenbach fights by breaking his erudite but sterile existence but, more obviously and ridiculously, also has himself literally made-over to try to look younger. From what I have read of other readers' comments, earlier translations of Death in Venice either shroud the homosexual overtones or cast them deliberately as pedophilia, completely missing the point because they are blinded by knee-jerk homophobia.

It probably required a gay man (or critic) at some point to surface the true theme contained in Death in Venice and encourage its translation. This novel is not about a love affair with a teen-age boy (note that the book never goes there). It's about feelings of loss gay men may have when thinking back on our youth before we came out. These are complex feelings because while they involve regret, they do not mean regretting the course of one's life. There is a bittersweet, almost poetic, sensibility bleeding out of Mann's prose. Perhaps this was doomed to be overlooked until attitudes towards homosexuality became less hysterical and newer translations could bring the truth of this novel to light.

Mann understands clearly the danger these emotions represent. At the beginning of chapter three, he has Aschenbach express his disgust for the 'make-over' tactic, when he witnesses the same thing being done by another older man. Mann's only possible point with this passage is to clarify that the attempt to recapture youth is pathetic and doomed to failure. Aschenbach himself, however, is carried away through Tadzio and is "no longer inclined to self-criticism...reluctant to analyze motives". He loses his sense of objectivity and becomes trapped by his regrets, feelings, and musings. He cannot move on, either physically - by leaving Venice - or mentally.

This idea of youth being forever lost is taken to an even deeper level in the text. Mann describes Tadzio - or more specifically youth in general - metaphorically through the myth of Hyacinth who "loved by two gods was doomed to death". Another parallel is drawn to Narcissus, the handsome young man who fell in love with his reflection and died (an obvious cautionary message there). More prosaically, Aschenbach notices that Tadzio bears physical traits that suggest he is not destined to live long. Repeatedly, as the book progresses, there is an inextricable link forged between the beauty or potential of Tadzio/youth and it's fleeting quality.

This all makes it clear that Aschenbach's attraction to Tadzio and his failure to help him by revealing what he knows about the cholera plague is not a story about pedophilia. Mann is writing a goodbye letter to his youthful self. It's about how beautiful our youth is, yet a recognition that it must end and we have to let it go.  We all grow older, and there is an inevitable sense of loss related to this passage.

I'll rest my case by noting Mann wrote Death in Venice after an actual encounter where he saw a handsome young Polish man while on vacation with his family. His wife noted the encounter in interviews but said Mann did not pursue the young man as Aschenbach did. It's also telling that Mann was in his late thirties when he wrote Death in Venice, about the time many men may end up reassessing who they are on some level. I know I did. This passage is often spoofed and dismissed as the 'mid-life crisis', involving fast red cars, comb-overs, divorce, and affairs with bimbos. However, for many men - obviously Mann and definitely for me - it's not like that at all. It's a point to stop and think about the difference between being a 'young man' and a 'man'. Death in Venice is about this rite of passage, although it is a tragedy because it focuses on man who is unable to let go of his youth and move forward.

Turning to Henryk Sienkiewicz

One of my favorite authors (if not my absolute favorite) is Henryk Sienkiewicz. He wrote what is in my opinion one of the best - if not the best - piece of literature I've ever read (The Deluge), however I love almost everything I've ever read by him. So after being run over by the nihilistic steamroller that was Celine's Journey to the End of the Night and deciding my next read had to be something by an author whose works are more on the heroic side, I turned to Henryk.

He's huge in Poland, and I am half Polish! He achieved his success largely based on three novels he wrote called 'the Trilogy'. The Trilogy is a historical saga with a highly nationalistic themes set during the Polish Commonwealth of the 1600s. The novels were written at a time when Poland had lost its independence so, in some ways, they were a bolster to the pride of the Polish people. Each of the three novels is massive. The first book of the Trilogy is With Fire and Sword which comes in at 1,135 pages. It's also the first book of his that I read. The second book in the Trilogy (The Deluge) is 1,761 pages, while the final novel (Pan Michael) is a mere 714 pages. But the page counts don't matter. All the books in the Trilogy, especially the first two, are epic adventures. Real page-turners in every sense of the word.

