Bad accounting practices

 My mother, who loved the scriptures, taught a wayward boy that he must always stand ready to give an account. She loved to quote a scripture that says: Always be ready to give an account for the hope that’s within you.

You’re supposed to be able to give that account, at the drop of a hat, to everyone that asks. You’re supposed to be able to do it in a gentle, respectful manner, leaving the impatience and exasperation that leads to defensiveness and sarcasm behind.

I remember her lesson on responsibility because she had to grind it in, as they say in the teaching trade. I was at the Tom Sawyer stage. I was trying to learn new and exciting ways to avoid having to give an account of my behavior.

It took a while for the boy to grow up, to realize that being able to give an account of my own conduct was the beginning of being my own person, rather than a child under my mother’s firm hand.

It took me much longer to see that in life, as in business, there are different methods of accounting, some more useful than others.

Consider people who divide life into good moments (vacation) and bad moments (work). That accounting scheme suggests life is all about finding less work, more play. I’ve heard lectures on “maximizing quality time.”

A better way of accounting might be to pay attention and behave well regardless of the circumstances, whether it’s time spent in work or play, in pain or pleasure.

That peculiar sense of accounting for one’s life might be the best description I could give of what thoughtful people mean when they say they’re religious.

• Source: The verse is 1 Peter 3:15.

N. Scott Momaday, 1934-2024

 The sad news that N. Scott Momaday had died made me wonder about his writing routine. This is a bit of what he told The Paris Review:

I had a strict routine at Santa Barbara, the best I’ve ever had. I made sure my mornings were free of teaching, and I’d get up around five or six o’clock and go to a twenty-four-hour diner for an hour. I would have coffee and four strips of bacon, read the Los Angeles Times. Then I would go back to my house and write for four or five hours.

 

I’m always interested in writing routines. And, like Momaday, I do something before I sit at a keyboard. I’d say it’s part of the routine of writing but not actually writing. I’d like to go to a diner, but I don’t think it would work for me. I love diners and newspapers that have ink on them. I’d stay longer than an hour.

• Sources: “N. Scott Momaday, The Art of Poetry No. 112,” interviewed by David S. Wallace; The Paris Review; Issue 242, Winter 2022. In honor of Momaday, the journal moved the interview from behind the paywall on Monday. It’s here:
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/7957/the-art-of-poetry-no-112-n-scott-momaday

Momaday’s poem “A Simile,” which is popular in textbooks, can be found here: 

https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/simile

“The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee is on the Poetry Foundation’s site:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46558/the-delight-song-of-tsoai-talee

For a note on how Momaday saw his work, see “How a writer sees his work,” March 7, 2022:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2022/03/how-writer-sees-his-work.html

Old Tragedy and an incomplete man

 In Sophocles’ view, the tragedy is human imperfection.

As Professor H.D.F. Kitto puts it:

 

To Sophocles, the tragedy of life is not that man is wicked or foolish, but that he is imperfect; even at his best unequal to a sudden demand made by circumstances … The pity is, always, that man should be so fine, yet ruin all by a single glaring fault; so strong, yet be brought low by stronger circumstances.

 

In Aeschylus, there is none of that. In his doomed “hero,” we do not have a complete man. We have a fatally flawed man — a man who is lacking something so fundamental that it leads to catastrophe. In King Agamemnon we have a man who is so arrogant that he can’t see why his wife might hate him. He’s blind to his own faults, and so he is blind to the hatred those faults have inspired in a person who is supposed to love him. He’s blind to his fate.

There’s no character development. Agamemnon arrives on stage as he is and forever will be.

Aeschylus’s plays are almost like a science experiment: If you put a fatally flawed person in this situation, this is what happens. Fate drops on him like a hammer.

It happens every time. It’s just physics: the laws of nature at work. 

As Kitto points out, in Aeschylus we don’t have suspense. We have foreboding. We know this guy who is leading the community is so tragically flawed he’s going to ruin himself and probably everyone around him.

Aeschylus’s brand of drama went out of style with the more psychologically nuanced plays of Sophocles. But I wish Aeschylus were writing today. I know what he did with characters like Agamemnon and Xerxes. I think I know what he’d do with Donald Trump.

No suspense. Just foreboding.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. p. 110. Kitto’s the expert here, not me. His chapter on “The Dramatic Art of Aeschylus” is on pp. 100-20.

Our capicity to feel

 Sam Keen says this is the way our capacity to feel works:

The ability to feel is indivisible. Repress awareness of any one feeling and all feelings are dulled. When we refuse to allow fear we correspondingly lose our ability to wonder. When we repress our grief, we blunt our capacity to experience joy.

 

It’s interesting, but is it true? I had imagined that it might be the other way around, that the inability to feel one thing might lead to an enhanced capacity to experience another emotion, just as some people who lose their sight report an increased capacity to hear or smell.

The question is not rhetorical. It seems like I should know how this works, but I don’t.

 • Source: Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man; New York: Bantam, 1992.

From the sublime to scat

 Between Greek tragedies, I’ve been reading scientific papers on coyote scat.

Coyotes have been in Texas for eons, but they’ve been in the Atlanta area for only 20 or 30 years. I’m trying to figure out what they’re eating.

Dogs are fed by humans, and we make sure they have digestible food. As a result, dog poop looks nothing like coyote scat, which contains animal hair, bones, seeds (especially persimmon), insect exoskeletons and occasionally feathers. To an observant person, coyote scat is a museum installation. Dog poop is just dog poop.

