Hart Crane is the subject of the following letters written by Jacob Moore to his Aunt Cindy.  The letters are part of a writing assignment I gave to my Modern Poetry students at BGSU. 

In addition to exploring Crane’s sexual identity and how it affected the man and his poems, Jacob also examines Crane’s “ability to break through the despair in life and progress beyond to ecstasy.” –TW

I asked Jacob to write his own bio.  Here is what he said:

It is so silly to write about oneself. You can ignore the false starts, but I figured I’d include them for humor, and for you to see what happens when I’m posed with the question, “Who are you?”  

Jacob Moore is the Self who Acts*.

Jacob Moore is the I AM I.

Jacob Moore is a sentence that ends with a period.

Jacob Moore is also Jacob Moore.

Jacob Moore is currently a senior at BGSU majoring in Creative Writing with a minor in English. He studies Rosicrucian and arcane philosophy, and is training to become a Kundalini yoga instructor. When not knee-deep in esoteric tomes, he focuses on social activism and bringing conscious awareness into everyday life. His penultimate goal is to distill the whole of esoteric cosmology into something actually comprehensible by the lay person, and also to become a librarian.

* That is to say, radiates outward

Letter I

Dear Aunt Cindy,

 I hope you’re doing well—you are receiving this letter because in our Modern Poetry class, instead of writing essays, we’re to write letters about a poet (chosen for us by our teacher), and send them to a friend or relative.

 The poet I was given is Hart Crane. He was a poet in the Modernist period, which peaked in the 1920’s. As I read more, I find that, even though the time didn’t have a real established gay culture, Crane was constantly struggling with his desires and the pain that comes from those unexpressed desires. I wonder if she chose this poet for me for this reason? He grew up with what some say was an extreme dissatisfaction with his life, which is understandable. Especially with the gay poets, there is an acute agony in the inability to fit within the normal sexual schema—one feels alienated and completely separate. Walt Whitman was the same way, and Garcia Lorca, and what this seems to do is help the poet reach a transcendent state. You should look up the poem “Royal Palm,” in which he takes a palm tree and compares it to his mother (he is known for such odd symbols—who else would compare a palm tree to his mother? It certainly doesn’t seem to be an appealing analogy), but the last stanza is extremely striking:

“Mortality—ascending emerald-bright
 A fountain at salute, a crown in view—
 Unshackled, casual of its azure height
 As though it soared suchwise though heaven too.”

The second line there, “a fountain at salute” is just so fresh, and the last two lines turn, changing it from just a tree to something that touches on immortality.

 This is the strength of poetry, certainly.

 Much Love,

 Jacob

Letter II

Dear Aunt Cindy,

So, for this letter we are instructed to write about the poet’s biography and a poem or two.
 

First, Hart Crane was born in 1899, in Garrettsville, Ohio, which is a place not too far from our home in Newton Falls—and his father was the one who invented Life Savers. All I can think of is how horrid it was to grow up in those small Ohio towns as a gay guy. After his parents separated, he left school at 17 and tried to work for a while, but found himself to be completely unsatisfied with his life, and then finally went to New York and met a man called Emil Opffer; this inspired him to write, but still the tragic seemed to be the glue uniting his life.

Along with these feelings (for men), one of the most difficult things is that of the want—the desire—to fit in, to be “normal” and just live. I still am frustrated with how—in the field of Love—things are stacked against me. It’s depressing and the one true thing that brings me down. But, through his poems, one can learn to break through the despair and actually be free. He sadly died when he was 32 from suicide. He jumped off a boat in the Caribbean Sea.

I’m reading a review in the Boston Review called “Grand Failure,” and I really think it touches deeply on his work. I really like one of the first things the author remarks on: “Crane didn’t know how to restrain himself (we find the same pattern in his drinking too).” This really reminds me of Theodore Roethke, another ecstatic poet who was possibly bipolar or manic depressive. Roethke also turned to drink.

And while I have never turned to drink to cope, what I do that hides me from that pain is lose myself in my dreams and phantasms and illusions. This reviewer portrays Crane mostly like a child, “one who begins a drawing and, showing his mother the beginning lines, is inspired by her praise to continue.” He would send unfinished poems to friends for advice. The reviewer praises him in “Praise for an Urn”

“Still, having in mind golden hair
I cannot see that broken brow
And miss the dry sound of bees
Stretching across a lucid space”

The reviewer revels in the use of the words “lucid” and “dry” and I agree, but then he goes on to say that the poem (a six part series) “Voyages” was too banal about mortality and too sentimental about Love. I disagree completely, especially when the fact is that this series was inspired by one of his gay lovers. The first section immediately reaches out and seizes me; the last stanza warns gay men against the “cruel bottom of the sea,” which might be interpreted as the harsh cruelty of Love or the heart.

 “O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,
  fondle your shells and sticks, bleached    <—- obviously sexual
  by time and the elements; but there is a line
  You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
  Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
  Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.        
  The bottom of the sea is cruel.”

I leave you with this, Much Love
                Jacob

Letter III
Dear Aunt Cindy,

In my previous letters, I more focused on the homosexual aspects of his poetry, but, after I read his biography again, something really stood out. Rather than using the homosexual context as a means to its own end, it rather was emphasizing another, stronger point in his poetry—that of the ability to break through the despair in life and progress beyond to ecstasy.