There are several reason his books grab me so much. First, his characters are awesome. I can't imagine anyone not falling in love with the always ready to go drinking, cowardly...rather sketchy...but when the chips are down fiercely loyal Pan Zagloba. It's impossible not to like and root for tomboy Basia. Pan Yan is the epitome of 'hero' and he's a fantastic protagonist. Not only are the characters involving, but the plots are epic in scope and fantastic reads. On top of this, Sienkiewicz creates a strong thematic backdrop for those looking for such things.

Aside from his many adventure novels, he wrote Quo Vadis about the rise of Christianity during the Roman Empire. He also penned a more interior novel in Without Dogma, earning the deep admiration of none other than the brilliant Leo Tolstoy. The quality of Sienkiewicz's work ultimately won him the 1905 Nobel Prize for Literature.

So, as I said, when I needed some fresher air after Celine. Sienkiewicz was the first author I thought to turn to. This time, I'm tackling the final major novel of his that I have not read: Children of the Soil. I have little information about the plot, so I'm flying blind here. But so far I'm enjoying it very much.

If you want to try out Sienkiewicz, I would suggest either In Desert and Wilderness (his 'children's story'), Quo Vadis, or With Fire and Sword.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine - Journey to the End of the Night

I haven't posted much lately, but I have been reading. Just had a very challenging book on my plate. I'm fascinated by Paris in the early 20th Century: the explosion of philosophy, the unprecedented freedom of expression, the manifestos, the radicalism, all of it. It seems to be such an exciting time for a creative person to have been alive, as if the air was electric with change and genius. (I clearly romanticize the period a bit!).

Much of the literature is absurdist, existentialist, even nihilistic as writers shattered standards, social norms, and revolutionized self-expression. As a result, much of the literature is rather black in outlook. For some reason, though, I have always found this literature stimulating, even when it is downbeat, because of the questions being asked and dealt with. My latest read from the period is the infamous Journey to the End of the Night by the equally infamous Louis-Ferdinand Celine.

Celine published Journey to the End of the Night  in 1934, and I believe it was his first novel. It was a success but also shocked the critics of the time. The shock value may have faded a bit by now, but what remains shocking about Celine's writing is the unmitigated revulsion and social cruelty bleeding from every sentence of his prose.

In one sense, Journey to the End of the Night builds off the realism of Zola. It takes a detailed, semi-autobiographical approach to the 'story'. However, there is no plot, no true conflict, and no character development. What we do get is a very clear view of the narrator's reflections on his life and the people around him. The narrator - named Ferdinand Bardamu - is a directionless failure, battered by life, and moving from one negative environment to the next, always feeling alienated and alone (and even hated). Add to this a strong nihilistic streak and Celine's prose, which is very casual and colloquial, and you have something thoroughly 'modern' in purpose and style.

Celine writes with utter candor, his brutal observations and acidic black humor adding a layer of omnipresent loathing to the bleak potpourri of the novel. That said, Celine has a wonderful command of language and is able to deliver stunning turns of phrase to perfectly capture the thoughts he wants to get across. This can be thought-provoking as well as appalling. A few choice lines/images:
- "My soul was as obscene as an open fly."
- "He had always been afraid of life, and now he attached his fear to something different, to death, to his blood pressure, just as for forty years he had attached it to the peril of not being able to finish paying for the house."
- "Youth may be nothing more than a hurry to grow old."
- "The morning papers hang yellow and limp, an enormous artichoke of news going bad."
- "Good work is tolerated only when hammed up."

He is also able to deliver images to illustrate his view of life. The image that has stuck with me most is from the following passage. This sums up Journey to the End of the Night quite well and also neatly encapsulates Celine's view of life and humanity:

"The crowd was outside a butcher shop. You had to squeeze into the circle to see what was going on. It was a pig, an enormous pig. He was groaning in the middle of the circle, like a man who's being pestered, but louder. The people were tormenting him, they never stopped. They'd twist his ears just to hear him squeal. He'd tug at his rope and try to escape and squirm and wriggle his feet in the air. Other people would poke him and prod him, and he'd bellow even louder with the pain. Everyone was laughing more and more.

