Wanted: small, shy, intellectual girl

2002-08-25T18:55:00.000-04:00

Finding a new home.

All things here have now been moved to a new home on LiveJournal. Won't you please come visit? You don't have to have a LiveJournal account to read and reply to messages posted there. It is a nice place.

{ Mr Novanglus pulls down the shades, turns out the lights, and locks the door behind him. }

2002-08-24T15:30:00.000-04:00

I am considering migrating this weblog over to LiveJournal. It seems to be easier and more flexible, with more group features as well, although copying it all will be tedious.

2002-08-21T21:00:00.000-04:00

Rolling up the rugs. Wish you were here.

2002-08-20T23:36:00.000-04:00

Murmurs of Earth

Launched 1977-08-20, 25 years ago today. Our farthest wanderer, now beyond the limits of the solar system.

When asked what should be on the record, Lewis Thomas said, "All of Bach," and then added, "But that would be boasting."

May the solar wind be ever at your back, Voyager.

2002-08-19T00:03:00.000-04:00

Human nature?

2002-08-18T14:23:00.000-04:00

Ha, the whole script is available too.

2002-08-18T14:15:00.000-04:00

Best PHC skit of the day: The Happy Soybean Radio Theater. You can actually listen with RealAudio. (Though I haven't tried it; does it work?)

2002-08-17T21:21:00.000-04:00

Shakespeare on PTSD:

Tell me, sweet lord, what is't that takes from thee
Thy stomach, pleasure, and thy golden sleep?
Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth,
And start so often when thou sitt'st alone?
Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks,
And given my treasures and my rights of thee
To thick-eyed musing and curst melancholy?
In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watch'd,
And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars,
Speak terms of manage to thy bounding steed,
Cry, 'Courage! to the field!' And thou hast talk'd
Of sallies and retires, of trenches, tents,
Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets,
Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin,
Of prisoners' ransom, and of soldiers slain,
And all the currents of a heady fight.
Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war,
And thus hath so bestirr'd thee in thy sleep,
That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow,
Like bubbles in a late-disturbed stream;
And in thy face strange motions have appear'd,
Such as we see when men restrain their breath
On some great sudden hest. O! what portents are these?

2002-08-17T21:11:00.000-04:00

Going to a new life, August 28th. Perhaps you will be there.

2002-08-16T17:00:00.000-04:00

Brilliant yellow Goldfinches picking seeds from brilliant yellow sunflower heads.

2002-08-14T23:41:00.000-04:00

Old Mr. Nash of the turtles and eels is best remembered for his light verse, and probably always will be. But admired Miranda, I suspect, remembered him for this most beautiful love poem, which surely took her breath away:

A Lady Thinks She Is Thirty

Unwillingly Miranda wakes,
Feels the sun with terror,
One unwilling step she takes,
Shuddering to the mirror.

Miranda in Miranda's sight
Is old and gray and dirty;
Twenty-nine she was last night;
This morning she is thirty.

Shining like the morning star,
Like the twilight shining,
Haunted by a calendar,
Miranda is a-pining.

Silly girl, silver girl,
Draw the mirror toward you;
Time who makes the years to whirl
Adorned as he adored you.

Time is timelessness for you;
Calendars for the human;
What's a year, or thirty, to
Loveliness made woman?

Oh, Night will not see thirty again,
Yet soft her wing, Miranda;
Pick up your glass and tell me, then -
How old is Spring, Miranda?

2002-08-14T02:25:00.000-04:00

The full source (Henry V, 4.1) for the title below:

O God of battles! steel my soldiers’ hearts;
Possess them not with fear; take from them now
The sense of reckoning, if the opposed numbers
Pluck their hearts from them. Not to-day, O Lord!
O! not to-day, think not upon the fault
My father made in compassing the crown.
I Richard’s body have interr’d anew,
And on it have bestow’d more contrite tears
Than from it issu’d forced drops of blood.
Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay,
Who twice a day their wither’d hands hold up
Toward heaven, to pardon blood; and I have built
Two chantries, where the sad and solemn priests
Sing still for Richard’s soul. More will I do;
Though all that I can do is nothing worth,
Since that my penitence comes after all,
Imploring pardon.

2002-08-13T12:27:00.000-04:00

Ogden Nash, 1902-2002

I don't mind eels.
Except as meals.

2002-08-12T20:56:00.000-04:00

"Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?"

Time magazine has a cover story this week on "The Bipolar Child." If ever there were a case study in real (as opposed to classroom) biology, this is it: a powerfully multifactorial phenomenon involving multiple genes, probably all of them with pleiotropic effects and epistatic interactions, and all influenced by the external and internal environment. Cool. (I'm really a scientist, you know. It just doesn't show here very often.)

And also a new memoir from David Hackworth that I know will be powerful: Steel My Soldiers' Hearts. A prize (to be determined) to the first person who can tell me the source of the title.

2002-08-11T15:42:00.000-04:00

"Art is the concealment of effort."

2002-08-09T18:35:00.000-04:00

Fragments again

Some time ago there was a series of posts here about the power of literary fragments. I have one in my mind now, heard weeks ago on NPR when half asleep and instantly burned in. I wish I knew the full context. Billy Collins, the US Poet Laureate, was reading a poem that contained a scene in an expensive restaurant. In the dining room was a tank of live lobsters. The tank was

Filled to the brim with their copious tears.

2002-08-08T20:42:00.000-04:00

Memes and surveys

Although I've done some of the standard personality surveys on the web (Keirsey: INTJ), I have thus far avoided the epidemic of "which X are you" memes. ("Which Triassic rock formation are you?" "Which John Lennon hairstyle are you?" Etc.) But perhaps I ought to try one or two of those for amusement. I am willing to entertain requests - just point me to the URL and I'll do my best to provide endless memetic amusement. (I reserve the right to be selective, though. There must be some really clever ones out there. I don't really want to know which Cosmo girl I am or which sugar plum fairy reflects my inner being.) ^ : ^

2002-08-06T15:23:00.000-04:00

What da ya know, the archives links are miraculously working again. I couldn't get them to work at all for days. Should I go through and try to repair broken image links? Probably so.

2002-08-05T22:22:00.000-04:00

The Twilight of Civilization

Today NPR mentioned the poet "John Butler Yeats," and also Thoreau's Walden, "named for the state park in Concord." We might as well pack everything up right now and batten down for the long Dark Age ahead.

2002-08-04T16:55:00.000-04:00

Sic Semper Tyrannis

Andrew Hamilton in New-York v. John Peter Zenger, 1735-08-04/05:

The question before the Court ... is not of small nor private concern, it is not the cause of a poor printer, nor of New-York alone, which you are now trying. No! It may in its consequences affect every freeman that lives under a British government on the main of America.... I make no doubt but your upright conduct this day will not only entitle you to the love and esteem of your fellow citizens; but every man who prefers freedom to a life of slavery will bless and honor you as men who have baffled the attempt of tyranny; and by an impartial and uncorrupt verdict, have laid a noble foundation for securing to ourselves, our posterity, and our neighbors that to which nature and the laws of our country have given us a right - and liberty - both of exposing and opposing arbitrary power ... by speaking and writing truth.