A lot of people in Georgia are convinced coyotes are killing deer, so the deer hunters are up in arms. People shoot coyotes year-round.

I read a paper that suggests that coyotes are eating adult deer, not just fawns.

That's interesting, but It bothers me that so much of the research is focused on that one question, as if the supply of game animals for hunters were most significant question that biologists could study.

I’d like to know, aside from deer, what coyotes are eating. The evidence on the trail suggests that coyotes in our neighborhood get some of their calories from our garbage cans and litter. I’d like to know how much.

A second thought about poems

 This is a second thought on Camille Paglia’s essay on Joni Mitchell’s poem “Woodstock.”

Why would I choose other poems? Why would I put other poems in my collection?

I suppose I had a different sensibility of the 1960s. I’m more interested in the movements that were behind the counterculture, rather than the counterculture itself. I’d think first of poems by Robert Hayden, Louise Glück, Gary Snyder and Yusef Komunyakaa.

But I’m not sure I’d go looking for poems that reflect an era — or whether that idea makes much sense.

Michael Dirda wrote an essay about Auden that gave a list of topics that interested him: “opera, cold weather, Mozart, ballet, Shakespeare, the moon landing, and the detective story.”

That kind of sensibility is closer to home for me. I don’t know why that kind of poet, one with broad interests, should be excluded in a discussion of the 1960s. I’d want to know what a poet has to say about cold weather, for example, regardless of the era.

Auden’s “Thanksgiving for a Habitat,” and particularly the section “The Cave of Making,” might be a good ’60s poem.

Here’s what I should have said about Paglia: She is a good critic. I don’t share her tastes and sensibilities. I disagree with many of her judgments. But she’s an expert at provoking second thoughts.

• Sources: Michael Dirda, “W.H. Auden,” is in Classics for Pleasure; Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, Inc., 2007, 174-9. The quotation is on p. 175.

Auden, W.H. Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson; New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

'I came upon a child of God'

 Camille Paglia says that Joni’s Mitchell’s song “Woodstock” is one of the few songs from the ‘60s that stands up as a poem. You might know it from Crosby, Still, Nash and Young’s version in 1970.

In Paglia’s view, if you ignore the music and put the lyrics on the page, “Woodstock” works as a poem. It compares favorably with other poems that said something about the dreams of the era.

I think it’s an intriguing idea but wasn’t convinced about “Woodstock.” I’d choose other poems.

I think we build canons of literature like we build other collections. Some of us started by collecting marbles, old bird’s nests and baseball cards. The obvious problem with a shared collection is that individual taste varies so much.

It was always astonishing when I found someone who was interested in a writer that I was interested in. That seemed like a rare occurrence.

Paglia says when she was in high school, she adored Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edna St. Vincent Millay and loathed Robert Frost. 

Paglia and I would not have been kindred spirits in high school.

• Sources: Camille Paglia, Break, Blow, Burn; New York: Pantheon Books, 2005, pp. ix and 225-32. For a previous note on Paglia’s view about canons, see “Specimens in a collection,” Jan. 16, 2024.

Arabia Mountain: Late January

 The winter storm has gone. Lows were in the 30s, but above freezing. Three deer were in the backyard. Goldfinches and cardinals were at the feeder.

Glad to get out of our den, we went to Arabia Mountain and took a trail that went over a long stretch of granite outcrop. The granite is pockmarked with holes, with the scientists call “depressions.” Small plants grow in them, die and decay, building up soil. Biologists call those pockets of soil in the rock face “islands.”

The kind of plant communities that grow in the islands depends on the depth of the soil. These four are common:

• Diamorpha communities — 2-6 cm.

• Lichen-annual herb communities, 7-15 cm.

• Annual-perennial herb communities, 16-39 cm.

• Herb-shrub communities, 40-50 cm.

We stopped to look at a large group of haircap moss, family Polytrichaceae, mixed with pixie cup lichens, genus Cladonia, in one of the islands. I will never get tired of that sight: green things, apparently growing out of solid rock.

• Sources: The four kinds of communities are described in M.P. Burbank and R.G. Platt, 1964. “Granite Outcrop Communities of the Piedmont Plateau in Georgia. Ecology, 42:2, 292-306. I found an excerpt on Scott Ranger’s Nature Notes:

http://www.scottranger.com/granite-outcrop-plants.html

Aeschylus: ‘The Eumenides’

 The last play in the trilogy has a great opening scene. The Pythia, the priestess who speaks Apollo’s oracles, is giving the audience a calm — almost dull — lecture on the history of the oracle and is telling how she spends her day when she opens the temple doors, looks inside and turns back, terrified.

She’s seen Orestes, smeared with blood from the purification rites of the god, surrounded by sleeping Furies, who are so horrible they’re hard to describe. They are kind of like gorgons, the Pythia says, “and they snore with breath that drives one back.”

Apollo’s power has weakened them and put them into a deep sleep. But the ghost of Clytemnestra wakes the sleeping Furies and harangues them, telling them to get back to the job of hounding Orestes, her son and killer, to his grave.

Apollo is revolted by the Furies. He drives them out of the temple, threatening to shoot his bow, using flying snakes instead of arrows.

Professor H.D.F. Kitto points out that dike, the Greek word we usually translate as “justice,” was retributivejustice. Clytemnestra took justice by killing her husband Agamemnon, who had killed one of their daughters. Their son, Orestes, took justice by killing his mother. The Furies were determined to take justice on Orestes.

If “justice” is simply retribution or vengeance, it can never end.