"The pig couldn't manage to hide...He couldn't escape from those people, and he knew it. He kept urinating the whole time, but that didn't help him either...No hope. Everybody was laughing. The butcher back in his shop was exchanging signs and jokes with his customers and gesticulating with a big knife."

No lack of clarity there. Journey to the End of the Night represents - without doubt - the bleakest view of humanity and life I have ever encountered in a serious novel. The characters careen through events and experiences which suggest that - to Celine - life (the journey to the end of the night of the title) is a meaningless gauntlet of torment to endure before we die. As a result, the vices and crimes of characters are rarely described with the dramatic flair or outrage one might encounter in the novels of Camus or Zola. The vice is natural, the crimes irrelevant. His people are too jaded to find drama in anything and too petty and/or aware of the hopelessness of life to be outraged.

As I said, I find the literature of this period stimulating despite it's sometimes black tone. However, this book was almost too much even for me. The fidelity of Celine to his pessimism and disgust for life is artistically impressive, but it makes for a very tough read. I will also say that Celine sometimes loses control of his material, with sections of the novel lacking purpose. The book could have been condensed by perhaps 50-100. At the same time, the drudgery of the book is part of the point.

As always, I like to visit these dark corners of the human psyche, so I'm glad I've read Celine. If nothing else, I've expanded my education. Will I read another book by him? I'll give an answer I think Celine would approve of: What the hell for?

Jean-Paul Sartre - 'The Wall'

The Wall is a collection of five short stories that Jean-Paul Sartre published in 1939, the year after he published his electrifying novel Nausea - one of the key works of fiction in Existentialism. This post is about the first story in the collection, also titled 'The Wall'. It's about a man - Pablo Ibbieta - who captured during the Spanish Civil War. He and two other prisoners are sentenced to death by firing squad. How the prisoners handle their impending death is the launch pad from which Sartre expounds his Existentialist creed, and the story is chock full of imagery and loaded language. I definitely won't do the story justice, but here's some of what I pulled out of it.

The story begins with a mock trial, and the first line is: "They pushed us into a big white room and I began to blink because the light hurt my eyes." This image evokes a meeting with God in the afterlife and the judgement religion says we will face. However, the judgement here is a military tribunal with no concerns for morality or justice, good or evil, innocence or guilt. Sartre is clearly likening this irrational procedure to our illusions of divine justice. Given the randomness of existence - who lives and who dies - how can God be much different than these bureaucrats?

In their cold cell, Pablo and two other prisoners - Juan Mirbal and Tom Steinbock - try to make sense of their impending death. Tom tries to warm up by exercising, but fails to do so. He just winds himself. His futile efforts are a metaphor for the futility of any action that attempts to avoid the 'cold' reality of death (the 'wall' of the story's title). Our actions do not change the fundamental fact of our reality: that we will die.

Tom deals with his sentence the best - on the surface. He almost seems to go on as normal with no pronounced reaction, but Sartre soon shows us something different. When Tom seeks to comfort the horrified Juan, Sartre asserts he is doing so because "it would have passed his time and he wouldn't have been tempted to think about himself". Again, Sartre's words are full of meaning. Tom is simply ignoring the issue; he's in a kind of denial. Later, when Tom references the wall they will stand against when executed, he seems to begin dealing with his death. As he imagines the firing squad, he says, "I'll think how I'd like to get inside the wall, I'll push against it with my back...with every ounce of strength I have, but the wall will stay, like in a nightmare." Tom cannot avoid the fact if his own death no matter how hard he tries.

In contrast, Juan is a young man who never really accepts or faces his death.  Because of his youth, both Tom and Pablo reason that he will be spared. But when the prisoners learn they are to be shot in at dawn, Juan's reaction is shocked disbelief ("Not me...I didn't do anything."). The jailer responds with a shrug, and we even get the impression that the wrong sentence has been attached to these three men through some clerical error. Age and innocence mean nothing in the face of death. As Juan emotionally breaks down in response to his death, Pablo thinks critically: 'the kid made more noise than we did, but he was less touched." As the story progresses, we see that Juan's reaction to death is paralysis. Complete fear. He is passive and neither resists nor accepts his mortality.

