February 16, 2010:
Maureen Dowd has a column in today's NYTimes in which she comments on a series of plays produced by the Pentagon and entitled "The Great Game." The plays are about the history of Afghanistan and I find it a hopeful sign that the Pentagon thinks the history of Afghanistan is an important thing to understand, although it comes a bit late, nine years late, to be exact. In an ideal world--i.e., an intelligent world--the Pentagon would have known something about the history of Afghanistan well before it went in, flags flying, guns blazing, to drive out the Taliban and capture Osama bin Laden, neither of which they managed to do. But at least they're beginning to recognize that that might have helped. They're slow learners, to be sure, but at least they can now see how useful it would have been to know things like, oh, the language, and the tribal nature of Afghan society, and that even more useful thing, Afghan history.
That name, in fact, is encouraging all by itself. "The Great Game" is what the British called their long-standing, more or less bloodless contest with Russia in central Asia in the nineteenth century. The British had conquered India and India was a prize everybody wanted, but the Russians were the closest, they were expanding their own empire through central Asia toward the Himalayan passes, and Great Britain invaded Afghanistan in order to forestall the Russians acquiring influence and land in the area. The best book on the subject is Peter Hopkirk's book of the same name (The Great Game); it's long, but an easy read, and very enlightening. As we should all know, the British failed miserably to subdue the Afghans and in 1842, after promising to let them go unharmed, Afghan tribesmen descended on the last British column to leave Afghanistan at one of those Himalayan passes and killed them to the last man, woman, and child. Well, no--I think there was one survivor. We always need one, who, like Ishmael, bobbing on his coffin in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, can live to tell us the story of the search for the great white whale, and the unfortunate destruction of the Pequod, ship and crew alike, by that selfsame whale. In any case, referring to the Great Game is a good sign; it means that the Pentagon has, or has acquired, people who know the nineteenth century history and therefore something about Afghan society and its stunning otherness. Know, that is, that it operates by rules totally unlike our own.
It was the same thing in Iraq. It is always the fools who rush in, where just a little knowledge would have been enough to have added a note of caution. I remember writing about this in the pages of the Sag Harbor Express, our little local newspaper where for a while I had a column, in 2003, before the U. S. went into that country, flags flying, guns blazing, and trying to remind my few readers (I thought of them as the happy few) that it wasn't that simple. I knew something about Iraq: not the language, I'm afraid, but the culture. And how did I know? Years before I had read T. E. Lawrence's book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and I had subsequently seen David Lean's great movie based on the book, Lawrence of Arabia. And Lawrence did speak the language, he knew the names of and the relationships between the various Arab tribes, he had read the Koran and could quote swatches of it from memory, he understood the differences between the Shia and the Sunnis, and he knew how to speak to tribal leaders and what motivated them and how they lived and thought. And here were the Americans, diving 80 years later into this complex situation, thinking they would be greeted by Iraqis carrying flowers.
Now that's not much: one book, one movie, not very impressive for an I-told-you-so moment like this one. But it was clear that the Americans hadn't even bothered to know that much. Like so many empires before them, the American empire was ham-fisted and ignorant, and seemed to think ignorance was a virtue. Empires are arrogant by nature; they are built on arrogance, but a certain amount of arrogance can be helpful. The problem is that ignorance is the twin brother of arrogance, and the two together become delusional. And no one seems to learn. Currently we have the Tea Party, just as arrogant, just as unknowing, charging into Washington thinking they can eliminate a culture, defenestrate a huge, often wasteful, but still essential bureaucracy, and simplify the enormous complexity of the way Washington works with a bunch of mottoes. The Federal Government is in fact a lot like Afghanistan, and it will destroy you if you don't educate yourself about how it works and why.
Not knowing history is one of the many ways, in short, of being stupid. The levels of stupidity in the world never cease to amaze. According to Reuters, one third of all Russians believe the sun revolves around the earth. According to a Pew Foundation poll, half of all Republican voters believe that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. (I owe these facts to my very knowing son.) It's funny, yes, but then it's not, because ignorance has consequences, large ones, and the stupider we get the worse they're going to be. I have no solutions to this. I don't see the United States suddenly getting smart in the near future, although Barack Obama is a hell of a lot smarter than George Bush. The fact is, it all just makes me sad. I am an aged man and I would like to die happy, and I cannot do so when my country is in such steep decline. I fear for my children and my grandchildren. Sometimes I think they should learn French or Spanish and get the hell out of here before it's too late. Maybe they should learn Swedish and get themselves to the ancestral home in Jonskoping. Global warming can only benefit Sweden.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR
February 8, 2011:
In today's NY Times I was pleased to see a piece on p. A16 about the end of Congressional earmarks. I knew this would come back to bite them. Last fall on a cold Sunday Lorraine and I were in Montauk, having just had lunch out at a local restaurant, and we parked in a parking lot overlooking the entrance to Lake Montauk, no longer a lake in fact but an inner harbor used by commercial fishermen, a yacht club, and five or six boatyards. To the commercial fishermen it's an essential place; nowhere else in that area could they find such a beautifully safe docking area. But the entrance periodically silts up. So who dredges it? The Federal government. And I said to Lorraine, what happens if earmarks get killed? What if we get a Tea Party Congressman out here committed to ending earmarks, and suddenly his constituents discover that he's the guy responsible for making it impossible to get this entrance dredged; he's the guy who's destroying the Montauk fishing industry, and forcing boatyards to close, etc. etc.? According to the Times, this is now happening across the country. Congress ended earmarks, and now the people who voted for these ideologues are finding out that some of those earmarks that are no longer acceptable were for them; they were some of their favorite projects, in fact, that were going to provide jobs and fix roads and fund research and all the other things that require more money than is available locally to make them happen. That idiot John McCain has made earmarks his favorite target, thinking maybe that would get him elected next time, and has gone most recently after research projects involving honeybees, apparently unaware that honeybee colonies are suffering, and have been suffering for years, long term colony collapse. In other words, bees are dying off, bees are essential to the pollination of food crops, particularly fruit trees, as well as flowers, and food supplies will be in serious trouble if bees disappear. So a million or two of Federal money devoted to figuring out what's going on and how to fix it is very much money well spent.
It goes without saying that not all earmarks make sense. Under ex-Senator Ted Stevens Alaska, the crybaby of the Western world, got fat on bad projects, the famous "bridge to nowhere" being just one of them, all the while complaining endlessly, mindlessly about Federal involvement in Alaskan affairs. But Stevens is gone, and throwing out earmarks because some of the projects seem wasteful doesn't solve the problem. Nothing actually solves the problem; the problem is one of those things you have to live with in order to make use of it when it's not wasteful, when it's absolutely necessary. It's politics, it's all local, as Tip O'Neill said, and the process of scratching somebody else's back when they've scratched yours is just part of the game.
The real problem is ideology: the purist, or Puritan, mentality that sees the world from one perspective only, recognizes no virtue in the other side, and can't compromise on its so-called principles. Spare me your angst, liberals and conservatives alike. Conservative demagoguery is just ridiculous. Listen to Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity for five minutes, which is about all it takes, and you don't know whether to laugh or throw up. Conservative economics is merely a screen for maintaining the status quo and keeping the rich, their own kind, rich; it has been taken apart again and again by the facts, but it lives on nevertheless. The liberals have fewer demagogues but they can be blind to the reasoning behind various conservative positions, which are based, fundamentally, in a much darker conception of human nature than theirs, and therefore blind to the serious flaws of American democracy, which, if it is to survive, is in desperate need of a better educated populace, which probably isn't going to happen.
In the name of balancing the budget, then--to which one can only say, get real--we no longer have earmarks, and communities all over the country are going to suffer, losing useful research projects and essential infrastructure repair and all manner of other things that need doing. Good work, guys. You've made your silly point. Now could you please wake up from your neat little dreams and start actually governing the country?
In today's NY Times I was pleased to see a piece on p. A16 about the end of Congressional earmarks. I knew this would come back to bite them. Last fall on a cold Sunday Lorraine and I were in Montauk, having just had lunch out at a local restaurant, and we parked in a parking lot overlooking the entrance to Lake Montauk, no longer a lake in fact but an inner harbor used by commercial fishermen, a yacht club, and five or six boatyards. To the commercial fishermen it's an essential place; nowhere else in that area could they find such a beautifully safe docking area. But the entrance periodically silts up. So who dredges it? The Federal government. And I said to Lorraine, what happens if earmarks get killed? What if we get a Tea Party Congressman out here committed to ending earmarks, and suddenly his constituents discover that he's the guy responsible for making it impossible to get this entrance dredged; he's the guy who's destroying the Montauk fishing industry, and forcing boatyards to close, etc. etc.? According to the Times, this is now happening across the country. Congress ended earmarks, and now the people who voted for these ideologues are finding out that some of those earmarks that are no longer acceptable were for them; they were some of their favorite projects, in fact, that were going to provide jobs and fix roads and fund research and all the other things that require more money than is available locally to make them happen. That idiot John McCain has made earmarks his favorite target, thinking maybe that would get him elected next time, and has gone most recently after research projects involving honeybees, apparently unaware that honeybee colonies are suffering, and have been suffering for years, long term colony collapse. In other words, bees are dying off, bees are essential to the pollination of food crops, particularly fruit trees, as well as flowers, and food supplies will be in serious trouble if bees disappear. So a million or two of Federal money devoted to figuring out what's going on and how to fix it is very much money well spent.
