Heaney's journey to Aarhus

August 30, 2013 - Heaney died today. This is an excerpt, with some lines from the poet, from an unpublished essay I wrote about, among other things, my encounter with Ötzi the Iceman:

I’ve always loved old bones. I love their mystery, the tactile connection they represent to personal histories, so close yet so obscure. For me there has been no bigger thrill than peering into a gaping, ruined grave in Enniskillen to spy in the shadows an old browned skull and to imagine, just for a moment, just a sound the brain it held might have produced, just one emotion, one sensation. And if old bones were thrilling, then old faces, old noses, old fingernails and old whiskers were even better. Although I’d found they could disappoint, too. Once I had walked the long, grim, subterranean corridors of a monastery in Palermo where hundreds of dried mummies of all ages, dressed in their burial clothes, gazed back at me. Their poses bordered on clownishness and their display amounted to a violation, like a deprivation of promised sleep. They should have delivered me to a morbid nirvana. Instead they left me unmoved.

The Bog People by P.V. Glob

Then I read P.V. Glob’s classic, The Bog People (from the miraculous New York Review of Books imprint), about the fully-preserved Iron Age corpses found in bogs in Denmark and Ireland, men who were criminals, young women who were adulterers or in some cases sacrifices to the gods. I could spend an entire afternoon staring at photographs of the tormented, peat-stained, human face of the Tollund Man, his impressively aquiline nose, the vertical crease of mortal anguish in his forehead, the hangman’s noose around his neck still. I had read and re-read the poems the bog mummies had inspired in Seamus Heaney. For the poet, the Tollund Man, the Grauballe Man, the Bog Queen, and the brutality and cruel, ignorant sacrifice to which they bore witness, became useful symbols for the violent, religion-fueled predicament of the Irish of the 1970s. Here he would leave behind snipes and drowned farm cats as symbols and turn to something more ambiguous and better. “Opening The Bog People,” he told Dennis O’Driscoll, “was like opening a gate."

Through them Heaney could exercise his gift for ruthless identification and self-reflection. It’s all there in a bog poem called “Punishment,” with passages like these:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

This desire I feel and draw I find in Ötzi Heaney describes precisely in these stanzas from “Tollund Man:"

Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eyelids,
His pointed skin cap,

In the flat country nearby
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds,
Caked in his stomach...

Heaney dreamed of a journey to Denmark to see the Tollund Man, like mine to Italy to see the Iceman; I happen to know he made it. I could think of few better fates for a corpse than to become the inspiration for a poem, or a journey to Aarhus, by Seamus Heaney. And all Ötzi gets is me.
                                                                                     
                                                                                              -from "The Find"

Three Unforeseen Masterpieces

 

3 unforeseen masterpieces, multiple copies

A couple of years back, I had two unpublished essays in hand: this one here, about three great works of American nonfiction by three authors famous for things other than writing; and another, more personal one, that I thought was the best thing I'd ever written. The latter one, the personal one, wasn't quite done, but I thought that when it was I might submit it to The Believer. While I was finishing it, I submitted this literary one below. I expected them to reject it; while I had published many articles in GQ and some other local magazines, everything I had ever submitted to a literary publication had been rejected. Still, I figured that by the time they read and rejected this one, I'd have the other one finished, it would be the best thing I ever wrote, I would immediately follow up with it, and they would like it. But before that could happen, to my great surprise and even greater delight, they accepted this one here. There followed a long silence. A couple of times in the following months, I emailed asking for an update, but got little information in return. In the meantime, I finished the personal essay, submitted it, and it got rejected. It took another year and a half for edits on the accepted, literary essay to come, and several months more after my re-write, but eventually The Believer changed their minds about the piece and told me they wouldn't be publishing it after all. Neither would anyone else, I suspect. So, here it is, because I think it is interesting and that it might inspire a few people to read these three books, which will bring them pleasure. The Sarah Palin opening is slightly dated, but the point of it is clear enough, so I won't revise it with a more relevant name. (I'm so glad she's no longer relevant.)

To read the essay, please go here: 
Three Unforeseen Masterpieces: 
Grant's Personal Memoirs; Thomas Hart Benton's An Artist in America; Whittaker Chambers' Witness.*

* I know there's a typo in the introduction to the full essay, but blogspot won't let me correct it, for now...


From the essay:

There are examples, though admittedly moving ever deeper into America’s past, of great works of literature being produced by public figures whom we might not have thought capable of writing an undeniable literary gem. And in three particularly controversial cases, neither their bitterest enemies nor their harshest critics could naysay the literary force at work in narratives by three men each of whom had found fame without words: one as a zealot and informer, one as an iconoclastic muralist, one as a master of the art of war and a drunk who kept falling off his horse. What Whittaker Chambers, Thomas Hart Benton, and Ulysses S. Grant have in common is this: each at a critical point in his life wrote a brilliant autobiography evocative of his times, his country, and his soul. All three wrote books that betrayed an intimacy and skill with words unforeseen in an otherwise complex life. Each author achieved a singular, unmistakable tone. Each work is an invitation into the distinct and fertile mind of its creator.