2002-08-03T23:54:00.000-04:00

One non-conformist (e.e. cummings) on another (Jesus), for the suffering people of the Middle East:

no time ago
or else a life
walking in the dark
I met Christ

jesus)my heart
flopped over
and lay still
while he passed(as

close as I'm to you
yes closer
made of nothing
except loneliness

2002-08-02T17:05:00.000-04:00

Going back to Novanglia. Maybe I'll find a life there this time, among the maple leaves.

2002-03-30T17:23:00.000-05:00

Adolph Hitler called her "the most dangerous woman in Europe." I think that's about as great an epitaph as anyone in the twentieth century could have. He understood Napoleon's dictum, "the moral is to the material as three to one."

2002-03-12T14:19:00.000-05:00

"Opera star Jessye Norman sang 'America the Beautiful'...."

Ms. Bates' fourth verse, the one that we don't hear very often, has always been my favorite:

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

2002-03-04T23:11:00.000-05:00

And now a word from the Office for Strategic Influence:

If you can't trust rocket science, what can you trust?

(Brain surgery, I suppose.)

2002-03-02T23:19:00.000-05:00

Another jewel from Sir Thomas, whose cadences are unmatched:

In the deep discovery of the subterranean world a shallow part would satisfy some inquirers; who, if two or three yards were open about the surface, would not care to rake the bowels of Potosi, and regions toward the centre. Nature hath furnished one part of the earth, and man another. The treasures of time lie high, in urns, coins, and monuments, scarce below the roots of some vegetables. Time hath endless rarities, and shows of all varieties; which reveals old things in heaven, makes new discoveries in earth, and even earth itself a discovery. That great antiquity America lay buried for thousands of years, and a large part of the earth is still in the urn unto us.

2002-02-24T23:10:00.000-05:00

The future can add new layers of meaning to old lines, whether from Bruce Springsteen or from the Civil War:

Colonel Corcoran led the Sixty-ninth on that eventful day.
I wish the Prince of Wales were there to see him in the fray.
His charge upon the batteries was a most glorious scene,
With gallant New York firemen, and the boys that wore the green.

2002-02-23T14:10:00.000-05:00

Cedar Waxwings in the holly trees.

2002-02-22T23:29:00.000-05:00

The lament is one of the most beautiful genres of literature.

For there's nothing here but war,
Where the murdering cannons roar,
And I wish I was back home
In dear old Ireland.

2002-02-16T19:04:00.000-05:00

And a jewel from the hand of Sir Thomas:

When the Funerall pyre was out, and the last valediction over, men took a lasting adieu of their interred Friends, little expecting the curiosity of future ages should comment upon their ashes, and having no old experience of the duration of their Reliques, held no opinion of such after considerations.

But who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to buried? who hath the Oracle of his ashes, or whether they are to be scattered? The Reliques of many lie like the ruines of Pompeys, in all parts of the earth.

2002-02-16T18:47:00.000-05:00

Howard Carter, 1923-02-16:

My first care was to locate the wooden lintel above the door: then very carefully I chipped away the plaster and picked out the small stones which formed the uppermost layer of the filling. The temptation to stop and peer inside at every moment was irresistible, and when, after about ten minutes' work, I had made a hole large enough to enable me to do so, I inserted an electric torch. An astonishing sight its light revealed, for there, within a yard of the doorway, stretching as far as one could see and blocking the entrance to the chamber, stood what to all appearances was a solid wall of gold.

2002-02-14T22:41:00.000-05:00

Recent mathematical wisdom found on the web:

2 is never equal to 3, not even for very large values of 2.

2002-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00

A very nice annotation link is now available for each entry.

2002-02-14T00:15:00.000-05:00

Mrs. Browning's first, for Valentine's Day.

I thought once how Theocritus had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,
Who each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals, old or young:
And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,
I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,
Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
A shadow across me. Straightway I was 'ware,
So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move
Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair:
And a voice said in mastery, while I strove, --
"Guess now who holds thee?" "Death," I said. But, there,
The silver answer rang, "Not Death, but Love."

2002-02-10T14:31:00.000-05:00

Wow. Let's do that again. The power injected by the "I swear" is incredible. Listen to clip 18 (from the earlier stanza; it would begin here with the bridge "But thou thereon" instead of "The thirst that from") to see that it is done as a classical lullaby.

I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
Not so much honouring thee
As giving it a hope, that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon didst only breathe,
And sent'st it back to me;
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
Not of itself, but thee.

2002-02-09T21:26:00.000-05:00

This time, Paul Robeson singing Ben Johnson (quoting Philostratus):

Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not ask for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove's nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.

2002-02-09T13:33:00.000-05:00

Farewell, your royal highness.

2002-02-06T19:40:00.000-05:00

Listening to Paul Robeson sing Tennyson's "Summer Night":

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.

Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.

2002-02-05T22:29:00.000-05:00

Quite clever: wheresgeorge.com. One that I found yesterday had traveled 150 miles in a year and a half.

2002-02-01T20:51:00.000-05:00

Mr. Gray's exceedingly clever, Classically allusive, moralistic allegory with the prize-winning title, to wit:

Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes

'Twas on a lofty vase's side,
Where China's gayest art had dy'd
The azure flow'rs that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclin'd,
Gazed on the lake below.

Her conscious tail her joy declar'd;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
She saw: and purr'd applause.

Still had she gaz'd; but 'midst the tide
Two angel forms were seen to glide,
The Genii of the stream;
Their scaly armour's Tyrian hue
Thro' richest purple to the view
Betray'd a golden gleam.

The hapless Nymph with wonder saw:
A whisker first and then a claw,
With many an ardent wish,
She stretch'd in vain to reach the prize.
What female heart can gold despise?
What cat's averse to fish?

Presumptuous Maid! with looks intent
Again she stretch'd, again she bent,
Nor knew the gulf between.
(Malignant Fate sat by, and smil'd)
The slipp'ry verge her feet beguil'd,
She tumbled headlong in.

Eight times emerging from the flood
She mew'd to ev'ry wat'ry god,
Some speedy aid to send.
No Dolphin came, no Nereid stirr'd;
Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard.
A Fav'rite has no friend!

From hence, ye Beauties, undeceiv'd,
Know, one false step is ne'er retriev'd,
And be with caution bold.
Not all that tempts your wand'ring eyes
And heedless hearts is lawful prize,
Nor all, that glisters, gold.

2002-01-31T22:12:00.000-05:00

America

An old, simple, romantic song; one of Mr. Simon's best.

"Let us be lovers,
We'll marry our fortunes together.
I've got some real estate
Here in my bag."

