MacCaig and his little boat

 Norman MacCaig loved the bleak, wild country of Assynt. He was a teacher, and he liked to spend vacations in the Highlands with his family.

He liked fishing from a rowboat. One day when he was in the boat, something odd happened, and he wrote two poems — years apart — that mention the incident.

“Basking shark,” written in 1967, tells the story:

            To stub an oar on a rock where none should be

            To hear it rise with a slounge out of the sea

            Is a thing that happened once (too often) to me.

Good poems find something surprising in the telling, and it’s a surprise when we meet a huge shark on “a sea tin-tacked with rain.”

Astonishment yields to reflection. The poet wonders what kind of monster nature had created. Then he thinks of man.

In “Praise of a boat,” written in 1974, he considers the boat itself,  and concedes it’s clumsy.

"It butts the running tide with a bull’s head … In crossrips it’s awkward as a piano.”

While it’s a good boat — a slayer of haddock, salmon and mackerel —its courage is questionable.

            Though it once met a basking shark with a bump

            And sailed for awhile looking over its shoulder.

• Source: Norman MacCaig, The Poems of Norman MacCaig; Edinburgh: Polygon, 2005.

The poetry of Norman MacCaig

 In my mind, Norman MacCaig is one of the great underappreciated poets of the 20^th century.

He was born in 1910 in Edinburgh, studied classics at university and became a primary school teacher. He died in 1997.

During World War II, he was a pacifist and was jailed for 93 days. He didn’t care for people who followed authority or custom blindly.

He was a great smoker. He would take a blank sheet of paper into a pub and would emerge with a poem. He said a short poem took one cigarette. A longer poem took two.

His collected poems include some wonderful poems about nature and about love. He also wrote one of the great dog poems in literature.

In “Praise of a collie,” the poet is grieving for the shepherd Polo’chan, who has taken his dog on her last stroll. The poem shows why this dog was loved.

            Once, gathering sheep on a showery day,

            I remarked how dry she was. Pollo’chan said, ‘Ah,

            It would take a very accurate drop to hit Lassie.’

It’s a fact of a certain kind of rich, full life: Some people appreciate and admire animals. A good dog can inspire people to tell tales about her, to tell how she sailed in a boat, how she was always the first across a burn and how “she flowed through fences like a piece of black wind.”

This poem is his masterpiece, I think.

• Source: Norman MacCaig, The Poems of Norman MacCaig; Edinburgh: Polygon, 2005.

The full text of “Praise of a collie” can be found here: https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2013%252F01%252F17.html 

Chekhov on dying

 In Chekhov’s story “The Bishop,” the title character is on his deathbed.

He recalls that old Father Simeon, small and gentle, had a lout of a son who abused the cook, calling her Jehud’s ass. The bishop remembered that Father Simeon had not intervened and was embarrassed only because he could not remember where such an ass was mentioned in the Bible.

As Peter Orner observed in a penetrating essay, this is not epic deathbed stuff simply because there is no epic deathbed stuff. At the end, the bishop just had a parade of thoughts, one following the other. 

Tolstoy thought dying should be different: “An animal simply dies, but a human should return its soul to its creator.”

It’s as if the soul were a library book that’s due.

• Sources: “The Bishop” is in Anton Chekhov, Peasants and Other Stories; New York Review of Books, 1997. Peter Orner’s essay is in Am I Alone Here?; New York: Catapult, 2016. The observation by Leo Tolstoy is in A Calendar of Wisdom; New York: Scribner, 1997, p. 159.

Thinking about Mandela’s mile

 When Nelson Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island by the apartheid state in South Africa, he was forced to break rocks into gravel in a quarry, perhaps a 20-minute march away.

Some of the prisoners hated the walk. But Mandela noticed things along the way: birds and blooms of wildflowers.

In a way, the walk was a small part of the day he had to himself and his own thoughts. And so he gave that time to himself, just by paying attention.

We often take a walk and notice nothing, or very little. Or we put on headphones and try to blot out the unpleasantness we feel with music.

What the Spartans wanted for their enemies

  Some people think that the interference of Russia in U.S. politics is a new idea.

But the Spartans tried to put a “strong man” in charge of Athens, their rival.

They were not talking about strong leader — just a tyrant.

They argued that if you consider another group of people your enemy, you want them to have the weakest leadership possible, a leader who would make the masses subservient, the polity sick, the people weak.

The Spartans, who called themselves Lacedaemonians, had decided that the power of Athens was growing and thus threatening. So they called their allies together and announced plans to install a tyrant in Athens.

The allies grumbled, but only Socleas of Corinth spoke up.