It goes without saying that not all earmarks make sense. Under ex-Senator Ted Stevens Alaska, the crybaby of the Western world, got fat on bad projects, the famous "bridge to nowhere" being just one of them, all the while complaining endlessly, mindlessly about Federal involvement in Alaskan affairs. But Stevens is gone, and throwing out earmarks because some of the projects seem wasteful doesn't solve the problem. Nothing actually solves the problem; the problem is one of those things you have to live with in order to make use of it when it's not wasteful, when it's absolutely necessary. It's politics, it's all local, as Tip O'Neill said, and the process of scratching somebody else's back when they've scratched yours is just part of the game.
The real problem is ideology: the purist, or Puritan, mentality that sees the world from one perspective only, recognizes no virtue in the other side, and can't compromise on its so-called principles. Spare me your angst, liberals and conservatives alike. Conservative demagoguery is just ridiculous. Listen to Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity for five minutes, which is about all it takes, and you don't know whether to laugh or throw up. Conservative economics is merely a screen for maintaining the status quo and keeping the rich, their own kind, rich; it has been taken apart again and again by the facts, but it lives on nevertheless. The liberals have fewer demagogues but they can be blind to the reasoning behind various conservative positions, which are based, fundamentally, in a much darker conception of human nature than theirs, and therefore blind to the serious flaws of American democracy, which, if it is to survive, is in desperate need of a better educated populace, which probably isn't going to happen.
In the name of balancing the budget, then--to which one can only say, get real--we no longer have earmarks, and communities all over the country are going to suffer, losing useful research projects and essential infrastructure repair and all manner of other things that need doing. Good work, guys. You've made your silly point. Now could you please wake up from your neat little dreams and start actually governing the country?
Sunday, February 6, 2011
SUNDAY MORNING
February 6, 2011:
I was channel surfing the other night and ran across a show about the soul, and scientific interest in studying it, that turned out to be mostly about a twelve-year-old American boy who remembered, at the age of two, or maybe three, being shot down in a plane over an Okinawan bay near the end of World War II and being trapped, and dying, in his cockpit. The University of Virginia has a center that rounds up accounts like this from all over the world and has thousands of them; it was founded by a psychologist whose name was Ian Stevenson, who persisted, in the face of large scale scorn and indifference among his peers, to pursue this during his entire career. That particular example came from this center; most of Stevenson's examples, however, were from the Middle and Far East, where reincarnation is an accepted idea. What usually happens in such cases is that those who remember their past lives forget them by the age of five, a fact that most people would consider made them unreliable witnesses, although the memories can be extraordinarily specific, as this boy's was. But five is the cut-off point. After that it all fades away.
I've always been curious about the idea of reincarnation. I know that if I had grown up recalling my life as a participant in the Russian revolution, as my psychic friend Leor once told me I had been, I would be likely to believe in the idea; no, more, I would be certain of it. But what then? Would it explain anything about my current life? And if we live out life after life but have no memories of any of them, and only rare exceptions have any such memory, how can it help me now? I mean me, Anthony Brandt, son of Axel Hjalmar Brandt and Grace Scott, brother of the late Charles Henry Brandt, father of Kate and Evan, husband of Lorraine Dusky. Me in all my particularity, shaped by my upbringing, my genes, my height, my bodily gifts and woes, my education, my reading, my loves and losses. What of the Russian who was supposedly reborn in me? I can find no trace of him unless perhaps it's a fondness for vodka (although when I was younger I only drank Scotch). I don't know a word of Russian except nyet, which everybody knows. The Buddhists say there is no self and my daughter tells me that when they are asked what it is that reincarnates, they laugh and say, "bad habits." The self, however, the me, dies, evaporates, is as if it had never been. Thus their effort in this life to detach themselves from it.
I am what I suppose you could call not-quite-a-Buddhist. I grew up in the Methodist Church but it didn't take. My parents never went to church except on Easter and didn't, I think, believe a word of it and my mother used to say that hell was not a place you went to after you died, it was life on earth. So much for Christianity. I was taken recently, reading about Dante, by something St. Augustine had written, that souls do not suffer in the fires of hell (it may have been purgatory, although I think purgatory was invented well after Augustine's time) because they're hot--souls do not feel physical pain--but because they are trapped in fire, they take the shape of fire, are fire, and can never be free of it. It's a wonderful image, very seductive, but it won't do. It's that "never," and its implications. "Never" renders it meaningless to human consciousness; "never" blots everything out.
Anyway the point I'm getting to is that if something survives, a soul, say, well, that soul is quite clearly not me. Not the person, or personality, that so preoccupies my time now, in my 70s, staring at mortality and wondering what language the dead speak. Am I fond of myself? Do I like myself? Is the "who" that "I" am worth preserving? I do like myself, but I don't think it matters a hoot whether the me that is me survives. All that will survive of me, my wise daughter reminds me, is my words, maybe a million of them by now, preserved in the dozens of magazines I've written for and the few books. Keep writing this blog, Dad, she tells me.
But I will be sorry to leave this world. "Death is the mother of beauty," writes Wallace Stevens in "Sunday Morning," a poem that is rich with the love of the world; and when I look at the birds, the trees, the harbor, and in the spring the tiny insects that hover over the flowers of our Arctic thyme, I realize how attached to it I still am. The hawk that preens its wings on the back of one of the benches on our deck is a handsome fellow indeed. When my brother was told he had a year to live he slowly backed off from things, from people; but my old friend Carter Jones, who died in a plane crash and told me a week before that he no longer dreamed about the future, that his nighttime dreams were dark, abyssal, well, Carter was somebody who savored the ice cream he would eat like no other man I've ever known. He tasted it like nobody else. He lived richly. Maybe that's not me who loves the birds and the wild storms and the ocean, but the soul currently occupying this me. I don't know. I try to maintain a Socratic ignorance. And now Lorraine wants to go out to Sunday brunch, and I have to finish this post. "Is there no change of death in paradise? / Does ripe fruit never fall?" The words are from "Sunday Morning," and they ask an immortal question. Are we forever, or just for now? We don't know. We mustn't know, because death is the mother of beauty.
I was channel surfing the other night and ran across a show about the soul, and scientific interest in studying it, that turned out to be mostly about a twelve-year-old American boy who remembered, at the age of two, or maybe three, being shot down in a plane over an Okinawan bay near the end of World War II and being trapped, and dying, in his cockpit. The University of Virginia has a center that rounds up accounts like this from all over the world and has thousands of them; it was founded by a psychologist whose name was Ian Stevenson, who persisted, in the face of large scale scorn and indifference among his peers, to pursue this during his entire career. That particular example came from this center; most of Stevenson's examples, however, were from the Middle and Far East, where reincarnation is an accepted idea. What usually happens in such cases is that those who remember their past lives forget them by the age of five, a fact that most people would consider made them unreliable witnesses, although the memories can be extraordinarily specific, as this boy's was. But five is the cut-off point. After that it all fades away.
I've always been curious about the idea of reincarnation. I know that if I had grown up recalling my life as a participant in the Russian revolution, as my psychic friend Leor once told me I had been, I would be likely to believe in the idea; no, more, I would be certain of it. But what then? Would it explain anything about my current life? And if we live out life after life but have no memories of any of them, and only rare exceptions have any such memory, how can it help me now? I mean me, Anthony Brandt, son of Axel Hjalmar Brandt and Grace Scott, brother of the late Charles Henry Brandt, father of Kate and Evan, husband of Lorraine Dusky. Me in all my particularity, shaped by my upbringing, my genes, my height, my bodily gifts and woes, my education, my reading, my loves and losses. What of the Russian who was supposedly reborn in me? I can find no trace of him unless perhaps it's a fondness for vodka (although when I was younger I only drank Scotch). I don't know a word of Russian except nyet, which everybody knows. The Buddhists say there is no self and my daughter tells me that when they are asked what it is that reincarnates, they laugh and say, "bad habits." The self, however, the me, dies, evaporates, is as if it had never been. Thus their effort in this life to detach themselves from it.
I am what I suppose you could call not-quite-a-Buddhist. I grew up in the Methodist Church but it didn't take. My parents never went to church except on Easter and didn't, I think, believe a word of it and my mother used to say that hell was not a place you went to after you died, it was life on earth. So much for Christianity. I was taken recently, reading about Dante, by something St. Augustine had written, that souls do not suffer in the fires of hell (it may have been purgatory, although I think purgatory was invented well after Augustine's time) because they're hot--souls do not feel physical pain--but because they are trapped in fire, they take the shape of fire, are fire, and can never be free of it. It's a wonderful image, very seductive, but it won't do. It's that "never," and its implications. "Never" renders it meaningless to human consciousness; "never" blots everything out.
Anyway the point I'm getting to is that if something survives, a soul, say, well, that soul is quite clearly not me. Not the person, or personality, that so preoccupies my time now, in my 70s, staring at mortality and wondering what language the dead speak. Am I fond of myself? Do I like myself? Is the "who" that "I" am worth preserving? I do like myself, but I don't think it matters a hoot whether the me that is me survives. All that will survive of me, my wise daughter reminds me, is my words, maybe a million of them by now, preserved in the dozens of magazines I've written for and the few books. Keep writing this blog, Dad, she tells me.
