4170. “Good God, man, get on with your story!”
Uncle Arthur … never got through Moby-Dick, but how
savagely he fought with Melville throughout the first fifty
or a hundred pages! … I discovered … he had written in
the margin … “Good God, man, get on with your story!”
Brendan Gill on Uncle Arthur, Here at the New Yorker
Though I sympathize with Uncle Arthur (who, having endured even while enjoying Melville, could help but share some of his impatience?), I think most of us are getting on (and along) with our story as best we can. What would help, of course, would be a better idea of what’s going to happen in advance. Sure, there are plenty of clues (governing precedents, exigent circumstances, constitutional philosophies), but there’s no expediting the outcome of determinations (dim or defined; casual or concentrated). At least there’s no rushing the stories that do everything they can to make everyone think (themselves included) that, drowned or saved, they’ll go on forever … as long as they have a leg left to stand on, a bone still to heal, or the feeling that something’s been forgotten, somewhere below what you see.
The dice of drowned men’s bones … bequeath
An embassy (Hart Crane, “At Melville’s Tomb”).
“Sail on, sail on sailor” (The Beach Boys, “Sail on Sailor”).
4172. Postseason Sentiment
Only emotion endures.
Ezra Pound, “The Art of Poetry”
Most times, it seems more like the opposite: more like only emotion perishes, while most everything else stays put. But even the most dug-out feeling persists, and knows what to do when it gets its turn at bat.
Making up for lost time, it’ll knock you out of your park.
You can never tell with either
how it will go
or what you will do.
(Marianne Moore, “Baseball and Writing”)
4181. “The voice reaching us from a great distance must find a place in the text”
Different “heterologies” (sciences of the different) have the
common characteristic of attempting to write the voice. The voice
reaching us from a great distance must find a place in the text.
Michel de Certeau, “Quotation of Voices”
Voices of people I have loved, or have wished that I could, carry themselves from far away, and make themselves at home in the nearby neighborhood of the books I like to read, coming to nest in this or that favorite piece of poetry or prose.
At least I think it’s them. Maybe it’s just me. Or maybe it’s more like some harmony between us.
There was this girl I knew in college—I think it was college; maybe it was later; maybe before—I’m pretty sure I hear her (speaking or singing or crying) in most everything I care to read. On the other hand, I’m sentimental, and apt to exaggerate how much I recall of people that have meant a lot to me. Still, I’m pretty sure I hear her. She’s gotten older and younger, more and less fluid and fragmented, but I’m pretty sure she’s always there, her voice pressed into the words that matter to me most. It’s like a story a friend told me once about how his grandmother, in her last years, heard the sound of the birds she’d grown up with singing in her ears everywhere she went. He says that he still remembers hearing the thrill in her voice when she first said something about it to him.
That may sound like a miracle. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine how you’d forget hearing something like that.
Never again would birds’ song be the same.
And to do that to birds was why she came.
(Robert Frost, “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same”)
4182. Losing Voice to Regain It
She has an extremely soft, weak voice, as if she
were afraid of losing it if she forced it a little.
Mircea Eliade, Journal, November 6, 1962
I wonder if she was right about the weakness of her voice. She probably wouldn’t have lost it (not forever, anyway) if she had forced it a little, but what if she forced it a lot, and for a long time? I ask because sometimes when I’m feeling frayed or frustrated, and catch my voice sounding forced (fake), I suddenly fear that my whole being has been taken over by a Profane and foreign body that will rattle out false recordings across every distance, long and short, from here to eternity, thus casting the calls of Sincere and Sacred Sentiments into a limbo where they are forever waiting for their turn to be heard.
Later, after I give it a rest, it feels more real again. Wow, that was a close call, I think to myself.
Too close for comfort. Just close enough to wake me up so I can find some way to get some quiet and, after that, my true note.
Note: “… rest is silence” (Shakespeare, Hamlet).
“He’s off the hook for a while, quietly planning the Restoration of a Great Society—his silence ‘like Grant’s in Galena’” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night).
