Envy and love

Going through the Divine Comedy again. What does it say about me that my favorite tends to be the Purgatorio? The Paradiso is certainly grand and lovely, but something about the earthly Purgatorio attracts my feeling more. Perhaps it's because I don't know what it's like to live in perfection; I only know what it is to strive to be better.

At the center of each, the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, Dante calls attention to a key concept about that place. In hell the center is a vast void, basically following the line of thinking that sin is a "lack" of goodness; it is emptiness. Sin makes humans less (which is basically the premise of all the souls in hell; they have chosen to be less than what God created in them). When we sin, we decrease our humanity and our potential.

At the center of the Purgatorio is one of my favorite concepts from the Divine Comedy, something quite reflective of human nature. Up the spiral of Purgatory, as the sinners repent for their flaws in life, they must work their way through the seven sins, or whichever applied to them. The souls in life that were envious repent by having their eyes sewn shut. (That's not the part I believe). But the point about sewing their eyes shut is so they cannot see and be envious of others. Envy or "invidia" is better understood in Dante as wishing others misfortune or feeling ill will toward someone. It can be in terms of material things or immaterial. For example, if I felt envious of someone's new car, I would secretly wish for it to have problems. Then I would experience satisfaction and perhaps even joy at the bad luck of the buyer. That's envy. And to Dante, it is one of the darkest sins because it wishes for pain and failure in the world.

The sinners doing penance for envy cure their hearts by feeling charity or love toward others. The antidote for envy is good will. It is a focus on what can be shared and increased, rather than what is limited and depleted. I may want a new car for myself, but if someone else gets one and I don't, I do not wish any harm toward the person. I am happy for him or her. I do not see another's gain as a failure to myself. I realize that life is not a zero sum game where I am trying to win while everyone else loses. Instead, feeling charity tends to focus on things that are increased by giving. Knowledge and love are two things that do not diminish when you share them. If you teach someone something, you don't lose what you knew. Instead two people now have that valuable information. And as with love and affection, the more you give, the more is created and even returned to you. That's the dynamic of charity and the dynamic of moving toward heaven. It's something I wish was more common in the world.

Celebrating... our style

To celebrate the bank accepting our offer we went for cheeseburgers... I know, not very fancy, but we've got to save the coinage. Then we looked into the depressing, terrifying reverse-mirror that is Revolutionary Road... such "great" timing. We are just glad everything truly seemed our opposite.

After the flick, I looked at the special feature titled "Lives of Quiet Desperation." I asked J.D. what writer they were quoting. He immediately guessed "Hemingway"; then I told him he could have hints. The first question he asked was "American?" "Yes." "19th or 20th century?" "19th." Then he guessed "Whitman." "No, close." Then "Thoreau." "Yep."

So I read the section that people often misquote: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" (Walden 8). And then the other section people often quote, which yes, is one of my favorites too: "I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived" (90).

Very eloquent Thoreau. I should have stopped reading out loud there. But, I went on, past even the part about fighting pygmies and cranes: "Still, we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest" (91).

I looked over and my hard working, sweet husband was asleep. Showing more wisdom than both Thoreau and myself.

Goodnight all. Thanks for all the love and support.

Cute

Prague's Franz Kafka International Named World's Most Alienating Airport

Hell

I'm going through The Divine Comedy right now.

If you just read The Inferno there's little to love or even like. I'm not one for relishing the descriptions of people drowning forever in pits of filth. I suppose you can find humor in the fact that flatterers are buried past their noses in excrement, but eternal torture, however poetically fitted to one's crimes, reveals no Divinity but merely the God of Cruelty and Spitefulness. Even as allegory, the combined spirit of revenge and despair of The Inferno is soul-crushing. Perhaps that was my lesson from it. Although, like William Blake, I did find the image of the forest of suicides in a terrifying way beautiful. The "self-murderers" turn into trees that bleed when their branches break. I suppose they destroyed their humanity and in hell lose it further.

