Lines from Conrad

It was the farthest point of navigation and the culminating point of my experience. It seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on everything about me -- and into my thoughts. It was sombre enough, too -- and pitiful -- not extraordinary in any way -- and not very clear either. No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light.
                                                                                  - Joseph Conrad
                                                                                     Heart of Darkness

It Was Supposed to be Funny

Uncovered: The revealing truth about how we eat now
by Jim O'Brien
in the November 2012 issue of Diablo Magazine

Poem by John Berryman

The first time I read John Berryman I was impressed with his sense of humor and with the self-deprecation in his confessional poetry. I thought, "What a great outlook he has on life." Then I learned he had killed himself. He jumped off the Washington Street Bridge in Minneapolis. Into the Mississippi River. (I always imagine people who jump from bridges regret it mightily on the way down.) It was jarring news, jarring in a way such news rarely is for me. Usually, news of the death of a famous stranger doesn't move me much. And in this case I'd come to Berryman late, so the death was decades old. But it was the nature of it, I guess, the contrast between the despair in the act and what I'd interpreted as his healthy confrontation with his demons in the poetry. Berryman was an alcoholic. Eventually I read his novel, Recovery, about being in rehab, and I got a sense of the hopelessness, loss and pain he must have felt, and perhaps the powerlessness over his condition. I also read his joyful and singular books on Shakespeare and Stephen Crane, and more and more of his poetry, all the time thinking about how prolific he was, in act and mind, despite the pain he must have been in. What can I say about this poem but that I love its tone.

A Prayer After All

Father, Father, I am overwhelmed.

I cannot speak tonight.

Do you receive me back into Your sight?

It seems it must be so, for

strangely the Virgin came into my mind

as I stood beside my bed --

whom I not only have not worshipped

since childhood, but also

harsh words have said of, that she pushed her Son

before his time as come

which he rebuked her for, and leaving home

repudiated hers & her --

and for no reason, standing in the dark

before I had knelt down

(as is my custom) to speak with You, I found

my tongue feeling its way

thro' the Hail Mary, trying phrase by phrase

its strangeness, for the unwelcome

to my far mind estranged, awaiting some

unacceptable sense, and

Father I was amazed I could find none

and I have walked downstairs

to sit and wonder. You must have been Theirs

all these years, & They Yours,

and now I suppose I have prayed to You after all

and Her and I suppose she is the Queen of Heaven

under your greater glory, even

more incomprehensible but forgiving glory.

Poems by Stephen Crane

Along with Isaac Babel, Stephen Crane is my favorite short story writer. (I could throw Trevor, McGahern and Salter in the mix, but then I start to sound wishy-washy.) In the story, "The Open Boat," Crane wrote my favorite opening line; he wrote my favorite ending in "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky." Crane also wrote poems, strange little poems that remind me, no so much in their language or themes as in the way they get where they are going, of Emily Dickinson. Here are three. They have no titles, so I'll just number them. In #1, I like "gardens/ lying at impossible distances." Feels very precisely like life. In #2, I hear the first voice as some lying, hyperbolic evangelist in Ocean Grove, NJ, the revival town near where Crane grew up. The second voice, ironically, sounds like a truth-teller. In poem #3, I like the craving for hope and, of course, "...hence with your red sword of virtue."

1

There was set before me a mighty hill,

And long days I climbed

Through regions of snow.

When I had before me the summit-view,

It seemed that my labor

Had been to see gardens

Lying at impossible distances.

2

"Truth," said a traveller,

"Is a rock, a mighty fortress;

Often have I been to it,

Even to its highest tower,

From whence the world looks back."

"Truth," said a traveller,

"Is a breath, a wind,

A shadow, a phantom;

Long have I pursued it,

But never have I touched

The hem of its garment."

And I believed the second traveller;

For truth was to me

A breath, a wind,

A shadow, a phantom;

And never had I touched

The hem of its garment.