In class we have been discussing poets of ecstasy, like Whitman, Dickenson, and Roethke, and how they seem to take the binary of birth and death (or sex and death or love and death), and break it down, finding ecstasy behind it, rather than just a hopelessness that most people find. In his biography, Hart Crane states that he really writes poetry “as a counterstatement to The Wasteland,” a poem by T. S. Eliot. I feel that Crane, at the very least, wanted to give hope to everyone else. If he couldn’t make it (and he clearly didn’t), perhaps others could.

His poem “Black Tambourine,” focuses on a black man, dwelling in something he calls the “mid-kingdom.”  The man is compared to a beast, and Aesop (Aesop’s fables) is invoked in the poem, because the black man is forced into that space by his oppressors. The last stanza is most poignant

“The black man, forlorn in the cellar,
Wanders in some mid-kingdom, dark that lies,
Between his tambourine, stuck on the wall,
And in Africa, a carcass quick with flies.”                                                         

Not only do I feel that this is indeed about racism, and how racism puts people between a rock and a hard place, but also about his own experiences with homosexuality. The last line reflects the embroiled and raw sexual nature of homosexuality and the cellar, the degenerate place foisted upon him/them: something dirty and, almost in a way, hidden and secret. A literal reading is straightforward and clear, but if one takes the images as symbols, the meaning changes entirely. Even in the second stanza, when he brings forth Aesop, the tone changes, and with the inclusion of the word “Heaven,” a light seems to burst forth from the poem:  “Aesop, driven to pondering, found / Heaven with the tortoise and the hare; /Fox bush and sow ear top his grave /and mingling incantations on the air.”

There is hope; it shows us that it is entirely possible to escape this oppression:  to transcend it and become “incantations on the air.”  I hope he doesn’t mean the release that comes in death; this would not be an answer I would be satisfied with at all.   

And in part (section) III of Voyages, there is a stanza “and where death, if shed/ Presumes no carnage, but this single change,–/ Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn/ The silken skilled transmemberment of song;”

Here Crane seems to say that if we remove death, and death is an illusion, we can see what truly lies behind it, more life, wrapped tightly like a spool of thread. Also, as an aside, only Hart Crane could use the word “transmemberment” in a poem.

And with section III, as with most all of his other work, we can see him stepping beyond—Hart did Not like this world—at all. There is no reason, then, why his poems would dwell in this world. He went looking for the veil that led to the behind-of-things, and he found it and he stepped through*. I just got the image of his death into the Caribbean seen as his final parting of that veil rather than simply a suicide. It is a fitting death, either way.

* I feel like a mediaeval monk, inserting a point like this, but, even at the beginning of III, it reads, “Infinite consanguinity,” words again that clearly characterize Hart, but also describe a unity that is possible within all of us. That is where his poems lead me and I hope you find the same pleasure in them.

Much Love,

Jacob

This past Sunday was the birthday of Marianne Moore, a poet of some great stature in American letters. She was born in 1887, and she passed in 1972. In thinking on Marianne Moore, I of course went looking for a wine connection, in order to give myself an excuse to write a post on her. Unfortunately, she has seemingly contributed little to the poetry of wine — as far as I can tell, the only arguably relevant (and this is a stretch, believe me!) work would be a poem entitled “It Makes No Difference To Balbus Whether He Drinks Water Or Wine,” which actually doesn’t appear to be about wine at all, and in fact, in garishly modernistic fashion, it doesn’t even mention wine. It does, however, contain the following rather excellent line:

“…if you are not interested in art,
it is not necessary to say so…”

Amen!

Anyhow, in continuing to think on Ms. Moore, I eventually recalled a story which occurred during her four-year tenure as editor of the very influential literary publication The Dial. While there, she was approached by the poet Hart Crane with a poem entitled “The Wine Menagerie.” She famously (or perhaps infamously, depending on your feelings for Mr. Crane’s poetry) accepted the poem, with the stipulation that she be able to edit it. And edit it she did! Crane in fact reportedly wept for hours when he read the nearly unrecognizable work that Moore had retitled as “Again.” The poem in its original form only finally appeared in the Crane collection “White Buildings.”

Anyhow, here is an excerpt from Crane’s (pardon the pun!) “heady” work:

Invariably when wine redeems the sight,
Narrowing the mustard scansions of the eyes,
A leopard ranging always in the brow
Assets a vision in the slumbering gaze.

 Then glozening decanters that reflect the street
Wear me in crescents on their bellies. Slow
Applause flows into liquid synosures:
—I am conscripted to the shadows’ glow.

I include this excerpt (and in fact, this is probably the true rationale for my post) because of the language, and specifically, the glozening decanters. I just want everyone out there to know that in our tasting room, our decanters most definitely glozen. Just in case you were worried. We’re glozening.

I heard about this poem on a podcast from Harold Bloom who is hilarious and then, through his vanity and pomp, i find it so moving how much he loves poetry. http://www.radioopensource.org/whose-words-these-are-15-blooms-hart-crane/

The line i like here is the one about entering the broken world to trace the visionary company of love

The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn
Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell
Of a spent day – to wander the cathedral lawn
From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.

Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps
Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway
Antiphonal carillons launched before
The stars are caught and hived in the sun’s ray?

The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals… And I, their sexton slave!

Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping
The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!
Pagodas campaniles with reveilles out leaping-
O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!…

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

My world I poured. But was it cognate, scored
Of that tribunal monarch of the air
Whose thighs embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word
In wounds pledges once to hope – cleft to despair?

The steep encroachments of my blood left me
No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower
As flings the question true?) -or is it she
Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power?-

And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes
My veins recall and add, revived and sure
The angelus of wars my chest evokes:
What I hold healed, original now, and pure…

And builds, within, a tower that is not stone
(Not stone can jacket heaven) – but slip
Of pebbles, – visible wings of silence sown
In azure circles, widening as they dip

The matrix of the heart, lift down the eyes
That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower…
The commodious, tall decorum of that sky
Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.

-Hart Crane

Maybe you have yet to read the great Jazz Age poet Hart Crane, put off by his reputation for writing “difficult” poetry, or maybe you read him a while back and think there’s nothing left to say on the subject. Whatever may be the case, this terrific conversation about Crane’s work with the magisterial critic and educator Harold Bloom will send you running to find a copy of The Bridge, Crane’s long poem about the Brooklyn Bridge.

Chris Jordan talks about visiting and photographing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Blake Eskin talks about the science of nightmares, and using imagery-rehearsal therapy to make bad dreams less scary.

In my first post, I introduced myself; and in this second one, I want to introduce “Ricky” Riccio, from whose poetry assignments comes our book, Unlocking the Poem.

Ricky has the distinction of having been born just as his parents reached America. His first love was music, and in addition to playing the saxophone in swing and dance bands, he also studied music composition; he was even told his work was so good, it must have been professional! World War II interrupted his studies, and he served in the Pacific, acting as a lending library to his buddies who made sure to keep his duffel bag safe and dry so they’d continue to have books to read.

After the war ended, Ricky worked for a time at Baker Library at Harvard Business School, collecting experience that he would then put to use as a librarian working for the US government. In due course he went to Washington, DC where he had a job lined up at the US Army Medical Library. During the interval between his arrival in Washington and the day he started work, he kept warm in the Library of Congress, largely by feasting on the poems of Hart Crane—in fact, he copied out all of Crane’s poems longhand. As Ricky himself has written in a memoir entitled “Trio,”

“I don’t regret that work one bit. . . . While I copied that magic poetry something else happened to me. The fact of the contact between paper and pencil while I pored over those copies in the Library of Congress made me aware of Crane’s work in a way that would not have been possible by simply reading those painful but inspiring poems. . . . It was as if the lines and images penetrated my skin as well as my mind, and something of Hart Crane’s mystical vision—his very spirit—became part of me and will always remain so.”

Was it absorbing the poems of Hart Crane that helped turn Ricky from the pure sounds of music to the magic inherent in words? His in-depth absorption in Hart Crane’s work gave him an education in the forms and structures of poetry, and fed a new love for the music of language. Ricky was to prove a master of both sound-music and meaning, producing poetry with rich, rolling tones and a depth of emotion.

Ricky has always been a voracious reader, and it was through his reading that he met his first personal “muse,” Anais Nin. Enchanted by a recording he found of Nin reading from her book House of Incest, he wrote to The Phoenix Bookstore asking for a list of all her work, and for a biography of her. What he got back was a personal letter from Nin. That began a correspondence, followed by visits to her Greenwich Village home. Anais Nin—the well-known diarist and poet—kept pressuring her young friend to show her his own poems. Ricky was reluctant, but she persisted. With great trepidation, he finally brought her a sheaf of his poems . . . and she gave him important advice: start being-with other poets; start workshopping, the road to strengthening the poetic work.

Ricky took Nin’s advice to heart. He was then living in West Acton, Massachusetts. He sold his house in West Acton and moved to Belmont, Massachusetts, closer to Boston; and he signed up for a workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education—a workshop that, at various times, included John Holmes, Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, Sam Albert, and George Starbuck, all prize-winning poets (Sexton and Kumin were both Pulitzer Prize winners). Within the workshop, he developed his own poetic voice and began publishing his poems. Eventually Ricky moved from workshop participant to workshop leader, and found—to the joy of scores of other poets—what became a major vocation. He has now led poetry workshops for forty years, and in that time has nurtured thousands of poets.

Ricky has an uncanny gift for spotting the essence of the poem in the product a student brings to workshop. Gently yet incisively, he has taught scores of others to find their own true poems, even when those true poems were sunk in unnecessary verbiage. Ricky’s major teaching tools have included his ever-creative, ever-inspiring assignments. Students fortunate enough to sit in his workshops have found whole books of poems emerging from the stimuli these assignments provided.

I count myself lucky to have had the chance to learn from such a skilled and artful teacher—a true master, not just of the craft of poetry, but of the craft of teaching. I count myself as luckier still to have had the chance to write Unlocking the Poem with him, a book of his assignments and teaching, all “illustrated” by poems written by his students. For anyone interested in writing poetry: please, take a look; there are sample pages available for downloading from this website. I think you’ll want to use what you find there to start new poems of your own—and please share them with us!

No Art in Eden II (Hjersman) 

Copyright  ©  Peter Hjersman 2009  

     —if we listen.  In a poetic and novel sense, the breeze, the sunrise, a heart-felt hug, a pause under a quiet tree—all give us grit for the mental mill.  Meditation, a day with the sea, a mountain walk offer us more than we can possibly share in a full writing career. 