At least on Mount Purgatory the sufferers have the possibility for redemption. They suffer and work toward forgiveness. They have the potential to ascend and in that very hope, they practice faith. The darkest torture of Hell is precisely believing the command to "Abandon All Hope." I wondered what would happen if someone challenged the hopelessness and asked for God's forgiveness anyway, even in the depths of hell?

Satan is at hell's core, frozen in extreme exile. He furiously beats his giant wings, always attempting to break free, which only further ices the frigid air and locks him in more. What if even Satan asked for mercy? What if Satan could stop the fury of his own heart and be still? Would the ice around him melt? Would God's heart melt?

Another day in the Garden of Eden

Today my heart is full.

It feels like spring. I walked to the school today and actually had to take off my coat. My daffodils are growing. The tallest one is now over three inches high. And the neighbor's yard that I enjoy walking past has new mulch, and her bulbs are coming up too.

Also today I reached the uppermost Terrace on the way out of Purgatory. How perfect it empties into eternal spring:

. . . . They, whose verse of yore
The golden age recorded and its bliss,
On the Parnassian mountain, of this place
Perhaps had dream’d. Here was man guiltless; here
Perpetual spring, and every fruit; and this
The far-famed nectar. (28. 145-150)

Eden is fed by the living waters that issue straight from God's will, and it is cooled by a light breeze caused when the earth's atmospheric envelope sweeps through the cosmos. The air fills with the songs of birds and the sweet scents of many red and yellow "tender blossoms."

In moving toward paradise-- (ultimately, perhaps our only position) -- we already have salvation but need our heart's acceptance of the fullness of God's peace and joy. And we need a hand or two to hold as we walk. Then in our striding the line between Purgatory and Eden, some few days our footsteps fall within the boundary of paradise, and we do well to be grateful for the sense found in the "lively greenness and new-springing day" of our own souls.

Through that celestial forest, whose thick shade
With lively greenness the new-springing day
Attemper’d, eager now to roam, and search
Its limits round, forthwith I left the bank;
Along the champain leisurely my way
Pursuing, o’er the ground, that on all sides
Delicious odour breathed. A pleasant air,
That intermitted never, never veer’d,
Smote on my temples, gently, as a wind
Of softest influence: at which the sprays,
Obedient all, lean’d trembling to that part
Where first the holy mountain casts his shade;
Yet were not so disorder’d, but that still
Upon their top the feather’d quiristers

Applied their wonted art, and with full joy
Welcomed those hours of prime, and warbled shrill
Amid the leaves, that to their jocund lays
Kept tenour; even as from branch to branch,
Along the piny forests on the shore
Of Chiassi, rolls the gathering melody,
When Eolus hath from his cavern loosed
The dripping south. Already had my steps,
Though slow, so far into that ancient wood
Transported me . . . . (28.1-4)

"She Dwelt Among The Untrodden Ways"

(c. 1798-1800).

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
--Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!
(112)

from what is called Wordsworth's "Lucy poems"

Today I'm playing around with this as a possible opener in my chapter due by the end of March. I used part of it to start my second major field paper, and I'm just trying to cannibalize all I can, since I was encouraged to do so. (It's difficult though). Anyway, this haunting little poem has an image I love: "Fair as a star, when only one / Is shining in the sky." Personally, it conjures for me an image I connect with home, watching Venus come out before all the other stars, standing on the steps facing west, feeling the wind blow my hair away from my neck, maybe humming something as I took the clothes off the clothesline for the night.

Simply also, it makes me sad. I think of Lucy. Figment of Wordsworth's imagination or not, she seems worthy to be loved and known by many, but in the end very few of us are loved or known at all. The most we can really hope is to be loved and known by the people that matter most -- and make a difference to them.

J. Alfred Colbert?

Colbert talking to Elizabeth Alexander about the inaugural poem and J. Alfred Prufrock...

http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/full-episodes/index.jhtml?episodeId=216591

"I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me."

Happy big 400 Milton!