“Whatever next?” he said. “Will the heavens be under the earth and the earth up in the sky on top of the heavens? Will men habitually live in the sea and fish live where men did before? It’s a topsy-turvy world if you Lacedaemonians are really planning to abolish equal rights and restore tyrants to their states, when there is nothing known to man that is more unjust or bloodthirsty than tyranny. If you think it’s such a good idea for states to be ruled by tyrants, you should take the lead and set up a tyrant for yourselves before wanting to do so for others.”

• Source: Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Robin Waterfield; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, Book V, paragraph 92.

Insider information for tyrants

 Herodotus tells a story about what it’s like when tyrants take counsel.

Periander of Corinth asked Thrasybulus of Miletus how to stay in power.

The young Corinthian sent a messenger to ask the old tyrant how he’d stayed around so long.

Thrasybulus took the messenger on a long walk through a field of grain. He kept asking the messenger why he’d come. The messenger asked a dozen times, but Thrasybulus showed no interest in Periander’s question.

Every time Thrasybulus passed an ear of grain that was taller and heavier than the others, he snapped it off.

Thrasybulus sent the messenger home with no advice.

The messenger, distraught, told his boss he had been given no helpful insights. He described Thrasybulus as a kind of lunatic who destroyed his own wealth — the best specimens of his crop.

Periander heard the story and understood.

• Source: Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Robin Waterfield; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, Book V, paragraph 92.

A press as dream and as therapy

 When I was young, I read Leonard Woolf’s account of the founding of Hogarth Press. He and his wife, Virginia, set up a small letterpress in their dining room in 1917.

I was interested in printing and thought it would be a great thing to start a weekly newspaper one day. I read Leonard’s essay because I wanted to learn how to start a publishing business.

In my rush to learn the business, I missed one of the reasons that Leonard gave for wanting to start the press. Both Leonard and Virginia had dreamed of printing things that other publishers wouldn’t. But Leonard also hoped that the activity of setting type by hand would be therapeutic for Virginia, who suffered from periods of mental illness.

Setting type by hand — picking out letters from a California job tray and justifying a line in a composing stick — takes skill and attention.

It’s also repetitive. You have to set many lines before you can make up a page. Perhaps Leonard thought that the repetitive action would be soothing.

In reading his essay now, I can see he hoped that setting type would take Virginia’s mind off her work — her writing — for a while.

Virginia Woolf was an interesting thinker. I admire her essays, especially those devoted to writers who tend to be overlooked.

She was born in London on Jan. 25, 1882, 140 years ago.

Last year, I had a series of notes under the heading “Marking the day.” They marked the birthdays of some of the people who influenced me. You could search this site using that phrase and find most of my literary heroes.

Since they’re heroes, I’ve got to talk about them. But I’ll try to move on from birthdays. This is an exception.

• Sources: Leonard Woolf’s essay was a chapter in Beginning Again; New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964. I read the essay as “Hogarth Press” in The Publish-It-Yourself Handbook, edited by Bill Henderson; New York: Pushcart Press and Harper & Rowe, Publishers, 1980. For an explanation of the series “Marking the day,” see “An activity in lieu of making resolutions,” Dec. 31, 2021.

The green beneath my feet

 Perhaps you start becoming a part of a place when you notice what’s beneath your feet.

In San Antonio, I got to know the little plants that most people overlook: horseherb, henbit and Santa Maria.

In the Georgia Piedmont, the green beneath your feet, at least in winter, is likely made up of mosses.

Some moss beds here are big. While the lawns in Stone Mountain are brown, some yards are green. The mosses have grown where grass doesn’t. In some places, they’ve taken over.

Asphalt streets have green spots, some of which are impressively large. I’ve seen moss beds in areas of “alligator cracking.” That’s what engineers call the pattern of cracks that looks like an alligator’s hide. It means that the road’s base is failing.

I’ve also seen smaller mosses growing directly on smooth asphalt. I’m guessing the rainfall here is sufficient to wash nutrients into the road.

For the moment, I’m guessing — wildly — that this hardy little moss that I've seen on asphalt is White Awn Ash, Grimmia laevigata. But I’m lost when it comes to mosses. I am looking for a good book on Phylum Bryophyta.

Adapting to the local environment

 The enormous dog saw it first: a turkey vulture, on the ground, investigating a storm drain.

The big bird would stick its head down the drain. Whenever it heard a car, it would come back away from the drain and stand by the road until the car passed.

The dog looked at me as if to ask if this kind of thing were OK. I didn’t know. I’d never seen such a thing.

A turkey vulture, Carthartes aura, is called a buzzard in Texas. I’ve never seen one that would allow a human — much less a human with a dog —get so close. 

