Toasty

…is a decent description of me at the moment…but that’s not of importance.  The point of this post is to swing this blog back to interesting literary matters, it having dwelt a little to much lately on inconsequential miscellany and on matters rather close to my heart and therefore somewhat inappropriate for the oh-so-professional tone you readers (all 3 of you, being generous) have come to know and love and mourn the recent departure thereof.

Spiel gespielt, here’s a poem by Philip Larkin that I initially disliked, but have grown to appreciate.  It’s called “High Windows”.

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives–
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

John Derbyshire (a writer I like only very intermittently, but then do extremely like) once labeled Larkin a “conservative” poet.  I picked him up for that reason about two years ago and was somewhat disappointed, not exactly having banked on Derbyshire’s use of the word “conservative” in the more austere English sense.  I’ve since grown to appreciate Larkin much more, and I see this poem as a fundamentally conservative statement of the old saw that the “the grass is greener…”.

But what is quite different from that adage and all it entails is that fact that the poem explicitly eschews quaint verbal formulations and recognizes that life occurs to one with an immediacy beyond the spoken word: “And immediately / Rather than words comes the thought of high windows”.   In other words, there are no words.  Or at least, no ultimately effectual words.  It puts me in the mind of the following from Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” explaining Max Weber:

    No matter what conservatives may think, traditions had a beginning  that was not traditional.  They had a founder who was not a conservative or a traditionalist.  the fundamental values informing that tradition were his creation.  The tradition is the continuing half-life of the charmed moment when a happy few could live on the heights of inspiration with the creator.  Tradition adjusts that inspiration to the ordinary, universal motives of man, such as greed and vanity; it routinizes charisma.

Now, Bloom of course doesn’t buy into Weber wholesale, to say the least; nevertheless, there is a point to Weber’s analysis that’s expressed quite nicely in Thoreau’s maxim that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”, namely, with the idea that there is something more out there to be got and savored.

I get the impression that one of Larkin’s points in this poem is to parody the naive version of that idealism in the rather childish image of the “long slide”.  As though if only you could do A, B, and C, 1, 2, 3, lickity-split, Bob’s your uncle, and there you go, down the long slide to happiness, having chuck out the window all the inhibiting thoughts and habits the former generation crammed down your throat such that it becomes difficult to actualize your every whim.  There’s also something rather base and typical about his description of the young couple having intercourse that jars with the notion that it could be a desired “paradise”, as he terms it, in the deeper sense of that word.   Fixating upon “high windows” looking out at a peaceful oblivion is to ignore the illuminated indoors of one’s actual surroundings, where life actually happens in all its unfair and non-ideal semi-glory.  I believe Larkin recognizes the temptation to consume the lotos, and the nonetheless rejects it.

2 from the East

An otherwise unfortunate series of circumstances has led me to a delightfully increasing acquaintance with Korean poetry. I don’t (yet) know the language, but I do appreciate what I can currently describe only rather vacuously as a sense of being an isolated thought suspended in a gentle breeze, flitting between apprehensiveness and freedom.

The first is one of the oldest extent Korean poems, a hyangga from the Silla period. The author is purportedly one Ch’oyong:

I revel all night long
in the moonlit capital,
come home and discover
four legs in my bed!
Two are mine;
whose are the other two?
Legs once mine, now purloined!
What am I to do?

(trans. from here)

The other is from a modern Korean poet, and curiously enough it reflects the situation that brought me to it. The author is Kim Sowôl:

Long From Now

Long from now, if you should seek me,

I would tell you I have forgotten.

If you should blame me in your heart,

I would say “Missing you so, I have forgotten.”

And if you should still reprove me,

“I couldn’t believe you, so I have forgotten.”

Unable to forget you today, or yesterday,

but long from now “I have forgotten”

Exile

My favorite Spanish poet has to be Rafael Alberti, and my favorite of his poems has to be the following, from his first volume, “Marinero en Tierra”, “Sailor on Land”:

[Untitled]

El mar. La mar.

El mar. ¡Sólo la mar!

 

 

¿Por qué me trajiste, Padre,

A la ciudad?

 

 

¿Por qué me desenterraste

del mar?

 

 

En sueños, la marejada

Me tira del corazón.

Se lo quisiera llevar.

 

 

Padre, ¿por qué me trajiste

acá?

-Rafael Alberti

It’s a rather simple poem, but it’s virtually untranslatable into English on account of the gender manipulation. Generally speaking, the sea is normally masculine in Spanish, but it can also be feminine according to well-established poetic usage. In any event, that’s only one of the reasons I like it, namely, the insight that mere word choice encodes so much. The way we choose to speak is the way we choose to live. Heidegger once wrote, “Language is the house of being”. Now, I certainly can’t claim to understand all of what Heidegger meant by that. But based on what I have read, I’m fairly certain that part of what he mean has to do with the relationship between the shared experience of individuals in common society as reflected by a common tongue. As we still say of people who display an instant mutual comprehesion, “They speak the same language”.

