"Change," and other motives

I have been toying with an impression that one could be relevant with-out, necessarily, being topical. Circumstances, it now seems to me, are not a bar to this ambition, so much as the intrusive omnipresence is, of the day’s leading personality. This represents a measurement of the scale of the latter as greater, possibly not to our surprise, than that of the most unnerving neutral scourge to engulf the planet in the present generation; and this would be true if he hadn’t undertaken, with his genius for precaution and infamous antic exuberance, to inflate the horror of it all past humane imagining. 

Children, raised in the most distant continents, studying the seizure of their parents and siblings by protracted asphyxiating torment and implacable extinguishment, must now mature in the understanding that what crippling he willed upon the vital organs of international epidemiological co-operation, had left his signature on these more proximate formations of their consciousness. A mind, we used to say in charitable moments, is a terrible thing to waste, only to discover now that the waste of a terrible mind lives after it. In short, laboring under the oppression of the rudest topicality, we must inquire again, Es muss sein?

Yet I couldn’t claim the agency of my own reflection as giving form to these effects, without the help and support of two of our least impeachable chronic-lers these days, Haberman and Martin of The New York Times, who published today this fascinating reduction as their lead:

President Trump’s erratic handling of the coronavirus outbreak, the worsening economy and a cascade of ominous public and private polling have Republicans increasingly nervous that they are at risk of losing the presidency and the Senate if Mr. Trump does not put the nation on a radically improved course.

And you were suspecting, dear Reader, that a reference to remote continents were a reach too far? Well, then you are exactly the reader to see this Pulitzer-provenanced projection for what it is: a preposterous hypothetical. It isn’t necessary to be an Isaac Newton to recall that inertia on a certain scale does not turn on a dime.

The stunning silliness of the condition laid down in this writing only exposes, once again, how confident so many have become in the habitation of unreality, or rather, the shiny-object dominion. Republican officekeepers don’t clamor for a radically improved course. They want a defter twirl of the topics. The passivity to which they’ve succumbed has never been more eloquently pealed. At the same time, the exalted powers presumed by our correspondents, for the constant puller of their focus, can be a lesson to us all in what to read. 

I’ve been wondering if Miss Anne really could have harbored a conjugal intention toward Wentworth through all those missing years, without her captivity in Austen's fiction, and why Fielding's Sophie Western exhibited such indifference to the escapades of Tom Jones, unless her education in Paris had been comparably varied, or reconciled to exploiting his. 

Even now, though, I marvel that our media could be so helplessly fully abducted, as to leave us having to accost each other for the preservation of relevance. And who better, to cultivate the taste for what we must hear?

ii   Robert Mapplethorpe, USS Coral Sea, 1983

iii  Arnold Newman, Igor Stravinsky, 1946

iv   Bill Emrich, unidentified models, 1991

NB  The final link refers to a column published
        several hours after this posting, and was
        inserted as compatible, the next day, with
        no change in the original posting.

Saturday commute clxxix: No rush

The idea that Pasternak knew these 

lines, and had perhaps carried 

them around in his head for twenty-

five years, really thrilled me,

more than any review I've ever read.

I think the parrotlike way in which

people say there is no 'communica-

tion' nowadays is rubbish really;

communication is having the faith

that if you do your utmost someone

somewhere does and will understand

this and sometime somewhere you 

will know it.

Stephen Spender

1959

Matthew Spender

A House in St John's Wood

  In search of my parents

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

2015©

The name one has

             So that I could mark it, the continuance of

             quality could in some way be that, the time
             of accord. For us, as beneath the falling water
                      we draw breath,
                      look at the sky.
             Talking to the man hitching a lift back
             from the hospital, I was incautious in sympathy:
             will she be back soon I was wishing to
             encourage his will to suppose. I can hardly
             expect her back he said and the water
             fell again, there was this sheet, as the time
                      lag yawned, and quality
                      became the name you have,
             like some anthem to the absent forces of nature.
             Ethnic loyalty, breathe as you like we in fact
             draw it out differently, our breath is gas
             in the mind. That awful image of choking.

The present American government has
challenged the latent ecumenicism in
every honest and inquiring heart, to
recoil into denial of both qualities.
At this, it is said to have succeed-
ed; but how hollowly, how transitor-
ily does that intimidating edict a-
chieve our hearing, given the dial-
ect of the voices which give this
verdict. It is not of the languages
of our continent -- French, Swahili,
Sioux, Spanish, Dutch, German, Gael-
ic, Italian -- but of our illiterate
merchants of obliteration as revenge.

We do not risk choking on the breath
of our descent, but on its aliena-
tion from others who would comprise 
ourselves.

J.H. Prynne
The White Stones
  Concerning Quality, Again
  first verse
New York Review Books, 2016©

Carlo Scarpa
  Olivetti
  Venice

Ivan Terestchenko
  Beach fire

A box of captain's biscuits, nearly full

"Rat," he moaned, "how about your supper, you poor, cold, hungry, weary animal? I've nothing to give you - nothing - not a crumb!"

"What a fellow you are for giving in!" said the Rat reproachfully. "Why, only just now I saw a sardine-opener on the kitchen dresser, quite distinctly; and everybody knows that means there are sardines about somewhere in the neighbourhood. Rouse yourself! Pull yourself together, and come with me and forage."

They went and foraged accordingly, hunting through every cupboard and turning out every drawer. The result was not so very depressing after all, though of course it might have been better; a tin of sardines - a box of captain's biscuits, nearly full - and a German sausage encased in silver paper.