So we bought a pack of cigarettes,
And Mrs. Wagner's pies,
And walked off
To look for America.

"Cathy," I said,
As we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh,
"Michigan seems like a dream to me now.
It took me four days
To hitchhike from Saginaw.
I've come to look for America."

Laughing on the bus,
Playing games with the faces.
She said the man in the gabardine suit
Was a spy. I said, "Be careful,
His bow tie is really a camera."

"Toss me a cigarette,
I think there's one in my raincoat."
"We smoked the last one an hour ago."
So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine;
And the moon rose over an open field.

"Cathy, I'm lost," I said,
Though I knew she was sleeping.
"I'm empty and aching and
I don't know why."

Counting the cars
On the New Jersey Turnpike.
They've all come to look for America,
All come to look for America.

2002-01-28T21:25:00.000-05:00

The moon is full.

One luminary clock against the sky...

2002-01-28T13:23:00.000-05:00

Lira, guilder, franc, and more, all passing into history. The bankers quoted on the radio don't care, of course ("it's all just money"), but it seems a great cultural loss to me.

2002-01-26T01:22:00.000-05:00

A poem a day.

2002-01-23T15:48:00.000-05:00

MLK, eec, Runts, and Comparative Samaritans

When I was little some relatives who lived on a farm had a cat that gave birth to a litter of kittens, and I remember that I got to watch them being born (a big deal I suppose for a six or seven year old kid). I got to pick one to take home (after a few days), and I automatically picked the last one that came out, the runt of the litter. It seemed like it needed to be taken care of. Perhaps because Homo sapiens is a social species some of us are automatically drawn to weak things because we know there is strength in numbers - two runts of the litter when they team up can take down the fat cat alone.

During this past Martin Luther King holiday the radio was playing many of his speeches of course. Here is an exercise in comparative Samaritans, courtesy of MLK and my countryman e.e. cummings. One is eloquent, the other raw and ugly and real; they could not be more different in style; both are great because both put fear at the center. And ee ends with one of the greatest star pictures I know.

MLK:

Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness. One day a man came to Jesus; and he wanted to raise some questions about some vital matters in life. At points, he wanted to trick Jesus, and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew, and through this, throw him off base. Now that question could have easily ended up in a philosophical and theological debate. But Jesus immediately pulled that question from mid-air, and placed it on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho. And he talked about a certain man, who fell among thieves. You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side. They didn't stop to help him. And finally a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy, but with him, administering first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying, this was the good man, this was the great man, because he had the capacity to project the "I" into the "thou," and to be concerned about his brother. Now you know, we use our imagination a great deal to try to determine why the priest and the Levite didn't stop. At times we say they were busy going to church meetings - an ecclesiastical gathering - and they had to get on down to Jerusalem so they wouldn't be late for their meeting. At other times we would speculate that there was a religious law that "One who was engaged in religious ceremonials was not to touch a human body twenty-four hours before the ceremony." And every now and then we begin to wonder whether maybe they were not going down to Jerusalem, or down to Jericho, rather to organize a "Jericho Road Improvement Association." That's a possibility. Maybe they felt that it was better to deal with the problem from the causal root, rather than to get bogged down with an individual effort.

But I'm going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It's possible that these men were afraid. You see, the Jericho road is a dangerous road. I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, "I can see why Jesus used this as a setting for his parable." It's a winding, meandering road. It's really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about 1200 feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho, fifteen or twenty minutes later, you're about 2200 feet below sea level. That's a dangerous road. In the days of Jesus it came to be known as the "Bloody Pass." And you know, it's possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it's possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the Levite asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?"

eec:

a man who had fallen among thieves
lay by the roadside on his back
dressed in fifteenthrate ideas
wearing a round jeer for a hat

fate per a somewhat more than less
emancipated evening
had in return for consciousness
endowed him with a changeless grin

whereon a dozen staunch and leal
citizens did graze at pause
then fired by hypercivic zeal
sought newer pastures or because

swaddled with a frozen brook
of pinkest vomit out of eyes
which noticed nobody he looked
as if he did not care to rise

one hand did nothing on the vest
its wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt
while the mute trouserfly confessed
a button solemnly inert.

Brushing from whom the stiffened puke
i put him all into my arms
and staggered banged with terror through
a million billion trillion stars

2002-01-21T20:50:00.000-05:00

Web Immortality

Very cold and raw on Saturday; raining for hours with the temperature right at freezing all day. A few degrees colder and it would have made a spectacular ice storm worthy of Robert Frost.

I almost died on Saturday. Crossing the highway in the dark afternoon rain - all the cars had their lights on except one. I watched them all pass but I didn't see the dark one. It blew its horn and I jumped back. Would've got me square on.

I later thought how this page would have been abandoned here, and would have sat unchanged for who knows how long; months or years. People would come across it; some would send the usual hate mail; some, notes of appreciation; some, intellectual comments. These would pile up in some mailbox or on another page, unanswered, and every now and then someone would wonder why that odd/lovely/disgusting/clever page wasn't added to anymore. Perhaps it would wind up in some web archive years from now and become like Borges' poet, remembered only because he heard a nightingale one evening two thousand years ago.

In the cold afternoon rain, dozens of late Robins, fearful that their world would turn to ice, were flocking all over the wet lawns and madly rushing about in search of something to keep themselves warm. Like Peter Kagan at sea, they were all afraid they were going to freeze to death in the night.

2002-01-20T04:47:00.000-05:00

Comparative Studies in Immortality

First from Borges:

In the rapt evening that will never become night
You listen without end to Theocritus' nightingale.

which collapses into nothingness when set beside ED's most sacred text (which I have never before typed in public):

Would Daisy disappoint you — no — she wouldn't — Sir — it were comfort forever — just to look in your face, while you looked in mine — then I could play in the woods — till Dark — till you take me where sundown cannot find us — and the true keep coming — till the town is full.

which is the most utterly brilliant translation ever made of Revelation 21.23-25:

And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it. And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there shall be no night there.

2002-01-19T21:42:00.000-05:00

Fragments and Immortality

I remembered this poem a few days ago when the theme was fragments, but I couldn't find it at the time. It is Borges' "To a Minor Poet of the Greek Anthology." This is immortality.

Where now is the memory
Of the days that were yours on earth, and wove
Joy with sorrow; and made a universe that was your own?

The river of years has lost them
From its numbered current; you are a word in an index.
To others the gods gave glory that has no end:
Inscriptions, names on coins, monuments, conscientious historians;
All that we know of you, eclipsed friend,
Is that you heard the nightingale one evening.

Among the asphodels of the Shadow, your shade, in its vanity,
Must consider the gods ungenerous.

But the days are a web of small troubles,
And is there a greater blessing
Than to be the ash of which oblivion is made?