3

Supposing that I should have the courage

To let a red sword of virtue

Plunge into my heart,

Letting to the weeds of the ground

My sinful blood,

What can you offer me?

A gardened castle?

A flowery kingdom?

What? A hope?

Then hence with your red sword of virtue.

Even in the Bitter Core the Seed

If I should apply myself
tongue to skin -- but one should never
press too hard but only lightly
pass over until the object begins
to break down, lightly, so it barely knows
you're trying, until for your gentle persistence
it secrets its essence to you alone,
surrenders for having found finally
your subtle touch agreeable and true,

                                                             lightly,
because you must maintain your application
in duration, almost an apparition, so the taste
that stays sweet comes, leisurely and long,
lightly, so you'll recall that first bright smoothness
even as your (light) effort takes you
all the way to the core, so when you arrive --
and this is inevitable, you must believe it --
you will have come to understand
that even in the bitter core
lies the seed to which your long
and gentle plight has given light.

                                                 

                                                   - J. O'Brien

                                                       

Psychache in the Life of John Kennedy Toole

There's a new, interesting and sensitive biography of John Kennedy Toole out. It's called Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Short, Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces. Or coming out. Not sure if it's out yet. Toole wrote the great comic novel in the Sixties, while stationed at an Army base in Puerto Rico. It was never published in his lifetime. Cory MacLauchlin's book traces the labyrinthine path the manuscript took to publication and fame. Walker Percy enters the story late, but figures as a hero, along with the Toole's mother, for their roles in the novel's publication. Toole killed himself, and the author of the bio considers very realistically,  with insight and compassion, the possible causes of his suicide. Here he summarizes the conclusions of Edwin Schneidman, who studied suicide and those who commit it. It's an accurate elucidation of the conundrum of living with pain but no visible wound.

Foremost suicidologist Edwin Shneidman described suicide as an incredibly complex event. He coined the term "psychache" to express the intricate and complicated condition leading up to suicide. After years of studying suicides and interviewing people with suicidal tendencies, some of whom ultimately carried out the act despite his efforts to help then, Shneidman determined that suicide is not reactive, but rather "purposive." In his definition, it is a "concatenated, complicated, multi-dimensional, conscious, and unconscious 'choice' of the best possible practical solution to a perceived problem, dilemma, impasse, crisis or desperation." And before arriving at the decision to kill oneself, Shneidman argues, the person is in excruciating pain; the pain may have no physical manifestation but still relentlessly tortures the subject. To the person suffering from this "psychache," the pain is just as potent and troubling as the ghost pain riddling the body of an amputee. They cannot point to the wound they feel, but they feel it intensely. In this context, suicide is not a moment of weakness, but rather a final attempt to take control of the pain, regardless of its origin.

                                                                                                 - Cory MacLauchlin

                                                                                                   Butterfly in the Typewriter

Poem by Gevorg Emin

Seemingly simple, but does it describe the Armenian poet himself? Or what has become of someone he knew? Or a country? A people? All humanity? I feel like I was an exclamation point until about the age of 18. Question mark ever since.

The Question Mark

Poor thing. Poor crippled measure

of punctuation. Who would know,

who could imagine you used to be

an exclamation point?

What force bent you over?

Age, time and the vices

of this century?

Did you not once evoke,

call out and stress?

But you got weary of it all,

got wise, and turned like this.

                                 -Gevorg Emin

                                 Translated byDiana Der Hovanessian

Poem by R.S. Thomas

Thomas was a great poet of the second half of the 20th Century. I mean one of the great poets. Welsh (thus the Anglo-spellings), an Anglican priest, often he wrote as if to reconcile his despair at the silence of God with his faith. He wrote about, and universalized, marriage, Welsh nationalism and what he referred to as "the machine," by which I think he meant a coldly engineered future that is slowly crowding out the influence of the human soul. Some of his greatest work was done in and about old age. This one, ostensibly about traveling, I came upon while traveling myself.