     As discussed last week, writers, besides inner quiet, also use tension to produce.  Would we create anything if we were satisfied?  Yet for many writers, life-tension is not enough.  They strive to find ways to break through the mundane daily living.  Some choose not to listen and try to circumvent their hearts and inner senses by the use of stimulants, such as tobacco, alcohol, drugs, caffeine, and other artificial means.  They seek new knowledge through external stimulants.  This occurs so often, that dozens of books exist on this subject, such as. The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs, by Marcus Boon. 

     To be a successful writer, do we need to use artificial stimulants?  What do these do, what would they give us and why do writers use them?  They shock the norm and produce new perspectives.  Okay, but so does news, TV, movies, new friends, new foods, new places.  If we fully engage in a new adventure, is this not as powerful a stimulant?  When was the last time you jumped out of an airplane, made friends with a horse, and rode it?  If we take responsibility to fully engage—one teacher hands out one raisin each to eat and asks students to focus on that and that alone—shouldn’t we gain stimulation?  Native Americans have an ancient tradition, alive today, to solo in the wilderness with nothing and allow visions to absorb the mind. 

     “Drugs or alcohol are sometimes used to produce abnormal states to the same end of disrupting the habitual set of the mind, but they are of dubious value, apart from the dangers of addiction, since their action requires judgment, and the activities they provoke are hallucinatory rather than illuminating.  What is needed is control and direction,” as Brewster Ghiselin states in The Creative Process: A Symposium (1952, UC).

     The consideration of drug use occurs in the second stage of a writer’s development <for stages, see >.  At stage one, the wannabe is stuck in blissful ignorance; the stage three writer has found the pace and only needs time.  That a writer might NEED stimulants is a misnomer of a stage two writer. 

     When I am asleep or rising with the sun, many ideas clamber for my attention.  After numerous attempts to record the midnight insight, I found an acceptable method, despite the many I tried and the discomfort.  I use a small flashlight and an ink pen with a clipboard.  For a short while, I used a voice recorder but too often, I only heard unintelligible gibberish in the morning. 

     A friend started a business and had trouble finding the right name.  I mentioned the middle night insights and strongly suggested she prepare a way to write it down or it would be lost.  She joined us in the morning and was intolerably irate. 

     “What…?” 

     “The perfect name came to me and I did not write it down!  Now I don’t know what it was.”  Her anger preceded patience. 

     I used this method when I was a student.  For difficult problems, I would “sleep on it”.  I would concentrate on the problem as I met the pillow and on that alone and the solution would often arise with the sun.  Is this a form of simulated death?  When we are asleep, our being is in a different mode than when awake and we can use this. 

     Friedrich von Schiller, the German writer, “liked to have the smell of rotten apples,…under his nose when he was composing poetry.”  “Hart (Crane) tried to charm his inspiration out of its hiding place by (moderate) drinking and laughing and playing the phonograph.”  (Ghiselin) 

     If a writer needs an inspirational zap, how many will take a two minute chocolate break?  How many will take a ten minute quiet time?  Which gives more? 

     Some hope to make it happen faster.  When one is in The Zone, nature provides.  The best seller may not be provided, but a clear path set by the writer is nurtured through listening.  Totally giving oneself to the writing, opens the mind, the self, the heart to answers from life. 

     With inspiration, we let the Muse enter the house of our mind.  With artificials, the writer may think the muse is in, but there is no muse, no opening, no door—all an illusion.  Seeking the Muse is opening the door and finding the Muse standing there.  “What kept you?” asks The Muse. 

###

Bear with me for a moment, because I’m not sure where I am going with this, though I promise it relates to music (or at least the way we experience it). If you are a frequent reader of The Indie Handbook, you may have noticed that I have been away for a couple of weeks. It wasn’t really an intentional hiatus, it just sort of happened, and while I love this blog, I am glad I’ve had these two weeks to myself. It has given me a chance to think about a lot of things: about this blog – where we started, how far we’ve come, where we’re going; – the paradoxical, amorphous, ridiculous “indie” universe we (all of us) are constantly creating and defining, even whilst it defines “us” and what the crap this all has to do with me.

And, in all of this, it’s that quest for self-definition – and the subsequent manufactured persona – which has stuck with me (while this is the ideal place for a Kierkegaard reference, I’ll give it a miss; go read The Sickness Unto Death). It’s time we faced the truth: we are a lost generation. Unfortunately, while we are tragically overrun with Hemingways, we haven’t produced an Eliot or Fitzgerald yet (though I suspect there is at least a Hart Crane in our midst, you’ve not yet met her; she lives in Chicago). Even though we claim to prize ambiguity above all other virtues and cherish what we like to call “nuance”, we all require some degree of definition.

And I am not immune to this. When we began this blog, we set out to be ourselves. We were going to ignore the rules and dress code and requisite iPod playlists that define indieness and be honest with you about who we are and what we like – and where the music is concerned, I think we’ve achieved that. But talking to Kristin this week, I came to the realization that I have done a fair bit of inventing over the last eight months. I’ve reinvented myself (or, more accurately, manufactured a second, internet exclusive, Self), and I’m not sure I like him.