What’s going on?

As far as I can tell, there’s not a level square yard of naturally occurring earth in this part of the Georgia Piedmont. If you fall, you’re going to roll for a while before you come to a stop.

This part of Georgia also is wet — at least by the standards I’m used to. We get a lot of rainfall and the water runs. Little rivulets become streams, and the gutters of paved streets become something I’d call a creek in Texas.

Pine cones, tree limbs and other things — including, I imagine, the carcasses of small animals that die in the woods — end up in the stream.

At least one buzzard around here has learned to check the street drains.

You get a line, I'll get a pole

 A footnote on river cane: Specimens of Arundinaria gigantea were fishing poles when I was a boy.

My grandfather was a walker of the land. He’d scout good weed fields where quail and dove would gather long before hunting season. And on his walks he’d occasionally cut long, straight canes. The poles would dry for months, hanging from a set of nails in posts high above the barn floor.

When the canes were cured, he’d rig them with lines, hooks and sinkers. We’d dig worms and put them in old Prince Albert tobacco tins.

We’d catch catfish and all kinds of perch: red-ears, bluegills, goggle-eyes and sunfish, all members of genus Lepomis. Pomoxis annularis — what we then called white perch but later came to know as crappie — still strike me as the best a fish eater can do.

A stand of cane in the woods

 Walking in the woods, we came across a stand of river cane, Arundinaria gigantean.

The species grows as far west as Texas, which is where I got to know it.

What we saw just south of Stone Mountain was a stand of cane, rather than a canebrake. I’ve seen canebrakes so dense that a human could not get through. The old timers would tell of old, patient horses that could “nose” their way through a brake. The only way a human would get through was to stay in the saddle and trust the horse.

Those brakes are in open areas where the cane can get plenty of sunlight.

The stand we ran into was along a small creek in the forest. The canopy in this area was spotty. Enough light got through to the forest floor to allow the cane to grow. But it wasn’t hard to get through.

The question is: What happens next?

River cane can spread by rhizomes. Could it take over the flood plain, pushing the trees back from the creek? Or could the trees — a mix of oaks, gums, hickories and pines with some beech thrown in — shade out and overrun the cane?

It’s an interesting balance, and ancient humans played a role. They used cane for many things, particularly baskets. The Cherokee people of the Piedmont used cane in historical times.

How could humans — ancient or modern — tilt the balance in favor of cane?

Fire.

Fire creates open space, and grasses, including Arundinaria gigantean, grow faster. Some fire, of course, is natural. Lightning does strike.

But many dense brakes were aided by humans who were observant enough to sense the tension between grasses and trees and to see what happened after lighting struck, setting the woods on fire, opening the canopy, allowing sunlight in.

Roy Bedichek’s routine

 Roy Bedichek, who wrote some wonderful letters, described his routine in retirement.

He went to bed not long after the sun set and usually got up at 4 a.m.

He’d get in three to five hours of writing, depending on how he felt about it. Then he’d run errands, perhaps a trip to the library or the store.

After lunch, he’d take an hour’s nap and go for a cold swim. The water at Barton Springs is brisk, even in summer.

After that, he’d do some gardening, lawn mowing or other physical labor.

For supper, he liked avocado and tomato salad on dry toast. He wrote:

At this juncture I begin to get ‘tired eyelids’ and soon close them upon tired eyes. Thus most days pass, with of course some friendly visits with friends, few but fit.

I like that last line about his friends. Bedichek liked a good conversation. “Fit” was his way of describing a person who could hold up one end of a dialog.

• Source: The Roy Bedichek Family Letters, selected by Jane Gracy Bedichek; Denton, Texas: University of North Texas Press, 1998, p. 409.

Bedichek’s sense of place

 When people ask me about Texas writers, I always mention Roy Bedichek. He somehow caught a sense of the place.

People talk about time all the time, usually to say that they are busy. In the old days someone might mention a new wristwatch. Now someone is more likely to mention a new app that helps to organize all those schedules and routines.

Bedichek, at 80, said the real clocks are waistline, eyesight and mood. He wrote:

My main ambition in life, I told a friend the other day, is to avoid getting lumpy and grumpy.

Maybe such things are said in other parts of the country. But I read those words and hear the drawl of the Texas Hill Country.

If people in other parts of the country talk like that, well, there’s this: The same letter goes on about how a fellow should take a nap in the afternoon and then go for a swim in Barton Springs, which will give you chills even on a 100-degree afternoon.

And if that doesn’t convince you, the letter continues with advice on how to make a lunch of a kershaw, known in other parts of the world as cushaw.

