Thanks for the Memory

Another of life's great conundrums is the one related to your own past experiences, of which you feel comfortably familiar, even to the point of prefacing some observations to friends with the meme, "I've probably told you this before..." The subtext is always memory.

You frequently feel so comfortable with your past that you have become deferential to those about you when discussing it, almost to the point of, "Yeah, I did that." or "I liked it there, too."  Comfort also means you think twice or perhaps even three times about inflicting your past on anyone else until there is a clear, valid opening.

With that set-up in place, your quotients of comfort and deference become challenged when you are reminded of things you did or said in the past that you do not remember.  This is particularly telling since you are reputed to have an extraordinary memory, which is in your own opinion more quirky than extraordinary, evidenced by the fact that you can remember stories of students from your past, or some arcane fact that, while accurate, has no real bearing on anything useful to you.

In a realistic way, when it comes to memory, you are indeed your parents' son.

"Say," your father would muse aloud, "what ever happened to--" at which point your mother would interrupt with an exasperated, "Oh, Jack, he's been dead for ten years," and your father would, with equal exasperation, respond, "Not him, I mean the man who was married to--"  Another sigh.  "He wasn't her first husband, you know."  "Right.  He used to be married to what's-her-name, whose father owned the furniture stores."  "They were lighting fixture stores."  "Not him!  I mean that place where you got the sofa that had mice in it."   They could--and did--go on like that for several minutes, all to your wishing you could get the rhythms, pauses, growing sense of increased impatience, which even then you recognized had nothing to do with each other but rather each with a personal irritation about the way the past has or morphing into something that leaves you wondering which version of it is correct.

Story is such a convenient, human trait.  We are drawn to individuals who tell them well, whether the telling is simply their way of verbalizing an event in which we were present (and now see differently through the telling), making us wish we were there, causing us to fictionalize to the point where we now believe we were there.  We are drawn to individuals whose life appears to us to be a story in progress, with little time for narrative leaps.  Sometimes, in reflective moments, we seek to inject story into portions of our life that seem in retrospect to have been uneventful.  We stand as Yeats stood in his poem,"Among School Children:"

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

A Country for Old and Young Writers

Whichever direction we turn, we seem to be presented with an ongoing scenario of dissent, making us spectators at a Balkanized, fractured landscape ruled by old passions and questionable logic.  

It is not a landscape we have entered with zeal or adventureous spirit.  Rather, it is a place where we have turned in search of refuge if not solace from the consternation about us.  It is more a place for a cynic, a politician, or a career diplomat that one who would offer the soaring freedom of the creative imagination.

Cormac McCarthy called it no country for old men; he was quoting Yeats, who was old when he wrote the lines:
That is no country for old men. The young
  In one another's arms, birds in the trees
  - Those dying generations - at their song,
  The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
  Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
  Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
  Caught in that sensual music all neglect
  Monuments of unaging intellect.

McCarthy's sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, was inspired by those lines and he,in the best artistic sense, became our man in this fractured landscape.  It is the job of the story teller to take us into such dismal and disspiriting places, asking questions, forging the moral boundaries over which we must not retreat lest we limp backward to the cynical state of the politician or career diplomat or other well-paid pragmatist.  

The landscape of the reader is a country for old men and women as well as young, teeming voices, eager to find their own aimbre and pitch. 

Invocation

Perhaps my fond regard for books printed and bound in India comes from my fondness for and close association with the middle generation of pulp magazines, the iconic Haldeman-Julius Blue Books, and the first generation of the massmarket or paperback book. Whatever the source, I think fondly of the pulpy text paper, the sewing of the bound signatures reminding me of my own early attempts at sewing, the covers more reminiscent of a fast food hamburger than a book. Books published in India frequently begin with some invocation to some deity, frequently to Ganesha, sometimes to Saraswati. Praise to Ganesha, the text will begin, shifting immediately to whatever subject the book addresses, suggesting that the invocation has worked and we may now go secular, Ganesha or Saraswati or some other divine being having delivered up the connective tissue to make the reading of the text a benefit for the reader.

Perhaps my favorite of the T.S. Eliot Quartets is Little Gidding, this because in it, Eliot, no stranger to prayer and invocation, attends a cemetery:

And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time...

Close to exquisite in his description of the state beyond time, space, and causation the creative person must seek when venturing into a new work, Eliot encounters a ghost who, in my view, has to be the ghost of a poet I have long admired, perhaps as much as I admire any poet. No, not Hopkins, not Sexton, nor Thomas, although I dote on them. Not Chaucer, into whom I read so much and from whom I draw so much more. Not even Ezra Pound, whom, his anti-Semitism and archness to the contrary not withstanding, I follow reluctantly at times but doggedly. I speak here of Willie--William Butler Yeats, brought to life for me for the first time by a mentor from my university days, a man who knew him, explained him to me in a way that made sense to my callow nineteenth year. Meeting Yeats thus, Eliot is now free to get on about the understanding and connection he seeks in the very act of writing the poem.

Earlier invocations from writers may be seen as wanting an okay from a divine being, a kind of cosmic sign-off on a task or venture to be undertaken. If we track back such remarkable ancients as Hesiod or Homer, we may find source or contemporary theory that the Muses, those daughters of Zeus, were more capricious than we might have imagined, and since I am dancing around with the capricious nature of such sources can imagine Yeats, who had among other things a sense of humor, thinking it would be fun to have Eliot on, possibly even by suggesting to Eliot that he write a series of poems about cats. Oh, well.