Even beyond that, though, I read the poem partially as a statement on the tension between chosen meaning, imposed meaning, and the difficulty of discerning between them. The sea can normally be either masculine or feminine, but for Alberti it is only feminine, it is only romantic, it is only visionary, it is only poetic because there can be no other way for him.  There is no intermediate ground to language choice.  The spoken word is the ultimate Either/Or.

But then why is it “del mar” in line 6 instead of “de la mar”, which would be metrically equivalent? That strikes me now as an indication that the poetic vision remains intact even when removed from immediate experience. For the sailor on land, the sea remains all it is…and perhaps more by virtue of the distance (cf. Donne, “A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning”).  While he may be removed from the sea (El mar), that is quite a different thing from being removed from the vision encoded by the sea (La mar).

All of that, however, fades into the background of the poem against the direct questions: Why did you bring me to the city? Why did you uproot me from the sea? Why did you bring me here? Why? Why? Why? The tempestuous image of my lover haunts my dreams, beckoning. Why have I been brought here, when I know I am wanted there?…or is it only that I desire to be wanted there…only in my dreams…? What am I doing here? The poem never directly reveals the speaker’s emotions, and I think it’s absolutely crucial that the desire the speaker expresses must be read into it on account of word choice. Does he really want to go back to the sea? Why does he want what he apparently wants, yet not enough to come right out and say it? Does he actually want that? What does he want? Why all this vagueness? The poem begins with a strong laconic statement of vision, of chosen meaning, but then trails off into a series of enjambed uncertain questions.

One of the more powerful moments of self-discovery is when one realizes that much of how has constructed oneself has been dependent upon circumstances. Exile shatters this illusion and forces us into deeper questions of who we are, what we believe, and what we want. But whereas exile is normally construed as expulsion from civilization, this poem turns that paradigm on its head by construing the “city”, the center of civilization and human contact, as the center of exile.

Insofar as the city has anything to do with the sea, though, it is practical, commercial, fungible. And if one’s current obligations are tied to the city, how does one retain a romantic vision of the sea? I’m not talking about the romantic vision of fantasy, which is merely a false escapist construct manufactured from discontent and imputed conceptual oppositions. It is not that because the sailor is a sailor. He has been to sea, he knows what is there, he knows it is difficult, he knows what it is worth. But he is no longer there. And now that he is no longer there…what then?

This type of question about what to do when displaced from what one once thought were one’s natural desires is characteristic of 20th century peninsular Spanish literature.  Another way to say that is that those Spaniards really like to plumb the depths of the fact that the world’s concreteness actually has an impact on us…but what kind of impact?  In a  world that is increasingly driven by ideologies and virtual experiences, how do we continue to be limited, embodied, contingent beings? There’s much more to say, of course, but I’ll save that for a later post on an excerpt of Unamuno or Torrente Ballester. Or Cervantes…it all goes back to him anyway.

My Ántonia

I love the introduction to Willa Cather’s masterpiece so much that it’s actually hindered my completion of the book, so often do I return to read it. It’s a little long to type out here in full, but here’s the first paragraph:

“Last summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season of intense heat, and it was my good fortune to have for a traveling companion James Quayle Burden–Jim Burden , as we still call him in the West. He and I are old friends–we grew up together in the same Nebraska town–and we had much to say to each other. While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we say in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it was like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.”

I suppose the first thing to say is just how remarkably Cather strikes precisely the appropriate tone for her Virgilian epgraph: “Optima dies…prima fugit”, from Georgics 3. Life springs seamlessly from descriptions passionately evocative of death; the mere repetition of “burning” is so well employed as to avoid all sense of redundancy and instead to imply the insurmountable rift between language and experience, the unbridgeable memorial gap between the past and the present. Death as well as life lie in those hidden interstices and yield to one another: Nature,by virtue of its bounty “stifles”, yet remains as stimulating as the otherwise sterile ground “stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron”. This burning unknown desire, this animating principle seeking for something, searching for some kind of expression, dying to live and living to die, ultimately finds its answer in attempted reconstruction of another human being, an act of artistic creation, of memorial parturition. The best days have fled; the Golden Age has past. How can we keep alive within us its burning splendor?

UPDATE: Here is the extended quote from Georgics 3.  I think it more or less supports my interpretation:

Optuma quaeque dies miseris mortalibus aevi
prima fugit; subeunt morbi tristisque senectus
et labor, et durae rapit inclementia mortis.

“Ah! life’s best hours are ever first to fly
From hapless mortals; in their place succeed
Disease and dolorous eld; till travail sore
And death unpitying sweep them from the scene.”

(J. B. Greenough, trans.)