Incorporeal Works

I have moved two of my web pages to a new location, links found below. I will not be updating these pages except at long intervals.

Word Press Blog

My new general topics blog.

Word Press Writings Blog

My new blog for my fiction and such.

…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.

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.

…of mine, entered here in the interests of Full Disclosure and Contrition. I was twelve when I committed the following literary crime (from the archives of the Mountain Breeze, a PTA publication):

The Sea

by Felix Miller (sixth grade)

Ah! The sea! It mystifies me!
There are strange things in the sea.

The whale, the shark, make it their home,
The octupus, the squid, in it roam

Man is awed by it, scholar wondering.
Mystyfied the sailor wandering.

Sometimes, stormy, sometimes clear,
in it the eternal death fear.

Storm lashed, wind whipped,
Bows of great ships in it dipped.

Sometimes angry, sometimes calm,
Ever watched by the shore palm.

Powerful, full of might,
In it the eternal fight.

Now, a critique by my 64 year-old self:

Rather a wooden insistence on rhymed couplets, combined with erratic metric discipline make Master Miller’s youthful effort painful to read, especially by his 64 year-old self. The influence of Mr. John Masefield and Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson (Sea Fever and Requiem, respectively) is felt. Unfortunately, the workmanlike literary skills of those worthies are absent. The pairing of phrases in many lines, as in:

Man is awed by it, scholar wondering

…

Sometimes, stormy, sometimes clear

…

Storm lashed, wind whipped

tend to induce a mild sea-sickness from the rocking sensation imparted. Some consideration should be granted, one supposes, to the youthful ineptness of the author at age barely twelve. Not a great deal of consideration, however.

It is a mark of the amusement of the PTA editors that all such efforts by schoolchildren remain completely unedited, including such fey misspellings as “mystyfied” and “octupus.”

The distance of years and a decent regard for youthful mistakes must bring this commentary to a close. Mister Miller has matured somewhat in 52 years, in some ways. Thank the merciful Lord for that.

Another July has rolled around, with heat, humidity and memories of summers past. I have written here of the sounds of summer, especially nights on the sleeping porch of my grandfather’s farm house, when the crescendo of cicadas around the house walled in my sisters and me, as we fell into sweaty sleep.

I was today reading the opening description by James Agee of another summer, this one in Knoxville in 1915. The passage describes the neighborhood in which he grew up, and the summer evenings after supper when fathers watered their lawns with garden hoses, while their wives and children sat on the front porches, trying to stay cool. The passage is the prologue or introduction to Agee’s posthumous novel, A Death in the Family, an autobiographical account of the death of his father. Left in disorganized form, the novel was shaped into its present form by Agee’s editor. The description of summer 1915 in Knoxville was placed as a prologue because it seemed to fit nowhere else. Reading it, I realized that summer nights in the south were never more minutely or eloquently described before or since.

The sound of the cicadas (Agee calls them “locusts”) I will quote here:

The noise of the locust is dry, and it seems not to be rasped or vibrated but urged from him as if through a small orifice by a breath that can never give out. Also, there is never one locust but an illusion of at least a thousand. The noise of each locust is pitched in some classic locust range out of which none of them varies more than two full tones: and yet you seem to hear each locust discrete from all the rest, and there is a long, slow, pulse in their noise, like the scarcely defined arch of a long and high set bridge. They are all around in every tree, so that the noise seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at once, from the whole shell heaven, shivering in your flesh and teasing your eardrums, the boldest of all the sounds of night.

Wonderful. That completely describes a summer concert of cicadas. James Agee could write.

I don’t mean to infringe on William Safire’s excellent column in the NYT Sunday Magazine, but language is such a large and universal subject, maybe he won’t mind me borrowing his title.

Have you ever thought what life would be like for us without language? As King Lear says, “unaccommodated man is no more than . . .a poor, bare, forked animal . . . .” Language is, indeed, the ultimate accommodation, the intellectual shelter in which we huddle against the tempest.

Without language, we would be unable to describe our experiences and wisdom to our children, other than those few skills and lessons communicable by pantomime. No history, no songs, no record of past generations, all our experience would start with the first glimmerings of childhood consciousness, and end in the darkness of death. Mankind would be limited to perpetual hunting and gathering, with perhaps a few decorative arts. I wonder if the artists who captured the animals of the hunt in the caves of Lascaux and others in France and Spain had language? Or did their visual memory, perhaps fortified by earlier art, supply all they needed?

With language, we build our understanding of the world, both natural and man-made. With language, skills more complex than those of hunting, gathering and finding shelter can be passed on, and additions to that store of understanding can occur. Each generation does not start from scratch. The long slog from lives fierce, brutish and short depends on language.

And, given enough time and accretions of sporadic genius, language in the hands of Homer, the Beowulf bard, and poets from Chaucer to Shakespeare and beyond can lift human conception to worlds of thought and feeling the inarticulate early humans could never comprehend. Language, like other building blocks of thought and culture, is incremental, and never stops evolving and changing, until its speakers are all gone.