Meanwhile Pablo offers up gallows humor about death. He refuses to cry, because he "wants to due cleanly". He also rejects the comforts offered by his captors: cigarettes and alcohol. He avoids all physical, philosophical/spiritual, and emotional means of comforting himself about his mortality. He thinks: "Several hours or several years of waiting is all the same when you have lost the illusion of being eternal." Of the three men, only Pablo survives. I won't how or why, but it's enough to say that he escapes through a completely random chance event. This blackly humorous ending underlines Sartre's point that there is no fairness about existence, no justice. This lack of overarching morality is one of the hallmarks of Existentialism.

'The Wall' is a very short story and a cool little read if you enjoy early twentieth century literature. There's a lot to think about and read into this brief story; well worth a read.

Influx of Input

I have been on fire the last few days: amazon.com, updating the Netflix queue, and reviewing my magazine subscriptions. Here's what's in and what's coming:

• Two new CDs by BT: If The Stars Are Eternal So Are You And I and Nuovo Morceau Subrosa
• Renewed subscription to ArtNews
• New subscription: BOMB - A magazine in which artists, musicians, authors, etc. are interviewed by other artists, musicians, authors, etc.
• Swann's Way, Marcel Proust - Gotta give this guy a try.
• Death in Venice, Thomas Mann - Angst from the early 20th Century
• The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov - Absurdist lit from Russia
• Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Celine - Comments about this novel promise that it will make Sartre and Zola look like lighthearted romps
• The Complete Stories, Franz Kafka - I have yet to read "The Metamorphosis"!
• Orpheus - directed by Jean Cocteau (this is coming on the Netflix queue) - Led to this by his connection to Andre Gide.

Lots of stuff for my mind to digest. Oh but I have neglected to mention what's here at our home now from Netflix...ah yes...The Muppets! One must moderate oneself.

Here's Animal! He's always been my favorite!

C.P. Cavafy

C.P. Cavafy was a Greek poet (born in 1863) who lived much of his life in Alexandria, Egypt. He isn't an especially well known poet, although he did publish during his lifetime and seems to have been read by some of the avant-garde writers of the day (such as Gide).  I was drawn to him because of several factors, the main two being that he used Classical motifs and characters as inspirations in his poetry (something I liked doing for quite a while) and that he was open - and apologetically open - about being gay.

Many of his poems are love poems to and about gay men, which the author of the introduction to the hardcover volume of his poetry that I bought recently suggests may be why Cavafy did not publish more work. Back then, naturally, it was not acceptable to be out.

I've picked up several works by writers who were openly gay at around the turn of the century, so hopefully I'll get to reading them soon. I've always been fascinated by the first 20-25 years of the 20th Century. It seems like such a heady time, with all the rebellion in painting and writing, music and philosophy. And I've always wondered how fantastic and exciting it would have been to be in Paris at this period, which seemed like such an epicenter of the new culture of bohemians, intellectuals, and radicals. Reading gay men at that time seems like an interesting project!

Anyway, Cavafy has a rather unique writing style for his time. He seems to be blank verse yet very direct in his writing, a clarity which seems opposed to some of the work that would come after him. And yet he was devoid of the flowery trappings of poets before him and perhaps of his own time.  I was struck by this particular piece written in about 1910 - one of his more famous - called Ithaca.  The message is clear and well-expressed, and the references to the Odyssey speak to his fascination with ancient Greek and Roman culture. I also really like the cadence of the words; they flow with a meter as patient and quiet as the speed of travel the work recommends to us in life.

Ithaca
(translation by Daniel Mendelsohn)

As you set out on the way to Ithaca
hope that the road is a long one,
filled with adventures, filled with discoveries.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
Poseidon in his anger: do not fear them,
you won't find such things on your way
so long as your thoughts remain lofty, and a choice
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
savage Poseidon; you won't encounter them
unless you stow them away inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up before you.