But I will be sorry to leave this world. "Death is the mother of beauty," writes Wallace Stevens in "Sunday Morning," a poem that is rich with the love of the world; and when I look at the birds, the trees, the harbor, and in the spring the tiny insects that hover over the flowers of our Arctic thyme, I realize how attached to it I still am. The hawk that preens its wings on the back of one of the benches on our deck is a handsome fellow indeed. When my brother was told he had a year to live he slowly backed off from things, from people; but my old friend Carter Jones, who died in a plane crash and told me a week before that he no longer dreamed about the future, that his nighttime dreams were dark, abyssal, well, Carter was somebody who savored the ice cream he would eat like no other man I've ever known. He tasted it like nobody else. He lived richly. Maybe that's not me who loves the birds and the wild storms and the ocean, but the soul currently occupying this me. I don't know. I try to maintain a Socratic ignorance. And now Lorraine wants to go out to Sunday brunch, and I have to finish this post. "Is there no change of death in paradise? / Does ripe fruit never fall?" The words are from "Sunday Morning," and they ask an immortal question. Are we forever, or just for now? We don't know. We mustn't know, because death is the mother of beauty.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
STARTING WITH SNOW
January 25, 2011
I was sitting in the car in the King Kullen parking lot waiting for Lorraine, who was inside buying bananas and milk, and large flakes of snow were falling onto the window beside me. I have an interest in snow, dating from my work on my book The Man Who Ate His Boots, in which snow and ice figure prominently, and I remembered that the great British whaler and Arctic scientist William Scoresby had been the first to make detailed drawings of snow crystals and had revealed the great diversity in their structure. So I put on my reading glasses and looked closely at these particular snowflakes, which were very large and composed of any number of smaller snow crystals, not formed in the usual variations on star shapes but as spikes of ice, and as they started to melt they collapsed in on themselves in sudden implosions, as if melting were an instantaneous process. Where there had been ice there was now only a drop of water, running down the glass.
Spikes of ice. In the Arctic, when it's very cold, thirty or forty below, and clear outside, tiny spicules of ice will fall out of the air as if it were snowing. The cold freezes the moisture in the air and it falls as these spicules, and can gather on the snow underneath to a depth of an inch or more.
To amuse and amaze his sailors, Scoresby would take a piece of clear ice--only fresh water makes clear ice--and cut it into the shape of a lens, then use the lens to focus sunlight on something, a sailor's pipe, say, which he would proceed to light using only this lens, or he would start a wood fire, or make some other demonstration. He found that he could melt lead by this means. Then he would ask the men to touch the lens while he was using it to light up the world in this way, and, most amazing of all, the lens remained ice cold.
For a long time no one thought that ocean water, salt water, in other words, could freeze; what was found in the Arctic as sea ice was, it was believed, fresh water flowing off the land that had frozen and lay on top of the sea water underneath. Where there was no land to provide the fresh water, there could be no ice. These theories prevailed in the science of the day well beyond Scoresby's time; they were still being propounded as late as the 1880s. Scoresby, of course, knew otherwise; he had watched sea ice form to a depth of a foot even while the seas themselves were rough and stormy; he had dodged ice floes that were ten feet thick; he had melted sea ice and come up with salt water. But he was a whaler, a commerical fisherman, in other words, and not learned as the learned were learned, so his knowledge was discounted. In 1820 he published a book in two volumes on the Arctic that became the founding document of Arctic science, and one of the great scientific books of its time. It is now exceedingly scarce. But he was, as I say, a whaler. Who could give credence to a whaler?
Reading the NYTimes this morning I came across a map of the Arctic showing the extent of sea ice in September 1979, and its extent in September 2010. Thirty percent less in the latter year. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the period covered by my book, the average thickness of sea ice in the high Arctic measured about ten feet. It now averages about four feet, and the Northwest Passage is opening up every summer. Still, large numbers of people do not believe the scientists about global warming. They are watching the Arctic melt, but they're only scientists. What do they know?
Human intelligence has not evolved to keep pace with human technology. The plain fact of the matter? We are too stupid to deserve the earth.
I was sitting in the car in the King Kullen parking lot waiting for Lorraine, who was inside buying bananas and milk, and large flakes of snow were falling onto the window beside me. I have an interest in snow, dating from my work on my book The Man Who Ate His Boots, in which snow and ice figure prominently, and I remembered that the great British whaler and Arctic scientist William Scoresby had been the first to make detailed drawings of snow crystals and had revealed the great diversity in their structure. So I put on my reading glasses and looked closely at these particular snowflakes, which were very large and composed of any number of smaller snow crystals, not formed in the usual variations on star shapes but as spikes of ice, and as they started to melt they collapsed in on themselves in sudden implosions, as if melting were an instantaneous process. Where there had been ice there was now only a drop of water, running down the glass.
Spikes of ice. In the Arctic, when it's very cold, thirty or forty below, and clear outside, tiny spicules of ice will fall out of the air as if it were snowing. The cold freezes the moisture in the air and it falls as these spicules, and can gather on the snow underneath to a depth of an inch or more.
To amuse and amaze his sailors, Scoresby would take a piece of clear ice--only fresh water makes clear ice--and cut it into the shape of a lens, then use the lens to focus sunlight on something, a sailor's pipe, say, which he would proceed to light using only this lens, or he would start a wood fire, or make some other demonstration. He found that he could melt lead by this means. Then he would ask the men to touch the lens while he was using it to light up the world in this way, and, most amazing of all, the lens remained ice cold.
For a long time no one thought that ocean water, salt water, in other words, could freeze; what was found in the Arctic as sea ice was, it was believed, fresh water flowing off the land that had frozen and lay on top of the sea water underneath. Where there was no land to provide the fresh water, there could be no ice. These theories prevailed in the science of the day well beyond Scoresby's time; they were still being propounded as late as the 1880s. Scoresby, of course, knew otherwise; he had watched sea ice form to a depth of a foot even while the seas themselves were rough and stormy; he had dodged ice floes that were ten feet thick; he had melted sea ice and come up with salt water. But he was a whaler, a commerical fisherman, in other words, and not learned as the learned were learned, so his knowledge was discounted. In 1820 he published a book in two volumes on the Arctic that became the founding document of Arctic science, and one of the great scientific books of its time. It is now exceedingly scarce. But he was, as I say, a whaler. Who could give credence to a whaler?
Reading the NYTimes this morning I came across a map of the Arctic showing the extent of sea ice in September 1979, and its extent in September 2010. Thirty percent less in the latter year. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the period covered by my book, the average thickness of sea ice in the high Arctic measured about ten feet. It now averages about four feet, and the Northwest Passage is opening up every summer. Still, large numbers of people do not believe the scientists about global warming. They are watching the Arctic melt, but they're only scientists. What do they know?
Human intelligence has not evolved to keep pace with human technology. The plain fact of the matter? We are too stupid to deserve the earth.
Monday, January 24, 2011
OR WHAT'S A HEAVEN FOR?
January 24, 2011:
Last night I tried to watch Shangri-La on TCM and the picture froze a third of the way through. The dialogue continued with a hysterical young woman ordering the leader of the Himalayan monastery in the film out of her room. She has a disease that's going to kill her in a few months, he offers to help her heal, but she wants none of it. It's all a fraud, she says, by which I think she means that the offer of healing powers, plus the religious background that presumably goes with it, is nothing but false promises designed to make you feel better. She, clearly, has done with religion and its powers. As I remember, the movie went on to picture a perfect little utopian community filled with spiritual grace and calm, and the question for Ronald Colman, playing the lead, is, should I leave and go back to the world, or stay here and live for a couple of hundred years amidst these enlightened people? And I think he decides to go back, to fulfill his responsibilities as a British foreign minister. Anyway, I had to bail out. I wanted to watch things moving on the screen, so I found a nature show. Nature, red in tooth and claw. More like real life, no?
But the movie reminded me of a debate I had in high school with another student in our senior English class about the nature of heaven. He--he died young, by the way--believed that heaven, when you reached it, would be more of the same, things to do, activities to keep you busy, sort of like a good retirement home, I suppose, where they take you on trips to museums and historic houses and neat little historic villages like Sag Harbor, where Lorraine and I live, or maybe even to bowling alleys. My own view was more complicated. I had read enough in religion by that time to doubt that eternity could be at all like life lived in time, which is essentially what he was arguing for, a life lived in time, only an extremely long time. Eternity, I said, could not in fact resemble the life we were familiar with at all. I did not believe that human consciousness could endure an eternity of familiar activities, or an eternity of singing in choirs in praise of God, or any sort of eternity you could describe. Eternity, I said, was beyond the ability of human consciousness to comprehend or to experience. We literally cannot imagine it, and if we cannot imagine it we cannot live it. If something of us survives death, I said, what it would experience in heaven most probably was a moment of bliss, an explosion into bliss, in fact, that would dissolve us into some larger whole, a drop of rain in the ocean.
This is not an argument, of course, you can win or lose. Nobody knows the answers except the dead, and they're not talking. He was arguing for a heaven very much like Shangri-La, which, in the last scene I was able to watch, had really good fruit on the table all the time; and I was arguing that a heaven resembling a physical paradise, a palace of pleasure, represented a failure of imagination, and, ultimately, an unwillingness to face the fact of death and get beyond the limitations of being human: being embodied. And in the years since I've never seen an image or description of heaven I could believe in. Even the Sistine Chapel, for all of Michelangelo's muscular spirituality, failed to persuade me of anything except the glory of art and the mass mindedness of tourism. The truth is, embodiment is the source of all meaning. It is our fate to have evolved into a consciousness of our own deaths, and therefore to live and die with that fundamental question: what then? Is that the end? The best thing we can do, the noblest thing, is to face up to it and to develop what John Keats called "negative capability"--the ability not to have to know. To live, calmly, without any kind of certainty. Because certainty is the real killer. This is especially true of certainty in religion, but it's also true of certainty in anti-religion, i.e. in atheism. They both lead to dogmatism, and dogmatism leads again and again to cold murderous rage.