I wandered over to the English department for cake this afternoon. (Silly enough, it was my breakfast; I stayed up until 4:30 a.m. last night).

Anyway, today was Milton's birthday party!

I love odd-English types. We will come up with any reason to eat desserts. (Check the calendar; whose birthday is it tomorrow!?) Well, that and Milton was a pretty exquisite poet. Some of his lines are as delicious as chocolate cake, yet I suppose it's an acquired taste. We ate cake and sat around listening to people read small portions of their favorite verses. Here at the Harvard of the Midwest (snicker, snicker, ha ha) we like things a little more comfortable. So, we sat in the warm lounge upstairs with our snacks and beverages.

At real Harvard this morning they stood outside in the cold at 7:00 a.m. reading "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity." --Yeah, we're definitely a little softer around here. Although, we did read for an hour. Also I got to talk to a former student and a former professor, chit-chatting about dissertation stuff. I'm happy I went. I was contemplating remaining antisocial at home.

Here's "Sonnet 7" that we read today about lost youth (sigh) and the elusive employment of fleeting talent (sigh, sigh again). Excepting the cake, it brings to mind the last seven years:

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stol'n on his wing my three and twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,
That I to manhood am arrived so near;
And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
That some more timely-happy spirits endueth.
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure even
To that same lot, however mean or high,
Toward which time leads me, and the will of heaven:
All is, if I have grace to use it so
As ever in my great task-master's eye.

Well, and excepting the manhood bit, of course. Here is a reading of this poem I found online. (You really have to look at it). I think my favorite part is the analysis: "He points out that he has not grown to be a man because 'no bud or blossom shew'th.' 'Bud,' in my opinion, refers to facial hair and 'blossom' to blossoming pecks or muscles."

It's also entertaining that "Dr. Spork" at the end of the comments mentions the entire reading is wrong. Anyway, so much for people reading Milton.

I'll leave you with my favorite lines from "Il Penseroso":

And let some strange mysterious dream
Wave at his wings in airy stream
Of lively portraiture displayed,
Softly on my eyelids laid.
And as I wake, sweet music breathe
Above, about, or underneath,
Sent by some spirit to mortals good,
Or the unseen genius of the wood.
But let my due feet never fail,
To walk the studious cloister's pale,
And love the high embowed roof,
With antique pillars' massy proof,
And storied windows richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light.
There let the pealing organ blow
To the full-voiced choir below,
In service high, and anthems clear,
As may with sweetness, through mine ear,
Dissolve me into ecstasies,
And bring all heaven before mine eyes.

Freewrite

I don't know how this is going to come together. I've been watching stupid television and feeling lazy all day. So, I decided I just needed to write something, even something rambling, incomplete, ungrammatical, silly, and with mixed metaphors.

Upon finishing the translation of Things Past the other day, I had one of those rare but meaningful moments when I remember what it is I love. --Those moments when you're caught up in aesthetic completion, those moments some books make us feel. This book was such an immense labor of time, going through it. And while some passages along the way are vivid, lovely, and wonderful... there are also moments that annoy, as the character wallows in his possessive jealousy or recounts tales of casual sex with milk, bakery, and grocer "girls." (But, now I'm getting side-tracked). Because the experience was one of greater beauty, and lingering on the more annoying aspects makes me forget my larger point. The point is that I'm grateful to be able to appreciate this sort of work of art, to be able to see the bigger picture, to get aesthetic pleasure from a text.

Then there was Thanksgiving, and I began to realize that I should be thankful for who I am --. If you think about it, really, the odds of you being you and me being me were crazy. First, none of our ancestors had to die from plague or a dinosaur (Kentucky science) before some other ancestor of ours was born. Secondly, consider the odds we were up against even with the thousands of eggs and innumerable sperm.... (ok, I wander again). My point is that I'm ok with my own existence. I have been blessed with the ability to feel and experience some few things in unique ways. I don't mean to sound like an ass, although with the egoism involved in blogging, I'm afraid I probably come across that way a lot. (I really try not to). I think there are thousands of ways of appreciating beauty, and we're all given unique insights and ways to contribute to the whole. As an example, I wish I had some insight into the beauty of math. I know some individuals can see in numbers, formulas, and proofs a pleasurable pattern; they perceive a beauty I can only realize exists, but I do not get to personally experience. They have an insight with the universe that deepens it. They add to God's creation by adding to God's experience of her creation.