Following Apollo’s counsel, Orestes flees to Athens, where Athena conducts a trial. The Furies are prosecutors. Apollo is defense counsel.

Athena picks 12 Athenian citizens as jurors. She says that if they split, she will decide for Orestes.

The Furies, goddesses of the older generation, are enraged at Athena, threatening to poison the Athenians and Attica. 

Athena lets them vent and gradually converts them to a more merciful idea of justice — one that excludes vengeance and demands judgment by an impartial court. However, Athena doesn‘t want to exclude fear entirely from social life — people should fear doing wrong.

The Furies, transformed into the Kindly Ones, still have a role. Where they were focused on strife among kin, now they are to be concerned with strife within the state.

Athena says working with human beings is a bit like tending a garden — it’s as much about encouraging good growth and good behavior as in discouraging the bad.

Among the wonders of The Eumenides are these lines, spoken by Athena:

 

No anarchy, no rule of a single master. Thus

I advise my citizens to govern and to grace,

and not to cast fear utterly from your city. What

man who fears nothing at all is every righteous?

 

Aeschylus likes that theme and repeats it. Between anarchy and a tyrant is some kind of reasonable government in which good citizens fear to wrong each other.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on The Eumenides is on pp. 90-99. 

The Eumenides, translated by Richmond Lattimore, is in Aeschylus I in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 133-171. The quotation is on p. 160.

Aeschylus: ‘The Libation Bearers’

 The libation bearers are enslaved women who are sent by Queen Clytemnestra to pour offerings on the grave of Agamemnon, the husband she murdered with the help of her lover. The queen’s daughter, Electra, loved her father for all his false and is tagging along with the women, who are the chorus.

The House of Atreus is a mess. King Agamemnon sacrificed his and Clytemnestra’s daughter Iphigeneia in furthering his disastrous, 10-year war against the Trojans. Clytemnestra welcomed Agamemnon when he finally got home. Then she murdered him in his bath with the help of her lover, Aegisthus.

While Electra and the other women are offering libations and prayers at the grave, she finds her brother Orestes, bent on vengeance. Clytemnestra and Aegisthus must be punished.

Maybe the play was so gripping this time because I was reading while the war in Gaza was raging. In this trilogy, you can get exhausted with the rants about why someone or another has committed unredeemable atrocities. Only blood for blood will do.

All the killing seems not only justifiable but righteous. So the killing doesn’t stop.

But then the old Nurse, the woman who raised Orestes while everyone else was busy, speaks.

Orestes, who has been away all these years, gets into the house unrecognized. He’s allowed in because he claims to be a traveler who has news that Orestes is dead. His mother and Aegisthus pretend to be sad. But they have feared Orestes because his father’s thrown is rightfully his.

But the Nurse is saddened by the loss of a life.

Professor H.F.D. Kitto, a wonderful guide to these plays, points out that the Nurse is a foil for all the calls of bloodletting from those who were “denied the luxury of natural affections.”

The Libation Bearers includes many wonders. My favorite is this passage from the chorus:

 

Terror, the dream diviner of

this house, belled clear, shuddered the skin, blew wrath

from sleep, a cry in night’s obscure watches,

a voice of fear deep in the house,

dropping deadweight in women’s inner chambers.

And they who read the dream meanings

And spoke under guarantee of God

told how under earth

dead men hold a grudge still

and smoldered at their murderers.

 

It’s all there: Clytemnestra has disturbing dreams, she sends the libation bearers and Electra to Agamemnon’s grave, Electra finds Orestes there … It’s early in the play, and a great playwright lets us know vengeance is coming.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on The Libation Bearers is on pages 81-90. 

The Libation Bearers, translated by Richmond Lattimore, is in Aeschylus I in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 91-131. The quotation is on p. 94.

Aeschylus: ‘Agamemnon’

 In thinking about Aeschylus’s brand of tragedy, Professor H.D.F. Kitto says it’s useful to think about the Instrument of Doom.

Aeschylus’s play was based on a story that everyone knew. King Agamemnon of Argos, bent on destroying Troy, sacrificed his and Queen Clytemnestra’s daughter Iphigeneia to advance his plans. He didn’t consult his wife. He just did it.

Ten years later, when he finally returned home victorious from the war, there was the Instrument, waiting for him.

In Sophocles’ tragedies, characters collide. Their motives conflict, and the drama is between the characters.

In Aeschylus, the tragedy is in how one person fails. There’s no revelation about motives, no anguished monolog from Agamemnon about what he was thinking. Kitto says:

 

The theme is not the tragic workings of a mind; it is that men of violence do things that outrage Justice, bring retribution, and provoke further deeds of violence.

 

Kitto says Aeschylus limited his characterization to the traits that were essential to that view of the story. Agamemnon had to be the kind of man who was capable of giving moral offense, and Clytemnestra was the kind of woman who was capable of taking it.

 

They collide, and her strength matches his, as does her moral build.

 

The story is not a battle of wills. It’s the dropping of fate’s hammer.

 

Kitto, who strikes the reader as a person who counts lines, says that lyrical passages account for exactly half the play. The chorus of Argive elders sings not to give us a narrative but to amplify the points where we ought to feel the story, rather than think about it. I like these lines: 

 

Cry aloud without fear the victory of Zeus,

You will not have failed the truth:

Zeus, who guided men to think,

who has laid it down that wisdom

comes alone through suffering

Still there drips in sleep against the heart

grief of memory; against

our pleasure we are temperate

From the gods who sit in grandeur

Grace comes somehow violent.