I take my father as a model. We went home, we being my first wife and I and our two children, for Christmas in 1974 and my father called me into the basement to show me something, some chairs he was working on--he recaned old chairs in his retirement--but really to tell me that this would be his last Christmas. He was very calm about it, matter-of-fact, and he didn't elaborate. I remember looking at him non-plussed, not knowing what to say. He then went on to tell me that his wife, my mother, was developing Alzheimer's, but she would be very sweet, he said. It all came to pass. He died a month later, my mother did develop Alzheimer's and eventually spent seven and a half years in a nursing home, slowly and painfully becoming less and less herself until she disappeared entirely from the frail body that just went on living, no ghost, any more, in that machine. So here were two models of how to die, and then my brother, dying of brain tumors, and all the friends who have died, my old buddy Carter Jones worst of all, in a way, dying in a plane crash just as he was achieving real success as a photographer; or maybe it was the three children who died in a fire. Friends of my kids. I will never forget telling my daughter, who was eight, that one of her best friends had died when their house burnt to the ground. You never forget any of these things. But it was my father, so calm, so matter-of-fact, facing his death, that stays with me best. He was not a religious man, never went to church, never took an interest in it. Clearly he had decided a long time before that it was not for him. So he had no supports in any kind of belief at his end; he was left with only himself, staring uncertainty in the face, and he didn't flinch. That's courage. If there actually is some sort of life after death, he's the one I would most like to say something to. To honor. But who knows if we get such a chance?
Speaking of Keats, he died in Rome, at 25, of tuberculosis, thinking he had failed as a poet, and he asked his friend Severn to have this epitaph engraved on his tomb, with nothing else, not even the words John Keats: "Here lies one whose name was writt in Water." The headstone with its epitaph, and Keats's name, stands in the Protestant cemetary in Rome, just outside the city walls, and it is impossible to keep flowers on it to this day because the devotees come and pick them, wanting a piece of him. When the Italian doctors did an autopsy after his death they discovered that something like 80 percent of his lungs had been eaten up by tuberculosis, which he contracted by nursing first his mother and then his brother, both of whom died of the disease. Knowing how to live is also knowing how to die, and the best of us do it without having a clue, either way, what is to come; and thereby they display what is the best in us as human beings, courage, always courage. And that may be the whole point of living. If you have enough courage, and have it at the right time, it no longer matters what heaven is, or what it might be for.
Last night I tried to watch Shangri-La on TCM and the picture froze a third of the way through. The dialogue continued with a hysterical young woman ordering the leader of the Himalayan monastery in the film out of her room. She has a disease that's going to kill her in a few months, he offers to help her heal, but she wants none of it. It's all a fraud, she says, by which I think she means that the offer of healing powers, plus the religious background that presumably goes with it, is nothing but false promises designed to make you feel better. She, clearly, has done with religion and its powers. As I remember, the movie went on to picture a perfect little utopian community filled with spiritual grace and calm, and the question for Ronald Colman, playing the lead, is, should I leave and go back to the world, or stay here and live for a couple of hundred years amidst these enlightened people? And I think he decides to go back, to fulfill his responsibilities as a British foreign minister. Anyway, I had to bail out. I wanted to watch things moving on the screen, so I found a nature show. Nature, red in tooth and claw. More like real life, no?
But the movie reminded me of a debate I had in high school with another student in our senior English class about the nature of heaven. He--he died young, by the way--believed that heaven, when you reached it, would be more of the same, things to do, activities to keep you busy, sort of like a good retirement home, I suppose, where they take you on trips to museums and historic houses and neat little historic villages like Sag Harbor, where Lorraine and I live, or maybe even to bowling alleys. My own view was more complicated. I had read enough in religion by that time to doubt that eternity could be at all like life lived in time, which is essentially what he was arguing for, a life lived in time, only an extremely long time. Eternity, I said, could not in fact resemble the life we were familiar with at all. I did not believe that human consciousness could endure an eternity of familiar activities, or an eternity of singing in choirs in praise of God, or any sort of eternity you could describe. Eternity, I said, was beyond the ability of human consciousness to comprehend or to experience. We literally cannot imagine it, and if we cannot imagine it we cannot live it. If something of us survives death, I said, what it would experience in heaven most probably was a moment of bliss, an explosion into bliss, in fact, that would dissolve us into some larger whole, a drop of rain in the ocean.
This is not an argument, of course, you can win or lose. Nobody knows the answers except the dead, and they're not talking. He was arguing for a heaven very much like Shangri-La, which, in the last scene I was able to watch, had really good fruit on the table all the time; and I was arguing that a heaven resembling a physical paradise, a palace of pleasure, represented a failure of imagination, and, ultimately, an unwillingness to face the fact of death and get beyond the limitations of being human: being embodied. And in the years since I've never seen an image or description of heaven I could believe in. Even the Sistine Chapel, for all of Michelangelo's muscular spirituality, failed to persuade me of anything except the glory of art and the mass mindedness of tourism. The truth is, embodiment is the source of all meaning. It is our fate to have evolved into a consciousness of our own deaths, and therefore to live and die with that fundamental question: what then? Is that the end? The best thing we can do, the noblest thing, is to face up to it and to develop what John Keats called "negative capability"--the ability not to have to know. To live, calmly, without any kind of certainty. Because certainty is the real killer. This is especially true of certainty in religion, but it's also true of certainty in anti-religion, i.e. in atheism. They both lead to dogmatism, and dogmatism leads again and again to cold murderous rage.
I take my father as a model. We went home, we being my first wife and I and our two children, for Christmas in 1974 and my father called me into the basement to show me something, some chairs he was working on--he recaned old chairs in his retirement--but really to tell me that this would be his last Christmas. He was very calm about it, matter-of-fact, and he didn't elaborate. I remember looking at him non-plussed, not knowing what to say. He then went on to tell me that his wife, my mother, was developing Alzheimer's, but she would be very sweet, he said. It all came to pass. He died a month later, my mother did develop Alzheimer's and eventually spent seven and a half years in a nursing home, slowly and painfully becoming less and less herself until she disappeared entirely from the frail body that just went on living, no ghost, any more, in that machine. So here were two models of how to die, and then my brother, dying of brain tumors, and all the friends who have died, my old buddy Carter Jones worst of all, in a way, dying in a plane crash just as he was achieving real success as a photographer; or maybe it was the three children who died in a fire. Friends of my kids. I will never forget telling my daughter, who was eight, that one of her best friends had died when their house burnt to the ground. You never forget any of these things. But it was my father, so calm, so matter-of-fact, facing his death, that stays with me best. He was not a religious man, never went to church, never took an interest in it. Clearly he had decided a long time before that it was not for him. So he had no supports in any kind of belief at his end; he was left with only himself, staring uncertainty in the face, and he didn't flinch. That's courage. If there actually is some sort of life after death, he's the one I would most like to say something to. To honor. But who knows if we get such a chance?
Speaking of Keats, he died in Rome, at 25, of tuberculosis, thinking he had failed as a poet, and he asked his friend Severn to have this epitaph engraved on his tomb, with nothing else, not even the words John Keats: "Here lies one whose name was writt in Water." The headstone with its epitaph, and Keats's name, stands in the Protestant cemetary in Rome, just outside the city walls, and it is impossible to keep flowers on it to this day because the devotees come and pick them, wanting a piece of him. When the Italian doctors did an autopsy after his death they discovered that something like 80 percent of his lungs had been eaten up by tuberculosis, which he contracted by nursing first his mother and then his brother, both of whom died of the disease. Knowing how to live is also knowing how to die, and the best of us do it without having a clue, either way, what is to come; and thereby they display what is the best in us as human beings, courage, always courage. And that may be the whole point of living. If you have enough courage, and have it at the right time, it no longer matters what heaven is, or what it might be for.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Marco Polo
January 6, 2010:
We are in the Pamirs, which lie at the western end of the Himalayas, north of the Karakoram range, and among their residents are the Keiaz tribe, who "live in caves on the highest peaks, subsist by hunting, keep no flocks, said to be anthropophagous (i.e., cannibalistic), but have handsome women; eat their flesh raw." So, at least, says a Mr. Gardiner, writing in the Journal of the Asian Society of Bengal for 1853. Among the other residents of the Pamirs are great sheep, the Ovis poli, whose curved horns run up to five feet long or longer, measured along the curve, and are so large in circumference at the base that it's said foxes use them as dens to raise their kits in. "Wood says that these horns supply shoes for the Khirgiz horses, and also a good substitute for stirrup-irons" as well. Who knew horns could be so useful? The French, it turns out. According to a Paris newspaper report dated November 24, 1894, French horse owners in Lyons regularly shod their horses with sheep horns (though not the horns of the large sheep of the Pamirs) because they didn't slip on the cobblestones. "Horses thus shod can be driven, it is said, at the most rapid pace over the worst pavement without slipping."
I am reading Marco Polo, there are two ways to do this, and I'm using both. The first is to take a modern edition and just plow through the book; in my case it's Marco Polo in the Everyman's Library edition, translated by Marsden, revised by Wright, and newly revised and edited by Peter Harris, with a short introduction by the great English travel writer Colin Thubron. It's a handsome edition, easy to hold, beautifully printed. But the notes are minimal, and nothing demands notes more than Marco Polo. Just the names alone are daunting. Cities have their old names and their new; towns the same; peoples likewise. The maps are inadequate and nobody demands maps more than Marco, with his complicated itinerary, his many years on the road. It's not a long book, you could read it in a couple of days; but you'd come away from it thinking, well, that was interesting, but how much of it is true? And what is one to make of the amazing tales?