Many people understand the underlying aesthetic wonder of nature itself, of painting, of music --we all get glimpses of the undercurrents of beauty rippling through different dimensions of our world. We tap into the groundwater now and then, even if it's a short, shallow drink. Still the water is cool and refreshing. Our souls receive life and are enlarged. This is also the spiritual experience. This is also love and friendship. These are the cherished and wonderful things that we all hold very dear.

But to hear a beautiful sonata is only one level. Imagine being Mozart. There is the human working through layers of deeper connection to creativity itself. Bringing back that vision, that touching of the stars, to share with other hearts and minds, not given the direct involvement.

Still, each time someone new experiences a beautiful song or finds something worthy, it deepens the universe's memory and experience of it. What I'm also saying is that we don't have to be Mozart. Each time something beautiful is relived and recreated, we participate in the life of beauty, of the life of art, in life itself (whatever mysterious purpose it has). So, while I do not create works of art, I feel the current of beauty running through them, some more than others. And that is a blessing. It is a gift to get a sense of completion from a text that feels like more than the writer, more than the words, more than myself.

The other day I was reading about a technique where painters use two colors alongside each other to create the impression of a third color. The third color isn't "really" there-- but it's the combination of the two and the human mind's filtering of the experience that gives rise to something more than what simply meets the eye. I feel lucky to get moments of seeing the third color when I read. I think some of us have that wellspring, and while we may often be burdened by thinking so much about something, at times it loses all distinction and becomes a mere blur, we also get the pleasure of a level of understanding not small in its beauty.

This sense, this third color also emerges in our personal lives and relationships. It emerges in our friendships and in our marriages. Think of how in a marriage you become more than a single person; you become a couple. You're both still complete individuals (in good marriages) but a third quality emerges, and that is the quality of you two together. That aspect that comes through is love and the unique way your relationship develops and adds to this world. They say when people are married "two become one," but I see it a little differently. My math doesn't add up I suppose. 1 + 1 = 3 . Again, back to me not understanding math!

Now, I feel the need to step back. Certainly I am a little speck of dust. There are people much, much smarter, more creative, more insightful, more everything. But for my lump of clay, I contribute to God's experience of beautiful things and add my humble love and ecstatic excitement, at least every now and then. That is what I can hope for and can be happy to feel on occasion. To be ungrateful would be to diminish the generosity of a thoughtful gift.

I know too that I have friends that feel and understand similar experiences. I know they access similar points of beauty. I have friends that know more than I do and have deeper wells into areas I do not venture. Some of them participate in the living waters of knowledge, especially specialized areas, of music, or art, of different types of literature, of different languages, philosophies, and ideas. We each have our own way of uniquely experiencing beauty through, being, and beyond ourselves. And while we may not see them all, we can still celebrate them.

Giving thanks

Not much happening here, just Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

J.D. is washing dishes to get ready to prepare Mr. Bird. (No Tofurkey this year). But we found a small turkey at Trader Joe's that was supposedly free-range. Thank you little turkey. I'm reminded of this Gibran passage on Eating and Drinking:

Then an old man, a keeper of an inn, said, 'Speak to us of Eating and Drinking.' And he said: Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth, and like a plant be sustained by the light. But since you kill to eat, and rob the young of its mother's milk to quench your thirst, let it then be an act of worship. And let your board stand an altar on which the pure and the innocent of forest and plain are sacrificed for that which is pure and innocent in humanity. When you kill a beast say to him in your heart, 'By the same power that slays you, I too am slain; and I too shall be consumed. For the law that delivered you into my hand shall deliver me into a mightier hand. Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven.' And when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart, 'Your seeds shall live in my body, And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart, And your fragrance shall be my breath, And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons.' And in the autumn, when you gather the grapes of your vineyard for the winepress, say in your heart, 'I too am a vineyard, and my fruit shall be gathered for the winepress, And like new wine I shall be kept in eternal vessels.' And in winter, when you draw the wine, let there be in your heart a song for each cup; And let there be in the song a remembrance for the autumn days, and for the vineyard, and for the winepress.