If you’re not from Texas, he’s talking about a kind of long-necked member of the gourd family. Bedichek says it’s best baked in the rind.

• Source: The Roy Bedichek Family Letters, selected by Jane Gracy Bedichek; Denton, Texas: University of North Texas Press, 1998, p. 409. 

Writing and a sense of place

 My friend Christopher sent me a copy of Barry Lopez’s essay “A Literature of Place.”

I replied with some poems by Lorine Niedecker, a poet with a strong sense of place.

And so a conversation began. We talked about writing and people who seem to be grounded in a place, almost rooted like a tree.

The conversation has gone on to other topics, and I’m just now remembering this:

Ezra Pound, after he’d gotten cranky and far less generous with his advice, told William Carlos Williams he ought to read George Crabbe’s poem “The Village.”

Crabbe, 1755-1832, was born in humble circumstances in Suffolk and was apprenticed to a farmer for a while. He later moved on to London and to other things, including medicine and poetry.

“The Village” is a long poem about village life, something that poets and novelists tended to portray in romantic light. Crabbe wanted to paint the village more honestly, more realistically.

I grant indeed that fields and flocks have charms 

For him that gazes or for him that farms; 

But when amid such pleasing scenes I trace 

The poor laborious natives of the place, 

And see the mid-day sun, with fervid ray, 

On their bare heads and dewy temples play;

While some, with feebler heads and fainter hearts, 

Deplore their fortune, yet sustain their parts: 

Then shall I dare these real ills to hide 

In tinsel trappings of poetic pride?

Crabbe’s village has a poorhouse, lonely widows and hungry people.

Pound gave a lot of advice to other writers, ranging from good to bewildering.

I’m not sure that Williams listened, but he wrote “Paterson,” a long poem about a place.

The other kind of columnist

 I was taken by the headline, “The Columnist.”

As a former newspaperman who was once a columnist, I was curious about what could go under that heading in a collection of ancient writings about Diogenes and other Cynic philosophers.

“The Columnist” is Symeon Stylites, of course. You know, the ancient Christian ascetic who lived atop a 50-foot column just outside of Aleppo. (The Greek stulos can mean column, pillar or post.) 

The saint’s life was written by Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, near Antioch.

The ancient Cynics took philosophy to the streets. They were performance artists. Diogenes of Sinope went about Athens, carrying a lantern in broad daylight, in search of a wise man. People talked about him and his beliefs.

Theodoret mentions that ability to spark interest, to draw a crowd. He says Persians, Armenians, Ishmaelites, Iberians and Homerites came to see Symeon. Even people from the barely imaginable west — Spaniards and Britons and the Gauls in between — came to see the guy who lived on top of the column.

And of course that celebrity allowed Symeon to preach, to get the message out.

I’m not much interested in Symeon. But reading about him was instructive.

Sometimes, I’m tempted to think that the cult of celebrity was invented by the stars of reality TV and social media. Symeon begs to differ.

• Sources: How to Say No: An Ancient Guide to the Art of Cynicism, sayings and writings of Diogenes and other Cynics selected, translated and introduced by M.D. Usher; Princeton University Press, 2022. I picked up Usher’s book to see his translation of part of Diogenes Laërtius’s Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. For more on that, see “Collecting chreiai,” Jan. 3, 2023.

A corollary to Angelou’s law

 Here’s a postscript to yesterday’s note on Mary Oliver, the poet.

Maya Angelou said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

I think there’s a corollary to Angelou’s Law: People will never forget when you turn them on to a really good poem, short story or other work of art.

I had somehow missed the beauty of Mary Oliver’s poetry. John Gorman of Galveston, an English professor, now retired, convinced me to take a closer look.

Mary Oliver’s poems contain many wonders. Whenever I read one, I always think of John.

Thanks, John. 

Mary Oliver: ‘The Country of the Trees’

 It was too cold for a walk in the woods at Stone Mountain, but we went anyway.

The woods were cold and quiet, and I thought of Mary Oliver’s poem “The Country of the Trees.”

The poet observes how trees protect the weak, delicate things like violets, offering them shade in summer and a blanket of fallen leaves in winter. Such are the ways of trees. And then the poet says this:

And none will ever speak a single word of complaint,

as though language, after all,

did not work well enough, was only an early stage.

Neither do they ever have any questions to the gods — 

which one is the real one, and what is the plan.

Walking through the woods, I started thinking about how gratitude might be just a feeling. But a life touched by gratitude is something else, something as remarkable as the life of a tree.

• Mary Oliver, Blue Horses; London: Penguin, 2018.