Above other heads the gods kindled
The inexorable light of glory, which peers
Into the secret parts and discovers each separate fault;
Glory, that at last shrivels the rose it reveres;
They were more considerate with you, brother.

In the rapt evening that will never become night
You listen without end to Theocritus' nightingale.

2002-01-19T01:08:00.000-05:00

A Story of Grace

This is a story of grace from a sermon I read once. An aside first: I am not at all religious; I have never "believed." One cannot be any kind of scholar, though, without seeing the world's great religious traditions as being utterly spectacular in their literature, passion, history, art, love, and violence. I consider the sermon, for example, to be a very neglected literary form; it is one I really enjoy. If you think that you don't, remember, for example, that all the speeches from Martin Luther King you will hear on radio and TV this week are sermons. And it is hard to beat Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" for gothic horror. What follows is what I remember from the end of a sermon by a Unitarian ("not much of a religion, but a nice club to belong to") minister; he was in fact quoting someone else, so I have no idea what the original source is. (So much for the Chicago Manual of Style.)

It is in the voice of a surgeon at the bedside of woman in a post-operative recovery room. She has just had a tumor removed from the side of her face, and her husband is sitting beside her, holding her hand.

I hold up the mirror to show her the bandage beside her ear, and tell her that the skin will heal quite well, and there will be little scarring. But all she can see is that the left side of her face is paralyzed. "Will it always be like this?" "Yes," I say, "because we had to remove part of the nerve. I'm afraid your smile will be a little crooked from now on." She smiles a crooked smile, but it is forced, and she has to hold back tears. Then her husband says, "I think your crooked smile is cute," and he bends forward to kiss her, and I am so close I see him twist his lips to one side so they match hers. And I remember that in ancient Greece, the gods sometimes took on human form, and only rarely, in sudden moments, did we realize that they were among us.

2002-01-18T00:48:00.000-05:00

I believe Yeats said something to the effect that this is not the poem one should ever use in a personals ad. So much for my judgement. I suppose that's the problem.

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

2002-01-17T23:42:00.000-05:00

May I have one please?
(You can use it, too, whenever you want.)

2002-01-13T18:36:00.000-05:00

Peter Kagan and the Wind, Darmok on the Ocean, Achilles and Patroclus, Husband-Wife Therapon, Survivor Guilt, "Greater love hath no man...", and Mythological Greatness

A few days ago I told the beginning of Gordon Bok's story-song of Peter Kagan and the Wind. The greatness of the story is in all that could still be told, before and after. It is stripped down to mythological level: a mortal against the gods, the mystery of the seal people, a husband-wife therapon relationship like Achilles and Patroclus, tragedy in the Classical sense of the inevitable destruction of what was most treasured, self-sacrifice, and the story that could be told after, perhaps, of survivor guilt (but which we know nothing of). In Bok's recorded version the isolation at sea is built up by the voice and the minimal music with great power. This is rambling, I know. It should be written as a literary essay.

This is how the story ends. If you don't want to have the ending given away, don't read further. But a good myth doesn't lose force in retelling, and in retelling the myth's power deepens. Go back to read the beginning first if you haven't.

Kagan is a lonely fisherman. He goes away for a time, and returns with a wife. The legends of the North Atlantic tell of seals that can come ashore and take on human form and live out their lives as humans. Kagan's wife was a seal. "Everyone knew that, even Kagan, he knew that. But nobody would say it to him." When she was lonely and wanted him to come home she would stand on the shore and call to him, and he said that he could hear her singing twenty miles to sea. A seal can only take on human form once; if it ever returns to the water it transforms back into a seal and can never become human again.

One day in autumn Kagan takes his dory out to catch some fish. His wife doesn't want him to go: "The Wind is coming, and the snow." But Kagan's not afraid of snow; it's early in the year, and he goes to sea.

The fishing is good and the haze in the sky doesn't worry him. It's autumn, and only signals a change of wind. "I'm not afraid of wind." But Kagan reads it wrong; the wind goes away and then comes back southeast. The fog comes round him.

He decides he had better go home at this point, and puts up his sail. But the Wind is watching. It picks up force and tears out his sail, and the dory goes a-drifting. Then he put in his oars and starts to row, but the Wind shifts and makes the waves short and hard to row against.

The Wind begins to speak to him, smoothly and calmly, like a lion encircling its prey: I have something to tell you. Kagan says, "I don't want to hear it." Kagan thinks about what to do, and he improvises a needle and thread and sews the sail up smaller and stronger and puts it up again. Then the Wind shifts to the east. The Wind says, You're heading out to sea. Kagan says, "I'm not afraid of water," I'll come about when I can tack back onto my course. The Wind says, I'll shift again. Kagan says, "You go ahead, then I can hold my course again. I can keep ahead of you." The Wind says, You may be smarter, but I'm stronger. The Wind blows harder, and the darkness comes on, and the sail tears out again, and the dory goes a-drifting.

Kagan takes the sail off the yard and pulls it round him; "Now you keep me warm." The Wind says, He can't keep you warm. The Wind shifts north by east as the night storm comes on. I'll freeze you. In the darkness the Wind brings ice and snow, the Wind blows long and long and black. So Kagan lies down in the bottom of the little boat, and tries not to be afraid that within a few hours he will freeze to death —

"So in the morning they found him. Asleep. With the sail wrapped around him. And there was a seal lying with him, curled over him like a blanket there. And all the snow was upon the seal."

2002-01-12T23:10:00.000-05:00

Why William Cullen Bryant is a good poet, and Emily Dickinson is a great poet:

Thou blossom bright with autumn dew,
And colored with the heaven's own blue,
That openest when the quiet light
Succeeds the keen and frosty night,

Thou comest not when violets lean
O'er wandering brooks and springs unseen,
Or columbines, in purple dressed,
Nod o'er the ground-bird's hidden nest.

Thou waitest late and com'st alone,
When woods are bare and birds are flown,
And frost and shortening days portend
The aged year is near his end.

Then doth thy sweet and quiet eye
Look through its fringes to the sky,
Blue -- blue -- as if that sky let fall
A flower from its cerulean wall.

I would that thus, when I shall see
The hour of death draw near to me,
Hope, blossoming within my heart,
May look to heaven as I depart.

2002-01-12T00:31:00.000-05:00

Random ED:

God made a little gentian --
It tried to be a Rose -- and failed --
And all the Summer laughed.
But -- just before the snows --
There rose a purple creature
That ravished all the hill --
And Summer hid her forehead --
And Mockery was still.
The frosts were her condition --
The Tyrian would not come
Until the North invoke it.
Creator -- shall I -- bloom?

2002-01-11T20:23:00.000-05:00

School again. No time to sit and think anymore. No time. Someday there will be time for life, and red leaves, and melting snow, and curled white horses' manes drifting across the sky.

2002-01-09T20:26:00.000-05:00

Even ED has a maritime poem or two:

Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea,
Past the houses -- past the headlands --
Into deep Eternity --

Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?