Hesiod and Homer did not begin their careers wanting to practice the narrative arts and may have been led to it by the Muses thinking it would help with their farming ventures. What a surprise.

Which is the point of all this; these events are freighted on the potential for surprise no matter if one ventures forth invoking Ganesha or Saraswati, putting Hebrew letters on one's forehead, or going secular and giving a nod to the forces of inspiration. No matter what wireless service one uses, the results are the same. When thought stops and inspiration takes hold, grab on for Mr. Toad's Wild Ride on steroids.

What About Comfort Poetry?

Almost everyone I know has squirreled away--an apt verb because even as I write this, I'm watching squirrels squirrel away a stash of peanuts left for that very purpose--some notion of a food that when ingested, even contemplated, will cause the metaphorical soothing hand to caress their brow.

Thus the very thought of the things I could find, even in such unlikely sources of comfort food as gas station minimarts, has the bio-feedback effect of getting my impatience foot off the gas pedal, my finger off the martyr button. Running late once for a series of what promised to be boring, time-consuming meetings, I confess to having purchased a single-serving tub of mashed potatoes (right, like those were really potatoes!) over which were poured a much less considerate white sauce than John Eaton's (from today's post) and wolfed the gelatinous mass down, realizing in the process that I'd had the microwave set way too high. You simply cannot trust gas station microwaves. But you can trust comfort food.

So it comes to me, which poets do I turn to in times of weal and woe? Is there a comfort poetry?

You bet there is, and just as is the case with comfort food, there is often no rational basis for it. F'rinstance, why would I take so much comfort from Ezra Pound's: Winter is icummin in/lhude sing goddamn/skiddeth bus and sloppeth us/what an ague hath my ham?

Not to mention E.P.'s lines: "What thou love'st well/Can never be reft from thee/What thou love's well/Is thy true heritage..."

Mashed potatoes and gravy, chocolate ice cream, creamed tuna on toast, and now, in my dotage, Surf Dogs from the stand by the beach in Carpinteria, not to forget the Island burger at the Kahua Grill, nor the occasional can of Wolf Brand chili, nor corn bread with hidden jalepeno peppers (gotta be Ortega canned). Such are the irrational natures of some of my own comfort foods. Oh, right, white asparagus spears (gotta be bottled--canned doesn't do it).

The poets? Emily Dickinson. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Yeats, William Butler Crazy Yeats; Neruda, Ramprasad, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Basho, Shall I compare thee to a Summer's Day? Go ahead, feel perfectly free to do so. Gabriella Mistral. The Eve of St. Agnes, ah, bitter chill it was...

I think it works. I am hungry just thinking about it.

Was it John Eaton's white sauce got me thinking this way, or the need for comfort, or perhaps the need for lunch.

Go figure, and while you're figuring, get ready for sunset tomorrow night. The big one's coming. Time to defrag your moral hard drive.

Lowenkopf's Uncertainty Principle

A quantum is an invisible entity of energy, say a poem, or short story, or novel. Quantum physics defines the position and momentum of an entity, say a poem, short story or novel.

A vector is an arrow drawn to scale, representing the magnitude and direction of an entity, say a poem, short story, novel, or photograph as it moves from its source somewhere in its creator to its impact point with a section of the viewers kishke.

Conjugate variables is another term from physics that seeks to define such observable dualities as magnitude and direction, time and space, or possibly even time and energy.

Werner Heisenberg, arguably one of the more insightful interpreters of quantum mechanics, noted the increased difficulty in measuring such conjugate variables. Thus the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, reduced to simplistic image with the observation: A watched pot never boils. 

 The more accuracy with which we measure one of the variables, the greater the uncertainty attending our ability to measure, much less define the variables. Indeed, Heisenberg's spectral self seems to be hovering over those physicists who are trying to define the initial state of our universe, thinking this would allow them to be able to predict behavior in the universe infinitely into the future.

Asking what makes a poem, short story, or novel linger in my sensitivities and, accordingly, in any one's sensitivities, brings Heisenberg to mind as a conjugate variable with the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats. In the admittedly alternate universe in which I live, I find it necessary to have the quanta defined by poets and scientists. Yeats, one of my great favorites, was nuttier than the proverbial fruitcake. Indeed:

The Ballad of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
I cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream,
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name;
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded in the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands.
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and hold her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

Heisenberg was able to walk among the long dappled grass of mathematics and the relationship of concepts. I am happy to think of him as My Man in Science.

You have only to know me to recognize that I dote on modern short story writers and novelists, even though I have spoken with affection in these entries of Hawthorne. I also add herewith D. H. Lawrence, whose splendid and diverse stories, "The Blacksmith's Daughter," and "The Rocking-Horse Winner," represent some lovely alpha and omega, respectively a gem from a rural landscape and another from an urban one. For me, these two have clearly lasted, withstood the test of time in the linear accelerator that passes for my mind. I can and will revisit them, speak of them with enthusiasm. Today, on Ben Huff's post, I saw two photos that gave me the most agreeable chills, a decidedly good sign.

As a writer, a reader, a reviewer, and a teacher, I bring four conjugate variables to the dinner table. Poems, short stories, novels, and photographs, since I began by mentioning these separate arts, are quanta, sometimes wave, sometimes particle, sometimes--amazingly--both. Attempting to apply a scientific judgment to them somehow deflects or undercuts the brilliance of the light they emit and my ability to bathe in that light.


This week is Oldie Week for my book review column. I have chosen Glendon Swarthout's remarkable, Bless the Beasts and Children, first published in 1970. You can read the review here.