Hope that the road is a long one.
Many may the summer mornings be
when - with what pleasure, with what joy -
you first put into harbors new to your eyes;
may you stop at Phoenician trading posts
and there acquire the finest wares:
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and heady perfumes of every kind:
as many heady perfumes as you can.
Many Egyptian cities may you visit
that you may learn, and go on learning, from their sages.

Always in your mind keep Ithaca.
To arrive there is your destiny.
But do not hurry your trip in any way.
Better that it may last for many years;
that you drop anchor at the island an old man,
rich with all you've gotten on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.

Ithaca gave you the beautiful journey;
without her you wouldn't have set upon the road.
But now she has nothing left to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca didn't deceive you.
As wise as you will have become, with so much experience,
you will understand, by then, these Ithacas; what they mean.

crazy jay blue)

A late entry for National Poetry Month!

ee cummings wrote this one in 1958, and I've loved it ever since one of my best friends in high school introduced it to me by giving it to me as a description of myself. For at least seven or eight years I have kept a copy of it posted at work as a reminder of some of my strengths . I especially love the construction with the unclosed parens, which create a loop that suggests the poem goes on forever.

crazy jay blue)
demon laughshriek
ing at me
your scorn of easily

hatred of timid
& loathing for (dull all
regular righteous
comfortable) unworlds

thief crook cynic
(swimfloatdrifting
fragment of heaven)
trickstervillain

raucous rogue &
vivid voltaire
you beautiful anarchist
(i salute thee

An Indian At The Burial-Place Of His Fathers

This is another poem by William Cullen Bryant, an American poet from the 1800s. He was an American of the Romanticist school and editor of the New York Evening Post. When I read a lot of his work - the most famous being "Thanatopsis" (which I also have posted earlier in this blog - I think of paintings by the Hudson River School painters. They seem imbued with a sense of the early days of our country mixed with a sense of Transcendentalism.

Unfortunately, Bryant seems to have been neglected beyond his masterpiece "Thanatopsis". That's a shame as in my opinion he's an American treasure. This poem, "An Indian At The Burial-Place Of His Fathers", is just as good as "Thanatopsis". Maybe someday Bryant will come back into vogue.

An Indian At The Burial-Place Of His Fathers

It is the spot I came to seek,--
My fathers' ancient burial-place
Ere from these vales, ashamed and weak,
Withdrew our wasted race.
It is the spot--I know it well--
Of which our old traditions tell.

For here the upland bank sends out
A ridge toward the river-side;
I know the shaggy hills about,
The meadows smooth and wide,--
The plains, that, toward the southern sky,
Fenced east and west by mountains lie.

A white man, gazing on the scene,
Would say a lovely spot was here,
And praise the lawns, so fresh and green,
Between the hills so sheer.
I like it not--I would the plain
Lay in its tall old groves again.

The sheep are on the slopes around,
The cattle in the meadows feed,
And labourers turn the crumbling ground,
Or drop the yellow seed,
And prancing steeds, in trappings gay,
Whirl the bright chariot o'er the way.

Methinks it were a nobler sight
To see these vales in woods arrayed,
Their summits in the golden light,
Their trunks in grateful shade,
And herds of deer, that bounding go
O'er hills and prostrate trees below.

And then to mark the lord of all,
The forest hero, trained to wars,
Quivered and plumed, and lithe and tall,
And seamed with glorious scars,
Walk forth, amid his reign, to dare
The wolf, and grapple with the bear.

This bank, in which the dead were laid,
Was sacred when its soil was ours;
Hither the artless Indian maid
Brought wreaths of beads and flowers,
And the gray chief and gifted seer
Worshipped the god of thunders here.

But now the wheat is green and high
On clods that hid the warrior's breast,
And scattered in the furrows lie
The weapons of his rest;
And there, in the loose sand, is thrown
Of his large arm the mouldering bone.

Ah, little thought the strong and brave
Who bore their lifeless chieftain forth--
Or the young wife, that weeping gave
Her first-born to the earth,
That the pale race, who waste us now,
Among their bones should guide the plough.

