Saturday commute clxxxii: Nice start

After an interval of unexpected length, it is a pleasure for me to look now upon a fresh, unmarked page in this journal. I would be the first to join whatever chorus there may be, for leaving it that way, if the project were completed. 

However, we have just noticed that the United States has discharged the obligation of disposing of its sitting President, and good behavior is always to be encouraged within sight of the young. Compliments, then, to the people of the United States disdained by that figure, over the last four years of exercising his preference for the fragment he seduced and betrayed. By every count, from epidemiology to pluralist reconciliation to international comity to planetary stewardship to fiscal sanity, he had rendered the nation the first justifiably outcast pariah of the New World. How delightful, then, that on the very date when first permitted by their constraining founding document to right his institutionally unchecked hostilities, the country showed him the door.

I know, there are those morose who wail, that this remedy is not enough. They are wonderfully paid, glitteringly honored, and as obvious as yesterday's excesses. I see too many minor movies, not to have heard Rossano Brazzi declare to Katharine Hepburn for David Lean, "Eat the ravioli." Please, do not instruct us in the array of anomalies still disfiguring the feast. Rather, organize for the State of Georgia's double Senatorial runoff in early January, of which more, soon enough. For this weekend, come outside. 

Refresh acquaintance.

Photo courtesy, ubayuri©

Origins of Wednesday cviii: Static

  I wonder, if I could reclaim
  from moments of incurable i-
  dleness, my years of sorting
  out the front from the back,
  of a freshly laundered T, to
  say nothing of locating some
  seam to tell me whether it's
  inside, out: what would I do
  with all that time, to match
  the useful recurrence of be-
  ing lost for a few unhurried
  breaths, before slamming out
  the door on some inferior a-
  genda? Would I apply myself,
  once more, to the pursuit of
  some higher understanding or
  would I content myself to be
  free?

J.M.W. Turner
Venice with The Salute
ca 1840

Saturday commute clxxvii: Going once

                                           

I don't know what I may seem to
the world. But as to myself I
seem to have been only like a 
boy playing on the seashore and
diverting myself in now and then 
finding a smoother pebble or pret-
tier shell than ordinary, whilst 
the great ocean of truth lay all 
undiscovered before me.

                         Newton
















David Brewster
Memoirs of the Life,
  Writings and Discoveries
  of Sir Isaac Newton
Cambridge University, 1855©

Origins of Wednesday cvii: Motivated to meet

A new acquaintance is seldom undertaken

entirely on one's own terms. Those that

are, can still remain interesting, when

a liberality of collaboration is a term

of one's point of view. I have been en-

joying screwball comedies from the '30s

and '40s again, which acknowledge anar-

chy less as a structuring principle and

more as a consequence of its resistance.

I could have been reading Euripides in-

stead, whose Bacchae is really not fun-

ny, but which acknowledges this paradox

pretty vividly. But now I have lost the

certainty of reach which depends upon a

life with one's books in an established

if quaintly disorderly location, having

moved house in the last quarter of 2019.

This inflicts a loss of fluency in con-

nectedness among influences on the mind

which I wouldn't wish on anyone. I deny

that it is refreshing, because connect-

edness comes first, propinquity second,

except if anarchy encounters resistance.

This glimpse of things was brought home

to me early in the life of the blog, in

a learnèd mentor's stupefaction, that I

proposed to consider water for its link

between the cinema of Jean Vigo and the

movie, If.., by Lindsay Anderson, where

there isn't any. No, there is gymnastic

exercise, though, whose incidence marks

connectedness with mesmerising fluidity.

The screwball comedy exhibits instabil-

ity as the price of a compulsory order-

liness about as well as if dull reform,

itself, had kept my translations of the

Bacchae all in one place, instead of in

the general terrain of each translator.

A more desolate outlook for the mind is

no pleasure for me to imagine. Give one

the connectedness of dark with light, a

sense of procession without fences, but

of genial collaboration, such as we ex-

perience in Henry Miller's intuition to

travel to Greece by way of the Dordogne

to Marseille - a passage ordered freely

by expectancy, astonishment, and nature.

So I packed my valise and took the train for Rocamadour where I arrived early one morning about sun up, the moon still gleaming brightly. It was a stroke of genius on my part to make the tour of the Dordogne region before plunging into the bright and hoary world of Greece. Just to glimpse the black, mysterious river at Dômme from the beautiful bluff at the edge of the town is something to be grateful for all one's life. To me this river, this country, belong to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. It is not French, not Austrian, not European even: it is the country of enchantment which the poets have staked out . .

Henry Miller
The Colossus of Maroussi
New Directions, 1941©

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

So much eloquence, so little time

I've been interested in The Aeneid again lately, so I've been less attracted to the prospect of achieving moral satisfaction, offered by people who advocate the impeachment of the American President, when the commitments of translators of that poem fur-nish so much of that fleeting peace by their example. The rendering of that work into English is one of the great struggles the mind can undertake, and we have seen how the ordeal yields an appreciation of an impossibility revealed even in the original. Inevitably, to witness this dilemma's exposure is to undergo the seeming urgency of experiencing its consequence, a trust in the limits of the intellect against impassioned certitude.