Internet Eric is fascinated by celebrities, loves cute girls, and has a particular appreciation for cute celebrities with a celebrity crush list twelve miles long. He does nothing but listen to, think about, and write about music all day. But if you went to a show expecting to meet a trendy, girl chasing, indie music blogger with earphones permanently attached to his head, you’d never find him, because he doesn’t exist. The real me cannot be trendy because they don’t make “indie” clothes for fat people. I like cute girls, but I am drawn to brilliant, creative, irrepressible, strong women with wide-ranging interests who are as fascinated by numbers as they are storytelling. And, frankly, you are more likely to catch me reading Lolita or a fashion/design magazine or “The Waste Land” for the 384^th time, than listening to my iPod (which is actually an Archos 605). It’s true, I am as cynical in real life as I come across online, but not so much about other people as my own inevitable failure as a human being.

I say this because I met a genius last week. She has created two of the most perfect albums I have ever heard. Her work is so intricate – so detailed – that I hesitate to even wish to understand her creative thought process because I’d probably break something. And, above all of this, she is one of the sweetest people I have ever met. In all, we sat for half an hour in a busy Starbucks and talked. As far as I know, no one recognized her, and all the while, in the back of my mind, was this little voice saying if you only knew who this woman is, what she can do, what she’s already done, you might stop and listen to what she has to say. I doubt she was thinking the same thing.

Later that night, she (Emilie Simon), made her Chicago debut at Berlin Nightclub, which (for those unfamiliar with the club) has a reputation as one of the premier gay discos in the city. I had never been to a specifically “gay” anything (well, a hotel, once, in Boston, but that’s a different story), nor have I ever felt so un-judged in any reputed “straight” club or bar that I’ve been to. I saw things that night that I’ve never experienced before. I saw people who were entirely uninhibited, dancing with abandon and wearing clothes I would never be caught dead in.

And I leaned over to my friend Lindsey and whispered, (read: shouted) in her ear, “I envy them.”

“So do I,” she said.

.

.

Cuántos amaneceres, frío tras su mecido descanso,

habrán de zambullirse las gaviotas a su alrededor

soltando anillos blancos de tumulto, erigiendo

la Libertad por encima del agua encadenada.

Luego, con limpia curva, apartamos los ojos,

espectrales como las velas que pasan por debajo,

de alguna hoja de cálculo que será archivada;

hasta que el ascensor nos libera de la jornada…

Pienso en los cines, esas vistas panorámicas

de multitudes inclinadas ante una escena trepidante

nunca mostrada, pero a la que pronto se apresuran,

anunciada a otros ojos en la misma pantalla.

Y Tú, cruzando el puerto entre destellos de plata,

como si te alcanzase el sol, pero dejando

siempre en tu andar algún movimiento pendiente.

Tu misma libertad te sigue sosteniendo.

Desde algún túnel de metro, celda o altillo

un loco se apresura hacia tus parapetos,

se inclina un poco, su camisa chillona se hincha,

una broma se arroja desde la atónita caravana.

La luz del mediodía gotea en las vigas de Wall Street,

diente roto de celeste acetileno;

toda la tarde giran las grúas entre nubes…

Tus cables respiran aún el Atlántico Norte.

Oscuro como el cielo de los judíos

tu galardón… gracia concedida

de anonimia que el tiempo no disipa:

vibrante absolución, el perdón que nos otorgas.

Arpa y altar fundidos por la furia

(¡qué fuerza afinaría el coro de tu cordaje!),

umbral terrible de la promesa del profeta,

de la oración de paria y del gemido del amante.

De nuevo las luces del tráfico que rozan tu lenguaje,

veloz y sin cesuras, inmaculado suspiro de los astros,

salpican tu ruta, cifran la eternidad.

Hemos visto la noche alzada en tus brazos.

Bajo la sombra de tus pilares esperé;

sólo en la oscuridad tu sombra es clara.

Los iluminados bloques urbanos se han borrado,

ya la nieve sepulta todo un año de hierro…

Insomne como el río que pasa debajo de ti,

tú que abovedas el mar, hierba que sueña en las praderas,

ven a nosotros, los humildes, baja

y con tu curvatura ofrece un mito a Dios.

.
Hart Crane
Al Puente de Brooklyn
.

Here is Darran Anderson’s recent article about writers’ disappearing acts:

Darran Anderson, “The Indian Rope Trick,” 3:AM Magazine 9 August 2009

October 1849. A dishevelled and incoherent bedlamite was found in some distress outside Ryan’s Tavern, a Baltimore drinking hole popular with corrupt canvassers and men of idle personage. He was wearing a variety of clothes seemingly assembled with scant regard to fitting or style; a palm leaf hat, a soiled silk coat and a battered pair of shoes. His hair was standing on end and his face smeared with dirt. Though presumed half-demented with drink, no traces of alcohol could be smelt or discerned on his person. This was no standard vagabond or panhandler. Instead, he was soon identified as no less than Edgar Allan Poe, poet, essayist and master of the macabre. His previous whereabouts were unknown. He’d simply vanished and reappeared, mysteriously afflicted and wearing the clothes of a stranger.