Somewhere

Something to bring back to show

you have been there: a lock of God's

hair, stolen from him while he was

asleep; a photograph of the garden

of the spirit. As has been said,

the point of travelling is not

to arrive, but to return home

laden with pollen you shall work up

into the honey the mind feeds on.

What are our lives but harbours

we are continually setting out

from, airports at which we touch

down and remain in too briefly

to recognise what it is they remind

us of? And always in one

another we seek the proof

of experiences it would be worthy dying for.

Surely there is a shirt of fire

this one wore, that is hung up now

like some rare fleece in the hall of heroes?

Surely these husbands and wives

have dipped their marriages in a fast

spring? Surely there exists somewhere,

as the justification for our looking for it,

the one light that can cast such shadows.

R.S. elsewhere on the blog: "Song at the Year's Turning"

2 Short, Ancient Irish Poems

These two poems from 9th Century Ireland (or around the 9th Century) reflect two sides of the complex Irish soul. And weather. One is from springtime and shows the happy side, the optimistic side, the tone of life I associate with my Grandfather, the side that loves God and nature. The other is the bleaker side and while a little obscure, is clearly full of foreboding. I associate it with me.

My understanding is that the first was found scribbled in the margin of a book an unknown 9th Century monk was transcribing by hand. At some point, he was distracted by the birdsongs and the peacefulness of his situation, wrote about it in verse, and was pretty damn happy with how it came out. On the rare occasions when I think I have written something good, a good phrase or sentence or paragraph, I admit to thinking to myself, "good the stuff I write in my cushy seat."

 

Notes of a Monastic Scribe

A hedge before me, one behind,

a blackbird sings from that,

above my small book many-lined

I apprehend his chat.

Up trees, in costumes buff,

mild accurate cuckoos bleat,

Lord love me, good the stuff

I write in a shady seat.

The other poem, I have run across several versions of it, is about winter and it makes me shiver. "Ice-frost time" and all that. Here are three translations, in order of how I like them. The middle one is the most recent version, and is a translation from the Irish by the great 20th Century Irish writer Flann O'Brien, author of, among many things, the novels At Swim Two Birds and The Pour Mouth; both are very funny. The third version below is probably the most poetically accomplished of these translations, but I like but I like #1 best, probably because it's the first I read.

#1

From the Fenian Cycle

A tale I have for you. Ox murmurs,

Winter roars, summer is gone.

Wind high cold, sun low.

Cry is attacking, sea resounding.

Very red raying has concealed form.

Voice of geese has become usual,

Cold has caught the wings of birds,

Ice-frost time; wretched, very wretched.

                                  A tale I have for you.

#2

Flan O'Brien's Version

Here's a song --

stags give tongue

winter snows

summer goes.

High cold blow

sun is low

brief is day

seas give spray.

Fern clumps redden

shapes are hidden

wild geese raise

wonted cries.

Cold now girds

wings of birds

icy time --

that's my rime.

#3

Winter's Approach

List my lay; oxen roar,

Winter chides, Summer's o'er,

Sinks the sun, cold winds rise

Moans assail, ocean cries.

Ferns flush red, change hides all,

Clanging now, gray geese call,

Wild wings cringe, cold with rime,

Drear, most drear, ice-frost time.

Why I read John Clare, Part 2

I also read John Clare for the empathy and compassion. I love in this poem -- I've seen it titled both "Gipsies" and "The Gypsy Camp" -- the perspective dipping inside and out of minds and bodies, how the boy "thinks upon the fire" and the gypsy "tucks his hands up." How the dog "feels the heat too strong" and how his pathetic condition (and the early image of the forest that "lies alone") adds so much impact to the poem's conclusion about the people it describes. Clare wrote this while a resident of the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he died in 1864, in May.

Engraving, Northampton General Lunatic Asylum; thanks, Wik

The Gypsy Camp

The snow falls deep; the forest lies alone;

The boy goes hasty for his load of brakes,

Then thinks upon the fire and hurries back;

The gypsy knocks his hands and tucks them up.