2002-01-06T23:45:00.000-05:00

Continuing the maritime theme further, Mr. Masefield will now honor us with his great "Sea-Fever":

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

2002-01-06T20:52:00.000-05:00

Why do people bother with Nostradamus when we have Melville?

Following the maritime theme that has been going on here for a little while, I was just browsing some pages in Moby Dick again. In the first chapter the narrator comments that his whaling voyage is just a minor event in the planned history of the world, and God's program for the interval probably read something like:

"Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.

"Whaling voyage by one Ishmael.

"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN"

Eerie, no?

2002-01-04T14:06:00.000-05:00

The great Crystal Palace of 1851.

2002-01-02T22:09:00.000-05:00

First snow of the year.

2002-01-01T16:52:00.000-05:00

One of the most wonderful things about major holidays like Christmas and New Year's, for those in urban and suburban areas, is the quiet that fills the whole outdoor world. On those few days if you walk around outside you can recover the sounds of the pre-industrial world. (Which you can find anywhere out in the country, too; it's just striking in the city and suburbs.) All machines off, no cars, few people. Earlier today I noticed the sound of a small woodpecker chipping bark off a tree at least a block away.

2001-12-30T01:15:00.000-05:00

I have thought more about my seeming inability to read novels, mentioned below, even though I read lots of poetry and certainly enjoy movies as most people do. It is a function of a short attention span and a tendency to over-link words and ideas from all over, I think; very interesting and odd. Maybe characteristic of INTJs more than others?

Thanks to NPR this week I got some more insight into question and an excellent example. NPR reminded us (who else would?) that the year now ending is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Moby Dick, another great work I have never read completely, although I have read many parts of it. Someone read this amazing passage in which Ahab speaks to the severed head of a freshly-decapitated whale tied up alongside the ship:

Speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed - while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!

Aahh. This is my problem in sum: after reading that passage, how can one possibly continue from that point? I have to stop right there and spend the entire day, if not week, just thinking about that one passage it is so incredible. (And we see here the difference with movies, which pull you along whether you want to go or not. With the book I just keep stopping to think.)

2001-12-27T18:31:00.000-05:00

I thank everyone for their messages in the guestbook. I apologize for not having replied sooner, and thought this time I would reply here to give an indication of the parallel postings that appear on that other channel.

I'm glad you enjoyed Millay, Ms. Rannva. She was very much out of academic fashion through much of the 20th C. because she didn't fit into the modernist style - she wrote razor-like sonnets in perfect meter that rhyme - but I think she will be seen as one of the great poets of the 20th C., very much like Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the 19th. There are many more where that one sample came from.

We were among the seals, Ms. Renee, and today I think I may go out into a pod of whales. The ballad you posted is striking and dark, as ballads often are, not "romantic" in genre like the Peter Kagan story - I may give away the ending of that story soon, since there is so much pleasure in the act of telling, and I know many people will never hear the recording. I would be curious to see a map of the geographical distribution of seal-people stories. It took me a moment to recognize that "silkie" must obviously be cognate with "seal." I don't have an Indo-European dictionary at hand; I doubt there is a pan-IE root for "seal," but there must be a fairly broad family of cognates in many IE languages. The silver coins of ancient Phokaia featured seals as the emblem of the city. (Phoca is a Latin word for seal, and a modern scientific name as well; that certainly does not sound cognate with the "s-l" family.)

I'm embarrassed to say, Ms. Joan, that I have never read Wuthering Heights. I have you all fooled, I think, into believing I'm a literary person, when in fact I'm a scientist. In college I only took one English class (it was a modern poetry class), and Dickinson and Emerson and Thoreau I learned in high school and as part of the heritage of New England. But I almost never read prose fiction. I don't have the attention span, I fear, or the ability to "lose myself" in it, which is how people who devour novels often describe the experience. That never happens to me. I would be a better educated person if it did. I can fix on beautiful fragments, and turn them over endlessly, and take them apart and reassemble them, and that is what one can do with poetry (and with science as well). I don't know - this is an inconsistent position and I often contradict myself (I am large; I contain multitudes). But it remains empirically true that just about the only section of a bookstore I never go into is the novels section.

And thanks to Ms. Deamer Gurl and Ms. Renee for holiday wishes, and to Ms. PurpleJain for the poetry links.

2001-12-25T23:17:00.000-05:00

Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang "Cherry Ripe" and another uncle sang "Drake's Drum." It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got onto the parsnip wine, sang a song about bleeding hearts and death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a bird's nest. And then everybody laughed again. And then I went to bed.

Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending, smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill, and hear the music rising from them, up the long, steadily falling night.

I turned the gas down. I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

2001-12-25T16:48:00.000-05:00

Parodia: more comparative literature from Allan, Randy, and Tom.

2001-12-25T16:14:00.000-05:00

Urbi et orbi: comparative literature from the Pope, the President, and the Queen.

2001-12-25T00:14:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas, my dear lady, wherever you may be.

2001-12-24T17:50:00.000-05:00

I've been quiet lately - a problem with introverts I suppose. Many thoughts, but when in quiet mode it seems strange(er) to type them into this space than it does otherwise. Thoughts on many topics here, on this Christmas Eve - on myth, culture, tradition, mistaken Borg philosophy, ritual substitution, the seal people, salvation, redemption, quietness, snow. Thoughts take on form best in talking, and only then in writing, unfortunately, at least for me. Perhaps I can bring some together soon even so.

2001-12-14T07:06:00.000-05:00

To my future wife,

Wherever you are tonight, my dear, I hope you are sleeping a quiet and dreamless sleep, and that harm and fear never touch you, and that I will find my way to take your hand in mine, though it were ten thousand mile.

2001-12-14T06:30:00.000-05:00

Not mere terza rima, but a sonnet in terza rima, from RF, for the hour:

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain - and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

2001-12-10T02:30:00.000-05:00

Miss Millay (XCIX*(8/14)):

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

2001-12-09T15:02:00.000-05:00

The wonderful three minute essay on John Knowles and George Harrison, mentioned below on December 2nd, has now been posted to the NPR website. If you have RealAudio (I think that may be required) you owe it to yourself to listen to this tiny narrative jewel.

2001-12-08T04:30:00.000-05:00

The guestbook has had some discussion of the question of husband-wife "therapon" literature. I suggested that perhaps one reason this is not a prominent literature is that in the classical versions of it (Gilgamesh/Enkidu, Achilles/Patroclus, Picard/Dathon), one of the partners dies. Translated into a husband/wife setting this makes for romance, but of the tragic kind, not the happy kind.

I do recall a magnificent example of this genre now, though. Any romantic, mythologist, folklorist, music-lover, poet, storyteller, or New Englander should know Gordon Bok's story-song Peter Kagan and the Wind, which is indeed a life-and-death, husband-wife therapon story. It is an original work based on legends of seal-people, legends found on both sides of the far North Atlantic (Scotland and New Scotland). The legends say that a seal can once come onto land and become human, but if it ever goes back into the water it will change back into a seal and can never become human again.