Comforting Words

I found some comforting words today upon finishing In Search of Lost Time, the story of my graduate career:

"Our greatest fears, like our greatest ambitions, are not beyond our strength, and we are able in the end to overcome the one and to realize the other."

(I hope so).

This summary also seemed comforting:
"In Search of Lost Time is the story of a man who is unable to bring himself to write. Finally he discovers his theme and decides it is time to begin. And as we finish reading the novel, we realize that it is the book on which he is about to start. Here we have the perfectly formed circle of ‘Time Lost’ and ‘Time Regained’, which was Proust’s original plan."

(In the end, Proust had time & strength to write thousands of pages).
-----------------------------------
Just for my own reference: this article.

Thought about today:

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."


I read this for the first time sitting on a hillside near my childhood home. I went for a walk that day with Leaves of Grass tucked into my coat. I haven't followed Whitman's advice by reading it every season every year of my life, but I have thought about it and read it every now and then. :)

Saint-Loup dies by sunset

When is a tree black but not burned?

When the sky is on fire.

One of my complaints about living in St. Louis has been that we do not get beautiful sunsets in the urban areas. In Idaho, you have the wide open spaces to see all the broad perspective of sky. Here, you get a slice of color at best, interrupted by many trees and tall buildings. But yesterday, November 13, 2008 around 5:00 p.m. walking home from the library, St. Louis made me eat my words. A soft purple glow summoned my attention; the trees' branches over my head spouted against lilac. Then the purple gave way to a charming Tiepolo rose, which with my walking, darkened into salmon, raspberry, cherry. Then the whole world was pink, the leaves, the air, the ground. Only a single white street lamp interrupted the hazy glow, by shining on a patch of still-green leaves.

As I walked, Robert Saint-Loup died again in WWI, trying to save his men. Saint-Loup had a glorious re-dying, as only possible in fiction. By the time I was home, Morel had received his cross for bravery, ironically. At least Saint-Loup's death was scenic and heroic. Poor Albertine was thrown from her horse while I was washing dishes. She died between scrubbing and rinsing the dinner plates. But now my humble kitchen is a landmark because I can say Albertine died there. Bergotte died by the park; his death, the precise moment, I recall well. I was looking at my favorite red tree back in October. It was barely raining. Bergotte went into another world with more than one splash of color, adding my red to his yellow.

"And since art is a faithful re-composing of life, around these truths that one has attained within oneself there floats an atmosphere of poetry, the sweetness of a mystery, which is merely the semi-darkness through which we have come" (Time Regained, 207).

You should take a look sometime

I know we're all busy, but if you ever have some time for recreational reading--although not mindless-- you should take a look at Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer. I finished this book yesterday. I enjoyed it, and I would recommend it for anyone interested in any of the following figures: Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Auguste Escoffier, Marcel Proust, Paul Cezanne, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, or Virginia Woolf.

But a bigger reason for reading this book is that it will change how you think about yourself, in terms of your brain and your senses: sight, smell & taste, and hearing.

It's not a perfect book, but it will make you appreciate all the mini-miracles it takes for basic and higher-level functioning in this world.

The other side of silence

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity. -George Eliot, Middlemarch

We do walk around not hearing things. Our brains filter even what we do perceive from our registered sensations. We sort and prioritize our senses.

If you were to walk outside right now, what would you experience? Sunlight, a breeze, maybe an autumn chill? Even the act of having expectations would change your experience. You would certainly notice anything that immediately varied from your expectations.