They waste us--ay--like April snow
In the warm noon, we shrink away;
And fast they follow, as we go
Towards the setting day,--
Till they shall fill the land, and we
Are driven into the western sea.

But I behold a fearful sign,
To which the white men's eyes are blind;
Their race may vanish hence, like mine,
And leave no trace behind,
Save ruins o'er the region spread,
And the white stones above the dead.

Before these fields were shorn and tilled,
Full to the brim our rivers flowed;
The melody of waters filled
The fresh and boundless wood;
And torrents dashed and rivulets played,
And fountains spouted in the shade.

Those grateful sounds are heard no more,
The springs are silent in the sun;
The rivers, by the blackened shore,
With lessening current run;
The realm our tribes are crushed to get
May be a barren desert yet.

Guillaume Apollinaire: Mirabeau Bridge

Photo: Eric Rougier

This is my favorite poem by Guillame Apollinaire, a French poet, art critic, and enfant terrible from the first quarter of the 20th century. He wrote brilliantly about modern art, knew all the leading Parisian artists of the time, and is credited with coining the term 'surrealism'. He had a rich life and died young.


Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away
And lovers
Must I be reminded
Joy came always after pain

The night is a clock chiming
The days go by not I

We're face to face and hand in hand
While under the bridges
Of embrace expire
Eternal tired tidal eyes

The night is a clock chiming
The days go by not I

Love elapses like the river
Love goes by
Poor life is indolent
And expectation always violent

The night is a clock chiming
The days go by not I

The days and equally the weeks elapse
The past remains the past
Love remains lost
Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away

The night is a clock chiming
The days go by not I

Truman Capote: "A Christmas Memory"

If you're looking for a great holiday read...this is the place I recommend you go. I love this book! Plain and simple. I always save it for the holiday season though, and I never read it at any other time. It's become a holiday tradition. The three short stories all take place in holiday seasons during the depression and feature the same setting and characters, so they form a nice group for a single volume.

"A Christmas Memory" is really the core of the book for me, and it's my favorite short story ever. I've read it every Christmas for something like ten years now and I have the same powerful, emotional reaction every time...and I'm not given to outbursts of emotional vulnerability. I smile, laugh, cry, and daydream about my own Christmas memories every time I read it. No other story affects me like this one, and I think everyone will see a little of themselves or their childhood somewhere in these pages. The other two stories are very well done. I'd probably rave about them much more if I could value each on its own merits, but they do get lost in the glare of "A Christmas Memory".

While this is excellent as a literary work, what I really value in these stories is their beauty, simplicity, and truth. Highly recommended for a holiday evening with hot chocolate, a lit tree, and Xmas carols playing. For an even better impact, there is a CD out there of Truman Capote reading "A Christmas Memory". Well worth picking up if you want to share this story as a holiday traditional with your family.

Two Years Before the Mast

Richard Henry Dana (1815-1882)

While I've been continuing with my readings in transcendentalism (see previous posts), I also have needed a little fiction fix. This is being satisfied by Richard Henry Dana's 1840 novel Two Years Before the Mast. The novel represents Dana's recollections of having served aboard a sailing ship as a young man, new to the life of a sailor.  It became a huge bestseller at the time once the Gold Rush picked up steam, because it described California in those days. I was led to the novel during my Herman Melville kick. I read in Melville's biography that he had read Two Years Before the Mast and I believe it had influenced his own writing. 

The book is apparently out of print, so I trolled ebay looking for an old or antiquarian hard cover edition for my library. I couldn't find anything I liked, so I hopped onto iBooks and found an edition there. For free! Got to love technology!  So far, the novel is a surprisingly easy to read, with very little in the language to mark it as having been written in the 1800s. This is because Dana's style is very crisp and lacks the filigree and ornamentation sometimes found in writers of the era. I've been reading it on planes and during my business travels, and I find that I like reading books this way because I always worry about how traveling with books can damage them.

Dana also seems to have been an interesting person in real life. Aside from his two years at sea, he was a lawyer who defied the people of his social circle to defend fugitive slaves. He was also a supporter of the Free Soil movement, which fought against slavery expanding into new territories as the United States stretched across the continent to the Pacific.

