Incorporeal Works

…and I don’t feel so good myself

Jumping in the Wayback Machine, in 1966, faced with angst and aimlessness, I thought of Rabbit Angstrom’s midnight ride through the darkness of personal anime, deep through the empty night, fleeing his life’s challenges. I drove one late afternoon towards Fall Creek Falls, a park some two hours’ drive north from Chattanooga. I was feeling trapped, as was Rabbit.

I turned back, as did Rabbit.  Back into life.

Today, John Updike ends his journey. Selah. The words of a craftsman have illuminated my life for me.

Thank you, Mr. Updike.

Addendum: I found the following published in The Guardian:

Perfection wasted
John Updike

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market -
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That’s it; no one;
imitators and descendants aren’t the same.

John Updike’s Collected Poems 1953-1993, published by Penguin

The timeliness of this poem has been noted by legions of bloggers. I like it, too.

So now we come to a beginning…and a continuation, both of the Presidency and of a hard-won chapter in the book of race and U.S. politics. Forty-three Presidents stand in a long line looking over Barack Hussein Obama’s shoulder, as the new President looks into the not yet recorded future.

As he said in his address this noon, President Obama’s father, sixty years ago, could not have eaten in most restaurants in the very city that is the seat of government over which the son now serves as chief executive. So another beginning is marked, which is really just another way station on the long journey towards the full redemption of the spirit as well as the letter of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

The challenges facing this country will need extraordinary efforts on the part of many in and out of government, with the President most in the forefront.

Let us, indeed, keep hope our watchword.

Rain is in the offing, again. Tonight the waning moon rose after eight, blood red shading to gold then silver as it cleared the horizon and attendant air pollution. The Nerdlinger Weather Supposition folks have opined that today will be partly cloudy, with showers in the afternoon possibly changing to snow showers, and again by Wednesday morning. Snow forecasts in Chattanooga and environs are the least dependable of any predictions, any time.

The season is slowly turning towards Spring, each day a little longer. I will enjoy winter while it lasts, and watch for the first buds, the first flowers. Back to the River walk early today. I haven’t walked there for several weeks, other than the bit downtown. I will go to the marshy areas bounded by industrial sites, watching for birds around the pond at Amnicola.

After yet another soggy and mild week plus a day or so, cold air has pushed into Chattanooga again, clearing the skies over a swollen river and closed streets from the mid-winter freshets we have recently dodged amongst. Of the seasons I love, winter has a special place, at least winter as I remember it. Arguments about global warming aside, the past thirty years have been warmer than the thirty years before. The snows and ice of my childhood have been little in evidence lately.

Tonight I walked Lucy the Wonder Dog under a freshly clear sky, scoured by a cold front of the clouds and rain of the past week or so. A fattening moon hung overhad, its nearly full light dimming the nearby stars. The air was cold and clear, moisture condensed out and pollution pushed southeastwards. Lights of the city vied with the moon, and I was reminded of my childhood rides in the car across town to my grandparents for visits in the winter, when the grimy smokestack Chattanooga of my childhood glittered with many lights.

Stars, now, they stop me in the night, as Lucy tugs at her leash, while I try to pick out Orion, the Big Dipper and zig-zag Casseiopea, the three constellations I can generally spot. Light pollution makes few stars visible in Chattanooga’s sky, especially when the moon is nearly full, as it is tonight.

Many years ago, I went on a ride deep into the rural depths of Albemarle County, Virginia, with dormitory mates of mine. One of them had borrowed his uncle’s car, and took us out on winding dark roads to his uncle’s farm, where the old, historic house was being renovated. Albemarle County was very historic, so much so that you couldn’t throw a rock without violating a National Register property. It was about this time of year, and bitter cold, much colder than tonight. The mud and gravel drive into the farm was frozen into iron ruts, flanked by crusts of earth with the moisture extruded into blunt, square stalagmites of ice. Inside the house, a few space heaters ineffectually fought the cold. We looked longingly at a bottle of Jack Daniels on a table, but A. R. would not permit raiding his uncle’s liquor.