 

Agamemnon is the first of a trilogy, The Oresteia. Aeschylus decides what to do about the killing of the king in The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Agamemnon is on pages 68-81. The quotations are on pp. 75 and 70.

Agamemnon, translated by Richmond Lattimore, is in Aeschylus I in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 33-90.

Looking at lichens in winter

 The winter storm that caused havoc across the country dropped temperatures into the teens in the Georgia Piedmont. Gusty, freezing weather would keep me by the fire. But Gunter the German shepherd is oblivious to cold. He insists on a couple of miles a day. After the brisk walk, he rests on the porch and crunches ice. He loves ice cubes, regardless of season.

If you are going to walk, you might as well try to learn something about the world. So I’ve been looking at lichens.

The suggestion comes from Richard Headstrom, a wonderful science teacher of my grandfather’s generation. Headstrom was a New Englander. He pointed out you could find lichens flourishing in snow.

Lichens are a community of organisms — commonly a partnership between fungi and algae — rather than a single plant.

The filaments of fungi provide a foundation and some protection for the algae, which provides the food through photosynthesis. (In some lichens, cyanobacteria, instead of algae, do the photosynthesis.)

Biologists call the relationship mutualistic. But there’s some debate about how to describe it: how much is mutually beneficial and how much is parasitic.

Headstrom says lichens are at their best in winter. They aren’t hurt by the cold and they like moisture.

His remark made me wonder how much cold lichens can take.

Australian scientists studying lichens in the Arctic say lichens can “exhibit net photosynthesis” — generate more energy for food than they use in making it — at temperatures as low as minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit.

They’ve found lichens as far south as 86.30 degrees. Lichens can absorb water from the atmosphere, as well as in the forms of snow and ice. They can grow even when covered by a layer of snow, which offers it some protection. In those extreme climates, a centimeter’s growth might take a thousand years.

The winter storm that hit the Piedmont has been impressive to me, but the lichens here don’t seem to have been hurt.

Lichens come in different colors. Headstrom says this about the most common kinds:

 

When dry, most lichens are chalky gray color, because the colorless fungal filaments so effectively cover the algal cells that their bright green is obscured. But when moist, the same lichens will appear green, because the moistened filaments transmit light quite well; hence the green algal cells can be seen through them.

 

After the walk, I can report that the lichens are green and the dog is happy.

I’m going to stay by the fire.

• Sources: Richard Headstrom, Nature Discoveries with a Hand Lens; New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1968, pp. 12-16. The quotation is on p. 13.

For information on the Australian Antarctic Program, see:

https://www.antarctica.gov.au/about-antarctica/plants/lichens/#:~:text=Lichens%20have%20adaptations%20that%20enable,provides%20protection%20from%20the%20elements.

Wordsworth: ‘Upon Epitaphs’

 William Wordsworth made a claim about epitaphs. The idea of an epitaph presumes some kind of monument to the dead. And the impulse to build monuments presumes a belief in immortality.

The claim is intriguing, but I don’t think it’s true.

I also don’t think it matters. But Wordsworth did. He spent a lot of time with an argument showing that all that effort would simply be unthinkable without a belief in immortality. I think he begs the question.

I read “Upon Epitaphs” because Charles Lamb admired it when it was published in The Friend in 1810. I then found two other essays on epitaphs in Wordsworth’s Prose Works.

I kept reading because I’m interested in these questions: What were people in earlier times thinking when they made cemeteries, tombstones and other monuments? Why, in an increasingly secular society, do we still do it? Why do we think a cemetery is a good use of scarce land?

Wordsworth at least takes a stab at it with his idea about immortality.

But he’s mainly interested in the aesthetics of the epitaph. Again, he has something interesting to stay.

While Europeans collected their monuments in churchyards, the ancient Greeks tended to put theirs at crossroads. (It’s why so many of those old epitaphs begin with a salutation like, “Pause, traveler!”)

Wordsworth thought the aesthetics of epigraphs depended on telling the story of a person within the limits of that short pause. He wanted real grief and natural descriptions, rather than “poetic” languages. His criticism of Alexander Pope is cutting.

It’s good advice on writing. But it seems to me humanity be better served if we got out of the monuments business. 

• Source: William Wordsworth’s essay “Upon Epitaphs” was originally published The Friend, Feb. 22, 1810 and collected in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by the Rev. Alexander B. Grosart; London: Edward Moxon, Son, and Co., 1876. The essay is in Vol. 2, along with two others on similar topics: “The Country Church-yard, and Critical Examination of Ancient Epitaphs” and “Celebrated Epitaphs Considered.” Project Gutenberg has them here:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16550/16550-h/16550-h.htm#II_UPON_EPITAPHS

The end of Hazlitt

 William Hazlitt, a great English essayist and a friend of Charles Lamb, died Sept. 18, 1830 at age 52.

Eric G. Wilson says: “The landlady was so eager to show the room to potential lodgers she hid the body under the bed.”

Wilson, whose biography of Lamb is excellent, says that Lamb grieved and mourned what ought to be. But he invariably looked on what actually is the case with humor.

Lamb’s humor is often dark and, at times, insufferably bleak. But stories like this make me think it had something to do with times, the manners of the day, what actually was the case, rather than what should have been.

I’m not saying that our times are better.

• Source: Eric G. Wilson, Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb; Yale University Press, 2022, p. 444.

William Stafford's writing practice

 I think William Stafford is a wonderful poet. His son, Kim Stafford, is too.

