How very very

Peripety, Discovery, and Suffering

A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility.
- Aristotle, On Poetics (238)

On Poetics is a diverting book for a few reasons. Lacking Aristotle’s declarative tone of absolute knowledge, I humbly submit a few for your consideration:

Reason # 1)  Imagine the long road of literature, anyone of us may not know all of the side streets, perhaps very few, but we do have an inkling as to one of the starting points. Reading Aristotle, (which in my mind is a lot closer than not to the starting place) in which he outlines and explains the art of Poetry, Epics, Tragedies,  and Comedies is fascinating for his relative juxtaposition- there’s not a lot more road where that came from. He breaks the thing down into hilariously pedantic laws and by-laws, but still- he’s not wrong.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars. (214)

Reason #2) Okay, so maybe it is the latent quasi librarian in me, but who can resist such a genius for categorization and organization? The ultimate constituents of language (chapter 20) is a marvelous deconstruction. Interestingly, he discusses the terms not only as we unthinkingly absorb them today: as written words, but also as most people of his day thought of them: as spoken sounds and words. The Diction is wrapped up in the grammar and from our view down the road, it makes one reconsider our penned ideas of language.

The iambic, we know, is the most speakable of meters, as is shown by the fact that we very often fall into it in conversation, whereas we rarely talk hexameters, (208)

Too true. I find the iambic regularly holds my tongue hostage leaving me laughing to myself like a mad woman. These things can’t be helped, apparently, and that’s a comfort.

Reason #3) Brevity. In form and function. Aristotle naturally has an opinion on the whys and wheres of the importance of brevity. Epics are long, Tragedies are not. I find that’s true in life as well. But Aristotle is no hypocrite, if something demands an explanation, he happily gives it, but when it gets down to brass tacks obvious, he doesn’t waste time, Here by ‘Diction’ I mean merely this, the composition of the verses; and by ‘Melody’, what is too completely understood to require explanation. (210) I really hope I remember that gem for the next time someone asks me to explain something obvious- too completely understood to require explanation- enough said. Aristotle, I could kiss you!

The argument of the Odyssey is not a long one. (226)

Then again, anyone who thinks that the Catalogue of the Ships section of the Odyssey is an “[episode] to relieve the uniformity of [Homer’s] narrative.” (235) is perhaps a little too much of a home town fan for my taste. To me that was like being stuck behind a parade of local by-gone heroes. The argument may not be long, but let’s get back to it, shall we?

Reason #4) Philosophy. Student of Plato he is. This is what I find so appealing about philosophy in general as a framework for studying anything- it seeps in. For example, his discussion of the proper makings of Poetry broken down into three parts: peripety, discovery, and suffering- If that’s not life, than I don’t know what is and perhaps deserve a refund.

The worst situation is when the personage is with full knowledge on the point of doing the deed, and leaves it undone. (220)

Yes, we all crave a little resolution. Aristotle inadvertently and on purpose makes many a brilliant observation that apply to our non-fiction lives. The one small little concern I have on his behalf, and this could simply be a result of having studied under the arm of the apparently humor-less Plato, is his view of Comedy.

As for Comedy, it is (as has been observed) an imitation of men worse than the average; worse, however, not as regards any and every sort of fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly. (208)

Well. That’s cause for a moment’s awkwardness. I’m not sure what I would do without my attachment to the Ridiculous. I’m not even sure if I am aware of the parts of life that aren’t ridiculous. He goes on to describe something which produces laughter as a thing “ugly and distorted without causing pain.” Come now, Ari, lighten up. Anything that doesn’t distort with pain is a-okay in my book.

*Aristotle, Rhetoric and On Poetics - translated by Ingram Bywater

Not So Muted Mirth

“It’s nothing but a kind of microcosmos of communism - all that psychiatry,” rumbled Pnin, in his answer to Chateau. “Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?” - Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (52)

One of the most delightful aspects of this blog is when someone comments that they are excited to read a book or author that I have written about. A rare, but delightful joy. The other morning I was collecting some of the essays that I have written, about the books of one of my favorite authors- Vladimir Nabokov. By the time I was done re-reading and repairing them, as much as I could, for a critical viewing, I was overtaken with desire for more Nabokov. I controlled myself long enough to take a shower but then practically ran out of the house with a towel turban still on my head in my febrile haste to the library.