Books for a guest room

 If I were dictator for a day, I’d pull a 5-page section of one of Michael Dirda’s books called “The Guest-Room Library,” declare it an essay and put it in a collection of readings for students.

I wish I’d seen this when I was in high school. It’s a delight.

Dirda thinks that every guest room ought to have a Bible, Shakespeare and a Jane Austen novel. It also ought to have a selection of books across many genres. He offers three recommendations in 10 categories:

• Mystery

• Horror and fantasy

• Humor

• Biography (including letters)

• Poetry

• Children’s classics

• Deep — but not too deep — thoughts

• Reference

• Journals and diaries

• Odds and ends

Since I know a certain romance novelist rather well, I noticed a lack among the genres. Romance is not for everyone, but neither are horror and fantasy and children’s classics. I like humor in essays and memoirs. But I can’t take the usual books of humor, even the ones he recommended. A night at a comedy club would be a long night for me.

But to each his own, which is why I like offering guests options in many categories.

I loved his recommendations for “deep — but not too deep — thoughts”: La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, Montaigne’s Essays and Guy Davenport’s Seven Greeks. Your guests should be spared Wittgenstein and Whitehead, I suppose. But anyone not exhausted by travels would find something to love in those three books.

I also like the suggestion about reference books. Surely I can’t be the only person in the world who likes to flip through a one-volume encyclopedia occasionally.

I love biographies, including collections of letters. I love journals and diaries. I’d read all he recommended and many others.

And we all should have a list of odds and ends — books that seem to defy category. And so I’ll be looking for The Literary Life by Robert Phelps and Peter Deana because I want to know what a cross between a scrapbook and an almanac looks like.

But the real pleasure of this essay was in poetry. He reminded me of the five-volume set Poets of the English Language, edited by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson.

When I was a young man, I knew where this set was in the library and I never entered the library without stopping there, just to browse, trying to find something to take home in my notebook if not in my head.

I was nearer penniless than flush, and I promised myself that when I was able I’d buy that set for myself. And I simply forgot.

It’s time to visit the bookstore.

• Source: Michael Dirda, Book By Book; New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005, pp. 40-44.

Komunyakaa: ‘Facing It’

 Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem ‘Facing It’ is about reflection, the kind of thing your eye catches with refracted light and the kind of thing your mind catches when it considers it all again.

It begins:

            My black face fades,

            hiding inside the black granite.

            I said I wouldn’t,

            dammit: No tears

            I’m stone. I’m flesh.

Komunyakaa, who was an Army correspondent in Vietnam, was standing in front of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The image is of man turning to stone and back to man again.

In the wall’s reflection, white people fade into black people. The poet thinks one woman is trying to erase names from the wall, but he sees only the reflection of a woman brushing a boy’s hair.

• Source: The Poetry Foundation published this here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47867/facing-it

Don’t miss the recording. This train of thought on Komunyakaa started with a war poem. Perhaps this war poem is a good place to end it.

Yusef Komunyakaa: 'Blue Notes'

 He was born James Willie Brown Jr. in Bogalusa, La. His father, a carpenter, was illiterate. Komunyakaa said he became aware of the possibilities of language through his grandparents, religious folk who spoke the cadences of the Bible.

Komunyakaa took the name of an ancestor whose mother smuggled him and two other children aboard a banana boat from Trinidad. If you read Komunyakaa’s poetry, you’ll find that Grandfather Komunyakaa wore mismatched shoes as a child. His mother couldn’t afford shoes for her youngest son. 

What I know of Komunyakaa comes largely from Blue Notes, a strange book. It’s a collection of 12 essays, six poems with comments, seven interviews and six miscellaneous pieces, including a monolog and jazz lyrics. But it gives you a sense of what he’s up to. Here are three samples:

• On his war poetry: “I wanted the images to do the work — I wanted to avoid statement, if possible.” (I like poets who make the images do the work. It’s one of the reasons that the Objectivist poets are a preoccupation of this collection on notes.)

• On the blues: They are not just a feeling nor a record of misfortune, but a confrontation. A person confronts his or her fate and argues with it, which is why the blues always have a refrain, just as Greek tragedies always had a chorus.

• On drama and poetry: Komunyakaa writes monologs, which are the building blocks of plays, and thinks poets ought to have the dramatist’s sense of injecting excitement into their work. He also thinks poets should learn to write in the voices of characters — that is, to write outside their own voice. “Let’s face it, the characters are always speaking from somewhere from within themselves.” 

• Source: Yusef Komunyakaa, Blue Notes; Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003, pp. 116, 120, 140.

A tragedy in Komunyakaa’s life

 In 2003, Yusef Komunyakaa’s partner, the poet Reetika Vazirani, killed their 2-year-son and then killed herself.

