5072. The Good Enough Beginning
The heavy and the weary weight
of all this unintelligible world
Is lighten’d.
Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”
It only needs to be lightened a little (enough to start a sentence or figure out a fear), and the next thing you know, even on a bad day, a frozen, foggy day, you’ve lessened your load enough to be on your way.
Note: “Affections gently lead us on” (“Tintern Abbey”).
5074. “A Hundred Million Billion Sonnets”
December 5, 2013, at 8:35am
“A HUNDRED MILLION BILLION SONNETS”
Raymond Queneau, OuLiPoetic
All I need is one.
Note: “child of yours” (Shakespeare, “Sonnet 17”).
5075. “He saw himself as a ludicrous figure”
He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for
his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist … the pitiable
fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror.
James Joyce, “The Dead”
Sometimes I see myself as a total fool and a total fake. I catch sight of myself in the midst of some caffeinated hyperbole—a programmed enthusiasm that a discerning viewer will quickly click past on the way to the higher channels—and I suddenly wish for a law against all kinds of mirrors. Sometimes my voice sounds so thin and eager that the only mercy I can imagine is a universal mute button.
In the midst of my wincing, though, I sometimes remember what a friend once observed when her infant son seemed drawn to me, as if I were a noisy and oversized mechanical toy: “Babies like Jeff. They like overacting.”
For people like me, I guess, acting and overacting are sometimes hard to tell apart. And people like me just have to hope that babies aren’t the only ones who can tell that.
Note:
a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?
(Browning, “Andrea del Sarto”)
Wonderstruck I sway, like a tree of tears.
James Merrill, “Investiture at Cecconi’s”
Struck, you remain rooted and ready to wonder, still. Stuck, you find yourself moving just the same. Sad as you seem, you still put out some shine.
After all, the perennials remain in one piece. Every sorrow has its seasons of light.
Note:
great-rooted blossomer …
body swayed …
brightening glance …
(Yeats, “Among School Children”)
5079. Rage Comes Home to Roost
the flash of recognition … as he whirled his stick upward
George Eliot, Middlemarch
The worst story, ever: some angry person from your past who knows everything bad about you finds out where you live now, and comes to destroy the peace that you’ve found since you got away from him. Wait, that’s not the worst story ever. The worst story ever ends with the flash of recognition that he never left your side (flesh of my flesh: Father, can’t you see I’m burning? – Genesis, Freud).
There’s a better story after that, though. It’s the one where you realize that you want to be on the side of sparing the rod (terrible swift sword!), not the side that rallies around it.
Note: “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Matthew 5:9).
5080. “if nobody can understand it?”
What’s the use of writing at all if nobody can understand it?
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Fair question. On the other hand, who would want to keep writing without at least a little mystery involved? It’s like the people you love. No matter how well you know them, you know there’s parts of them you’ll never really know. Sometimes, knowing you don’t know them shows how you love them.
Sometimes knowing you’re not knowing is the sign of what lasts.
Note:
December 11, 2013
Today I will give the last lecture in a course I teach on the nineteenth-century English novel. The lecture will take up Middlemarch one last time before everyone involved disperses to parts unknown.
And love’s the burning boy.
Elizabeth Bishop, “Casabianca”
He’ll be waiting for you, that burning boy, way out at sea. He’ll be waiting at least as long as it takes for you to find him. The deck he’s on and everything else about him is also burning. He’s been standing on that burning deck for a long time now, waiting for his father to relieve him of duty. (But his father’s dead, so he can’t.) You probably already know all this: the story’s been repeated a lot. When you reach him, you can hear him tell it yourself, if you want. (He stammers a lot: I hope you’ll be patient.) I think he’d like knowing that you want to hear him tell you the story he’s been practicing so long to tell, even though you’ve heard it all before.
Actually, I think he’ll love you for it.
Note: “faithful heart” (Felicia Dorothea Hemans, “Casabianca”)
[Emma] proposes to us the hope of victory in the
battle that the mind must wage, and it speaks
of the expectation of allies in the fight.
Lionel Trilling, introduction to the Riverside edition of Emma
No one can fight your battles for you, of course. (Your parents taught you that, or should have.) On the other hand, if you’ve got good friends around, some of those battles can feel less like going to war and more like learning to love.
Note: “so dear to her” (Austen, Emma).
5093. Part for the Whole
All the communions of a life-time are one communion.
Teilhard de Chardin
Remember all those moments of truth you’ve had with others—all those times that you managed to bypass all the interference and really connect with the people around you?
You can’t? Neither can I. Neither can anyone.
Sometimes you just have to count on the moments of closeness with others you do remember to stand for the ones that you don’t.
Somehow, you hope that they can.
Note: “proposing frankly … for those moments’ sake” (Pater, conclusion to The Renaissance).
An angel, speaking to a group of shepherds in a field.
Dickens, “A Christmas Tree”
A lot happens before and a lot happens after, but this has always been my favorite part of the story. Some migrant workers minding their own business somewhere out in the sticks suddenly hear from on high that a child’s been born in a nearby city and that this birth is a matter of considerable importance to them, even though, technically speaking, they’re not related.