Once the book was in hand, I had a moment’s calm to reflect, and I was struck with the realization that I was that person! I had influenced someone to run in a dead heat to the library to read something! I was quite pleased with myself. Right up until the moment that dawned - I was that person. Oh. That’s pretty pathetic, Jessica. Might even have to remove the qualifier from that sentence- nothing pretty about it, the narrator in my head added.

Then political questions. He asks: ‘Are you an anarchist?’ I answer ” -time out on the part of the narrator for a spell of cozy mute mirth - (11)

Call me over sensitive, but the narrator of Pnin hovered around charity, sometimes dipping a finger into condescension. I found myself talking to him, “Narrator, be nice. Poor Pnin is trying, and his heart! He’s heartbroken. Do be kind.” Pnin is a Russian émigreé working in the world of academia. With a caustic charm, Nabokov gently skewers the ridiculous people that populate Pnin’s world: from his silly colleagues, truly awful ex-wife, to a hilariously serious conversation about the flawed chronology of Anna Karenina. It’s all wonderfully told.

I found myself laughing out loud while reading the bulk of this book in an examination room of a cardiologist with my client. Every now and then she’d look over at me, “It’s very funny,” I would offer. But her narrator was keeping her busy working her up into a fit of fury that exploded on the doctor’s head when he came in. She was too cold, had waited too long, and had come too far. Finally, the heart doctor made an intellectual decision to say, “I’m sorry.” She was not fooled. “That doesn’t help me AT ALL. You have wasted the time of this valuable person!” All eyes turned to me. Of all three people in the room to have the word “valuable” attached to…I smiled with wholesome disquiet at the floor, looked up to the doctor and gave him an I have no idea what she’s talking about look. Meanwhile my narrator was in a paroxysm of giggles flopping about uncontrollably, mockingly holding up my paycheck- Oh shut up. I went back to my reading.

“Our friend,” answered Clements, “employs a nomenclature all his own. His verbal vagaries add a new thrill to life. His mispronunciations are mythopeic. His slips of the tongue are ocacular. He calls my wife John.”  (165)

The narrator of Pnin does not fully insert himself into the story until very near the end, just to underline and dot the head-scratchingly odd awkwardness of Pnin. But it’s not, perhaps, Pnin that is entirely at fault, it’s what’s distorted and lost in translation. That’s a feeling we all understand: translating what we feel, into what we say and how we act, into how we are then perceived- it’s a wonder there are any forms of successful communication at all. Maybe there aren’t. We all just think we understand each other. Pnin’s narrator is at the ready, standing by to laugh under his breath, shake his head just a little, Oh you poor dear. You’ll be alright.

“So I take the opportunity to extend a cordial invitation to you to visit me this evening. Half past eight, postmeridian. A little house-heating soiree, nothing more. Bring also your spouse - or perhaps you are a Bachelor of Hearts?”
( Oh, punster Pnin!)   (151)

Pnin is very endearing, but of course it’s the narrator that we fall in love with. He’s the voice in the head of the book, in a good mood, teasing without malice. I wish my narrator was in a good mood more often.

More reads by Nabokov, towel turban or not:

Avoid Vocatives: King, Queen and Knave
More Bleeding Stumps of Verse: The Gift
Sun and Stone: Speak, Memory

The Sedulous Farrago of a Woman’s Mind

However, the majority of women are neither harlots nor courtesans; nor do they sit clasping pug dogs to dusty velvet all through the summer afternoon. But what do they do then?  -Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (88)

The well-known first few lines of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, sum up her thesis neatly; she declares that a woman must have money and a room of her own in order to write. Having come into a bit of money, Woolf was in a position of some authority to make these statements.  At nearly one hundred years distance, it offers a still (depressingly) prescient message.