Komunyakaa’s ex-wife, the Australian novelist Mandy Sayer, said she had felt suicidal during their marriage. When she heard of the tragedy, she decided to write a memoir. The Poet’s Wife appeared in 2014.

One of the timeless questions about art is the connection between the work and its maker. It’s natural, when you wonder about an artist’s work, to look into the artist’s life for clues. Sometimes, you can find details that give you insight. Sometimes, you can end up questioning the integrity of the voice that’s talking to you. That, of course, is fatal to art.

I mention this because I have started to read Komunyakaa’s poetry again.

I find wonderful things in his work. But I know people who would not.

I suspect that many veterans come to Komunyakaa through his war poems. And I suppose it would be possible to put questions about his later life, his marriage and that tragedy, if you could just focus on the war poems.

I cannot. Some of his most interesting poems are about how men try to love women.

In “My Father’s Love Letters,” the poet is still a little boy. On Fridays, his father would open a can of beer and ask his son to write a letter to the boy’s mother.

                        He would beg,

            Promising to never beat her

            Again. …

The boy is happy his mother is gone and wants to slip in a reminder that even a good jazz tune won’t make the swelling go down.

His father, though illiterate, could look at a blueprint and tell how many bricks it would take to build each wall. But at letter writing time, he would stand

            With eyes closed & fists balled,

            Laboring over a simple word, almost

            Redeemed by what he tried to say.

I think that’s a wonderful poem.

As to the questions it raises about life and art, I just don’t know. 

Looking through a scope with a poet

 Yesterday’s note on neglected writers made me think of the poet Yusef Komunyakaa.

Not that you have neglected him. I have.

His poems might not speak to you, but they speak to me, and it’s been a while since I’ve read him.

Komunyakaa, who is 75, I think, was in the Army, writing for Southern Cross, in Vietnam. His book of war poems Dien Cai Dau was published in 1988. The phrase means “crazy.”

I came to him through one of those war poems, “Starlight Scope Myopia.”

            Gray-blue shadows lift

            shadows into an oxcart.

The poet, using a night-vision scope, is watching Viet Cong load ammo.

            Are they talking about women

            or calling the Americans

 

            beaucoup dien cai dou?

The poet wants to shush the laughing man and hug the old bowlegged fellow as he watches over the sights of his rifle.

• Sources: Yusef Komunyakaa, Dien Cai Dau; Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988. The Poetry Foundation has some of his poems here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/search?query=Yusef+Komunyakaa&page=3

Perhaps you’re an appreciator

 A couple of days ago, I had a long note about major and minor works of literature and how I almost invariably love the minor.

But Michael Dirda has been on my mind, and I found this:

In fact, I’m a bookman, an appreciator, a cheerleader for the old, the neglected, the marginalized, and the forgotten. On sunny days, I may call myself a literary journalist.

I don’t call myself a literary journalist. But as for the rest … that’s me.

Dirda got to the matter in 29 words. It took me almost 500.

But it explains a feature of this collection of notes. You’ll see more references to writers like Charles Reznikoff and Lorine Niedecker than to writers like Dante and Shakespeare.

Source: Michael Dirda, “Book Projects: The Art of Keeping Busy”; The American Scholar, Jan. 18, 2013.

On 'making a life'

 Michael Dirda’s commonplace book, published as Book by Book, is a wonder.

I thought about something he’d said, remembered I’d seen the quotation I was looking for in in his book, and while looking for it found this:

It’s a note from Lionel Trilling, lamenting the decline of a once important idea in Western culture.

(It’s) the idea of ‘making a life,’ by which was meant conceiving human existence, one’s own or another’s, as if it were a work of art upon which one might pass judgment … . This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.

Trilling died in 1975, so this lament speaks to an earlier time. But even then, most of us were going to college in search of a career, rather than in search of a good way to live.

You could get a sense of what Trilling was talking about by reading Plutarch’s biographies or by reading Seneca’s letters.

The aesthetic sense of a life well lived absorbed Wittgenstein. He didn’t believe you could talk about a beautiful life, but he believed you could live it.

• Source: Michael Dirda, Book By Book; New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005, p. 10.

A note on any ‘structured reading program’

 Robertson Davies, a man of letters who was the founding master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, once met a young fellow in a graduate class who didn’t know who Noah was.

Here’s what Michael Dirda, who writes about books for The Washington Post, makes of the tale:

What should a person know of the world’s literature? It has always seemed obvious to me that the great patterning works ought to be at the heart of any structured reading program. By “patterning works” I mean those that later authors regularly build on, allude to, work against. 