4183. “though now superseded in details”
On the general function of magic, a classic text, though
now superseded in details, is Bronislaw Malinowski,
Magic, Science and Religion (Boston, 1948). Malinowski
calls magic “the specific art for specific ends.” … “Magic is
surrounded by strict conditions: exact remembrance of a spell,
unimpeachable performance of a rite, unswerving adhesion
to the taboos and observances which shackle the magician.
If any of these is neglected, failure of magic follows.”
Angus Fletcher, “Allegorical Causation: Magic and Ritual
Forms,” Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, note 9
For about ten years, until about ten years ago, my running-mate and I would make the rounds most every weekend, on the lookout for a little magic we could call our own. Our preparations and our purposes were as routine as the coming of day (though they rather came at night, rather leaving with the coming of the day). Those wonder years have vanished for us now, replaced by new, more or less specific arts for new, more or less specific ends. I’ve been too busy accepting and articulating the mad methods of this latter-day magic to ask myself much whether I miss much the magic I’ve given up, and that’s given up on me.
(It could be that the question never much comes up, because the one art and aim of this second, silver age of magic is remembering and revising the golden, gone one.)
All of this is old news, I know—a really small footnote to a really Big Story, studded with chapters like the one about how old magic rituals for getting what we want are modernized (turned into more scientific, experimental methods, subject to correction, reflection, and refinement), and the one about how all the new knowledge is always about all the old losses.
Speaking of experiments, I’ve been wondering a little lately about the ones that will light the way to the next age of magic. I’m hoping that it will be a little less about method and a little more about mystery; a little less about loss, and a little more about love.
Note: “an undecaying hope in our trivial ambitions” (Yeats, “The Moods”).
4186. “the purpose of writing”
The first piece of advice is this: to achieve style, begin by
affecting none—that is, place yourself in the background. A
careful and honest writer does not need to worry about style.
As he becomes proficient in the use of language, his style will
emerge, because he himself will emerge, and when that happens
he will find it increasingly easy to break through the barriers
that separate him from other minds and hearts—which is of
course the purpose of writing, as well as its principal reward.
Strunk and White, The Elements of Style, 3rd ed.
I always know (always too late) when my words come too quickly and too loudly: too concerned about putting on a show to give other people in the room much of a chance to show a little themselves. What do I think I’m doing when I make this dumbfounding error, announced by the silence that succeeds my fast and furious words? I guess it’s partly that I am prone to fall under the mistaken impression that I’ve been put in charge of Society—I find it hard to divide myself into the executive me and me (Howard Moss to Elizabeth Bishop). And I guess it’s partly because I’m afraid that whoever’s really in charge of Society (running the show, behind the scenes) will kick me out on my ass if I’m not singing for my supper, stylin as fast as I can, smack dab at the center of stage or page.
But the best elements of style are free. Compounded in ourselves, together they form whatever interest we have in really speaking to one another.
Note: “the purest, most transparent, and most casually appealing kind of interaction, that among equals” (G. Simmel, “Sociability as the Autonomous Form of Sociation”).
4188. “their breathless disorder”
Their breathless disorder, their passionate
symbolism and their tone of prophetic preaching
… the appearance of a string of remarks.
Sartre on Bataille, “A New Mystic”
Lately, I’ve been trying to improve the way I write: I’ve been trying to calm it down a little. Given all that’s going on inside and outside where I live (maybe where you live, too), I’m not expecting miracles. I’ll settle for a disorder that’s a little less breathless; a prophetic tone a little less preachy. That’s about as far as I plan on going right now. The swollen symbolism stays. Same with the string-theory remarks, as long and short, entwined and disentangled, as the strains of a lifetime. Like I say, there’s too much going on, too much pressing down and pressing up for me to be trying Full On some Head-to-Toe, Plain Style. I’d be lying down on the job if I cut too much of the common-cloth chaos of duress and divinity that the work I try to do tries to distinguish, in some fashion. If I eliminated all the fast and fancy parts of speech, I’d lose too much of that. So I’m stuck with the rapid flashes (Bataille) that seeks to simulate what strikes at a speed that no clock can count; stuck writing the essay that tries with all its might to include everything in a few sentences; anguish, decision (Bataille).