So I'm also reading the Yule-Cordier edition, in two volumes, published by that indispensable company Dover Books, which took upon themselves the noble task of republishing in its entirety the extravagantly annotated Yule-Cordier edition of the nineteenth century, and it is from the above, in all its Victorian splendor, that the news above about the horned sheep of the Pamirs, and the Keiaz people, comes; and I have to tell you, I haven't had this much fun since I ran down Mt. Rainier. (Actually, I boot-skied down Mt. Rainier.) The books themselves are more or less the same: same text, in other words, with some slight variations; because the texts of Marco Polo exist in any number of manuscript versions from the 14th century, and there are definitely variations. But the notes: was anybody ever more indefatigable than Sir Henry Yule and Henri Cordier? One of the things that has fascinated me for a long time is the enormous Iron Gate that Alexander the Great is supposed to have constructed somewhere in the Caucasus Mountains to keep the giant Biblical wild men Gog and Magog, who may or may not have been associated with the ten lost tribes of Israel, locked up in their mountain fastnesses, so that they could not erupt into the civilized world. Marco Polo mentions this gate in his book and it is all the prompting Yule needs to take us to Derbend, where the remains of this fabled gate and its attendant wall run along ridge lines in the mountains for a distance of eighteen or twenty miles, and there are pictures even of the remains, and the town of Derbend, washed by the Caspian Sea, and reports from people who have been there. And there it is, the legends of Alexander's life mixed with Biblical legends about Gog and Magog, and travelers' tales, and it just takes your breath away. We live in an endlessly fascinating world; we emerge from an endlessly fascinating past. The Spanish conquistadors who conquered Mexico and Peru saw themselves as following in Alexander's footsteps, and what is the legend of El Dorado but an echo of the ants as big as foxes who dug gold out of the ground in India (which Polo mentions later in his book) and piled it beside their burrows? Because the Americas were the new Asia.
I read through the modern edition of Marco and then turn to the Yule-Cordier when I run into something I want to know more about. This is what it means to have a large library, and to dig into it. I acquired the Yule-Cordier years ago, and it has sat on my shelves unread for maybe twenty years. The Everyman's Library edition I've had for maybe eight years. Now I'm reading them both, and I don't want it to end. This is my gold, gold of the mind, and it is why I've wound up with 7,000 books.
We are in the Pamirs, which lie at the western end of the Himalayas, north of the Karakoram range, and among their residents are the Keiaz tribe, who "live in caves on the highest peaks, subsist by hunting, keep no flocks, said to be anthropophagous (i.e., cannibalistic), but have handsome women; eat their flesh raw." So, at least, says a Mr. Gardiner, writing in the Journal of the Asian Society of Bengal for 1853. Among the other residents of the Pamirs are great sheep, the Ovis poli, whose curved horns run up to five feet long or longer, measured along the curve, and are so large in circumference at the base that it's said foxes use them as dens to raise their kits in. "Wood says that these horns supply shoes for the Khirgiz horses, and also a good substitute for stirrup-irons" as well. Who knew horns could be so useful? The French, it turns out. According to a Paris newspaper report dated November 24, 1894, French horse owners in Lyons regularly shod their horses with sheep horns (though not the horns of the large sheep of the Pamirs) because they didn't slip on the cobblestones. "Horses thus shod can be driven, it is said, at the most rapid pace over the worst pavement without slipping."
I am reading Marco Polo, there are two ways to do this, and I'm using both. The first is to take a modern edition and just plow through the book; in my case it's Marco Polo in the Everyman's Library edition, translated by Marsden, revised by Wright, and newly revised and edited by Peter Harris, with a short introduction by the great English travel writer Colin Thubron. It's a handsome edition, easy to hold, beautifully printed. But the notes are minimal, and nothing demands notes more than Marco Polo. Just the names alone are daunting. Cities have their old names and their new; towns the same; peoples likewise. The maps are inadequate and nobody demands maps more than Marco, with his complicated itinerary, his many years on the road. It's not a long book, you could read it in a couple of days; but you'd come away from it thinking, well, that was interesting, but how much of it is true? And what is one to make of the amazing tales?
So I'm also reading the Yule-Cordier edition, in two volumes, published by that indispensable company Dover Books, which took upon themselves the noble task of republishing in its entirety the extravagantly annotated Yule-Cordier edition of the nineteenth century, and it is from the above, in all its Victorian splendor, that the news above about the horned sheep of the Pamirs, and the Keiaz people, comes; and I have to tell you, I haven't had this much fun since I ran down Mt. Rainier. (Actually, I boot-skied down Mt. Rainier.) The books themselves are more or less the same: same text, in other words, with some slight variations; because the texts of Marco Polo exist in any number of manuscript versions from the 14th century, and there are definitely variations. But the notes: was anybody ever more indefatigable than Sir Henry Yule and Henri Cordier? One of the things that has fascinated me for a long time is the enormous Iron Gate that Alexander the Great is supposed to have constructed somewhere in the Caucasus Mountains to keep the giant Biblical wild men Gog and Magog, who may or may not have been associated with the ten lost tribes of Israel, locked up in their mountain fastnesses, so that they could not erupt into the civilized world. Marco Polo mentions this gate in his book and it is all the prompting Yule needs to take us to Derbend, where the remains of this fabled gate and its attendant wall run along ridge lines in the mountains for a distance of eighteen or twenty miles, and there are pictures even of the remains, and the town of Derbend, washed by the Caspian Sea, and reports from people who have been there. And there it is, the legends of Alexander's life mixed with Biblical legends about Gog and Magog, and travelers' tales, and it just takes your breath away. We live in an endlessly fascinating world; we emerge from an endlessly fascinating past. The Spanish conquistadors who conquered Mexico and Peru saw themselves as following in Alexander's footsteps, and what is the legend of El Dorado but an echo of the ants as big as foxes who dug gold out of the ground in India (which Polo mentions later in his book) and piled it beside their burrows? Because the Americas were the new Asia.
I read through the modern edition of Marco and then turn to the Yule-Cordier when I run into something I want to know more about. This is what it means to have a large library, and to dig into it. I acquired the Yule-Cordier years ago, and it has sat on my shelves unread for maybe twenty years. The Everyman's Library edition I've had for maybe eight years. Now I'm reading them both, and I don't want it to end. This is my gold, gold of the mind, and it is why I've wound up with 7,000 books.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
MYTHOLOGIES
December 21, 2010:
Yes, 7,000 books. I haven't actually counted them; what I did was count the books on a few standard-length shelves, then count the shelves, then guess the numbers of books piled up on various floors, and finally guess the number in storage. Doing this is to be reminded of Henry David Thoreau's rueful remark to somebody, possibly Emerson, after his publisher sent him the two or three hundred copies of his book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers that had failed to sell (the bulk of the printing), that he now had a library of six hundred books, about half of which he had written himself. I have something similar, several cartons of books I edited for the National Geographic Society Press, but I don't count those as part of my library. I'm trying to find a place to give them away to, but can't imagine why anybody would want eight or nine copies of, say, Sven Hedin's My Life as an Explorer, fascinating as it is.
The other day I picked up a book that's been kicking around my library for many years, Roland Barthes's Mythologies. It, too, is a fascinating book, and I looked through it to see what I had made of it when I first read it, because it's full of my notes. I had bought it in the early 1970s from England--I once had an account at Blackwell's, the Oxford bookseller--because English books were a bit cheaper than American books, and the bookseller's catalogues were far more interesting, and also because I wanted to keep up with French thought, which was beginning to take over humanities studies in this country. I thought it might provide a method; at the time I was trying to figure out how to approach the American dream. I had a contract to write a book about the history of the American dream, and it seemed clear to me that the American dream was a myth, but it wasn't clear what kind, or how it worked in the culture. And I thought Barthes might provide a way to think about such things.
The book turned out not to be all that helpful; rereading the book, I find myself as puzzled now as I was then by Barthes's analyses. On the ways the public "reads" particular events, like a wrestling match, or particular things, like wine and milk, he's brilliant. Wine, for example, he calls a "resilient totem," which is an excellent phrase, and notes that it "supports a varied mythology which does not trouble about contradictions." For the common man, wine connects him to his Frenchness; everyone 'knows' that French wine is the best, and that only the French really understand wine. For the writer, however, it serves another function. "The local white wine or the beaujolais of the writer is meant to cut him off from the all too expected environment of cocktails and expensive drinks (the only ones which snobbishness leads one to offer him). Wine will deliver him from myths, will remove some of his intellectualism," will turn him into a man of the people, in short, connect him with the proletariat he longs to relate to, make him more virile, and so on. It's amusing and illuminating; we all know intellectuals who hang out in bars because that's where the "real people" are, the carpenters and plumbers who play darts and watch football and occasionally get into fights.
But when Barthes writes about the more abstract questions of how myths operate semiotically, it becomes much harder to follow his distinctions. Here my old notes express confusion and frustration, and as I read the section over again I am no clearer on what Barthes is trying to say.