I heard "Peter Kagan and the Wind" on the radio some years ago. (NPR of course: it's fifteen minutes long; where else on the radio could one possible hear it?) It was one of those things that stops you dead in your tracks: you hear it begin and are immediately transfixed, and can do nothing but stop everything and listen until it is finished. Some of the readers here have commented on how certain texts become sacred to us for one reason or another. (William James would understand.) Like Darmok, this is one of my sacred texts.

Peter Kagan is a fisherman and the story is set on the coast of Maine. You owe it to yourself to listen to the whole. This is how it begins:

Peter Kagan was a lonely man, in the summer of his years. Then one day he got tired of being lonely and he went away off to the eastward, and when he came again he had a wife with him. She was strange, you know, but she was kind, and people liked her. And she was good for Kagan, she kept him company, and winter come to summer they were happy.

Kagan had a dory then. He had a lug sail on her. He'd go offshore for three, four days, setting for the fish. But oh, his wife was sad then, she never liked to see him go. She'd go down and call to him:

Kagan, Kagan, Kagan, / Bring the dory home, / The wind and sea do follow thee, / And all the ledges' calling me.

He said that he could hear her singing twenty miles to sea. And when he heard her he'd come home, if he had fish or none.

She was a seal, you know. Everyone knew that, even Kagan, he knew that. But nobody would say it to him.

Then one day in that year's autumn, Kagan says, "I got to go now, go offshore and get some fish." She says, "No, don't go away." She starts crying. "Please don't go. The Wind is coming, and the snow."

Kagan, Kagan, Kagan, / Don't go out to sea, / The stormy Wind and snow do come, / And oh, but I do fear for thee.

But Kagan's not afraid of snow. It's early in the year. He puts his oars in, and he goes to sea.

2001-12-07T02:59:00.000-05:00

Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

2001-12-04T14:45:00.000-05:00

May the gods be praised again for NPR. I came to consciousness this morning hearing Jean Redpath signing Robert Burns in Scottish dialect, and if you haven't heard it sung in Scottish dialect you can't begin to know how beautiful it is.

Till a' the seas gang dry, my Dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun:
I will love thee still, my Dear,
While the sands o' life shall run.

And fare thee weel my only Luve,
And fare thee weel a while.
And I will come again, my Luve,
Tho' it were ten thousand mile.

2001-12-03T00:47:00.000-05:00

Parallel Lives, Deaths, and Stories. II.

This is the Darmok story, which I can no longer prevent myself from telling. It is long. I quoted a passage from it earlier - Picard's retelling of Gilgamesh. You should see the original rather than just read this retelling, but the act of telling gives such pleasure that it cannot be withheld. (That is why great myths live forever.) Just as West Side Story is Romeo and Juliet retold, so Darmok is part of Gilgamesh retold. But it is as though West Side Story had embedded within it a performance of Romeo and Juliet by the characters themselves. That is Darmok's self-referential brilliance. And my retelling is what a folklorist might call an authentic retelling; it is not a quotation, it is just part of my consciousness, and will be for the rest of my life.

The Enterprise makes contact with an alien race that seems advanced and peaceful, but their language is incomprehensible. The alien captain addresses Picard:

Rai and Jiri at Lungha. Rai of Lowani. Lowani under two moons. Jiri of Ubaya. Ubaya of crossed roads. At Lungha. Lungha, her sky gray.

Everyone looks at each other in confusion. More incomprehensible speech. Finally the alien captain takes out two knives and in frustration says Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra and Picard is kidnapped by the alien transporter and finds himself alone with the alien captain on the surface of the planet below.

The alien captain throws one of the knives at Picard's feet as says Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. Picard doesn't understand, but "I won't fight you" is the reply, and Picard throws the knife back. The alien captain in disgust picks it up and exclaims more incomprehensible phrases.

Night falls and it is getting cold. The two captains are watching each other from a safe distance; the alien has made a fire to stay warm; Picard's fire keeps going out. The alien sees Picard's problem and picks up a burning piece of wood from his fire and throws it toward Picard saying Temba. "Temba? Is that fire? Does that mean fire?" Temba, his arms wide. "Temba is a person... His arms wide... In giving. In taking?" Temba, his arms wide. Picard takes the fire, and they both look at each other, realizing the first breakthrough has been made.

The next morning the alien captain seems to be gone, but soon he reappears, running to the camp and agitated, and tries to give the knife again to Picard, who shoves it away and yells that he will not fight. Then an electrical roaring sound is heard in the distance, and the alien scans the horizon. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

The roaring comes closer, and an electrical dragon-like beast appears and disappears around them. The alien forcefully holds out the knife again: Temba. Picard now understands and takes the knife. The beast appears and disappears, strikes at them, they attack it, the alien captain is wounded and falls, Picard strikes at the beast, which disappears again.

Now it is night, and Picard and the wounded alien are together around a fire keeping watch. They say various things to each other, but there is still no understanding. Picard keeps trying. "You said 'Temba' when you gave me the fire, and the knife. Does that mean 'give'? Temba - Darmok - Temba. Give me more about Darmok." And the tale begins.

Darmok on the ocean. "Darmok on the ocean... An image of isolation? Of being alone?"

Tanagra on the ocean. Darmok at Tanagra. "Darmok at Tanagra... A country? Tanagra on the ocean - an island. Temba, give me more about Darmok."

Jalad on the ocean. Jalad at Tanagra. "Jalad at Tanagra... He went to the same island as Darmok."

In a strong whisper: The beast at Tanagra. Picard's mind now racing as the picture is coming clear: "There was... a creature at Tanagra, the beast at Tanagra. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra... They arrived separately, they struggled together against a common foe, the beast at Tanagra."

Darmok and Jalad on the ocean.

"They left together. Darmok and Jalad on the ocean." And the whole is clear.

And if it ended there, it would have been brilliant enough. But it doesn't end there. The alien captain, wounded and dying, now gestures to Picard: Temba, his arms wide.

"You want me to tell a story? Ah, well, I'm not much of a story-teller. And besides, you wouldn't understand.

"But perhaps that doesn't matter. You want to hear it anyway.

"Alright. There is a very ancient story, from Earth. I'll try to remember it...

"Gilgamesh, a king, at Uruk. He tormented his subjects. He made them angry. And they cried out aloud, 'Send us a companion for our king! Spare us from his madness!'

"Enkidu, a wildman, from the forest, entered the city. They fought in the temple. They fought in the streets. Gilgamesh defeated Enkidu. They became great friends. Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Uruk."

Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Uruk.