He gives a list of 21 works. Shakespeare (five plays) and Homer (two epic poems) making up a third of his version of the canon.

Know these well, and nearly all of the world literature will an open book to you.

Do you think that’s true?

Yes, I think so. If we all had a general knowledge of our shared literature, no one would be lost at the mention of Noah.

That’s a good thing — but it’s good in a peculiar way.

Of the books listed in the various versions of the canon, almost all interest me, but remarkably few excite passion.

In most cases, I have read the classics to find out what all the excitement was about, only to find me that it wasn’t all that exciting to me. Interesting, but not riveting.

Reading the books of the canon — however that’s conceived — is worthwhile. We need to find what others who share the planet are thinking and doing. We need to have some kind of understanding of what so many people before us liked and admired. Finding out is a kind of pleasure. It’s also a necessity, if we hope to live together.

But there is another kind of pleasure that is far more intense and wonderful. It’s the pleasure of finding kindred minds, voices that speak to you.

When others speak of Dante, Defoe, Swift and Austen — all writers on Dirda’s list — I can follow the conversation. But I don’t speak of those authors, at least not often.

Meanwhile, I weary my friends talking about things that people who were not on Dirda’s list have said. I can’t go long without thinking about Montaigne, Thoreau or Herodotus.

Also, I’m more likely to think of a remark that a contemporary has made — Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Roy Bedichek — than of something from the canon.

Respect for the common tradition: yes, or course. But it’s natural for individuals to like other voices better. And perhaps a bias for contemporary voices is excusable.

• Source: Michael Dirda, Book By Book; New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005, pp. 7-8.

A creia involving Casals

 If you halfway buy the notion that creia can be used as building blocks for constructing a sense of morality, you might look around you. You’ll find examples everywhere.

Here’s one featuring Pablo Casals, the cellist, who was still playing Bach’s cello suites when I was boy. When Casals turned 90, some reporter was told to go interview the famous man.

Asked why he continued to practice the cello at 90, Casals replied: “Because I think I’m making progress.”

That assertion is neither right or wrong. But the anecdote is in my memory because it’s useful, especially now that I am old. If Casals thinks progress is possible at 90, I’m not going to whine about my late 60s. (Well, maybe I won’t whine so loudly.)

The suggestion that these kinds of stories can be used to construct a sense of morality appeared Tuesday (“Collecting creiai, Jan. 3, 2023).

Here’s a corollary: I’ve found that people in the arts — musicians, painters, sculptors, actors, dramatists, dancers, poets — have had suggestions about moral behavior that are more useful to me than the suggestions of professional moralists.

If you doubt that, here’s a test: Ask people you know what makes a person human.

I’ve known people would could go on for hours.

When asked, Casals said: “The ability to care.”

Umberto Eco's last book

 Umberto Eco’s last book or first posthumous book, Chronicles of a Liquid Society, is a collection of 116 columns, each 600 to 750 words, for L’Espresso, a weekly. The column was named “La Bustina de Minerva” after a matchbook that had a couple of white spaces inside, which Eco used for notes. Eco was a great note taker.

The title of the book refers to an idea from Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish sociologist who described the melting of societies from a solid to liquid state.

Eco asked: “What freedom do nation-states retain when faced with the power of supranational entities?”

Societies based on nations used to be able to resolve individual disputes. Now, no matter what the courts rule, the case is not settled — it’s reargued through social media, often without reference to facts. As Eco put it:

The crisis in the concept of community gives rise to unbridled individualism: people are no longer fellow citizens, but rivals to beware of … The certainty of the law is lost, the judiciary is regarded as the enemy, and the only solutions for people who have no points of reference are to make themselves conspicuous at all costs, to treat conspicuousness as a value, and to follower consumerism.

Eco’s last columns were on the theme of living in a social order that had gone from solid to gooey.

He thought the role of a responsible press in such a world was to stop feeding the instant news machine online and to get experts to analyze the content of various websites for accuracy and reliability. Instead of being part of the online phenomenon, newspapers and newsmagazines should stand apart from it, cover it and criticize it. Or so he thought, as do I.

The new calendar says today is Eco’s birthday. He was born in 1932 and died in 2016 at 84.

• Sources: Umberto Eco, Chronicles of a Liquid Society; Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

Last year, I made a note about Eco’s thinking on lists. If you’re a list maker, you can find it here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2022/01/umberto-eco-and-importance-of-list.html

A chreia about paying taxes

 Yesterday’s note on chreiai suggested that the basic form looks like this: “Seeing x” or “Being asked y,” the eminent person “said z.”

Readers who grew up on the Bible might think of Jesus’s sayings, many of which are in that form.