Nevertheless I love this book. It is, for one thing, quite handsome. The dust jacket is a soft purple, darkened with age, and the back cover holds a full-page photo of Barthes himself, looking sideways at the camera, a cigarette in his right hand, which rests on an open book--what is a French intellectual without his cigarette?--and a small, dry smile on his face, itself handsome and somehow very French. The book has been moved many times, from residence to residence; it has been packed in boxes, rearranged on shelves, and it shows its wear, not only internally with my notes--my handwriting has hardly changed at all in the last thirty or forty years--but externally, with little scuff marks, a scratch or two, and the oil that has come off my skin and soaked into the paper of the jacket and lent it a certain patina. We talk about rooms looking lived in. Books can look lived in, too, and one of the pleasures of collecting rare books is precisely this lived-in look they acquire with age; it is the smell, the feel of them, and their aura. I once owned a book that belonged to Daniel Webster; it had his signature in it, on the front free endpaper (in rare book parlance that's FFE), very firmly, boldly written. It is fatal to grow attached to books, or to anything, and I have sold thousands of my books over the years, including the rarest, but their beauty simply as objects, quite apart from whatever knowledge or pleasure the reading of them reveals, continues to attract me. They are the other half of a relationship that is in some ways like a friendship. Whom shall I be talking with today? The difficult Barthes, or shall I once again follow the elderly American Lambert Strether as he walks the streets of Paris for the very first time and begins to understand that the life he has not had any opportunity to lead is the life he was meant for. That, of course, is Henry James, the book is The Ambassadors, I've read it twice and my copy of it, which is not distinguished in any way, is also something I love. Because the text is not just a text, available on an electronic device nobody could possibly love. It is a physical thing, paper, cardboard, cloth, glue, ink. It has a feel and a familiarity that makes it yours in a way no electronic gadget can supply.
The only thing I have from my parents' house, my house, besides a few pictures and the family photographs, is a small round table that holds books in a revolving case beneath the top. I asked my mother for it and she gave it to me on the spot. I remember my father after he retired reading the World Book Encyclopedia, which they had bought for my brother and me to help us with our schoolwork, volume by volume, cover to cover. Sometimes I wonder where it came from, the various intellectual passions, the insatiable curiosity. Was it indeed my father? Does it come from forebears at all? I don't know. I'm probably living out my own mythology, trying to be the hero of my own story, the last independent scholar. It certainly seems so. And so it may be: learning may not be the way to enlightenment. But it's the way I chose and I'm not going to change now. What's the Zen saying? Live as if you were going to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were going to live forever. Exactly. If I thought I were going to die tomorrow, what would I be doing now? I would be reading one of my books.
Yes, 7,000 books. I haven't actually counted them; what I did was count the books on a few standard-length shelves, then count the shelves, then guess the numbers of books piled up on various floors, and finally guess the number in storage. Doing this is to be reminded of Henry David Thoreau's rueful remark to somebody, possibly Emerson, after his publisher sent him the two or three hundred copies of his book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers that had failed to sell (the bulk of the printing), that he now had a library of six hundred books, about half of which he had written himself. I have something similar, several cartons of books I edited for the National Geographic Society Press, but I don't count those as part of my library. I'm trying to find a place to give them away to, but can't imagine why anybody would want eight or nine copies of, say, Sven Hedin's My Life as an Explorer, fascinating as it is.
The other day I picked up a book that's been kicking around my library for many years, Roland Barthes's Mythologies. It, too, is a fascinating book, and I looked through it to see what I had made of it when I first read it, because it's full of my notes. I had bought it in the early 1970s from England--I once had an account at Blackwell's, the Oxford bookseller--because English books were a bit cheaper than American books, and the bookseller's catalogues were far more interesting, and also because I wanted to keep up with French thought, which was beginning to take over humanities studies in this country. I thought it might provide a method; at the time I was trying to figure out how to approach the American dream. I had a contract to write a book about the history of the American dream, and it seemed clear to me that the American dream was a myth, but it wasn't clear what kind, or how it worked in the culture. And I thought Barthes might provide a way to think about such things.
The book turned out not to be all that helpful; rereading the book, I find myself as puzzled now as I was then by Barthes's analyses. On the ways the public "reads" particular events, like a wrestling match, or particular things, like wine and milk, he's brilliant. Wine, for example, he calls a "resilient totem," which is an excellent phrase, and notes that it "supports a varied mythology which does not trouble about contradictions." For the common man, wine connects him to his Frenchness; everyone 'knows' that French wine is the best, and that only the French really understand wine. For the writer, however, it serves another function. "The local white wine or the beaujolais of the writer is meant to cut him off from the all too expected environment of cocktails and expensive drinks (the only ones which snobbishness leads one to offer him). Wine will deliver him from myths, will remove some of his intellectualism," will turn him into a man of the people, in short, connect him with the proletariat he longs to relate to, make him more virile, and so on. It's amusing and illuminating; we all know intellectuals who hang out in bars because that's where the "real people" are, the carpenters and plumbers who play darts and watch football and occasionally get into fights.
But when Barthes writes about the more abstract questions of how myths operate semiotically, it becomes much harder to follow his distinctions. Here my old notes express confusion and frustration, and as I read the section over again I am no clearer on what Barthes is trying to say.
Nevertheless I love this book. It is, for one thing, quite handsome. The dust jacket is a soft purple, darkened with age, and the back cover holds a full-page photo of Barthes himself, looking sideways at the camera, a cigarette in his right hand, which rests on an open book--what is a French intellectual without his cigarette?--and a small, dry smile on his face, itself handsome and somehow very French. The book has been moved many times, from residence to residence; it has been packed in boxes, rearranged on shelves, and it shows its wear, not only internally with my notes--my handwriting has hardly changed at all in the last thirty or forty years--but externally, with little scuff marks, a scratch or two, and the oil that has come off my skin and soaked into the paper of the jacket and lent it a certain patina. We talk about rooms looking lived in. Books can look lived in, too, and one of the pleasures of collecting rare books is precisely this lived-in look they acquire with age; it is the smell, the feel of them, and their aura. I once owned a book that belonged to Daniel Webster; it had his signature in it, on the front free endpaper (in rare book parlance that's FFE), very firmly, boldly written. It is fatal to grow attached to books, or to anything, and I have sold thousands of my books over the years, including the rarest, but their beauty simply as objects, quite apart from whatever knowledge or pleasure the reading of them reveals, continues to attract me. They are the other half of a relationship that is in some ways like a friendship. Whom shall I be talking with today? The difficult Barthes, or shall I once again follow the elderly American Lambert Strether as he walks the streets of Paris for the very first time and begins to understand that the life he has not had any opportunity to lead is the life he was meant for. That, of course, is Henry James, the book is The Ambassadors, I've read it twice and my copy of it, which is not distinguished in any way, is also something I love. Because the text is not just a text, available on an electronic device nobody could possibly love. It is a physical thing, paper, cardboard, cloth, glue, ink. It has a feel and a familiarity that makes it yours in a way no electronic gadget can supply.
The only thing I have from my parents' house, my house, besides a few pictures and the family photographs, is a small round table that holds books in a revolving case beneath the top. I asked my mother for it and she gave it to me on the spot. I remember my father after he retired reading the World Book Encyclopedia, which they had bought for my brother and me to help us with our schoolwork, volume by volume, cover to cover. Sometimes I wonder where it came from, the various intellectual passions, the insatiable curiosity. Was it indeed my father? Does it come from forebears at all? I don't know. I'm probably living out my own mythology, trying to be the hero of my own story, the last independent scholar. It certainly seems so. And so it may be: learning may not be the way to enlightenment. But it's the way I chose and I'm not going to change now. What's the Zen saying? Live as if you were going to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were going to live forever. Exactly. If I thought I were going to die tomorrow, what would I be doing now? I would be reading one of my books.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
BOOKISHNESS
December 16, 2010
Our front porch is enclosed and semi-heated, although it faces northwest and nothing facing northwest, which is where Canadian cold fronts come from, is ever going to be really warm here except in summer; but it doesn't matter, we don't use it anyway even though I have a large desk there. I actually work upstairs. The large desk mostly holds the bills. And the room itself holds books. When people walk in through our front door they pass through this room, and it is not uncommon for them to say, I love this room, or words to that effect. They have a vision of themselves taking a year off and finding a nice chair someplace and burrowing through the books to their hearts' content, nothing to stop them from reading and reading, and reading some more.
I had lunch with my friend Ken Robbins today and he told me about somebody he knows, or knows of, whom he calls a "peripatetic reader." This is a person who reads while he walks, holding a book in front of his face as he ambles down the street or across the room; he reads, he says, up to 18 hours a day, and at the same time manages to navigate the world. Remarkable. As a result, says Ken, he's incredibly erudite. I also would sometimes like to be incredibly erudite, drop appropriate quotations into conversation, add facts to arguments that completely destroy one position or maybe its opposite, call in examples from Darwin or refer to Shroedinger's cat while discussing Keats: dazzle, in short. I've never been particularly dazzling. Not aggressive enough, too unsure of my ground. My trouble is that I never think I know enough. I have all these books, 7,000 of them, but I don't pretend to know all that much. Well, OK--sometimes I do pretend, but in fact I'm well aware of my limitations.
The truth is, it's not all that easy living with so many books. They sit on your shelves and stare at you, wanting your attention. You look at a book you decided to keep when it came in for review and you wonder, what happened to the great interest I once had in this subject? and you realize, the interest has faded. Or it's there, dormant, but you don't have time for it now. And it's not just the time reading takes. I sometimes pick a book off my shelf to read and find that I've already read it; the margins are pockmarked with my notes. Yet I have no memory of what's in the book, and I don't remember when I might have read it. Are the filing cabinets in my brain full? Can nothing more be jammed in there? And books do take so much time. In the midst of life, bedeviled by errands, meals, friendship, sleep, movies and TV, parties, gardening, and the endless task of straightening up the house, it might take months to read a really long book. It took months to read Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder, which I loved; but it was a really long book, I had to fit it in to my other work, and into my life, and it took months. Who has months? Sometimes I think I should have just one book, or a few. Three hundred years ago most people had a Bible, and not much else. Maybe a Book of Common Prayer, or an almanac. They would know those books extremely well, I imagine. Whereas I know a great many books, none of them well at all. If I had to confine myself to a hundred books out of my library, which ones would I choose? Probably they would all be classics, books that the experience of centuries of readers has certified as what lasts. But think of the difficulty of so drastically refurnishing one's mind! I might be too old to do it. The fox knows many things, as Tolstoy said, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Well, I'm a fox by nature. I can't be content to know just one thing well; I have to know a great many things, if only superficially.