Whisked away to a sanatorium by friends, the writer’s condition deteriorated rapidly. Though he had been depressed and had taken to the drink following the death of his young wife (and cousin) Virginia Clemm, he had since cleaned himself up, joined an abstinence society and was working extensively on plans to launch his own periodical. The week previous, he had routinely left Virginia to travel back to New York City. What happened in those intervening days has never been revealed. In the hospital, the bedridden writer ranted and raved, slipping in and out of consciousness. He called out to his dead wife and an unknown “Reynolds” and begged those by his bedside to let him die. Finally in the early hours of the morning, without revealing what had happened to him, he gasped, “Lord, help my poor soul” and passed away. Faced with a vacuum that no rational explanation could fill, his close associates turned to fiction. His last panic-stricken words were altered to something more suitably lofty and erudite, in this case the following abomination; “He who arched the heavens and upholds the universe, has His decrees legibly written upon the frontlet of every human being and upon demons incarnate.” His death certificate was soon mislaid leading to speculation as to his cause of death, running the full spectrum of diseases and syndromes; epilepsy, diabetes, stroke, cholera, syphilis. When they ran out of genuine medical maladies, the gossip-mongers invented some of their own (“brain congestion” being chief among them). Soon speculation took a darker turn with tales of poisoning, laudanum overdose (Poe was a known opiate user) and the DTs vying with reports he’d been kidnapped, robbed and drugged (two shadowy figures had been spotted following him in the vicinity of a train station). Given the ghoulish nature of his writing, there’s the constant hint of something diabolical at work. Poe had stared into the abyss for too long perhaps and one day the abyss had noticed him.

Disappearing is an act with its own bewildering history (or anti-history considering it is a litany of what we do not know and perhaps never will). In 1587, the New World pilgrims of the Roanoke Colony (over 100 souls in all), in what would later be named North Carolina, vanished into thin air leaving only the word “Croatoan” carved onto a tree. In 1872, the Mary Celeste was discovered drifting in the Atlantic, a month after the brigantine had set off from New York for Genoa. Below decks, the ship’s cargo and cabins were relatively undisturbed but for the absence of her crew who were never seen again. In 1971, the bourbon-drinking hijacker D. B. Cooper leapt out of a Boeing 727 and into infamy with a parachute and a briefcase with $200,000 in ransom money. Entire regions of the planet have become feared for the prevalence of disappearances, as if some devilry were involved. Collectively known as the Vile Vortices, the Bermuda triangle in the Caribbean and the Devil’s Sea near Japan are the most notorious examples of the phenomenon. Some fates are more decipherable than others; the sailor Donald Crowhurst forging a circumnavigation around the planet descended into madness, writing hundreds of pages about time travel, God and the nature of being before stepping off his boat and into the sea whilst Amelia Earhart’s Electra vanished in the South Pacific with a final radio communication to their Howland Island destination, “We must be on you, but cannot see you — but gas is running low. Have been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at 1,000 feet.”

Whilst it’s an occupational hazard for explorers to go missing, it’s surprising how many writers have gone forth to the great unknown. These days we’re largely used to writers as bourgeois academics writing stories about English teachers having affairs with students or the existential crisis of marriages set in second homes in Tuscany with deceptively enigmatic titles (The Bible of Forgetting, The Ironsmith’s Daughter ad nauseum). But what of the fuck-ups, those who struck out and never returned or simply had enough? The destructive impulse is passé, the stuff of adolescent folly and voyeurism goes the supposed consensus. And yet the literary past is littered with them, these missing in action. It’s not to gloat over nor celebrate nor condemn such lives in freefall rather it’s crucial to haul back their works and lives from the void. And while the mythology of self-destruction may seem old hat, it still exerts its magnetism; there is still always a voice in your head that cannot resist wondering where they went and why and maybe there by the grace of god…

At the heart of every writer lies a paradox. Whereas the other art-forms (music, theatre and film in particular) have a natural communal element, writing necessitates a monkish solitude but also a desperate clawing desire for recognition. The turbulence between these two states is the stuff that can make or break a person. Added to this are life’s natural disasters and the neuroses/bohemianism of creative types which have blazed a trail of glory and destruction from John Clare through Sylvia Plath and d.a. levy to David Foster Wallace. Whereas every successful writer’s path is more or less the same, every doomed one has a unique tale to tell.

Take Hart Crane for example; an American poet still ludicrously underrated, who in hindsight stands as a kind of bridge between Walt Whitman’s world and that of the Beats, who rhapsodised about the fledgling New York cityscape the way the Romantics had about the Lake District, a man who for all his troubles (and there were few more troubled than Crane, wracked by drink and sexual guilt) was perhaps the very first to decipher the magic in the streets and skyscrapers and technology of the new age of modernity and describe it in a unique veiled even arcane language all of his own (elevators that “drop us from our day,” cinemas that were “panoramic sleights,” traffic lights “that skim thy swift / unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,” a city with its “fiery parcels all undone, Already snow submerges an iron year”). Yet none of these factors were to save him when, wearing his pyjamas, he clambered over the railings of the SS Orizaba, midway between Cuba and Florida, having been spurned in his amorous drink-sodden advances to the sailors below decks and then robbed for his troubles, and leapt into the ocean. He was last seen swimming for the horizon.

