Prose passage from Osip Mandelstam

The Russian Osip Mandelstam, vindictively exiled by Stalin for the second and final time in 1938, died in a Siberian transit camp, reportedly out of his mind. He is known for his poetry, but wrote great, rich, dense, evocative essays and stories about Russian life in St. Petersburg and elsewhere. These two paragraphs (translated by Clarence Brown) are a perfect example. ("Scellé" means sealed. I don't know the "Song of Malbourk," although I have been to the amazing Malbork Castle, in Poland, and it is sometimes spelled "Malbourk.")

From "Riots and Governesses:"

It is my opinion that the little songs, models of penmanship, anthologies, and conjugations had ended by driving all these French and Swiss women themselves into an infantile state. At the center of their worldview, distorted by anthologies, stood the figure of the great emperor Napoleon and the War of 1812; after that came Joan of Arc (one Swiss girl, however, turned out to be a Calvinist), and no matter how often I tried, curious as I was, to learn something from them about France, I learned nothing at all, save that it was beautiful. The French governesses placed great value upon the art of speaking fast and abundantly and the Swiss upon the learning of little songs, among which the chief favorite was the "Song of Malbourk." These poor girls were completely imbued with the cult of great men -- Hugo, Lamartine, Napoleon, and Molière. On Sundays they had permission to go to mass. They were not allowed to have acquaintances.
                Somewhere in the Ile de France: grape barrels, white roads, poplars -- and a winegrower has set out with his daughters to go to their grandmother in Rouen. On his return he is to find everything "scellé," the presses and vats under an official seal. The manager had tried to conceal from the excise tax collectors a few pails of new wine. They had caught him in the act. The family is ruined. Enormous fine. And, as a result, the stern laws of France make me the present of a governess.

Perfect little poem by Henry Taylor

Henry Taylor was a professor in the Lit Department at American University in D.C. when I was a student there in the late Eighties. He was my independent study adviser my senior year. I don't think he was much impressed with me, but was always very kind about it. I love this poem and think of it all the time, partly because it is brief enough for me to remember it, but more because he gets everything right in it (even down to the colon at the end of line 2). I think I recognized this even when I was young, but now, no longer young, I experience the poem in a way I wouldn't have then. It's from his 1985 Pulitzer Prize winning volume, The Flying Change. Here's how he inscribed my copy after an appearance before a great class I took my sophomore year with Robert Bausch called The Living Writers: 

For Jim,
With thanks for good questions and kind words --
All best,
Henry Taylor
25 March 88

The poem: 

Airing Linen

Wash and dry,

sort and fold:

you and I

are growing old.

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"