I've had two significant dreams about books in my life. In one, I came upon a large tower of books, a four-sided bookcase three feet taller than myself, and all the books in it were bound in leather, they were eighteenth-century books, and they were mine. But they were ruinous. Water damage, fire, something had ruined them. In the second, a similar event: upstairs on the third floor of my dacha was my library, low bookshelves under the windows on all floor walls of the room. They were all in Russian. But the roof was open to the sky and the books were soggy, unreadable, papier mache. I have no idea whether these dreams about books have any significance. But they were deeply disturbing, and I have not forgotten them.
And at the back of my mind, Socrates, who professed to know nothing, and was always asking his pupils for instruction and then reasoning with them to show them that they, too, did not know what they thought they knew. That's one reason, perhaps, why history attracts me--at least it's over. It's not still happening. It's fixed. But of course it is still happening; history drives through us like, to mangle Dylan Thomas's line, the flower drives through its green fuse. We are the fruit of all the centuries before us, and what those centuries were, what they meant, is not revealed until we come along, and understand it at last. And, obviously, this is a continuous process. So, Socrates: there is no solid knowledge. We drift about on a sea of uncertainty, and for the most part this sea is far too deep for any anchor to find bottom. I could read all 7,000 books in the house and I would not be any closer to wisdom.
Well, maybe a little.
Our front porch is enclosed and semi-heated, although it faces northwest and nothing facing northwest, which is where Canadian cold fronts come from, is ever going to be really warm here except in summer; but it doesn't matter, we don't use it anyway even though I have a large desk there. I actually work upstairs. The large desk mostly holds the bills. And the room itself holds books. When people walk in through our front door they pass through this room, and it is not uncommon for them to say, I love this room, or words to that effect. They have a vision of themselves taking a year off and finding a nice chair someplace and burrowing through the books to their hearts' content, nothing to stop them from reading and reading, and reading some more.
I had lunch with my friend Ken Robbins today and he told me about somebody he knows, or knows of, whom he calls a "peripatetic reader." This is a person who reads while he walks, holding a book in front of his face as he ambles down the street or across the room; he reads, he says, up to 18 hours a day, and at the same time manages to navigate the world. Remarkable. As a result, says Ken, he's incredibly erudite. I also would sometimes like to be incredibly erudite, drop appropriate quotations into conversation, add facts to arguments that completely destroy one position or maybe its opposite, call in examples from Darwin or refer to Shroedinger's cat while discussing Keats: dazzle, in short. I've never been particularly dazzling. Not aggressive enough, too unsure of my ground. My trouble is that I never think I know enough. I have all these books, 7,000 of them, but I don't pretend to know all that much. Well, OK--sometimes I do pretend, but in fact I'm well aware of my limitations.
The truth is, it's not all that easy living with so many books. They sit on your shelves and stare at you, wanting your attention. You look at a book you decided to keep when it came in for review and you wonder, what happened to the great interest I once had in this subject? and you realize, the interest has faded. Or it's there, dormant, but you don't have time for it now. And it's not just the time reading takes. I sometimes pick a book off my shelf to read and find that I've already read it; the margins are pockmarked with my notes. Yet I have no memory of what's in the book, and I don't remember when I might have read it. Are the filing cabinets in my brain full? Can nothing more be jammed in there? And books do take so much time. In the midst of life, bedeviled by errands, meals, friendship, sleep, movies and TV, parties, gardening, and the endless task of straightening up the house, it might take months to read a really long book. It took months to read Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder, which I loved; but it was a really long book, I had to fit it in to my other work, and into my life, and it took months. Who has months? Sometimes I think I should have just one book, or a few. Three hundred years ago most people had a Bible, and not much else. Maybe a Book of Common Prayer, or an almanac. They would know those books extremely well, I imagine. Whereas I know a great many books, none of them well at all. If I had to confine myself to a hundred books out of my library, which ones would I choose? Probably they would all be classics, books that the experience of centuries of readers has certified as what lasts. But think of the difficulty of so drastically refurnishing one's mind! I might be too old to do it. The fox knows many things, as Tolstoy said, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Well, I'm a fox by nature. I can't be content to know just one thing well; I have to know a great many things, if only superficially.
I've had two significant dreams about books in my life. In one, I came upon a large tower of books, a four-sided bookcase three feet taller than myself, and all the books in it were bound in leather, they were eighteenth-century books, and they were mine. But they were ruinous. Water damage, fire, something had ruined them. In the second, a similar event: upstairs on the third floor of my dacha was my library, low bookshelves under the windows on all floor walls of the room. They were all in Russian. But the roof was open to the sky and the books were soggy, unreadable, papier mache. I have no idea whether these dreams about books have any significance. But they were deeply disturbing, and I have not forgotten them.
And at the back of my mind, Socrates, who professed to know nothing, and was always asking his pupils for instruction and then reasoning with them to show them that they, too, did not know what they thought they knew. That's one reason, perhaps, why history attracts me--at least it's over. It's not still happening. It's fixed. But of course it is still happening; history drives through us like, to mangle Dylan Thomas's line, the flower drives through its green fuse. We are the fruit of all the centuries before us, and what those centuries were, what they meant, is not revealed until we come along, and understand it at last. And, obviously, this is a continuous process. So, Socrates: there is no solid knowledge. We drift about on a sea of uncertainty, and for the most part this sea is far too deep for any anchor to find bottom. I could read all 7,000 books in the house and I would not be any closer to wisdom.
Well, maybe a little.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
THIRTY OR FORTY YEARS, AND A DAY
December 7, 2010:
I woke up at five-thirty this morning from a dream in which somebody was pounding on the door, or the floor, and could not go back to sleep. Yesterday's blog entry--that poem--I knew something was wrong. You always know something is wrong. I can't tell you how many versions of it I've been through, lengthening the list, shortening it, trying to find out what it needed. It needed something. Even when I had posted it yesterday I kept going back to it, changing a word, two words, but focusing on the last line. It was the last line that really bothered me. It was weak, didn't quite convey what I wanted, which was that sense at night when you hear the trains in the distance, as I used to do when I was a child, and you can't sleep, that sense of distance, of things passing away and passing you by, of loss and loneliness; and all that was congruent with the mood of the poem and I thought it was just a matter of finding the right combination that suggested that. But it didn't feel right. It felt clumsy and obvious.
So here I am, fresh from my own sleeplessness, after struggling with this and trying to doze off and failing, with the newest version. I can't promise that I'm done with it, but this one is better, I think, and it tells us more about this person and how much he's holding inside; and maybe it even says something about pain. I don't know. You tell me.
THE INVENTORY
Sunlight folded into the window curtains.
The five doors out of the house, the seventeen inside.
A cherry side table we both wanted once.
Your translation of Proust, and mine.
The wall clock in the kitchen, still ticking.
The wedding photograph in its Tiffany frame.
Lamplight and solitude in the long evening.
Train whistles screaming through the night.
Let me add that my mother had an old cherry side table, and my brother took it into his house when she died. It was a beautiful table. The doors into the house are now "out of the house," the connotation being that the house is, in a sense, a trap; and why five? I once lived in a big old house that had five such doors, during my first marriage. It also had more than sixty windows. Poems are made of these bits and pieces, personal and impersonal. We've all seen wedding photos in Tiffany frames, but I've never owned one. Wall clocks always work, don't they, and go on working, and time always passes.
But I say too much. I like this version better, and it's now after eight, and I can forget about this poem for a while. Until I see something in it, at any rate, that shouldn't be there, or something else that should. I'll let you know if that happens.
I woke up at five-thirty this morning from a dream in which somebody was pounding on the door, or the floor, and could not go back to sleep. Yesterday's blog entry--that poem--I knew something was wrong. You always know something is wrong. I can't tell you how many versions of it I've been through, lengthening the list, shortening it, trying to find out what it needed. It needed something. Even when I had posted it yesterday I kept going back to it, changing a word, two words, but focusing on the last line. It was the last line that really bothered me. It was weak, didn't quite convey what I wanted, which was that sense at night when you hear the trains in the distance, as I used to do when I was a child, and you can't sleep, that sense of distance, of things passing away and passing you by, of loss and loneliness; and all that was congruent with the mood of the poem and I thought it was just a matter of finding the right combination that suggested that. But it didn't feel right. It felt clumsy and obvious.
So here I am, fresh from my own sleeplessness, after struggling with this and trying to doze off and failing, with the newest version. I can't promise that I'm done with it, but this one is better, I think, and it tells us more about this person and how much he's holding inside; and maybe it even says something about pain. I don't know. You tell me.
THE INVENTORY
Sunlight folded into the window curtains.
The five doors out of the house, the seventeen inside.
A cherry side table we both wanted once.
Your translation of Proust, and mine.
The wall clock in the kitchen, still ticking.
The wedding photograph in its Tiffany frame.
Lamplight and solitude in the long evening.
Train whistles screaming through the night.