Whereas Crane’s end, for all its sadness, had an anger and near-defiance to it (after all he swam away rather than sank), the last act of Lew Welch was a more resigned even contemplative affair. A member of the Beat Generation, the Arizona-born poet was enraptured with nature, in contrast to Crane, viewing the city as a monstrous thing. Embracing rural life, he gave up his advertising career, after spells travelling with Jack Kerouac (appearing in Big Sur as the hard-drinking Dave Wain) and working as a taxi driver in San Francisco. He sought to make a living as a fisherman, spent time on communes and wrote elegiac Thoreau-influenced naturalist verse (Ring of Bone being the most definitive collection). On the 23rd of May 1971, struggling with alcoholism and despondent over a failed relationship (he had had several nervous breakdowns in the preceding decades), he took his rifle, walked into the mountains of the Sierra Nevada and out of existence, leaving a note to his friend the poet Gary Snyder that reads in part, “I never could make anything work out right and now I’m betraying my friends. I can’t make anything out of it — never could. I had great visions but never could bring them together with reality. I used it all up. It’s all gone… I went Southwest. Goodbye. Lew Welch.” Today, when he is remembered it’s as the most mysterious of all the Beats, giving his works the vital resonance of a rare and cherished relic in contrast to the over-exposed works of his comrades.

Similarly neglected but just as gifted, the poet Weldon Kees parked his car by the mist-shrouded Golden Gate Bridge in the summer of 1955 and exited history. The dapper Nebraskan had wowed New York’s literary circles with his gentile poetry of the suburbs (his Robinson series of poems being his most acclaimed) in which devastating everyday encounters tap into the dark undercurrents of life; murder victims, decaying animals, moral corruption, all fuelled by the sense that no matter how respectable and refined a life, death still casts its inescapable shadow. A sense that the American Dream was but a delusion, the achievement of its goals a Pyrrhic victory. Gradually like some self-fulfilling prophecy, his life fell apart. He split up from his wife after she descended into drink-fuelled paranoid delusions and he struggled to find willing publishers. He disappeared with a sleeping bag, a watch and his wallet. Rumour has it, he resurfaced in Mexico. Given the Golden Gate Bridge’s notorious history as a suicide spot, reports of his reappearance seem like wishful thinking.

One character who did make it to Mexico was the writer Ambrose Bierce, creator of the glorious Devil’s Dictionary. A Civil War veteran, journalist and scourge of big business, Bierce chose at the sprightly age of 71 to enjoy his retirement not by gardening or playing bowls but by crossing the border, gun in hand, and joining the rebel army of Pancho Villa. He sent one final letter to his niece which read in part, “Goodbye. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a gringo in Mexico ah, that is euthanasia… I shall not be here long enough to hear from you, and don’t know where I shall be next. Guess it doesn’t matter much. Adios, Ambrose.” Bierce’s life and subsequent vanishing in the tumult of the Mexican revolution makes a fantastic story in the true sense of the word yet it also points out the danger in romanticising the fates of those who disappear. In absence of facts and explanations, their fates become infinite, subject to limitless speculation which may seem irresistible for the fan or casual observer but is unimaginably horrifying for the loved ones they leave behind. Whilst we envisage all manner of fantastical stories, they are left with untold horrors.

Sometimes the riddle of disappearance is solved. When her husband abruptly left her for his mistress in the winter of 1926, Agatha Christie went AWOL, provoking a nationwide twitching of curtains amongst Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple fans across Middle England. She was discovered 11 days later, lodging at a hotel in Harrogate, under an assumed South African identity, suffering from amnesia and a suspected nervous breakdown (an episode she hastened to discuss).

Within the last ten years, the fate of the masterful French aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (author of The Little Prince and Wind, Sand and Stars), who vanished flying a reconnaissance mission for the Free French airforce over the Mediterranean, has become slightly clearer with a fisherman discovering his ID bracelet and a diver locating his P-38 Lightning plane off the coast of Marseilles. Just last year, a former Luftwaffe fighter (and fan of the writer) Horst Rippert claimed he’d inadvertently shot down his hero in a dog-fight during the Second World War.

Rather than the traditional binary view of existence and identity, it’s clear there are vast shifting grey areas. Consider Arthur Rimbaud, “the savage of the Latin Quarter” and poetry’s great enfant terrible, who famously disappeared at least from Western eyes but in doing so appeared to African ones and whose later life became the stuff of rumour and myth (slavetrading, gunrunning, going Kurtz) to the extent it’s almost impossible to decipher the truth from the fiction. Or B Traven (of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre renown) who didn’t disappear but didn’t ever fully appear, remaining a curious cipher of a man whose true identity has never been established. Or M. Ageyev the Istanbul-based Russian emigre whose Novel with Cocaine became a literary sensation before he chose (or was forced) to disappear into obscurity (over sixty years later, his book was found in the abandoned hotel room of Manic Street Preacher Richey Edwards after he’d gone missing). Or Oscar Acosta, the drug-crazed “300-pound Samoan” Dr Gonzo from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas who was last seen boarding a coke-filled Mexican yacht with a number of extremely shady undesirables. Or Franz Kafka who on his deathbed instructed his friend Max Brod to incinerate his papers in an attempt to posthumously fade away (an instruction that thankfully Brod ignored, barely escaping Prague and the Nazi invasion with a suitcase filled with the writer’s then-unpublished works). J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon have so far successfully evaded the cynical all seeing eye of the modern world and it could be said that they just wish to be known (and unknown) on their own terms. It’s ironic that dodging the spotlight can make such writers all the more intriguing, the curious double bluff of fame; the more you hide, the more they (or we) want to uncover.