A minute ago I walked outside. I expected to feel a slight chill or hear a car driving by. Instantly, I was surprised by the scent of clean laundry, the smell of someone's dryer sheets wafting up from the basement. Then I heard the dryer. I perceived the smell before the sound, in fact, the smell told me to listen for that particular noise. I had a new narrative and directed my attention to look for the pieces fitting the puzzle.

I didn't hear everything, not the sound of air molecules bouncing off each other all around me. Not the worms in the ground beneath me, not the leaves on the trees quivering in the wind. As Eliot eloquently writes, we don't perceive most of the world around us. We only get a sliver of reality, and usually only the slice we've selected to narrate and experience for the moment.

A few nights ago we watched a show about research in Crete and the decline of the Minoans. They've tried to explain what happened to the Minoans for a long time, usually falling back on a narrative of war and conquest. After the devastating 2004 tsunami, someone made that connection. Once they had the idea of looking for evidence of a tsunami, they found it. The evidence had been there all along. They had been staring at it for years. But it didn't mean anything until they had a particular reason to see it.

Of course, Eliot goes much further than merely discussing the world of our senses. Her real point is the world of human feeling, understanding, and empathy. Perhaps as a matter of survival, we don't really feel for each other very much. But maybe we should try to pay a little more attention to "all ordinary human life."

He prayeth best who loveth best

All things, both great and small:

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.



-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

OMG hilarious

National Endowment For The Arts Funds Construction Of $1.3 Billion Poem

September 12, 2008 Issue 44•37
WASHINGTON—The National Endowment for the Arts announced Monday that it has begun construction on a $1.3 billion, 14-line lyric poem—its largest investment in the nation's aesthetic- industrial complex since the $850 million interpretive-dance budget of 1985.

"America's metaphors have become strained beyond recognition, our nation's verses are severely overwrought, and if one merely examines the internal logic of some of these archaic poems, they are in danger of completely falling apart," said the project's head stanza foreman Dana Gioia. "We need to make sure America's poems remain the biggest, best-designed, best-funded poems in the world."

Gioia confirmed that the public-works composition will be assembled letter-by-letter atop a solid base of the relationship between man and nature. The poem's structure, laid out extensively on lined-paper blueprints, involves a traditional three- quatrain-and-a-couplet framework, which will be tethered to an iambic meter for increased stability and symmetry. If the planners can secure an additional $6.2 million in funding, they may affix a long dash to the end of line three, though Gioia said that is a purely optimistic projection at this stage.

The poem is expected not only to revitalize the community, Gioia said, but also create jobs for the nation's hundreds of out-of-work poets. According to the proposed budget, the poem's 224 authors have allocated $4 million for the final rhyming couplet, $52 million to insert hyphens into the word "tomorrow" so it reads "to-morrow," $7.45 for a used copy of John Keats' Selected Poems for ideas and inspiration, and $450 million for a simile likening human fate to the wind. Some experts, however, say the poem is already at risk of going over budget, citing the soaring $5,000-per-square-inch cost of vellum, and an ambitious but perhaps ill-conceived $135 million undertaking to make the word "owl" rhyme with "soul."

"We've already put 200 hours of manpower into the semicolon at the end of the first stanza," said Charles Simic, poet laureate of the United States and head author of the still-untitled piece. "And I've got my best guys working around the clock to convert all the 'overs' in the piece into one-syllable 'o'ers.' I got [Nobel Prize winner Seamus] Heaney and [Margaret] Atwood stripping all the V's and tacking apostrophes in their place. It's grunt work, but somebody's got to do it if this poem's going to get done."

Gioia denied allegations that the poem is being mismanaged, claiming that he has implemented several measures to keep the project on schedule, including giving no more than two words to each poet, limiting alliteration and assonance to a maximum of three words per line, cutting out all extraneous allusions to Eliot and Yeats, and restricting any unwieldy metaphors hinting at the vast alienation of modernity.