There was another ten-shilling note in my purse; I noticed it, because it is a fact that still takes my breath away - the power of my purse to breed ten-shilling notes automatically. (38)

Cash rules everything: that is as true for men as it is for women, however, we women simply have always been, and still are, the poorer half of society. I am, regrettably, neither an expert on having money, nor on having a room of one’s own. However, I wondered, as I read this rather brilliant little book, about that last point. Woolf spends a lot of time talking about the dearth of female literature, she adds odious quotes that would make most humans cringe, showing up the dumbest things a man is capable of saying on the subject of women and their intellectual capacities. She also clearly understands that the difference between men and women is potentially the all-important and wonderful thing.

It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? - (87)

As women were slowly “allowed’ to write more than letters, and then to show their work publicly, one of the problems, according to Woolf  that presented, was the difficulty in writing about a world in which a person knows so little. Confined as these early female proto-writers were, their writing was limited. Much in the same way, she adds, that men knew, and therefore wrote, next to nothing (and nothing at all interesting) about the all-important female to female relationship- they simply had, historically, no idea what that entailed and so female characters were by and large relegated to the role of lover or femme fatale with some female relations thrown in. Imagine, she asks, if everything written by a man was stripped of its male to male friendships? I can’t even get past re-imagining  The Epic of Gilgamesh, so let’s not try…I do seem to recall a vitally important prostitute in that tale, yeah Virginia, point taken.

But here I run into a slight problem. I get, theoretically, the whole room of one’s own thing, it sounds very nice. And yet, and yet…I believe this is one more of a piece. This is a man’s problem, not a woman’s. If a woman has money- which gives time; and confidence - which gives energy, a room is superfluous. Are we not the multi-tasking half of the sexes? It’s built in. Tend to children, roll the dough out, plan the dinner, read a book, jot down a brilliant thought, hang the clothes to dry, drive in circles taking kids to and from and back again to practices, friends, and libraries, and then sit down to write while answering homework questions and making plans for the week (you’ll notice it’s the having money part that would eliminate what many of us have to add in - doing all of the above for a minimum wage - a serious blow to both time and confidence). All this is done while the same writing-male sits in his room of his own. I’m not saying either is easy, or one easier, simply that a hermetic room of peace is not the key thing in a woman’s life. We don’t have time to be precious. Sorry, that came out wrong, what I meant to say is…it is possible…we have an innate capacity to hold a spoon in one hand and a pencil in another. We only needed to be respected for doing it- our way.

There are people whose charity embraces even the prune. (19)

All I’m saying is, don’t wait. The money problem is a definite problem, but if you are a woman, and you are waiting for a room of your own- it may be a long wait. You’re probably much more likely to get an hour snatched here and there with lots of workable minutes strung in between. As a client of mine, who gave me her delightfully underlined copy of A Room of One’s Own and was born years before it was even written,  always says- we must take what we can get. Although, she had money and room, so…on second thought, I’m open to the experiment- someday!

My motives, let me admit, are partly selfish. Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading - I like reading books in the bulk. (107)

Rhubarb Strawberry Pie

Camping With Chekhov

But silence is painful and terrifying only for those who have already said everything and who have nothing left to say; but to those who have not yet begun to talk, silence comes easily and simply. – Maxim Gorky, Twenty-Six Men And A Girl (210)

I dragged my Russian authors along on our annual camping trip. The Party by Anton Chekhov was an interesting contrast. Chekhov’s descriptions of the interior worlds of the painfully superficial and emotionally stunted bourgeoisie set alongside our chaotic, boisterous little group was amusing. While we are, some of us on occasion, at a certain…comfort level with emotionally stunted, the others try to help and,  painfully superficial has never been a danger in our midst. Some fifteen people, all of whom have their own struggles and hopes can at least find solace and encouragement sitting near one another next to the hearth discussing how to pronounce the word. And if that fails we can have fun arranging still-lifes:

Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe en L’Orange

It seemed to her for some reason that if her husband were suddenly to turn facing her, and to say, ‘Olya, I am unhappy,’ she would cry or laugh, and she would be at ease. She fancied that her legs were aching and her body was uncomfortable all over because of the strain on her feelings. – The Party (198)

How many of us wear ourselves out binding our pride to our confusion and a looming monotony of meaninglessness that scares or deadens us? I was admittedly late to making this discovery, but I am happier when I can say if I’m not. Just let me feel. Let me feel it. The demons in my head are dispelled, and then there is happiness, lurking on a cool path through the woods, in one of our children’s laughter, competitive four-square, rushing waterfalls, bags of ice, blackened marshmallows, the history of cinema, no money or shoes, forgotten tent poles, a starry night, copious amounts of quinoa salad and the color orange. It’s all there.