And as the alien captain is dying, Picard finishes the story: "The new friends went out into the desert together, where the great bull of heaven was killing men by the hundreds. Enkidu caught the bull by the tail, and Gilgamesh struck it with his sword. They were victorious. But Enkidu fell to the ground, struck down by the gods. And Gilgamesh wept bitter tears, saying, 'He who was my companion, through adventure and hardship, is gone forever.'"

2001-12-02T00:51:00.000-05:00

Parallel Lives, Deaths, and Stories. I.

I can think of no better way to tell the story of late 20th-century American culture than by making an audio anthology of the best essays and news broadcasts from NPR. Grace, wit, art, and brilliance can all be gathered there. I woke up this morning to a three minute essay on John Knowles and George Harrison (which I hope will be available on the NPR website soon).

In the shadow cast by the news of Harrison's death this week, John Knowles, author of the novel A Separate Peace, also passed away in Florida. Noting their passing on the same day, the essay focused on Knowles' life and work rather than Harrison's. It summarized A Separate Peace and then finished with a long quotation from the novel about the stark New England winter, and then the beginning of the spring thaw that brings life back into the world. The narration finished, and the segment came to its end with Harrison singing "Here Comes the Sun." Nowhere but on NPR. Nowhere.

Some of the world's grounds are sown with salt. Some of its wells are poisoned. Some of its treasures are destroyed. But here and there, grace abides.

2001-12-01T03:43:00.000-05:00

Darmok on the ocean.

2001-11-30T15:27:00.000-05:00

Companions

I should be working at the moment, but have now been diverted into this compelling intellectual channel, and the waters sweep me on. (It is an emotional channel as well, but because I am an intellectual, analyzing it intellectually makes its emotional power stronger, not weaker.) The theme is companionship, and it is prompted by the Darmok entry of 24 November.

The waters in my head are splashing in many directions. An earlier entry on appealing couples is connected to this theme, as is the "Rage" link on my left-hand "genius" column, which will take you to the scholarly and humane masterpiece Achilles in Vietnam by Jonathan Shay. It is interesting that the Darmok story (see below), the Gilgamesh and Enkidu story on which it is based, and Achilles in Vietnam which compares the psychological effects of combat as described by Homer and by Vietnam War veterans - all these are about the companionship forged through shared adversity, often life-threatening adversity. Is this only because they are war stories, and is that the only place this particular type of companionship is forged? I hope it is not. What is the counterpart literature for husband-wife companionship? I am not a literary scholar, of course, so don't know what it might be - can someone instruct me? I don't mean love literature in the conventional sense, of which there is much, nor literature on friendship, but on more powerful companion relationships forged though side-by-side battle with the hardship of life.

In Achilles in Vietnam Shay describes the relationship between Achilles and his friend (too weak a word) Patroclus, comparing it to the same relationships described by Vietnam veterans and their "brothers" (and of course "band of brothers" is an ancient metaphor for military companions, as we noted on St. Crispin's Day). There has been a lot of blather for centuries about whether Achilles and Patroclus were homosexual lovers; as Shay shows, this misses the point, probably isn't true, and is irrelevant. The Greek word "therapon" which Achilles uses is only weakly translated "companion" - it is my double, my stand-in, my partner, my other half, the one who stands in my place, and so on (a wide semantic field). This type of companionship seems to develop between people who depend upon each other for survival, as in war. When disrupted by death it leads to profound grief ("And Gilgamesh wept bitter tears, saying, 'He who was my companion, through adventure and hardship, is gone forever.'"). But when disrupted by death and betrayal it can lead not merely to grief but to traumatic psychological injury ("The insane rage of Achilles, Goddess, tell its story through me...").

Husband-wife (or male-female) love literature - of longing, friendship, care - is well known, and my canon in that genre begins with the Master Letters of Emily Dickinson (the first item in the "genius" column at left). But is there a husband-wife "therapon" literature?

An artless post, exposing my scattered mind at work. I beg your pardon.

2001-11-29T21:04:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I wonder if I'm ever gonna make it home again,
It's so far and out of sight.
- CK

2001-11-27T19:26:00.000-05:00

The Deep Field.

2001-11-27T02:06:00.000-05:00

Thomas Hardy prophesies the BLU-82:

That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares;
We thought it was the Judgment-day

And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, "No;
It's gunnery practice out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be...."

So down we lay again. "I wonder,
Will the world ever saner be,"
Said one, "than when He sent us under
In our indifferent century!"

And many a skeleton shook his head.
"Instead of preaching forty year,"
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,
"I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer."

Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

2001-11-24T20:45:00.000-05:00

From the taken-out-of-context department:

A widely respected scholar of Victorian literature, Christ was Berkeley's top academic officer from 1994 to 2000 and is credited with sharpening the institution's intellectual focus and building top-ranked departments in the humanities and sciences.

Gosh, you'd think He would have been able to do at least that much, if not more.

2001-11-24T19:53:00.000-05:00

Light fog tonight, softening all the street lamps and the distant shadow-trees. The universe becomes one soft, gray, dark sphere.

2001-11-24T03:46:00.000-05:00

I am a Star Trek fan, and always have been. Not one of the truly obsessed people who has a set of Vulcan ears, mind you, but a fan to be sure. Star Trek has given us a wonderful mythology for our modern age, and among its many episodes (I know the original series and Next Generation best) are examples of some of the best commercial television you will ever see.

There are many brilliant episodes of Next Generation; it is hard to deny the brilliance of The Inner Light for example. But the most adventurous and scholarly at the same time is certainly Darmok, which explores the nature of language, metaphor, narrative, and myth in ways never done before. It is an adaptation of the Gilgamesh epic, the most ancient literature on earth, and the night scene around the fire in which Picard recounts the adventures of Gilgamesh and Enkidu to his own counterpart, an alien ship's captain, is art as high as can be found in any film. Gilgamesh and Enkidu

went out into the desert together, where the great bull of heaven was killing men by the hundreds. Enkidu caught the bull by the tail, and Gilgamesh struck it with his sword. They were victorious. But Enkidu fell to the ground, struck down by the gods. And Gilgamesh wept bitter tears, saying, "He who was my companion, through adventure and hardship, is gone forever."

I wish very much to have a long married life. But if it should come to pass someday that I die before my wife does, I have often thought what a great honor it would be if she were to consider me worthy of that epitaph: "He who was my companion, through adventure and hardship, is gone forever."

2001-11-23T23:33:00.000-05:00

From the School of Relentless Poetry, whereat Kit Smart and Walt Whitman did also study:

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time -

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

2001-11-23T14:49:00.000-05:00

I am in want of a prosodist with a scalpel. The lovely Housman fragment below could be considered iambic trimeter, each line with three feet of two syllables each. And lines two and four are certainly read this way: "But when they drop and die // From all the star-sown sky."

But I definitely don't read lines one and three this way at all; to my ear they want to be heavily marked on the first two syllables, the accent (and duration) being driven forward: "Stars, I have seen them fall // No star is lost at all..."