Although the poem is still in the early stages of construction, it has already come under fire for serious structural issues, including a shaky foundation and a half-dozen partial synecdoches. "This poem is an eyesore," said literary critic Stanley Fish. "The whole right side of the verse is barely being held up by a load-bearing enjambment, and it seems as if they just sloppily patched up all the holes in the piece with plagiarized Rod McKuen passages."

In addition, the tenuous line that was being drawn between the narrator's mortality and winter unexpectedly collapsed on itself Monday. Two poets were killed in the incident. "Sure, some of the imagery might be beautiful, but is this poem actually going to be useful?" Fish said. "Or are people just going to look at it and go, 'Huh. Interesting.' Why not put this money toward something everybody can enjoy, like a TV pilot or a New Yorker cartoon caption?"
"The government needs to stop throwing billions of dollars at the arts," he added.

Fish cautioned that previous attempts to funnel money into poetry had been cut short before they were fully completed, resulting in the large number of unfinished, million-dollar poems that are still lying unread across the country to this day.

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/national_endowment_for_the_arts

I LOVE you Onion. I'm sure only a small audience will find this funny at all, but I know at least one other person will find it hilarious, especially the Stanley Fish part.

I love how Fish is reported to say flatly: "This poem is an eyesore." I burst out laughing.
I also love the nod to overcoming Deconstructionism by stabilizing the poem's internal logic, great little joke there about building a poem. And thinking literally about "partial synecdoches" is a real brain teaser, but a great in-the-know joke too. There's so much here. Isn't it lovely how Seamus Heaney is doing "grunt work" on the poem? One thing they should fix though, Charles Simic isn't the poet laureate anymore, now it's Kay Ryan. Anyway, pretty dang hilarious. So much to love.

Impressionism

. . . a pink cloud paints a last touch of life in the tranquil sky. A few drops of rain fall without noise on the water, ancient but still in its divine infancy coloured always by the weather and continually forgetting the reflexions of clouds and flowers. And after the geraniums have vainly striven, by intensifying the brilliance of their scarlet, to resist the gathering darkness, a mist rises to envelop the now slumbering island; one walks in the moist dimness along the water's edge, where at the most the silent passage of a swan startles one like, in a bed, at night, the eyes, for a moment wide open, and the swift smile of a child whom one did not suppose to be awake. Then one
would like to have with one a loving companion, all the more as one feels oneself to be alone and can imagine oneself to be far away from the world. ("The Guermantes Way II.106)

I love the image of water forgetting its reflections. Water is like the mind here, but Proust makes the water a constant tabula rasa, whereas, we hope human beings would retain the memories of their colored impressions. Perhaps that's the point. We do retain precisely impressions. We don't recall exactly how the pink cloud looked, but we recall the sensation of the pink cloud, the feeling of aloneness or quietude or appreciative beauty as it dissolves before our eyes. We also have a build-up of impressions. Proust worked a lot with memory. He helped develop the idea that our memories are not always, or even often, under our control. They are spontaneous and take on an independent life. Seeing a pink cloud in 10 years could remind me of eating the dark chocolate I'm snacking on right now as I write about it. Or the next time I eat chocolate, I could think about pink clouds. Our senses take us back through the past, often in an unpredictable time machine. We often suddenly remember something from our childhood, perhaps a loving memory of a grandparent when we smell fresh baked cookies. Our impressions to a large extent become our identity, but they are more wild than we like to admit.

I love most the line about the geraniums, intensifying their scarlet, against the darkness. This is one of the most beautiful features of a grey day. Of course, poor geraniums, it's a losing battle. But, they do seem to glow more vibrantly in the onset of the gloom.

There's a lot here in this passage. I think I can work with this, but I don't know why I am. Sometimes you have to have faith. All I know is that Merrill marked it, his check is by the word "dark-ness" as it breaks like a enjambed line. I know too that he worked with the imaginative connection between sight and memory, between all the senses and memory, and especially the nature of reflexion/reflection.