William Faulkner, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, said:

It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

Faulkner went on to say that man will do more than simply keep talking. Man has a soul, and will prevail. But language allowed us to know our souls, in ever-changing and broadening definitions. We are such stuff as words have made us, and our little life is rounded by our language.

On a local message board a poster referenced this site, which lists common “mispronunciations” of many words in English. A number of responses pointed out that many of the cited examples were regionalisms which gave local flavor to the larger language. Southerners will ‘probly’ continue to say ’stob’ for a fragment of a ticket. They are right, of course. What makes language is usage, by all speakers and writers of that language. Changes come and go, most of them, with the more robust and useful of them becoming part of the “standard” English. The author of the site, ‘Doctor Goodword’ (wonder if he drives a Chevy?) harps on standard pronunciation as an aid to clear writing. Thereby ignoring the development of all modern American literature from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

One of the more enjoyable and informative courses I took in any of my several iterations of college study was one at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, under Dr. John Tinkler. The learned professor managed that most difficult of tricks, being both a vivid and idiosyncratic character, florid and given to flights of language flirting with bombast, and a sound scholar with a passion for his subject.

The story of English for me is a tale of competing poles of thought; those who would be prescriptive in their treatment of our language, and those who prefer to be descriptive, charting its changes and discerning underlying currents bearing English from Anglo-Saxon to the global language of today.

As Dr. Tinkler repeatedly said, “Language is made by those who talk like folks.” Ah, you are right, John Tinkler. Any language that lives is constantly being re-made, expanded when necessary, and sometimes jettisoning archaic forms that no longer are part of active speech and writing. Like all growing things, some control is necessary, but more to note the direction and document the change than to confine language in a tweedy straitjacket.

Remember what Mark Twain cautioned at the beginning of Huck Finn:

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

THE AUTHOR

Let the language roll as it will, Doctor Goodword.

What I call the “NBA Effect” is the gut reaction to some feat so extraordinary your immediate reaction is, “How the hell did he do that?” Also works for women, by the way, “How the hell did she do that?” I might have called this reaction the “NFL” effect, or the “Olympic Effect,” to continue the sports analogies, but the reaction is accessible in many things we see or read or hear done every day. Music and art have these moments-the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven and most of Vermeer’s paintings do it for me. But this morning I was posting a poem by Emily Dickinson, one of my favorites, and I got to thinking about the NBA Effect so many great writers evoke in me.

Continue reading ‘The “NBA Effect” in Literature’ »

In my youth and now in the slow arc of my sinking years I have found poetry the spare and compact voice with which I would have liked to speak. You don’t always have to understand exactly what meaning and allusions are packed into each line to value a poem.

Dylan Thomas does that for me, convinces my ear of truth that my mind cannot parse or analyze. Here are two lines that set me back on my mental feet years ago:

And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

Images tumbling like a discordant but congruent brook across the page. Weather. Wind. Time. Sound of a clock. Heaven. The wheeling circuit of constellations. And the poet stricken dumb to explain his lines.

In a book I bought once, of Thomas’s letters, there was an artful photograph, I think shot by a fashion photographer, of Dylan Thomas standing in a graveyard rendered in high-contrast black and white, the ground carpeted with leaves and the winter trees black against the sky. Surrounded by tombstones tilting in the old earth, Thomas is standing, foreshortened by the camera, apparently in a depression, perhaps, the association is inescapable, in a new-dug grave, draped in a volumnious tweed overcoat, staring with slightly protruding eyes at the camera.

The caption for the photograph are the two lines quoted above.

Gives me a little hackle-raising chill at the back of my neck even now. I can parse the photograph better than I can the lines.

Most of Dylan Thomas’s poems are like that, resistant as smoke to analysis. He came by that ephemeral skill in accordance with a long tradition, evoking for me the great lines in Macbeth, equally inexplicable in their effect on me:

. his Vertues
Will pleade like Angels, Trumpet-tongu’d against
The deepe damnation of his taking off:
And Pitty, like a naked New-borne-Babe,
Striding the blast, or Heauens Cherubin, hors’d
Vpon the sightlesse Curriors of the Ayre,
Shall blow the horrid deed in euery eye,
That teares shall drowne the winde.

The sound and crowding images of those lines make me shiver in the same way that the lines from The “Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower” do. In the case of the lines from Macbeth, you have the awful foreshadowing of the events to follow. Thomas’s poem foreshadows only itself.

I must read more poetry before the long dark comes.

On October 3, 1900, Thomas Clayton Wolfe was born in Asheville, NC. In a brief life of not quite 38 years, he wrote a million words or so about the struggle of an artist to make sense of his existence in a world profoundly antithetical to the idea of art with a capital “A.”

At the age of twenty, I was greatly moved by Wolfe’s agonized examination of his own existence. I read about his life, which had provided the material for his fiction. Much has been made of the close correspondence of Wolfe’s fiction with the facts of his life. In Look Homeward, Angel, even the names of some of his family were used without modification.

At some level, all fiction is autobiography. With Wolfe, even the names and details of their lives were used.

The work is the justification of this usage.