Together, they produced a wonderful lesson on writing. Kim wrote an article about his father’s writing practice as a way of marking the centennial of his father’s birth. The article appeared 10 years ago today.

William Stafford would get up at 4 a.m. so he could enjoy the quiet before the household started the day. He reclined on an old couch with a sheet of paper.

Kim identified four elements on his father’s daily pages:

• The date, a kind of trigger to get started, but surprisingly useful.

• Some prose notes, an observation, a snatch of conversation, details of a dream. He was getting away from the temptation to pontificate and getting on the trail of ordinary experience.

• An aphorism, a free-standing sentence. It might be an idea or a question. 

• Something that looks like poetry. He was making notes and trying out lines, trying to turn the experience into a poem. Sometimes he succeeded.

William Stafford was generous with young writers. He wrote about his writing practice and gave interviews about it. Kim Stafford also wrote a book about his father’s practice and poetry. I recommend them all. But this article is an excellent place to start. It gets to what writing is, a practice, rather a romantic, heroic effort. It’s just a habitual way of thinking.

In Kim Stafford’s words:

 

Most of us do an assignment shortly before it is due. (That's often true for me.) It's better to begin the project when it's first assigned, not when it's due. And, I realize again and again, it's even better to practice self-directed searching, writing, thinking on the page — when there is no assignment given. This empowers the free range of mind, of "hands-on thinking." By something like this daily practice, you build up a personal sheaf of riches, a democracy of inner voices, an archive you can draw from as needed for work and pleasure over time.

 

• Source: Kim Stafford, “Four Elements of a Daily Writing Page in William Stafford's Practice,” Powell’sBooks.Blog, March 20, 2014. 

https://www.powells.com/post/poetry/four-elements-of-a-daily-writing-page-in-william-staffords-practice

Specimens in a collection

 I have been looking at specimens of some of the writers I admire, and I quietly decided that I will keep telling people about Roy Bedichek, a writer from Texas.

A specimen sounds like it belongs in a collection, doesn’t it?

Bedichek’s books have a place in my collection.

As a boy, I collected marbles, baseball cards, pocketknives, Prince Albert tins and other treasures. As a teenager, I listened to music and told friends about the good stuff. It seems to me that the same impulse is still at work. I find things that interest me and tell friends about them. The marbles are gone, but I still collect books.

I think our canons of literature might be formed like that. I like Virginia Woolf’s idea that the common reader has an influence on the canon.

This line of thinking started when I ran across this passage from Camille Paglia:

 

At this time of foreboding about the future of Western culture, it is crucial to identify and preserve our finest artifacts. Canons are always in flux, but canon formation is a critic’s obligation. What lasts, and why? Custodianship, not deconstruction, should be the mission and goal of the humanities.

 

I like collecting specimens of good literature, good writing, good thinking. I’d thought about being a good steward of the collection, an idea that includes some responsibility for telling people about the good stuff. I’d use the word stewardship, but I’m interested that Paglia used custodianship.

• Sources: Camille Paglia, Break, Blow, Burn; New York: Pantheon Books, 2005, p. xvii.

For those curious about Bedichek, this is the best I can do:

https://www.hebertaylor.com/roy-bedichek

Two steps toward disaster

 In the 1930s, Japan went through what is called the “Dark Valley.” It lost democratic institutions and descended into a dark place.

I’ve heard many Americans ask what happened to the Germans in the 1930s. But I don’t recall anyone wondering about similar events in Japan, a partner in the Axis.

When the last elements of democratic government were gone, the nationalist government carved out an empire at the expense of its neighbors. Perhaps 10 million people were killed during the occupation of China, to consider just one aggrieved neighbor. The atrocities were legion. Young Japanese soldiers were toughened up by undergoing bayonet training on living victims. Unit 731 conducted ghastly medical experiments.

The story of how Japan lost its democratic institutions is complicated and includes the assassination of two prime ministers. But two events stand out to me.

• The first was the passage of the Peace Preservation Law in 1929. It established something called the Thought Section, which could charge people with having dangerous thoughts. In three years, 59,000 people were charged. It’s important to remember that a lot of good people dissented and resisted.

• The second was the failed coup on Feb. 26, 1936. A group of army officers wanted to get rid of democracy and restore a strong leader. They wanted to make the emperor great again by restoring all his traditional, autocratic power. When the plot failed, no one was prosecuted for treason. There was no real punishment. The officers were said to be “patriots” who just wanted what was best for the country. It’s important because many people, perhaps most, believed that nonsense.

• Source: Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible; New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. This is Vol. 1 of the Pacific War Trilogy. Most of Toll’s discussion of this period of Japan’s history is in Chapter 3, pp. 63-123.

Guy Davenport's new edition

 Becca Rothfeld of the Washington Post says Godine Nonpareil has brought out a new edition of Guy Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays.

My old edition, battered and dogeared, is 43 years old. I suppose it’s time.

The archives of this collection turned up 17 other notes on Davenport. So I’ve shown a little restraint.

I think “Finding” is one of the great American essays. (You’ll find it in this book.) I also think his “John Charles Tapner” is one of the great American short stories. (It’s in the collection Da Vinci’s Bicycle.)

John Jeremiah Sullivan, who wrote an introduction to the edition, mentioned Davenport’s academic credentials, but then said: 

 

At the same time, I think he was someone who sincerely believed that
You can learn something interesting from every person you ever meet,
And that no thought is really interesting until you can discuss it plainly.
Curiosity was his philosophy, a way of being alive and liking the world.