He also has a major poem about swans and childhood, which he wrote in college around the same time as his thesis on Proust... could I perhaps have discovered the source / a source? Perhaps just another impression along the way to its formation, either way, it's promising I think.

p.s. I forgot to add too, the very nature of the passage, with it's flowing from one image and idea to the next builds or enacts this functioning of the human mind. We move rapidly from the pink cloud, to water, to red geraniums, to mist and swans, to awake eyes, to a child's smile, to the desired sensation of walking with one's imagined, beloved companion.

Baudelaire via Benjamin

From "The Paris of the Second Empire" and Baudelaire's poem "Abel et Cain":


Race of Abel, sleep, drink, and eat;
God smiles on you indulgently.
Race of Cain, in the mire
Grovel and die miserably.

(Translation, 55) Edited by Michael Jennings.


Recently I posted Wordsworth's "The World is too much with us" poem. Of course, Wordsy protests materialism and insipid religious doctrines that distance us from each other and nature. But my sadness recently has been that the world is too little with us; basically, we are too little with the rest of the world in compassion to make it any better. Churches teach that races deserve their sufferings because of some ancient ancestor. This only lessens our feelings of guilt or increases a misguided sense of entitlement, perhaps both. It's a very selfish and sinful teaching to propagate.

Instilling Depravity Since c. 3500 B.C.E.

In response to Phyllis Schlafly's terror of English Majors and her derision of "ethnic" texts.

Yes, since the invention of writing, we "English Majors" have been about our evil business, corrupting minds with all that thinking garbage. Sure, we started out a little slow with Sumerian lists of crops and livestock, but we really gained immoral ground once Gilgamesh became the rage. These days, we've really reached a peak with what is termed "non-Western literature" and texts by "ethnic" people! Granted, as long as most people don't actually understand (or read) the texts, some of the depravity is lost. It seems too, that once a text is old enough, it somehow becomes sanitized. Poor Shakespeare and Chaucer, with all their dirty jokes and innuendos, what a tragic waste of perfectly naughty writing.

This entry is a response to the recent news of Phyllis Schlafly receiving an honorary degree-- which come on... don't hand those things out like candy! I'm all for speaking and writing whatever the hell one wants, but that doesn't mean you have to be awarded for it. After all, do we really want to place an official seal of approval on someone who argues the student who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech did so because he was an English major? Schlafly questions: "Did Cho get evil egotistical notions from Professor Shoshana Milgram Knapp's senior seminar called 'The Self-Justifying Criminal in Literature'?" If anything, if he were bright enough and actually took that class, he might have glimpsed the flimsy self-justification behind criminal acts. Then again, does someone willing to mass murder people really think about the nuances of his literature class? Is that really the issue here Schlafly, really?

Evidently the modern English major is the worst of all sorts. We'd only be saved if we just read more Chaucer. Bring on "The Merchant's Tale"; save our country and our souls with a story of sex in a tree! Lascivious old men and adulterous fornication, irony and Middle English are the backbone of the GOP! And while we're quoting lines from Hamlet, let us not forget: "That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs." Bring on endless jokes about jewel cases and what not!

The following text is from Schlafly's newsletter Vol. 41, No. 8, March 2008
http://www.eagleforum.org/psr/2008/mar08/psrmar08.html :

What's Happened to Shakespeare? The bad news is that Shakespeare has disappeared from required courses in English departments at more than three-fourths of the top 25 U.S. universities, but the good news is that only 1.6 % of America's 19 million undergraduates major in English (according to Department of Education figures). When I visit college campuses, students for years have been telling me that the English departments are the most radicalized of all departments, more so than sociology, psychology, anthropology, or even women's studies. In the decades before "progressive" education became the vogue, English majors were required to study Shakespeare, the preeminent author of English literature. The premise was that students should be introduced to the best that has been thought and said. What happened? To borrow words from Hamlet: "Though this be madness, yet there is method in it." Universities deliberately replaced courses in the great authors of English literature with what professors openly call "fresh concerns," "under-represented cultures," and "ethnic or non-Western literature."