The usual example is about the time Jesus’s enemies asked him whether it was proper for God-fearing folks to pay taxes to Caesar. It was a trick question: If Jesus said yes, he alienated religious people who hated the oppressive state. If he said no, he got in trouble with the oppressive state.

In the chreia, Jesus asked for a coin. He then asked whose image was on it. Caesar’s, he was told. He said:

Then give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.

Many people see Jesus as divine. But if that seems unlikely to you and you are wondering what to make of him, it’s possible to see in the chreiai preserved in the gospels a Jewish kid from the provinces who had absorbed a little Diogenes. Bits of Cynic philosophy were floating around in the Hellenic culture that was part of the Roman Empire.

• Sources: The chreia about Jesus and taxes is in the gospel of Luke: 20:21-25. I first came across the suggestion about the influence of Cynic philosophy in ancient Judea and Galilee in John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant; HarperSanFrancisco, 1991.

Collecting Cherie

 Chreia, in ancient Greek, meant use. By extension, it came to mean a useful anecdote. The plural is chreiai(pronounced KRAY-eye).

For some thinkers, a useful anecdote was one you could live by. And so people like Diogenes Laërtius collected chreiai. His Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers is full of them. 

If you are inclined to think about literary forms, the basic form for chreiai is something like this: “Seeing x” or “Being asked y,” the eminent person “said z.”

Here’s one on Diogenes of Sinope, the Cynic.

He used to enter the theater, walking against the flow of people exiting. When asked why, he replied, “I’ve been pursing this course of action my entire life.”

In other words, seeing contrariness as a virtue, he was just practicing.

In the ancient world, people collected chreiai. There were private collections — Seneca mentioned his. But there were also collections that appeared in various versions of The Progymnasmata, an ancient textbook on rhetoric.

Try to picture students — kids that might be in junior high today — poring through collections of chreiai and then, as part of their training, rewriting them in different tenses and in the voices of different characters.

Scott Newstok makes a convincing case that this kind of education shaped Shakespeare and would be useful to people who are learning to write today.

But it seems to me that chreiai are also elemental in morality — at least in the way that some of us construct it. Many of us, when faced with a moral or ethical problem, resort to a collection of chreiai we carry around in our minds: stories our grandparents told us, parables from the Bible, anecdotes told of our heroes.

What briefs and cases are to our concept of law, chreiai are to our sense of morality.

They are, I think, the building blocks of how we think about our own behavior.

• Sources: Diogenes Laërtius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Section 64. The translation is by M.D. Usher in How to Say No: Diogenes and the Cynics; Princeton University Press, 2022. 

For more on Scott Newstok and his views on ancient education, see “Thinking about the Progymnasmata,” June 24, 2022, and “Habits that shape the mind,” June 28, 2022.

Dunn: ‘The Last Hours’

 I should have mentioned in yesterday’s note that Stephen Dunn’s poem “The Hours” has a companion piece, at least in my mind.

“The Hours” is a meditation on the how time is spent — and how the worst way to spend it is to try to live by someone else’s time. When someone else is dictating your schedule, someone else is dictating your values.

The poem states a principle. If you want to know how the principle works in real life — in Dunn’s real life — try “The Last Hours.”

At 25, the poet was on a shaky corporate ladder, headed up. He knew then only what he didn’t want, which was what he had, a job with a company that sold snack food.

At 19 minutes to 5, the big boss summoned him to his office and offered him a real job, with money and an office — the one that had belonged to the exec that had just been fired.

            I smile, I say yes and yes and yes,

            but — I don’t know from what calm place

            this comes — I’m translating

            his beneficence into a lifetime, a life

            of selling snacks, talking snack strategy,

            thinking snack thoughts.

Joy seeps in. The young poet knows he will quit, that this phase of his life is over, that we will pass time in other ways.

• Source: Stephen Dunn, Different Hours; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010.

Marking the New Year with a poet

 You can’t mark a New Year without thinking about the passage of time. I like to hear what the poets have to say.

That’s what I said last year.  I was reading Charles Reznikoff then. This year, I’m reading Stephen Dunn, one of my favorite contemporaries. He died in 2021.

His poem “The Hours” is a meditation on how our time passes, how our lives pass. He considers the different ways we spend time, and the way he had spent time.

            The worst was to live by someone else’s time,

            The hours scheduled for him, smudged

            With clarity and motives not his own.

The evening hours are dependent on “Desire & Need.” But there are lovely hours, “prolonged fiestas of the mind.”

• Source: Stephen Dunn, Different Hours; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010.

Last year’s note on Charles Reznikoff’s “Heart of the Clock” is here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2022/01/happy-new-year.html