So are those two lines just a spondee followed by two iambs? Is there a name for that (apart from genius)? Being a scientist, I don't know these things. Will you be my Preceptor?

2001-11-23T02:37:00.000-05:00

What is there to be thankful for on this holiday? I am thankful that on April 15th, 1862, this letter was written in an upstairs room of a house in a little town in western Massachusetts:

Mr Higginson,

Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?

The Mind is so near itself - it cannot see, distinctly - and I have none to ask -

Should you think it breathed - and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude -

If I make the mistake - that you dared to tell me - would give me sincerer honor - toward you -

I enclose my name - asking you, if you please - Sir - to tell me what is true?

That you will not betray me - it is needless to ask - since Honor is its own pawn -

2001-11-21T15:53:00.000-05:00

On the meteor theme, a kind contributor to the guestbook has reminded me of this face of one of Housman's jewels, which deserves to be brought out into the light:

Stars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.

And that brings to mind Yeats' famously bitter poem, "When you are old and grey." I quote the end here (from memory so I may get the punctuation wrong), but I disclaim the bitterness expressed in it. The only message being sent in posting it is a gasp at the last image:

And bending down beside the glowing bars
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled,
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Ahhh. Whew.

Another kind correspondent expressed the wish, should I ever find my small, shy, intellectual girl, that I would continue to post here so everyone can find out how it goes. Well, most of what I post is really just literary and (pedantic) academic comments, and since I'm both a perpetual teacher and student, those kinds of things just bubble out of me regardless of the setting I find myself in. The academic world is a public and published world by its nature, whether its medium is a weblog, a podium, a classroom, or a book. Only rarely do I post more private and personal comments, because my own nature is just to be personally private (I-ntj). And once or twice already I've regretted exposing an internal thought in this naked place, and have gone back and taken it out. So, if fortune's star does shine and my similarly private lady appears -- out from behind a tree in the woods, out from the library stacks, up from her hospital bed, down from the back row of a classroom, around from behind a laboratory bench, out from among her museum cabinets, along a glass wire from the darkness of her room at night -- if she appears, I'm afraid this space won't see any more personal thoughts and wishes from me. They will continue to be expressed, though, and much more often than they are here, but only as whispers in her ear.

2001-11-18T15:01:00.000-05:00

The Night of Falling Stars

If I were a writer, I would write an epochal story like Moby Dick, not about whales, but stars. I would preface it, as Melville did, with a long section of quotations from across the centuries, not about whales but about stars and meteors. One of the first would be Frost's homely and brilliant "Star in a Stone Boat":

Never tell me that not one star of all
That slip from heaven at night and softly fall
Has been picked up with stones to build a wall.

Some laborer found one faded and stone cold,
And saving that its weight suggested gold,
And tugged it from its first too certain hold,

He noticed nothing in it to remark.
He was not used to handling stars thrown dark
And lifeless from an interrupted arc.

He did not recognize in that smooth coal
The one thing palpable beside the soul
To penetrate the air in which we roll.

He did not see how like a flying thing
It brooded ant-eggs, and had one large wing,
One not so large for flying in a ring,

And a long Bird of Paradise's tail,
(Though these when not in use to fly and trail
It drew back in its body like a snail);

Nor know that he might move it from the spot -
The harm was done: from having been star shot
The very nature of the soil was hot

And burning to yield flowers instead of grain,
Flowers fanned and not put out by all the rain
Poured on them by his prayers prayed in vain.

He moved it roughly with an iron bar,
He loaded an old stone-boat with the star
And not, as you might think, a flying car,

Such as even poets would admit perforce
More practical than Pegasus the horse
If it could put a star back on its course.

He dragged it through the plowed ground at a pace
But faintly reminiscent of the race
Of jostling rock in interstellar space.

It went for building stone, and I, as though
Commanded in a dream, forever go
To right the wrong that this should have been so.

Yet ask where else it could have gone as well,
I do not know - I cannot stop to tell:
He might have left it lying where it fell.

From following walls I never lift my eye,
Except at night to places in the sky
Where showers of charted meteors let fly.

But the last would be Whitman's crystal "Clear Midnight":

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.

2001-11-17T20:11:00.000-05:00

Did you see the thinnest sliver of the crescent moon as it set this evening?

2001-11-17T00:32:00.000-05:00

From the something-lost-in-the-translation department (and also from the sublime-to-the-ridiculous department):

Subject: B E O R D A I N E D N O W ! Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 21:29:02 -0700

Minister Charles Simpson has the power to make you a LEGALLY ORDAINED MINISTER within 48 hours!!!! BE ORDAINED NOW! As a minister, you will be authorized to perform the rites and ceremonies of the church!!

WEDDINGS: MARRY your BROTHER, SISTER, or your BEST FRIEND!!

For only $29.95 you will receive: 1. 8-inch by 10-inch certificate IN COLOR, WITH GOLD SEAL. (CERTIFICATE IS PROFESSIONALLY PRINTED BY AN INK PRESS) 2. Proof of Minister Certification in YOUR NAME!! 3. SHIPPING IS FREE!!!

Well, OK, but only because it's printed by an ink press. No—wait! I don't have a sister, so this won't solve my problem at all. Shoot.

2001-11-16T19:25:00.000-05:00

Agnus Dei
qui tollis peccata mundi
dona nobis pacem.

2001-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00

Spender:

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious is never to forget
The delight of the blood drawn from ancient springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth;
Never to deny its pleasure in the simple morning light,
Nor its grave evening demand for love;
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are feted by the waving grass,
And by the streamers of white cloud,
And whispers of wind in the listening sky;
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

2001-11-13T17:42:00.000-05:00

White cirrus curls across the darkening sky. Come see.

2001-11-13T02:07:00.000-05:00

Roethke:

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood -
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks - is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

2001-11-11T15:38:00.000-05:00

I neither especially like nor dislike traveling. I have traveled around a bit for professional reasons (you know, picking up the paper bag of laundered money hidden behind the third flag pole in Red Square, that kind of thing), but have hardly ever been a regular "tourist," since professional travel is usually alone, and being a tourist alone seems to have no point. It would be nice to travel a little together, though. It wouldn't really matter where. Thoreau used to say he had traveled widely - around Concord. A trip to Maine or Tasmania or the Aran Islands, or just down the street, round the corner, through the first gate, into our first world to spend an hour watching a grasshopper would be an adventure if it were together. Or just an hour on a train watching the reflection of your face in the window.

2001-11-11T15:10:00.000-05:00

November without and within.

Bare ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

2001-11-06T23:37:00.000-05:00

Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.

2001-11-06T00:23:00.000-05:00

The minstrel boy to the war has gone,
In the ranks of Death ye shall find him.
His father's sword he hath girded on,
And his wild harp slung behind him.

"Land of song!" sang the warrior bard,
"Though all the world betrays ye,
One sword at least thy right shall guard,
One faithful harp shall praise ye!"