Life for those whose circumstances never change is agonizing and very difficult: the longer they live, the more agonizing such circumstances become, if their spirits are not broken altogether.  – Twenty Six Men and a Girl (213)

Our spirits are not broken. Throw the comfort of a soft bed, clean clothes, and dry bathroom floors aside- these new circumstances in good company are a sweet succor to me. It’s all here. Don’t let happiness pass you by.

*The Penguin Book of Russian Short Stories edited by David Richards
The Party, Anton Chekhov translated by Constance Garnett
Twenty-Six Men and a Girl, Maxim Gorky translated by Roger Cockrell

Working A Short Story

Does your grief sleep or not?’
‘Grief does not sleep,’ I replied.
- Nikolay Leskov, The Make-Up Artist, A Story on a Grave (162)

The Penguin Book of Russian Short Stories, is a collection of twenty short stories by different Russian writers. I began reading, as usual- at one of my jobs, with Pushkin’s The Shot which was about a steady and patient revenge. In between drying dishes and filling out forms, I read the quick tale. Unlike Eugene Onegin, this story is, sadly, not in rhyming verse, never the less it has a charmingly perplexed narrator doing his best to understand a puzzle of a man. When I was finished, it was time to deal with the commode, it’s the sort of task that is undignified all around- do not consider, just do. I think it’s best that way.

‘I don’t want to know! Do you think I’m going to let a sawn-off nose lie around in my room…you fathead!’ - Nikolay Gogol, The Nose (29)

While ironing in the basement I giggle at the weird Gogol and his ridiculous tale of a nose gone wild. No matter how hard I look before, I always find the odd stowed tissue in the shirt sleeves or pockets of the laundered clothes. Usually it comes out in flaky dried up bits I have to crawl around the floor collecting, but this day, the tissues separated into perfectly flat sheets pasted on the clothing. I had to spend some considerable time peeling them off my client’s fluffy bathrobe, too bad poor Kovalyov didn’t consider static cling as an adhesive for his wayward nose.

Later in the day I wandered the yard in search of suitable flowers to cut for the guestroom, I had only just finished Bezhin Lea, a truly beautiful tale by Ivan Turgenev:

I was at once surrounded by an unpleasant, motionless damp, just as if I had entered a cellar. (73)

A sleeping man privy to the fairy tales, and superstitions of a group of boys. The writing was so beautiful- the story is just lovely good. His power of description and sentiment is wonderful. A short story is such a marvel- precision and economy are vital,  a phrase such as “motionless damp,”  is arresting in its original yet flawless description- it’s quite perfect.

My pride increased over the years and if I had ever actually come to the point of admitting to someone that I was strange I think I should have gone straight home that very evening and put a bullet through my brains. - Dostoevsky, A Strange Man’s Dream (99)

I probably don’t need to cite Dostoevsky with that excerpt. Gotta love him- There are more than commodes not to consider. Too true, my dear.

‘“You’re a foolish girl,” she said, “who does want to at first! Why, life is bitter, but grief’s poison is even more so. But if you quench the burning coal with this poison it will die down for a moment. Take a sip, quickly, take it!”  - The Make-Up Artist (168)

Some days there isn’t enough silver to polish or toaster ovens to clean to quench the burning coal. Based on a story that he heard as a child, The Make-Up Artist is absolutely devastating. Naturally, I loved it. Heartache is the sort of condition that, while turning one’s heart into stone, remains an eternal burning coal. There is nothing to do, nothing with which to douse, no deceptions of perspective that smolder.

The pansies need to be dead-headed. I’ll contemplate my plan for dinner, maybe Tilapia in a white wine sauce with sauteed zucchini, my client loves that.  There will be another story tomorrow.