Still though, even with all that’s been and being thrown at us—in a word, something happened to man (Sartre)—even given all the givens—too much grandeur in the human creature for us to understand him on the basis of his wretchedness, too much wretchedness for us to deduce his nature from his grandeur (Sartre)—still, there’s room for improvement (smoothing the temperature, while still feeling the tempest).
It’s like the New Year’s Resolution a friend made a few years ago: not to stop drinking, but to stop getting so messed up that she’d forget the morning after how she’d gotten home the night before.
Note: Letter to an Author:
Dear Mr. Levy:
Thank you for your letter about The Elements of Style. I am glad you find it a good guidebook.
I think that the expression “dress up” is a useful—certainly familiar—colloquialism. Little girls dress up when they go to a party, perhaps because their thoughts go upward. …
Sincerely,
E. B. White
Homer having made the Gods into men,
man learned to know himself.
M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus
And I guess the first thing he learned about himself was that he himself wasn’t actually much of a God.
But he can still be pretty good. Just think of how much we can care for one another, and how much we like to tell stories about how people who came before us cared for one another, too.
Sometimes, people have the strangest ways of showing that they care—strange as the ways of any God anyone’s ever told me about. Take my best friend. It seems like he’s never around when I think I need him most.
And he’s always right there when it turns out I really do.
Note: “The Odyssey is about a man who cared for his wife and wanted to rejoin her” (Robert Fitzgerald).
Conveyors change, but the care stays, just the same.
Dante: “I could guide you into depravity, but I’m
not sure I could lead either of us back out.”
Frank O’Hara
—though I’m pretty sure that together, with a little teamwork, we can make our way up and out of whatever the Hell they call the Darkness where we happen to be stuck now and then. Depravity, Depression—whatever: it’s too damn dark to make out the street name, and it wouldn’t help even if I could, since—well, just since. Let’s just leave it at that. For once, let’s just leave well enough alone. The important thing is that we have each other. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I’ve got it on the best authority that Salvation is supposed to be a Comedy, so I think we should just go with that.
You don’t mind driving, do you? I’ll navigate. Oh, wait. You navigate. (I can’t read maps, Google or otherwise, and GPS—please. Be real. It’s all I can do to figure out how to make the frickin windows go up and down—and where was I, btw., when the decision came down to make all windows electric? Why is that a good idea? What if the car goes over a bridge or something: wouldn’t it be a lot easier, in the unlikely event of a water landing in the River Styx or one of those other Swamps, to open one of those “Old School” windows you just roll the frick down? Power windows are for the weak, that’s what I say, and in a state of submergence, pretty much the last thing you need. Also, aren’t they a waste of energy and aren’t we supposed to be conserving or something, to keep the world from going to Hell in a Handbasket? I’m no Engineer, but it doesn’t take too much time in the E-Quad to figure out that much.
My head is frickin’ filled with all these excellent points, but no one with the keys to the kingdom pays much attention to what I say. I’m pretty much exiled from the corridors of power, when it comes to car and other driving designs. Bummer.)
Anyhoo, how about this: Instead of pretending that I can contribute anything practical, why don’t I just talk while you get us the Hell outta here? How about that? Does that work for you? I’ll just go on and on incessantly; we’ll call that whole audio portion a Poem, once we call it a Day (once, thanks to You, we see Daylight). Maybe it’ll relax you while you drive and do all the rest of the heavy lifting. It’s a perfect setup. In fact, it’s a match made in Heaven! By the way, another side note: why do my boys tell me that “guys” don’t use exclamation points? What’s up with that!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?!!??!
And speaking of up—
Note: E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle (And thence we issued forth to see again the stars) (Dante, Canto XXXIV, “Inferno,” The Divine Comedy, trans. C. S. Singleton).