I love that way of liking the world. 

• Sources: Becca Rothfeld, “He joked that he had 13 readers. He deserves millions,” The Washington Post, Jan. 11, 2024. The article is here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/01/11/guy-davenport-geography-imagination-review/

John Jeremiah Sullivan, “The labyrinth of Guy Davenport’s mind” was published on unherd.com with a note saying that it’s the introduction to Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays. It’s here:

https://unherd.com/2024/01/the-labyrinth-of-guy-davenports-mind/

I do not have the new edition, but the battered old one is: Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination; San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. In my mind, the best place to start is his essay “Finding.” My note on it is “Davenport’s search for arrowheads,” March 15, 2022.

Lamb: 'The Old Familiar Faces'

 I think of Charles Lamb as an essayist, rather than a poet. But he was a poet, and he wrote a remarkable poem on grief and mourning. Those are recurring themes on this site.

Lamb’s poem is “The Old Familiar Faces.” It has this recurring line:

 

All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

 

Eric G. Wilson’s account mentions the recurring line.

 

This poem depicts the repetition compulsion of inconsolable grief. If there is any hope in the poem, it is the possibility that we can choose how to mourn, and some forms of mourning are more soothing than others. There is nothing you can do about the darkness, but you can decide to whistle or not, and some tunes sound better. 

 

I understand nothing about grief.

But the poem and Wilson’s account of it sound right.

I whistle.

• Sources: Charles Lamb, “The Old Familiar Faces,” in The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch; Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1912, p. 668. The Poetry Foundation has it here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44519/the-old-familiar-faces

Eric G. Wilson, Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb; Yale University Press, 2022, p. 126.

Wilson’s book is the subject of several notes, including “Charles Lamb’s Voice,” Jan. 10, 2024, about how Lamb’s writing was shaped by tragedy.

Stone Mountain, after the storm

 The storm blew through during the night. I walked through the woods south of Stone Mountain to see what had happened.

Small twigs and big limbs were down everywhere. A few trees had fallen, but this wasn’t a catastrophic storm.

The forecasters had said 60 mph winds were possible, but the highest gust measured at the Atlanta airport was 38 mph. My old friends in Galveston would smile, thinking that’s not much of a blow.

The volume of brush on the ground was a reminder that the forest is constantly renewing itself. Weaker and diseased limbs come down. New growth will take advantage of the sunlight that comes through the newly opened spaces in the canopy. This storm was just part of the cycle.

The other remarkable thing about the walk was the sound. Earlier in the week, the forest had been still, dry and quiet. But as the poet said:

 

Stones in the throat make the hill burn sing.

 

Every little rill coming off Stone Mountain was a torrent running over granite stones. It’s music to me: not as loud as a rock concert, but getting there.

• Source: The line is from Norman MacCaig’s poem “A noise of stumbles” in The Poems of Norman MacCaig; Edinburgh: Polygon, 2005, p. 156.

An attempt to assassinate King George

  One of the wonders of Eric G. Wilson’s biography of Charles Lamb is his recreation of Lamb’s time.

Lamb lived from 1775 to 1834. Some of the commonplaces of his day are barely comprehensible to us.

In those days people could pay two pence admission to a large insane asylum. Admission entitled people to run through the wards and make fun of the patients.

Another example of the barely believable is the attempted assassination of King George in 1800.

The king was at Royal Theatre to see a comedy.

In those days it was the custom to sing “God Save the King” before the show. The orchestra struck up the tune, and everyone stood to sing. The king rose to receive the honor.

As he did, a veteran who’d served honorably and been wounded several times drew a pistol and shot at the king. The shot missed, and the old soldier was hauled off.

King George insisted that the show go on.

Many people enjoyed it, but King George did not and nodded off.

Imagine being a fiction writer and having to cover the same material today. If the story were set in our time rather than in Lamb’s, security officers would have to cancel the show for reasons of national security and  King George would have to suffer horribly from the trauma.

Fiction writers would have to tell the story that way for it to be believable.

• Sources: Eric G. Wilson, Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb; Yale University Press, 2022, p. 86. Several posts mention this book, beginning with “A new biography of Charles Lamb,” Aug. 20, 2022.

Charles Lamb’s voice

 Eric G. Wilson’s biography of Charles Lamb is fascinating and heartbreaking to people who care about Lamb.

I’m among them. Lamb was one of the writers who made me realize that I’m more interested in essays than novels. (Montaigne, Thoreau and Baldwin were among the others.)

Lamb’s life was limited by tragedy.

When he was 21, he came home from the office one day and found that his beloved sister, Mary, had stabbed their mother to death. He heard the cry and took the knife out of Mary’s hand. Mary would struggle with her mental health the rest of her life. Charles knew on that day that the rest of his life would be devoted to taking care of her.

Charles Lamb had difficulties with his own health. His earliest letter that survives is to his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lamb reports that he’s spent six weeks in an asylum.

There’s more, much more, in terms of tragedy.

What interests me about Lamb is that his Essays of Elia are written in a warm, humorous voice. It’s a distinctive voice. Wilson says it’s a combination of whim and melancholy, which sounds about right.

Sometimes I think it’s just impossible that such a wonderful voice could have come from such tragedy. Sometimes I think it’s the only place that such a voice could have come from. 

• Source: Eric G. Wilson, Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb; Yale University Press, 2022. Wilson’s book is the subject of several notes. The first was “A new biography of Charles Lamb,” Aug. 20, 2022.