So we filed out to the car, under more stars than I had ever seen before. It was the dark of the moon, and civilization’s lights were far distant. The density of the stars prevented me from recognizing the few constellations I knew. My friends had to call me with increasing impatience before I got into the car. That night remains in my memory in vivid detail. I love winter.

We have met the words, and we are them. Apologies to Pogo and Walt Kelley, but the sense of Pogo wisdom applies in many ways to my life. We are both shapers and shaped, by everything we see and know. Language extends the reach of both. We are such stuff as words are made on, and our little life is rounded with a speech. And such speeches we may draw upon to exalt our days, and resonate in our experience. “Words are made on,” my play on Shakespeare, in Prospero’s speech defining imaginary worlds spun of words, from The Tempest:

Our Reuels now are ended: These our actors,
(As I foretold you) were all Spirits, and
Are melted into Ayre, into thin Ayre,
And like the baselesse fabricke of this vision
The Clowd-capt Towres, the gorgeous Pallaces,
The solemne Temples, the great Globe it selfe,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolue,
And like this insubstantiall Pageant faded
Leaue not a racke behinde: we are such stuffe
As dreames are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleepe

So words, when a Shakespeare wields them, can conjure up characters and scenes that never were, and make us believe them for that little time. In an incremental process, the way we think is shaped by each such experience - which by itself is justification for reading and literature - and we begin to find congruences between our lives and the words we read. Words and passages we have read pop into our internal pages, triggered by all sorts of allusive links.

At my stage of life, so much is behind me, but still I yearn for new experiences and hope for something yet worth an effort. I often remember another poet’s words, in the persona of an aging man of great consequence in our world, though he was crafted entirely of words; in Tennyson’s poem Ulysses, the aging king of Ithaca said:

The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

A friend of mine, long departed, once said in mock admiration of some drunken oration of mine, “You certainly have a way with words,” to which I answered, “No, Billy, words have had their way with me.”

And for that I am truly thankful.

Today is the Feast of the Epiphany, marking the twelfth day of Christmas, and traditionally the arrival of the Magi to view the new King of the Jews. I will later today serve as lector for the noon service at St. Paul’s in Chattanooga, and depending on the preferences of the officiating priest, may read the great words of Isaiah:

Arise, shine; for your light has come,
and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you.
For darkness shall cover the earth,
and thick darkness the peoples;
but the LORD will arise upon you,
and his glory will appear over you.

A day of illumination. Light both seasonal and internal, of the spirit.

Not coincidentally, I suspect, the featured poem on Garrison Keillor’s NPR show, The Writer’s Almanac for today is “What to do the first morning the sun comes back” by Roseann Lloyd. A greeting for the sun now rising earlier each day, since just before Christmas. The poet concludes:

It will be a short day.
Sit in the kitchen as long as you can, reading and writing.
At sundown, rub a smidgen of butter
on the western windowsill
to ask the sun:
Come back again tomorrow.

A fitting contemporary epiphany, Lloyd’s poem is a good companion to Isaiah.

from Epithalamion by Edmund Spenser:

Let no lamenting cryes, nor dolefull teares,
Be heard all night within nor yet without:
Ne let false whispers breeding hidden feares,
Breake gentle sleepe with misconceiued dout.
Let no deluding dreames, nor dreadful sights
Make sudden sad affrights;
Ne let housefyres, nor lightnings helpelesse harmes,
Ne led the Pouke, nor other euill sprights,
Ne let mischiuous witches with theyr charmes,
Ne let hob Goblins, names whose sence we see not,
Fray vs with things that be not.
Let not the shriech Oule, nor the Storke be heard:
Nor the night Rauen that still deadly yels,
Nor damned ghosts cald vp with mighty spels,
Nor griefly vultures make vs once affeard:
Ne let th’unpleasant Quyre of Frogs still croking
Make vs to wish theyr choking.
Let none of these theyr drery accents sing;
Ne let the woods them answer, nor theyr eccho ring.