"There's a banquet for you!" observed the rat, as he arranged the table. "I know some animals who would give their ears to be sitting down to supper with us tonight!"                             

  Look, what thy memory cannot contain

  Commit to these waste blanks, and

    thou shalt find

  Those children nursed, deliver'd

    from thy brain,

  To take a new acquaintance

    of thy mind.

  

John Julius Norwich

An English Christmas

  Kenneth Grahame

  The Wind in the Willows

  1908

John Murray, 2017©

Christmas Crackers

  Commonplace Selections

    William Shakespeare

    Sonnet 77

    1609

Allen Lane/Penguin, 1980©

Suppose Aeneas were American

How far our migrant always is from
setting up shop on destiny's shore.

In the meantime, there would be

a tiresome quality to his trials

if they were not flush with daz-

zling perpetuity, the indefatig-

able mechanism of surreptitious

poetry sending furtive messages

of being seen somewhere before.

      See to it that the Trojans

      Will never find their dwelling place and home

      In Italy. You know the ways to do it.

      You can make brother living in harmony

      With brother in concord turn on each other and bring

      Their house in hatred down around their heads.

      You know the way to bring the funeral torch.

      Your ways to hurt have a thousand different names.

      Your heart is full of possibilities.

      Shake them all loose at once. Do all of them.

      Tear peace to pieces. Sow the seeds of war.

      Make all the young men mad to take up arms.

Suppose Aeneas were American, and that a great last stand against him were invoked from the highest offices of trust, by resort to sowing permutations of confusion. We would see this, and tire of mentioning it, tire of thinking of it, every day an effluent of bombastic, vain alarms cranked from acrid tidal pools, demanding to be heeded. A shipwreck explained, as if it were contained in this day's drip.

I think it's more polite to recognize the familiar in what is irksome than to strive to copyright an anxious shot in the dank of expertise. We revisit Juno's speech to Allecto in Book Seven of Aeneas' story to see if anything's changed. 

Thomas Gainsborough
  Gainsborough Dupont
ca 1772

Virgil
The Aeneid
David Ferry
  translation
University of Chicago Press
2017©

La nuit américaine

Georges Delerue
La nuit américaine
  Grand Choral
1973





 

Saturday commute clxxiii: Image to epigram

The passage, with which we are
all familiar, of an image to 
an epigram is so ethically ex-
pensive that this must play a
large part in fatigue with the
President's endless proof of it.
Never seeing straight, one el-
ement of evidence, he frames a
whole world from fancies of the
timid wretch extracting his re-
venge by the propagation of myth.

              Europa of Athens can be had for a drachma

                    with nothing to fear, no resistance,

                         clean sheets,

              a fire in winter. So, my friend Zeus,

                    you had no business turning yourself

                         into a bull.

Antipater of Thessaloniki
11 BC - 15 AD
  Edmund Keeley
  translation
Peter Constantine, Rachel Hadas,
  Edmund Keeley and Karen van Dyck
  editors
The Greek Poets
  Homer to the Present
op. cit.

Saturday commute clxxi: Remembered sentences ii

I seldom mean anything, by
the poetic interlineations
here, but to celebrate the
virility with which phenom-
enally basic passages from
a scholastic past find il-
lumination, eventually ex-
perienced. And I'm content
especially, as forgiveness
arises by this provenance.

     The bewildering, intricate maze - 
     Never got through until Daedalus, out of pity
     For infatuated Ariadne, 
     Guided a prince's blind footsteps
     With a payout of thread, past every wrong turn
     And every dead end he himself had devised
     And constructed.

                      In which grand design
     You too would figure significantly,
     Icarus, had sorrow allowed it. Twice
     Daedalus tried to model your fall in gold, twice
     His hands, the hands of a father, failed him.












Virgil
Aeneid
  Book VI
  40 - 52
Seamus Heaney
  translation
Faber & Faber, 2016©

Of heroes on their weekend

  Having a Coke with you

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, 
  Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia
  in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better
  happier St Sebastian


partly because of my love for you, partly because of your
  love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around
  the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on
  before people and statuary

it is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be
  anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when
  right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting
  back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through
  its spectacles . .

        

Frank O'Hara

Having a Coke

  with You

  [fragment]

1960

Donald Allen

  editor

The Collected Poems

  of Frank O'Hara

op. cit.

Saturday commute clxix: Looking in the morning

On my block there was somebody knew the truth, I think.
Or so I thought. Anyway somebody knew
That trying to tell the truth is looking for somebody.















David Ferry
Bewilderment
  New Poems and
  Translations
  One Two Three Four Five
  [fragment]
op. cit.

Da Vinci at 500

All that would be dignified to say,

of this minor update in the longev-

ity of an imperishable contribution

to humanity by Leonardo da Vinci, 

is that this portrait of an athlete

instantly recalls to every inhabit-

ant of the West (the present govern-

ment excused, for its absence), the

geometric exercise he made famous,

of the figure in the perfection of

a circle. If you or I had to foot-

note the foundation of understanding

a machine of siege warfare; the con-

ception every student of Jesus has,

of his final meeting with his dis-

ciples; the impression every sent-

ient person has, of the inscrutabil-

ity of a smile, we know it isn't so

simple as to cite him. It's that one

learns better every year, not so sor-

didly to measure his influence, as to

accept the vitality of his life. 

Steele Johnson

 x Junfu Han