And seeks his squalid camp, half hidden in snow,

Beneath the oak which breaks away the wind,

And bushes close in snow-like hovel warm;

There tainted mutton wastes upon the coals,

And the half-wasted dog squats close and rubs,

Then feels the heat too strong, and goes aloof;

He watches well, but none a bit can spare,

And vainly waits the morsel thrown away.

Tis thus they live -- a picture to the place,

A quiet, pilfering, unprotected race

Why I Read John Clare, Part 1

I read John Clare because I like the sounds, like those of the closing line of this poem from the early-mid-1800s. I also like "the lodging snows..." Fodder is cattle feed; here, brawl means a loud noise or clamor.

Clare, 1820s, image borrowed from the John Clare Society 

The Foddering Boy 

The foddering boy along the crumping snows

With straw-band-belted legs and folded arm

Hastens and on the blast that keenly blows

Oft turns for breath and beats his fingers warm

And shakes the lodging snows from off his clothes,

Buttoning his doublet closer from the storm

And slouching his brown beaver o'er his nose.

Then faces it again -- and seeks the stack

Within its circling fence -- where hungry lows

Expecting cattle making many a track

About the snows -- impatient for the sound

When in huge fork-fulls trailing at his back

He litters the sweet hay about the ground

And brawls to call the staring cattle back.

David Stacton Aphorism

American author David Stacton is, was -- he's done writing now -- known for peppering his narratives with aphorisms. Often, they clearly are coming from the narrator, or are clearly in a character's voice. Other times I find it hard to tell and so figure it's just Stacton making a point he wished to make, some piece of wisdom, some certainty he felt he possessed and that he needed to share. I think it probably felt good to write it and eventually see it in print, even if very few people read it, as very few people read Stacton. He wrote challenging literary novels on wildly varying topics, as well as, under the pseudonym Bud Clifton, pulpy novels with great pulp titles like D is for Delinquent and The Murder Specialist, and one with a rather fine homoerotic cover, Muscle Boy, seen below. As for the following lines from a Stacton novel, they don't quite represent a typical Stacton aphorism, but what struck me was how true the thing about what is not audible seemed, and then how differently I felt about the rest of it. What remains audible for me are not the proper things, but things I said that I wish I hadn't, trivial things for sure, but they refuse to leave me be. What remains audible as well is what I wish I'd said, even if I never meant to say it. 

What is audible is what we said before, trivial things, the proper things for people to say while they wait. What is not audible is what we meant to say, and would so much like to say.

                                                                                             -David Stacton

                                                                                              Old Acquaintance

                                                                                              1964

Poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins Protesting the Cutting Down of Trees

As with Mew, I share with Hopkins a visceral reaction to the cutting down of trees I've known.

Binsley Poplars

felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,

Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,

All felled, felled, are all felled:

    Of a fresh and following folded rank

                    Not spared, not one

                    That dandled a sandalled

              Shadow that swam or sank

On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do

           When we delve or hew --

Hack and rack the growing green!

            Since country is so tender

To touch, her being so slender,

That, like this sleek and seeing ball

But a prick will make no eye at all,

Where we, even where we mean

  

                      To mend her we end her,

           When we hew or delve:

After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.

    Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve

            Strokes of havok unselve

                    The sweet especial scene

Rural scene, a rural scene,

Sweet especial rural scene.

Poem by Charlotte Mew Protesting the Cutting Down of Trees

This is from The Rambling Sailor, published the year my mom was born, 1929. Mew had killed herself by drinking Lysol the year before. I share with her her visceral reaction to the cutting down of trees I've known. Although I can't say it makes me suicidal. Other things maybe. (See also Hopkins response to cut-down trees: Binsey Poplars.)

The Trees Are Down 

    -and he cried with a loud voice:

    Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees --

                                                            (Revelation.)

They are cutting down the great plane-trees at the end of the gardens.