The other Judgment Day

As a boy, I heard plenty of sermons about Judgment Day. Preachers did not like to be accused of scrimping on the hell, fire and damnation, so I got my share early.

Judgment Day, as the preachers presented it, is a future event. I was in college before I heard about the other Judgment Day.

Socrates told about it, as recorded by Plato in Gorgias. Socrates said that in the days of Kronos and even in the early rule of Zeus, people knew the day they would die, just as they knew the day they were born. On the last day, a person would be judged — by living judges.

With a lot at stake, people in the dock tended to dress up as if they were going to church. They also brought out their best possessions, hoping that the judges might be confused about the difference between a richperson and a good one.

Eventually, Pluto, god of Hades, and his top staff came up to complain about the officiating — just too many blown calls. 

Zeus looked into it and saw that Judgment Day was a disaster. The whole concept had to be overhauled.

Socrates told the story as a warning that human beings tend to judge by appearances. That’s one of the reasons I’m reluctant to make any claims of knowledge about a Judgment Day in the future.

Some people claim to be good at foreseeing the future, but I’m not. I suppose I judge too much by appearances, but I was sure the St. Louis Cardinals would finish at the top of the standings last season, instead of at the bottom. I tend to be wrong so often in my predictions about trivial things that I’d hate to bet the farm on something important.

But I do wish that more people knew something of the history of the concept and could provide, especially if they feel called upon to preach, some perspectives on lessons learned from past mistakes.

I think the best part of Zeus’ Plan B was a provision for a court of appeals.

• Source: The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns; Princeton University Press, 1978, pp. 305-6.

Aeschylus: ‘Prometheus Bound’

 “Prometheus Bound” is without a doubt the greatest play that opens with a crucifixion.

Prometheus, a god taken down by a stronger god, is being nailed and chained to a boulder. He is being punished by Zeus for befriending humans. Zeus had planned to exterminate humanity and try something else.

And so Cratos (Might) and the unspeaking Bia (Violence) supervise Hephaistos, who is apologetic but has to do the dirty work of fastening Prometheus to the rock.

It would be a risky thing for a dramatist to do now — immobilizing the hero in the first scene. It’s also hard to image a contemporary playwright introducing the hero and not allowing him to speak through the opening scene, but that’s what Aeschylus does. Hephaistos, the smith god, hammers away, hating what he’s doing, while Cratos explains how Prometheus got into such a spot. Prometheus, contemptuous, refuses to talk to either one of them.

It’s an odd opening gambit for a dramatist. But this is Old Tragedy, and as Professor H.D.F. Kitto puts it, the drama is in the emotion, not in the events.

 

The real dramatic movement here is one which takes place in the mind of the immovable Prometheus, and Aeschylus’ presentation of this is one of the greatest achievements of the Greek stage.

 

Kitto says the play has two themes:

• Zeus’ tyrannical cruelty and Prometheus’ resistance to it.

• Long-range hope, the basis of which is a secret that Prometheus knows and Zeus doesn’t.

The Chorus of Oceanus’ daughters, who are kind of like mermaids, comes to console Prometheus, and then Oceanus himself arrives, riding on a hippocampus. (Imagine a sea monster: half horse, half fish.)

Oceanus is a Greek cousin of Job’s friends. He argues that it’s best to learn from your misfortune and seek to appease, rather resist, stronger forces. Resistance only invites more torture, more cruelty, more heartbreak.

Finally Io, the cow-horned maid, wanders in, wondering where she is. She, too, has been wronged by Zeus, turned into a heifer by the lusty god and pursued by a gadfly sent by the god’s jealous wife.

Prometheus alludes to the secret throughout the play. But he shares it clearly with a fellow victim: Tyrants fall.

In myth and in this play, Prometheus can see farther than anyone. He knows the day will come when Zeus will need his help. But Aeschylus was writing in a day when tyrants had fallen all over Greece. Peisistratos was an ugly memory in Athens.

Kitto reminds us that the Greeks had a primitive conception that Necessity was stronger than the gods. It’s almost a natural law. Tyrants are cruel and abuse people. They hate their enemies, of course, but they can never trust their friends. Inevitably, their greatest suspicions focus on those closest to them, those helping them hold on to power, the enablers who prop up the regime.

Such is the foundation of tyrannies. And with such a foundation, it’s only a matter of time.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on “Prometheus Bound” is on pages 57-67. The quotation is on p. 60.

“Prometheus Bound,” translated by David Grene, is in Aeschylus II in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1956, pp. 132-79.

Aeschylus: ‘Seven Against Thebes’

 There is nothing like a chorus of hysterical women to throw you off the track.

In Aeschylus’ play, the women of Thebes are mad with fear. The Argives have surrounded the city with plans to sack and pillage. The women are making such a scene that King Eteocles tries to reassure them. Their panic is a public danger, undermining the city’s ability to defend itself.

The women are so distraught that Eteocles casually mentions that he himself will defend one of the city’s gates. And with that line, dropped so casually it seems like an afterthought, that we learn that the play is not about the fate of Thebes but about the fate of Eteocles.

The Argives have seven champions, each leading soldiers against one of the city’s seven gates.

Eteocles coolly weighs what kind of man each Argive is and selects just the right person, by temperament and character, to lead the defense. Every choice is careful, considered, just.

Unsaid is that Polyneices, Eteocles’ brother, is leading the Argives. They are both sons of Oedipus, once king of Thebes, and both have been cursed by their father. Polyneices hates his brother so much that he’s willing to sack the city rather than let his brother have it. But Aeschylus doesn’t mention Polyneices by name until late in the play.