Human beings appear to have no choice but to strive for beautiful, orderly explanations of the ugly things we do. These explanations may also represent a basic drive - and in one way a more painful one. We have chances to get land, livelihood, and security for the next generation, pretty much in the forms we imagined or even better, though the cost will be high. We cannot match in reality our vision of what we need to create from our minds. Virgil couldn't, and I certainly couldn't in my efforts to translate his glorious poem.

Anything like a zeal for an impeachment verges on a vain matching of this awe-somely fateful need to create, with reality. Who sees its consequence?

James McNeill Whistler

The Ocean Wave

1883-84

  Whistler in Watercolor

  On exhibition at the Freer

    through November 3

Virgil

The Aeneid

Sarah Ruden

  translator

  fragment from her

  essay of introduction

Yale University Press, 2008©

Šli and the family stone

The upper Adriatic is not the most

fertile setting for dreaming up a

tease for the American president,

but that's where the esteemed col-

umnist for The New York Times, by

way of the internet, found one at

an hour I will not mention. Still,

to read Gail Collins by the dawn's

early light would be such a tonic

for those who stay up in the dark

to cavort in her latest fantasy, I

feel others may follow one's lead.

Her latest foray into presidential

interaction is so promising in its

particulars, and flawless in expres-

sion, that I commend it without a

single excerpt to spoil a delicious

sequencing of inspired irritants. If

you are not too elderly to withstand

the occasional ribald allusion, the

whole tenor of the thing encourages

being read to the tides, high or low.

Gail Collins
How to torture Trump
  Who's less popular than
  Elton John?
The New York Times
August 14, 2019

Resistance is meant to be tiring

And then the littlest kids are 
expected to be taken care of by 
the older kids, but then some of 
the oldest children lose inter-
est in it, and little children 
get handed off to other children. 
And sometimes we hear about the 
littlest children being alone by 
themselves on the floor.

   Every now and again, who hasn't

   complained of the price of con-

   ditioning to govern oneself? In

   the matter of the present Amer-

   ican President, his own default

   state of lassitude is less in-

   fectious than it is contemptib-

   le, yet it sets an infamous ex-

   ample. I read Eugene Robinson,

   but tell me, how do you go on?

Isaac Chotiner

Inside a Texas Building ..

The New Yorker

22 June 2019

Eugene Robinson

This is the reality

  of Trump's America

The Washington Post

24 June 2019

Spoiling for a nice day

I listened to an interview on the ra-

dio yesterday, with an energetic per-

son in London, fulfilling her commit-

ment to the saving of the climate by

joining with many to block traffic.

This demonstration of the futility

of fossil fuels, interrupted as it 

was, filled her with intense grati-

fication, and nourished her resolve

to keep at it. It wasn't difficult

to empathize with this character of

punitive arrest, because the piling

of one's body upon others in a road

has about it the gay proficiency in

going nowhere, of the separation of

one's ass from a board on the water,

while its carbon footprint matches

the radiant inefficiency of fueling

a Beetle to get to the beach, when

one may tumble down stairs at home.

We all desire nice weather, and are

happy to exert ourselves to love it.

Many are making love

Many are making love. Up above, the angels
in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing
are braiding one another's hair, which is strawberry blond
and the texture of cold rivers. They glance
down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy -
it must look to them like featherless birds
splashing in the spring puddle of a bed . .

 I've been making my own
 truant discoveries in the
 poetry of Robert Hass.


 Well, I'm sorry to have
 taken so long, but I do
 report from time to time
 from David Ferry, so I'm 
 in no position to claim 
 I've not been looking out.

and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically
like lithographs of Victorian beggars
with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags . .

Robert Hass
The Privilege of Being
  [fragments]
The Apple Trees
  at Olema
  New and Selected 
  Poems
Harper Collins, 2010©

Saturday commute clxvi: Street sign in O'Hara

It's the month of May in my heart as the song
says and everything's perfect: a little too chilly
for April and the chestnut trees are refusing to bloom
as they should refuse if they don't want to, sky
clear and blue with a lot of side-paddle steamers
pushing through to Stockholm where the canals're true-blue

in my spacious quarters on the rue de l'Université
I give a cocktail in the bathroom, everyone gets wet
it's very beachy; and I clear my head staring at the sign
LOI DU 29 JUILLET 1881 **

                                                             

                         so capitalizing on a few memories 

from childhood by forgetting them, I'm happy as a finger

of Vermouth being poured over a slice of veal, it's

the new reality in the city of Balzac! praying to be let

into the cinema and become an influence, carried through

streets on the shoulders of Messrs Chabrol and Truffaut

towards Nice

             or do you think that the Golden Lion

would taste pleasanter (not with vermouth, lion!) ?

no, but San Francisco, maybe, and abalone

                                           there is

nothing in the world I wouldn't do foryouforyou (zip!)

and I go off to meet Mario and Marc at the Flore

**  Introduced by the anti-monarchist, 

anti-imperialist representative of

Montpellier in the Chamber of Deputies,

Eugène Lisbonne, a diligent opponent of

"the government of moral order," this Law 

established the sweepingly broad freedom 

of the press in France, embodying special

protection against loyalty oaths and oth-

er indignities against chestnut trees.

Frank O'Hara

Beer for Breakfast

  Paris, April, 1960

  Floating Bear, 1961

Donald Allen

  editor

The Collected Poems

  of Frank O'Hara

op. cit.