The Shot, Alexander Pushkin translated by David Richards
The Nose, Nikolay Gogol translated by Ronald Wilks
Bezhin Lea, Ivan Turgenov translated by Richard Freeborn
A Starnge Man’s Dream, Fydor Dostoevsky translated by Malcolm Jones
The Make-Up Artist, Nikolay Leskow translated by William Leatherbarrow

“Yet the lovely cloud of green and summer lustre is within” (30)

A Polarized Flow, like love.

It is all a most artificial business of living according to prescription, keeping every impulse strangled, and ending where it begins, in materialism pure and simple.
- D.H. Lawrence, The Symbolic Meaning: Studies in Classic American Literature (55)

Vincent Scully mentioned this D.H. Lawrence book in one of his essays on architecture. Perhaps my interests have some collecting force that draw me to and around Lawrence, but I find that he is referenced again and again in other books that I read. Here in The Symbolic Meaning is a group of essays on American Literature. Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman are among the writers that Lawrence cites to discuss his theory of the American writer.

Only art-utterance reveals the whole truth of a people. And the American art-speech reveals what the American plain speech almost deliberately conceals.[…] And this, again, is one of the outstanding qualities of American literature: that deliberate ideas of the man veil, conceal, obscure that which the artist has to reveal. (18)

Lawrence hits hard on all of his most passionate philosophies and it’s interesting to read the introduction which seeks to untangle the different and sometimes opposing versions of each essay. It would seem that unlike many writers, when Lawrence revised he wholesale re-wrote - sometimes to ill effect. Lawrence was a unique thinker better left in his primary voice, as E. M. Foster so eloquently stated:

Lawrence “was both a preacher and a poet, and some people, myself included, do not sympathize with the preaching. Yet I feel that without the preaching the poetry could not exist. With some writers one can disentangle the two, with him they are inseparable.” (8)

While there are some 2013 politically incorrect moments, Lawrence is so forward at heart that he is easily forgiven. His essay on Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Novels (Last of the Mohicans, et all) is wonderful, perfectly describing what I loved about those books; his essay on the symbolism of the sea to American writers such as Melville is perceptive and fascinating; his appreciation for women, as discussed in the Hawthorne essay regarding The Scarlett Letter, as whole female humans is quite beyond the reach of most people still, depressingly,  to this day.

In the old days, when women turned in her terrible recoil, she became Astarte, the Syria Dea, Aphrodite Syriaca, the Scarlett Woman. To-day, in her recoil the Scarlet Woman becomes the Sister of Mercy. She cannot help it. She must, in her upper mind, keep true to the old faith that man has given her, the belief in love and self-sacrifice. To this she is, as it where, hypnotized or condemned. (132)

His humorous yet heartfelt remonstrations against the “great Greek-Christian will-to-knowledge” that result in such American respectables as the “admirable little monster of a Franklin,” (Yes, Benjamin) are what I love about his writing. When he states that the “modern virtue is a machine-principle,” we can only lament that things are far worse now. But he foresaw that.

 Now, after two thousand years, having established our knowledge and even our experience all in one sort, a halfness, we find ourselves in a prison. We reach the condition when we are so imprisoned in the cul de sac of our mutilated psyche that we are in the first stages of that madness and self-destruction into which the ancients fell when they were imprisoned and driven mad within the cul de sac of the sensual body. Quos vult perdere Jupiter, dementat prius. (71)

That Latin bit basically means- those that Jupiter (God) wishes to destroy, he first drives mad. And this is Lawrence’s point- which he never ceases to fit into whatever it is he is talking or writing about. He sees a duality and a disconnect. Where the pagans of old veered toward sensuality, the modern man veers towards knowledge. Both extremes are equally destructive.

Whereas there is a “magnificence of futurity flooding the heart,” in a liberated and appeased soul, the psychic toll to future generations when we cut ourselves off from one half of our soul is tragic.