Whatever special powers and promises may attach themselves to him, in one important way, he’s just like every other kid: his birth is everybody’s business.
Note:
Each with his gift according to his kind
Bringing this child his body and his mind.
(Auden, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio)
Elizabeth Bishop, “Filling Station”
Some days when you’re not feeling lovable, you just have to take that on faith. (You’ve felt loved before. You’ll feel loved again.)
It’s like planning a road trip. You can’t be absolutely sure that they’ll be always be a gas station when you need it, but you don’t let your uncertainty keep you at home.
All kinds of things have a funny way of turning up just in time.
Note: “able to approach the Future as a friend” (Auden for Freud).
5096. “real religious feeling”
Sometimes the Philosopher got so scared just sitting in his room that he didn’t know how he would ever get out. He told a friend that when things got really bad, the only cure he knew was “religious feelings.” The friend concurred:
I replied that I didn’t think that was crazy at all; that coming from Ireland I knew something of the power of religion. He seemed displeased with the answer as if I hadn’t understood him.
Wittgenstein: I’m not talking about superstition but about real religious feeling.
And then we walked on in silence for some time. (M. O’C. Drury, “Conversations with Wittgenstein”)
I think what the Philosopher meant by real religious feeling must have been what enters the room only after thoughts of power have left it. I guess it’s what shows up when you care less about being the kind of person with Keys to open all kinds of doors, and more about being the kind of person kind enough to open up your own.
Note: “anxious in the right way” (Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety).
5097. Seeing off People You Love
Tears of the widower, when he sees
A late-lost form
Tennyson, In Memoriam
December 28, 2013, at 7:36am
“I guess it’s just weddings and funerals from here on in,” my mother said a few years ago to someone she loves but doesn’t see much anymore—never, in fact, except at weddings and funerals.
Maybe the mixing of weddings and funerals runs in the family. Lately, the only way I have to hold anyone comes when I see that he’s basically already hit the road.
It takes all kinds of eyes to see the world.
Some of us can only have and hold the people we love when we see that they’re good, or good enough, to go.
Sometimes we like to see how going and staying can feel too close to tell apart.
Note: “two eyes make one in sight” (Robert Frost, “Two Tramps in Mud Time”).
How many in whose company I came into
the world are gone already!
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
And I know it’s just going to get worse and worse. (You should hear my mother on the subject.) Some of the ones who are gone (upstate now, or someplace further) were real beauties, by the way.
I miss them—though less so when I’m talking to the people I’ve met since the others left. Partly that’s because I’m talking about the ones who have left and partly it’s because I realize that I don’t always have to.
Note: “the risk of being cured” (Sartre on “The Talking Cure” in Being and Nothingness).
The incomplete or missing book is present in its fragments.
It is not therefore absurd to imagine that, instead of a
total book which would regroup all the combinations, it
would be possible to write one of such insufficiency that the
importance of what had been lost would shine forth from it.
Pierre Macherey, “Borges and the Fictive
Narrative,” A Theory of Literary Production
Good to know. Good to know when you wake up in the morning—“it was exhausting just to be asleep,” my best friend says—a little worse for being worn out by all those weird dreams about missing deadlines and documents. You have them, right? Can you send them my way if you’re done with them? I need to put them together. It’s the end of the year, and I have to start thinking about taxes. Wait, I just realized you can’t give me what I need, since I’m not really sure what I need. I’ll check back with you if I ever figure it out. (Don’t hold your breath.)
Good to see that shining (see citation above) when you open your eyes in the morning, ready for real tears as those imaginary gardens filled with people you love have already mostly disappeared.
Those people you love: you were never really with them, not in any way you could ever say for sure. It was more like being with a book you read when you were really young, all about how as soon as you figure out what you’re missing, you’re halfway home to finding it. (At least you’ve got some kind of blueprint, that book said, though it may look like so many cracks on the surface of an empty bowl.)
You lost that book years ago. (Now you have someone else’s copy.)
See? One way or another, coming or going (in circles, sometimes), what you’ve lost still finds a way to fill in your world.
Note: “Here something returns upon itself something coils around itself, and yet does not enclose itself, but frees itself in its very coils” (Heidegger, The Essence of Reason, qtd. by Macherey).
5100. “Now Voyager” (Whitman, H. Crane, C. Robinson)
Moby-Dick’s dark, violent and enigmatic theme …
Newton Arvin, Herman Melville
Well, it’s a good thing there are calmer mysteries than that particular dark-and-stormied dream.
There’s that voyage from madness to mildness, for example, where a Captain of Anger, for no reason, starts to speak softly to a terror-crazed boy.
Then there’s that Revelation (who knows from where?) that whatever it is you’re trying to catch doesn’t always have to be chased down to the bitter end.
Note: “lashings charmed and malice reconciled” (Hart Crane, “At Melville’s Tomb”).