Naturally, I'm not expecting the literary depth (some might say pretensions) of Melville. That was not Dana's point in writing Two Years Before the Mast. What I'm looking forward to (and already enjoying a bit of) is the idea of reading an account of life back then through a first hand eyewitness recounting actual experiences.  This is one of the reasons I find early US literature so fascinating; it is a means of becoming something of a time traveler and seeing what life was like when our country was growing and not even a hundred years old yet.

By the way, the picture at left is a photo of a replica of the ship that Dana sailed in, the Pilgrim, during his travels.  In fact, I believe Dana Point in California got its name from - you guessed it - Richard Henry Dana.

Chia Tao Poem

So far this my favorite from the book of Chia Tao's poetry I've been reading. The beauty and isolation depicted here is compelling. And the image of the moon and clouds seems reads to me like a symbol for finding clarity of mind.

Overnight At A Mountain Monastery
(translated by Mike O'Connor)

Masked peaks pierce
the sky's cold colors;
here, the trail junctions
with the temple path.

Shooting stars pass
into sparse-branched trees;
the moon travels one way,
clouds the other.

Few people come
to this mountaintop;
cranes do not flock
in the tall pines.

One Buddhist monk,
eighty years old,
has never heard
of the world's affairs.

In O'Connor's notes, he references a story that floored me so much I have to include it. Apparently, in a book written by someone who spent time meeting with Chinese hermits in the mountains during the 1980s, there was a story about an 85 year old monk who had lived in a mountain cave for 50 years. The monk spoke up at one point during a conversation to ask "who this Chairman Mao was whom I kept mentioning".  Wow!

Chai Tao (779-843)

I'm enjoying a compilation of Chia Tao's poetry edited and translated by Mike O'Connor. I had never heard of Chia Tao (or Jia Dao), but I was at a bookstore and was looking through some clearance books that were all around martial arts and spirituality and saw O'Connor's book. It's short, but with this kind of poetry you can't just flip through it quickly and get much out of it.

None of these poems are haiku, but they have an austerity in their subject matter and the way they are written that creates the impact that the best haiku should have. There's a solitude and loneliness running through his work, a quiet that recalls the archetypal image of a monk sitting alone in some forgotten mountain monastery, meditating and writing poetry, while the rest of the world continues on.

The translator notates that Tao had been a Zen monk, and this really seems to inform his work. He also comments on the sometimes cold, dry, or lean feel to Tao's poetry, and he's right. Some of the poems are downright unpoetic (perhaps sometimes due to translation and/or untranslatability of certain passages). I lean towards believing in the strength of the translations, however, because O'Connor is a poet himself if I remember correctly and I find it hard to believe any poet would take time to translate works and render them dry if they were actually rich with symbols and description. Not to say there aren't symbols, but they're more the use of a word that stands for something, without embellishment. In terms of imagery, the poetry also often calls to mind very vivid landscape images but very few words are used to do this.

However, I find the austerity of Tao's poetry to be a strength given what he's trying to do and delivering. His verse seems focused on communicating something that is very immediate and 'in the moment' - sometimes almost like a flash of kensho frozen in his lines and preserved. If he were to embellish with a lot of adjectives and imagery, he would destroy that precision and clarity to no real end. The coldness of the poems to me goes hand in hand with a detachment in the tone that conveys a sense of Zen. There were several times reading his poetry that I recalled my Pete Retreat (see other entries in the blog), and that wonderful feeling of being really alone and away by yourself. There's a kind of undemonstrative happiness that comes out of that which I can feel in Tao's poetry sometimes too. There is also a sense of contemplative regret or melancholy breathing through a lot of the pieces (many are about saying goodbye to people). However, this kind of melancholy isn't depressing or a downer; it sweet, calming, and comforting. Like sitting alone by a fire in a blanket while a snowstorm blows outside....if you've felt this you know what I mean!

O'Connor's notes are pretty good. Sometimes they illuminate certain images (his Glossary of Symbols is really useful!) or just indicate where certain physical locations are. The introduction is excellent as insight into the man who wrote these works. Overall, a great collection.