For days there has been the grate of the saw, the swish of the branches as they fall,

The crash of trunks, the rustle of trodden leaves,

With the "Whoops" and the "Whoas," the loud common talk, and the loud common laughs 

     of  the men, above it all.

I remember one evening of a long past Spring

Turning in at a gate, getting out of the cart, and finding a large dead rat in the mud of the drive.

I remember thinking: alive or dead, a rat was a god-forsaken thing,

But at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive.

The week's work here is as good as done. There is just one bough

On roped bole, in the fine grey rain,

Green and high

And lonely against the sky.

(Down now!--)

And but for that

If an old dead rat

Did once, for a moment, unmake the Spring, I might never have thought of him again.

It is not for a moment the Spring is unmade to-day;

These were great trees, it was in them from root to stem;

When the men with the "Whoops" and the "Whoas" have carted the whole of the whispering 

       loveliness away

Half the Spring, for me, will have gone with them.

It is going now, and my heart has been struck with the hearts of the planes;

Half my life it has beat with these, in the sun, in the rains,

In the March wind, the May breeze,

In the great gales that came over to them across the roofs from the great seas.

There was only a quiet rain when they were dying;

They must have heard the sparrows flying,

And the small creeping creatures in the earth where they were lying --

But I, all day, I heard the angels crying

"Hurt not the trees."

Passage from a Chekhov Short Story

Blog formatting won't allow traditional paragraphs, at least not in this case. I like that my grandfather was alive when this story first was published. Melville was still alive. So was Whitman. Crane, as well. Synge. What a world my grandfather was born into... Varvara and Sophia are sisters-in-law. Mashenka is an unlucky woman in a story they've been told by a traveler. Overall, this is a devastating story, but this moment, even though the women are considering killing their father-in-law, Dyudya, and Sophia's husband, Alyoshka, the hunchback, is one of hope, of a dark and bitter hopefulness, as perhaps only Chekhov could find. I find the scene easy to visualize, and that a simple statement like "It's time to sleep" resonates with meanings. I like that Chekhov doesn't describe the sky when Sophia gazes at it "steadily" (in this translation by Robert Payne).

From "The Peasant Women" 

From somewhere behind the church came the mournful song of three voices: two tenors and one bass. And again it was impossible to distinguish the words.

"They're nightbirds all right," Varvara said, laughing.

And she began to whisper about her nightly escapades with the priest's son, and what he said to her, and what his friends were like, and how she carried on with the officials and merchants who came to the house. The mournful songs awoke in Sophia a longing for life and freedom, and she began to laugh. For her, it was all sinful and terrible and sweet to hear about, and she envied Varvara and was sorry that she too had not been a sinner when she was young and beautiful.

From the church cemetery came the twelve strokes of the watchman's rattle, announcing midnight.

"It's time to sleep," Sophia said, getting up. "Dyudya will catch us if we don't!"

They both went quietly into the courtyard.

"I went away and never heard what happened to Masenka afterwards, " Varvara said, making her bed beneath the window.

"He said she died in prison. She poisoned her husband."

Varvara lay beside Sophia, deep in thought, and then she said softly, "I could kill Alyoshka and never regret it."

"God help you, you are talking nonsense!"

When Sophia was dropping asleep, Varvara pressed close to her and whispered in her ear: "Let's kill Dyudya and Alysoshka!"

Sophia shuddered and said nothing, but her eyes were open wide and for a long time she gazed steadily at the sky.

"People might find out," she murmured.

"No, they would never find out. Dyudya is old, and it's time for him to die, and they say they'd say Alyoshka had croaked from drinking!"

"It's terrible.... God would strike us dead...."

"I don't care."

Neither of them slept; they went on thinking in silence.

"It's cold," Sophia said, and she was beginning to shiver all over. "It will soon be light. Are you sleeping?"

"No...Don't listen to me, my dear," Varvara whispered. "I get so mad with those damned swine, and sometimes I don't know what I am saying. Go to sleep -- the dawn will be coming up soon.... Are you asleep?"