Marriage is an honourable estate, as the Book of Common Prayer says during the marriage rite. I have been married, and I have been divorced. Failing at marriage does not mean that you harbor bad feelings for it. Quite the contrary, both the best and worst of the human condition take place within marriage. I can say of marriage what Samuel Johnson said of London, that hating marriage is the same as hating life.

For years I have loved Spenser’s Epithalamion, especially the above lines, wherein the man invokes protection for his beloved’s sleep. The hours in the early morning, two or close to it, can be full of dread, and ‘deluding dreams.’ To gently shake a beloved out of such dreams, quieting her restless movements and sharp groans, and comfort her, is a pleasure and a wonder.

“Ne led the Pouke, nor other euill sprights…Fray us with things that be not.” Indeed not, my beloved.

I have a copy of a genealogy compiled by various hands at the prompting of my great-grandfather in the early years of the century just past. Mostly, there are lists of family members of my own patronymic line, as well as of maternal and collateral families. A few stories that had been handed down are sprinkled through the text, but all my forbearers were small farmers, forever on the move west, like so many of their countrymen, and they had little leisure for writing things down, and even less inclination, faced with a daily struggle to establish homesteads in hostile new soil.

Continue reading ‘The Millers of Millersburg’ »

From Aaron McCollough’s blog, I Endure. Here he is quoting from John Keats regarding poetry, used in Aaron’s poetry class discussion back in September

…at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason…

…the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth—Examine King Lear & you will find this exemplified throughout…

In short, Keats presents “Mysteries, doubts” as worth examining for themselves, shaped by poetic art to elicit complex reactions from the reader, without reference to orderly classification by logical strictures. It is this that gives all art its power.

Citing King Lear as an example makes me say, YES! I have always thought that play achieved its overpowering majesty by the language itself, the imagery and pace and complexity, all bent to tell a story without any redeeming moral or quiet little insight. As Kent sums up, in the final accounting of dead daughters, betrayed fathers and sons, “All’s cheerless, dark and deadly.” Except that if the actors are equal to the material, the audience does not feel that way.

That is poetry. Glory from despair and destruction, art’s alchemy.

Yesterday, on a local college station, I heard the full version of Woody Guthrie’s great pæan to our country, “This Land is Your Land.” I had never heard the last two verses of the song. The final verse seemed very timely on the first day of a year so uncertain, a time so unsettled:

In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office - I see my people
And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’
If this land’s still made for you and me.

An economic crisis decades in the making faces a people used to primacy in all things.  We were the example of a great country to those lesser breeds without the American spirit, at least, the spirit of the United States of America. A sense of primacy fueled, for my generation, by the shadow of the Great Depression, the formative experience for my parents and grandparents. Following the end of World War II, the U.S. was the last major industrial power left intact, and prospered accordingly. Since 1960 or thereabouts, the growth of other economies in the world has changed the equation, with signs that change was eroding our economic power, which would not be so unchallenged in the late twentieth century and beyond.

The present difficulties world wide are partly the fallout from that shift, partly a result of terrible miscalculations on the part of nearly every executive or board involved in our own economy. We now face what appears to be at least a Great Recession, if not full depression and deflation of currency as in the 1930’s. Retail sales, stock and bond prices, every measure of economic distress is depressing the whole country. We doubt our own assessment of national identity.

But the great principles which the rebel gentlemen of 1776 so forcefully declared are still our chief claim to greatness. Economic cycles cannot of themselves undermine life, liberty and the pursuit (not right thereto) of happiness. Life and liberty have to be guarded, and our happiness must be individually pursued, but the principles are sound. Everything else is subject to our collective ingenuity, our will. Those have not failed, ever, may have bent, may have seemed weakened, but have proved resilient enough to survive wars both foreign and civil, uncivil unrest, crime and duplicity on the part of some of our leaders.

Change and hope have been the watchwords of our incoming president. We must all hope to follow sound leadership to achieve and to prevail. This land still belongs to you and me; do not doubt it.