Instead, we know that Eteocles will defend one of the gates and that, one by one, he’s eliminating choices about which gate he’ll defend.

Somewhere along the way, we folks in the audience begin to suspect that Polyneices is at the seventh gate.

H.D.F. Kitto, whose reading of the play is being followed here, points out that any modern dramatist would have done it differently. Sophocles, Aeschylus’ younger contemporary would have done it differently.

Other playwrights would have loved the conflict between brothers. As Kitto puts it, Aeschylus had a different view of what tragedy was.

 

His mind and dramatic imagination were absorbed in the questions of Man’s relation to God, fate, and the Universe, not in his relation to Man.

 

Kitto says “Seven Against Thebes” is the most complete example of for Old Tragedy, just as Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” is the perfection of Middle Tragedy. After such a feat, playwrights have to try something new or tragedy, as an art form, decays.
• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on “Seven Against Thebes” is on pages 46-57. The quotation is on p. 48.

“Seven Against Thebes,” translated by David Grene, is in Aeschylus II in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1956, pp. 88-130.

The Wise Woman calls crows

 The Wise Woman, knowing I’m interested in crows, bought a bag of unshelled peanuts and a crow call. 

She auditioned for me.

I told her she was doing just fine.

She took her show outside to a live audience.

Within seconds, I heard the crow version of “The Hallelujah Chorus.” Three crows can sound like a choir, but I counted seven from my upstairs window, with more coming in.

The Wise Woman’s version of a crow in distress was convincing — to a red-tail hawk. The hawk arrived, seeking an easy kill. Crows from all over mobbed it.

Early January in the Piedmont

 On a cold New Year’s Day, we put on scarves, gloves and heavy coats and went for a walk on the Yellow River, where a young woman was splashing mid-stream.

When we called from the bank, she said the water was indeed cold, but it was fun. She advised that you have to keep moving.

We took her advice, tightening our scarves as we moved on down the trail.

Roger Deakin, an English writer I admire, was an advocate of wild swimming — swimming in natural bodies of water, as opposed to pools. Wild swimmers tend to swim year-round. I’ve found there are enthusiasts in the Georgia Piedmont.

When my father was a doctoral student doing research in Norway in the 1950s, my parents rented a flat from a woman in her 70s who used to swim in the fjord, regardless of season. I had grown up thinking that winter swimming was a European pastime.

Among other wonders outdoors:

• I’ve been sampling the leaf litter, looking for invertebrates, and have been surprised how often I find small green plants beneath the litter. They don’t seem the worse for repeated nights of freezing weather or for lack of sunlight. I suppose a gardener would think the litter was deep mulch.

• The beech trees at Stone Mountain still have their leaves, a khaki-colored canopy where the surrounding oaks and hickories are bare. I wrote often about this last winter. I go see the beech stand, I guess, because I can scarcely believe it.

• At Panola Mountain, we saw fragments of hickory nuts on top of a downed pine log. There were perhaps 200 shell fragments on top of the log. I can’t imagine why squirrels have declared it to be the place for a picnic.

'Purpose' and 'meaning'

 Among the many failures in my education was my first lesson on the dictionary.

I was told that words had meanings and the meanings could be found in the dictionary. The problem is not one of fact but of concept.

I imagined that meanings have some existence independent of us — you and me, the people involved in this conversation. I thought that meanings live, independently of our activities, in some ideal place. 

We share words, use them in common. But the use of the words is their existence, and we frequently use words in ways that stretch or exceed the definitions in dictionaries.

A better way of looking at it: Words that we use accumulate meaning. It’s more like accretion, and if that suggests a slow process, I think that’s generally true. It’s often so slow we don’t really notice. It’s one of the reasons that we find ourselves, later in life, “ready” to read someone we couldn’t read earlier.

Recent notes have been about J.L Austin and Ordinary Language Philosophy. Borrowing from Austin’s method, I took a stab at the distinction between meaning and purpose.

The dictionary was not that helpful, especially compared this:

 

Purpose determines what I will do with this part of my life. Meaning demands to know why I’m doing it and with what global results.

 

That’s Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun, going beyond the dictionary.

I think we all do that — that is, I think that’s the way we use language. If the conversation gets beyond a basic level, we define terms for ourselves and try to show how looking at it in that way is useful.

Austin always went to the dictionary first. Then he looked for examples of usage. He found law to be a rich source. Austin was a classicist, and classicists find a lot in nomos, the Greek word usually translated law. The word also was used in the sense of usage, custom and ordinary (or decent) behavior. A law was not generally something that was written down — it was what decent people habitually do.

Insights from law are helpful in many cases, but the usage of some words is made clearer from discussions about art or religion, as in the case above. The Greek psyche and pneuma are often interesting to artistic and religious thinkers — and both kinds of thinkers are prone to speak of inspiration.
Chittister says that purpose is about goals and productivity. Meaning is about who cares — who is helped or hurt by an intended action. Those are her distinctions, not the dictionary’s.

Her claim seems like the start of a conversation to me.

• Sources and notes: Joan D. Chittister, O.S.B., Wisdom Distilled from the Daily; New York: HarperOne, 1991, p. 102.

M.W. Rowe, J.L. Austin: Philosopher & D-Day Intelligence Officer; Oxford University Press, 2023. My notes on this book begin with “Reading your way into it,” Nov. 6, 2023.

If the gist of this post sounds familiar, see “A lexicon of words that mean trouble,” Oct. 30, 2023.