Let me add that my mother had an old cherry side table, and my brother took it into his house when she died. It was a beautiful table. The doors into the house are now "out of the house," the connotation being that the house is, in a sense, a trap; and why five? I once lived in a big old house that had five such doors, during my first marriage. It also had more than sixty windows. Poems are made of these bits and pieces, personal and impersonal. We've all seen wedding photos in Tiffany frames, but I've never owned one. Wall clocks always work, don't they, and go on working, and time always passes.
But I say too much. I like this version better, and it's now after eight, and I can forget about this poem for a while. Until I see something in it, at any rate, that shouldn't be there, or something else that should. I'll let you know if that happens.
Monday, December 6, 2010
HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO WRITE A POEM?
December 6, 2010:
I sent four of my poems to TLS (the Times Literary Supplement) on Saturday. I wrote them all many years ago, when I still had ambitions to be a published poet. At the time I had no reason to think I couldn't be a published poet; TLS had taken a poem of mine at that time, and shortly after several other publications took poems. The late Ian Hamilton was the poetry editor of TLS then, my college friend Michael Fried was Hamilton's friend and living in England as a Rhodes Scholar, he recommended the poem to Hamilton, and voila! there I was, in print. TLS was the first publication to pay me for something I had written; ultimately a check came for $7.63, or something close to that--three pounds in English money. The poem ran right above a review of one of Norman Mailer's books.
But in the end I was not moved to pursue poetry as a career path. I had always wanted to be a writer, but not necessarily a poet; I wrote poems mostly because I had no time to do anything else. I was working full-time, I was married, I had children, I commuted back and forth to the city, and the work I was doing involved writing. Under those circumstances, writing anything more ambitious than a poem was more or less out of the question. So that's what I did, write poems, working in the little spare time I had, and learning in the process how to bring a piece of writing to an end. In lyric poems, the end is everything; if you can do endings you have taken a very big step in learning how to write.
Poetry as a career path, however, was something else. Just about nobody makes a living at it. In those days, and even more so today, to survive as a poet you either had to teach, like almost every poet then and now who didn't have an independent income, or you had to have another job. Wallace Stevens, insurance lawyer. William Carlos Williams, doctor. John Ashbery, art critic and editor at Art News. I disliked teaching and wasn't very good at it, so that was out. I could have gone on with poetry after the peculiar writing job I had came to an end--I was a wealthy businessman's personal historian; when he died, so did the job; but he left me and his other personal employees seven years salary, tax-free, as a parting gift--since I then had a bit of money. But the money wasn't going to last all that long, and then what? Another job? Try teaching again? No thanks. It wasn't only the lack of an income, it was a certain amount of distaste for what a poetry career involved, especially the nasty competitiveness that was part of it, too many ambitious people striving for too few rewards. I wasn't that ambitious. I knew I was good, but I didn't think I could be great. I still wrote poems from time to time, but getting them into print no longer seemed that important. I wrote them for myself, for my own pleasure, and as a form of verbal play. When a line came to me, I pursued it. Many of them emerged from pain. Poetry is one of the great clarifiers when it comes to pain.
Ultimately I wound up with about twenty, maybe twenty-five unpublished poems that I liked well enough to keep in my files, and in the past couple of years I've been looking at them again and fiddling with them. And it's interesting: the original feelings that led to these poems have softened, if not entirely dissolved, and I can see their faults much more clearly. With that has come the insight necessary to find ways to make those faults go away. They are now much better poems than they were originally. Michael Fried and Thomas Carnicelli, who was our official "class poet" and I, all of us trying to write poems at the time, used to talk in college about the poem as a made object, a verbal artifact, and we all knew that what we were writing didn't have much to do with what bad poets think of as "self-expression." We were trying to make art. Our feelings had little to do with it, they were merely the occasion, the spark that kindled the process of making. And that process is fascinating, both to pursue and to watch oneself pursue. It's a little like doing a crossword puzzle, but much more intense and much more difficult, and you find yourself wondering every time, can you do it? Can you find the right word, the turn of phrase, the gut punch at the end that doubles your reader over with its power? And because I have no attachment to publication, though that would be nice, or to a career as a poet, the whole thing has a purity about it that I really like. So I'm back to it.
How long does it take, then, to write a poem? Sometimes thirty or forty years. I remember reading Rilke on this, in his Letters to a Young Poet, where he talks about the poem working its way into your blood; not until then, he said, should you write. Or Alexander Pope, who advised the wannabes who sent him poems to read to put them in a drawer and lock that drawer and not open it for a year or two. I speak from experience; it's good advice.
I have no idea whether TLS will take these poems, and it doesn't matter. I'd like to see them in print, but I'll be happy to have written them even if they never see the light of day. They're good, I know that, and I'm satisfied with them, and I'll send copies to my friends who read poetry, or write it, and let it go at that. Or maybe to the handful of people who follow this blog.
Here's one of those poems:
THE INVENTORY
Sunlight folded into the window curtains.
The five doors into the house, the seventeen inside.
A cherry table we both wanted once.
Your translation of Proust, and mine.
The wall clock in the kitchen, still ticking.
The wedding photograph in its Tiffany frame.
Lamplight and solitude in the long evening.
Train whistles at night, with their associations.
I sent four of my poems to TLS (the Times Literary Supplement) on Saturday. I wrote them all many years ago, when I still had ambitions to be a published poet. At the time I had no reason to think I couldn't be a published poet; TLS had taken a poem of mine at that time, and shortly after several other publications took poems. The late Ian Hamilton was the poetry editor of TLS then, my college friend Michael Fried was Hamilton's friend and living in England as a Rhodes Scholar, he recommended the poem to Hamilton, and voila! there I was, in print. TLS was the first publication to pay me for something I had written; ultimately a check came for $7.63, or something close to that--three pounds in English money. The poem ran right above a review of one of Norman Mailer's books.
But in the end I was not moved to pursue poetry as a career path. I had always wanted to be a writer, but not necessarily a poet; I wrote poems mostly because I had no time to do anything else. I was working full-time, I was married, I had children, I commuted back and forth to the city, and the work I was doing involved writing. Under those circumstances, writing anything more ambitious than a poem was more or less out of the question. So that's what I did, write poems, working in the little spare time I had, and learning in the process how to bring a piece of writing to an end. In lyric poems, the end is everything; if you can do endings you have taken a very big step in learning how to write.
Poetry as a career path, however, was something else. Just about nobody makes a living at it. In those days, and even more so today, to survive as a poet you either had to teach, like almost every poet then and now who didn't have an independent income, or you had to have another job. Wallace Stevens, insurance lawyer. William Carlos Williams, doctor. John Ashbery, art critic and editor at Art News. I disliked teaching and wasn't very good at it, so that was out. I could have gone on with poetry after the peculiar writing job I had came to an end--I was a wealthy businessman's personal historian; when he died, so did the job; but he left me and his other personal employees seven years salary, tax-free, as a parting gift--since I then had a bit of money. But the money wasn't going to last all that long, and then what? Another job? Try teaching again? No thanks. It wasn't only the lack of an income, it was a certain amount of distaste for what a poetry career involved, especially the nasty competitiveness that was part of it, too many ambitious people striving for too few rewards. I wasn't that ambitious. I knew I was good, but I didn't think I could be great. I still wrote poems from time to time, but getting them into print no longer seemed that important. I wrote them for myself, for my own pleasure, and as a form of verbal play. When a line came to me, I pursued it. Many of them emerged from pain. Poetry is one of the great clarifiers when it comes to pain.
Ultimately I wound up with about twenty, maybe twenty-five unpublished poems that I liked well enough to keep in my files, and in the past couple of years I've been looking at them again and fiddling with them. And it's interesting: the original feelings that led to these poems have softened, if not entirely dissolved, and I can see their faults much more clearly. With that has come the insight necessary to find ways to make those faults go away. They are now much better poems than they were originally. Michael Fried and Thomas Carnicelli, who was our official "class poet" and I, all of us trying to write poems at the time, used to talk in college about the poem as a made object, a verbal artifact, and we all knew that what we were writing didn't have much to do with what bad poets think of as "self-expression." We were trying to make art. Our feelings had little to do with it, they were merely the occasion, the spark that kindled the process of making. And that process is fascinating, both to pursue and to watch oneself pursue. It's a little like doing a crossword puzzle, but much more intense and much more difficult, and you find yourself wondering every time, can you do it? Can you find the right word, the turn of phrase, the gut punch at the end that doubles your reader over with its power? And because I have no attachment to publication, though that would be nice, or to a career as a poet, the whole thing has a purity about it that I really like. So I'm back to it.
How long does it take, then, to write a poem? Sometimes thirty or forty years. I remember reading Rilke on this, in his Letters to a Young Poet, where he talks about the poem working its way into your blood; not until then, he said, should you write. Or Alexander Pope, who advised the wannabes who sent him poems to read to put them in a drawer and lock that drawer and not open it for a year or two. I speak from experience; it's good advice.
I have no idea whether TLS will take these poems, and it doesn't matter. I'd like to see them in print, but I'll be happy to have written them even if they never see the light of day. They're good, I know that, and I'm satisfied with them, and I'll send copies to my friends who read poetry, or write it, and let it go at that. Or maybe to the handful of people who follow this blog.
Here's one of those poems:
THE INVENTORY
Sunlight folded into the window curtains.
The five doors into the house, the seventeen inside.
A cherry table we both wanted once.
Your translation of Proust, and mine.
The wall clock in the kitchen, still ticking.
The wedding photograph in its Tiffany frame.
Lamplight and solitude in the long evening.
Train whistles at night, with their associations.
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