What is the use to me if a man sacrifice and murder his living desires for me, only to return in death and demand the sacrifice again of me, tenfold? What is the use of a mother’s sacrificing herself for her children if after death her unappeased soul shall perforce return upon the child and exact from it all the fulfillment that should have been attained in the living flesh, and was not? (73)

Lawrence, of course, explores these esoteric themes in his novels to poignant and moving effect. If his deeply held passion for life was sometimes equaled by his profound disgust in his fellow man, there was at least a true commitment to finding our way back to the life force with a fervency of gratitude and communion. His work was influential to all serious thinkers and the artistically sensitive of his age and beyond. He believed in the vibrancy of life, not the stagnant extremes of the idea and the ideal which disturbed the “natural reciprocity and natural circuits” of the “breath of life.”

KNOWING and BEING are opposites, antagonistic states. The more you know, exactly, the less you are. The more you are, in being, the less you know.
This is the great cross of man, his dualism. The blood-self, and the nerve-brain self.
Knowing, then, is the slow death of being. Man has his epochs of being , and his epochs of knowing. It will always be a great oscillation. The goal is to know how not-to-know. (178)

Other books by or about D.H.Lawrence:

Women in Love - Fog of Love
Lady Chatterley’s Lover - Love’s Lambency
Sons and Lovers Part 1 - Kicking Against the Pricks
Sons and Lovers Part 2 - Flickering Sanity
Apocalypse - Start With The Sun
Lawrence, An Unprofessional Study by Anaïs Nin - On Impulse

*”A polarized flow, like love” from the essay Dana’s Two Years Before The Mast (181)

Belonging: An Object Lesson

“Vaguest recall of an elegant cockatoo at dusk 14th St.”
-Joseph Cornell quoted in Dime-Store Alchemy (13), Charles Simic

I think it’s the fact that vague recall of elegant cockatoos is a common enough experience that I couldn’t help immediately connecting with this lovely book. Perhaps it’s not elegant cockatoos for everyone, but that swarming cloud of images and words that materialize or vaporize in the mind is a shared universe of the observant. Charles Simic, who is more than just my favorite poet on ants, is the author of Dime-Store Alchemy, The Art of Joseph Cornell. Cornell was a New York artist born in 1903. In the vignette Where Chance Meets Necessity Simic describes Cornell’s philosophy of art thusly:

Somewhere in the city of New York there are four or five still-unknown objects that belong together. Once together they’ll make a work of art. (14)

I love that idea, and sense, of belonging. Finding the perfect mate, the perfect spot to place something, the perfect book at the right point of your life, the perfect person: it’s a lovely thought and dream that we extend, (some sadly only conferring) to all our objects- If this belongs here, then I belong somewhere too.

Beauty is about the improbable coming true suddenly. (53)

Simic’s use of the word “suddenly” is what rings that sentence with truth. Whenever one first views a piece of art there is a suddenness, the feeling of yes or no that follows is not the same for everyone, but the suddenness is there- it’s the magic of an infinity in an instant. What the artist, and art, gives is that moment  of connection. When Simic says, “The clarity of one’s vision is a work of art,” (20) I think he means the clarity of vision of the artist, but I would apply that succinct thought to both artist and viewer. The click of clarity- Cornell knew what sound to listen for as he let his eye roam the city.

I picked this book up because I enjoy Simic’s work, I confess I knew nothing of Cornell. But, I didn’t have to get very far into it to know that the book belonged in my hand. In the very last sentence of the introduction, Simic touched me with devastating simplicity. Relating the last day of Cornell’s  life in which he died of heart failure, Simic writes, “Earlier that day he told his sister on the phone, ‘I wish I had not been so reserved.’”

I suppose we all end up with our own mountains of regret, but my heart moved a few inches reading that one. It hurts to be your own worst enemy.

*Photographed Box:  “Untitled (Soap Bubble Set),” 1936 by Joseph Cornell
“A soap bubble went to meet infinity. “ (54)

Dreaming of future halcyon days

Halcyon Folds

Halcyon days in our photographs
When that thing I believed was my epitaph
Leaping through air
To find nobody there
Awaiting me down the short garden path.

I’ve stripped away all the fool’s gold
From the things to me that were told:
To fold within, our halcyon days,
Try and smooth the burrs that stay.
Caught in a dream
I guess only I’ve seen,
Making origami of sinner’s play.

JA/2013