                                                                                    -Anton Chekhov, 1891

Line from James Thomson, aka B.V.

 Our poor vast petty life is one dark maze of dreams

                             -Last line of the poem, "Insomnia," 1882 

 

Jeffers Poem

The Yevtushenko poem brought to mind this Jeffers poem. I've always loved its title. And I like that the speaker seems to win the argument with himself. I love the accusation "It is certain you have loved the beauty of storm disproportionately." The poem is from the 1930s, but surely like Jeffers' "present time," ours can seem as if it is "founded on violence" as well.

Self-Criticism in February

by Robinson Jeffers

The bay is not blue but sombre yellow

With wrack from the battered valley, it is speckled with violent foam heads

And tiger-striped with long lovely storm-shadows.

You love this better than the other mask; better eyes than yours

Would feel the equal beauty of the blue.

It is certain you have loved the beauty of storm disproportionately.

But the present time is not pastoral, but founded

On violence, pointed for more massive violence: perhaps it is not

Perversity but need that perceives the storm-beauty.

Well, bite on this: your poems are too full of ghosts and demons,

And people like phantoms -- how often life's are --

And passion so strained that the clay mouths go praying for destruction --

Alas, it is not unusual in life;

To every soul at some time. But why insist on it? And now

For the worst fault: you have never mistaken

Demon nor passion nor idealism for the real God.

Then what is most disliked in those verses

Remains most true. Unfortunately. If only you could sing

That God is love, or perhaps that social

Justice will prevail. I can tell lies in prose.

Yevtushenko Poem

This poem feels right, despite the fact that it seems to preach against everything every therapist I've ever had has tried to tell me. I love "It takes real talent not to dread being terrified/ by your own agonizing lack of talent." And "Indispensable is the cowardice to be cruel/and the observation of small mercies..." And, of course, the phrase, "unprince yourself."

Disbelief in Yourself is Indispensable

by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

While you're alive it's shameful to worm your way into

                                                                            the Calendar of Saints.

Disbelief in yourself is more saintly.

It takes real talent not to dread being terrified

by your own agonizing lack of talent.

Disbelief in yourself is indispensable.

Indispensable to us is the loneliness

                                                   of being gripped in the vise,

so that the darkest night sky will enter you

and skin your temples with the stars,

so that streetcars will crash into the room,

wheels cutting across your face,

so the dangling rope, terrible and alive,

will float into the room and dance invitingly in the air.

Indispensable is any mangy ghost

in tattered, overplayed stage rags,

and if even the shots are capricious,

I swear, they are no more capricious than those who are alive.

Indispensable amidst babbling boredom

are the deadly fear of uttering the right words

and the fear of shaving, because across your cheekbone

graveyard grass already grows.

It is indispensable to be sleeplessly delirious,

to fail, to leap into emptiness.

Probably, only in despair is it possible

to speak all the truth to this age.

It is indispensable, after throwing out dirty drafts,

to explode yourself and crawl before ridicule,

to reassemble your shattered hands

from fingers that rolled under the dresser.

Indispensable is the cowardice to be cruel

and the observation of the small mercies,

when a step toward falsely high goals

makes the trampled stars squeal out.

It's indispensable, with a misfit's hunger,

to gnaw a verb right down to the bone.

Only one who is by nature from the naked poor

is neither naked nor poor before fastidious eternity.

And if from out the dirt,

                                  you have become a prince,

                                                                          but without principles,

unprince yourself and consider

how much less dirt there was before

when you were in the real, pure dirt.

Our self-esteem is such baseness...

The Creator raises to the heights

only those who, even with tiny movements,

tremble with the fear of uncertainty.

Better to cut open your veins with a can opener,

to like like a wino on a spit-spattered bench in the park,

than to come to that very comfortable belief

in your own special significance.

Blessed is the madcap artist,

who smashes his sculpture with relish --

hungry and cold -- but free

from degrading belief in himself.