Of course the writers mentioned so far chose to disappear. There were many who had no choice in the matter. In totalitarian regimes, the first to go are nearly always the writers, being the conscience/trouble-makers of society (Lenin prophesised this murderous philistinism in a missive to the writer and Bolshevik Maxim Gorky when he castigated “the educated classes… who consider themselves the brains of the nation. In fact they are not its brains but its shit” and eerily warned him not to “waste yourself on the whining of decaying intellectuals”). It’s such a customary factor to dictatorships, this terrible need to silence, to make those who question disappear, that it becomes a noun: Zhen Fan in Maoist China, the Yezhovschina (“Yezhov’s Era”) in Stalinist Russia, the Nacht under Nebel (Night and Fog) of Nazi Germany, los desaparecidos under the right-wing juntas of South America. Some of the greatest cultural figures of theirs or any time (Osip Mandelstam, Robert Desnos, Bruno Schulz, Victor Jara, Sarah Powell, Jakob van Hoddis and on and on) were simply made to evaporate. “No man, no problem” in the words of Uncle Joe.

These are merely a few examples from the ones that we know. Then there are the writers whose names and works have been so deftly excised from history by their killers that we know nothing of them or their work. They die the first physical death but also a second death; that of forgetting which causes them to never have existed in the first place. The act of remembering thus becomes a revolutionary act, an act of defiance against the forces of death.

There is another more mundane but just as perilous a route to oblivion; that of sheer disinterest. Whether due to public taste (or lack of) or the woeful lack of vision of mainstream publishing houses, many writer’s legacies fall into disrepair or ebb away completely. Some are rescued by the admirable work of far-sighted publishers (Rebel Inc’s resurrection of Richard Brautigan and Sadegh Hedayat in the nineties for example or the recent Richard Yates revival) or by near acts of God (Janet Frame the great New Zealand novelist was only saved from a lobotomy by winning a literary prize). The question arises, who’s to save long neglected writers (say Delmore Schwartz, Chester Himes, Clarence Cooper Junior, Lola Ridge, Nathaniel West) from the death that is amnesia if not us? And to paraphrase that great architect of remembering the writer Primo Levi, if not now, when?

Some Brie-head interviewed over here at ShatterColors Literary Review. I guess he edits the magazine or something. So he’s interviewing himself in his own magazine?  And he publishes himself in his own magazine? Hell, I don’t know. I’m tired after running a hill workout. Then I read this, making me more tired. He’s one literary dude, though. Very literary, no doubt.

Robert Scott Leyse (14 bucks he prefers you use all three names) says some really un-sightful things here.

Like he says that he attended a “writing event.” Sounded like he had a hell of a good time, too. In his words, I thought, “What does a gathering of clowns spouting pretentious rubbish and thirsting to have their asses kissed have to do with writing?”

Touche, Robert Scott Leyse. “Thirsting to have their asses kissed” is an excellent image, or maybe just a mixed metaphor/dating service for burros. Either way, I love a man who can recognize a clown in disguise (or were the writers wearing their red noses and giant shoes?).  Reminds me of the grandmother in Flannery O’ Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Grannie wears very clean underwear and knows exactly how to identify “Good Men.” Only takes her a few minutes, too. (Unfortunately, she is soon executed, along with the entire family she leads directly to their collective doom.)

I’ll just jot down this epic poem here, la-dee-da….

One problem I have with Robert Scott Leyse is that the people I meet at “writing events” are scared of clowns. Also they are self-deprecating, witty, humble, interesting, well-read, grinders at the page after page, and know how to drink a shit-load of quality ale. (Those that don’t drink beer I maybe never meet.)

Possibly we attend different conferences?

As an editor Robert Scott Leyse prefers, “love stories, at whatever stage of a relationship…”

Hey! I do too, maybe. So good call, maybe.

Then Robert Scott Leyse reveals his true internal thrumming, as he drops the dark and stormy nights of his intellect onto flash fiction.

Egads! Run for the big tent, you clowns!

On flash fiction (you can hear the disgust steeping in his bottom lip like a tobacco chaw): “It’s a writing exercise, useful in learning the virtues of succinctness of expression. As for it being a viable form… Basically, some corner-cutting smartass thought, “Hey, why waste these writing exercises? Why not doll them up in fancy terminology — call them ‘flash fiction,’ ‘flashers,’ or ‘impromptus’ — and persuade people they’re real stories? That way, I’ll be able to churn out three or four or five of them a night!” Needless to say, I neither read nor publish writing exercises.”

I adore that last sentence. Cutting, shall we say. In fact, fuck it, all short forms are actually writing exercises, especially those damn sonnet things. I mean how can 14 lines be “viable”? Yo, parable, fable, mythology, psalm, and all you annoying hieroglyphics, please go away or at the very least add a whole lot of words, OK? Can we get some more words, seriously? Back up the fucking WORD truck, beep-beep-beep. MORE, MORE, like in a legislature or a contract.

And, yes, you pegged me, Robert Scott Leyse, since I do write and read flash fiction, I am indeed a “corner-cutting smartass.”

[But Impromptus? That sounds like a type of water dwelling dinosaur in a children's book. Dude, don't bring that one out in public, just a friendly tip.]

Speaking of “corner-cutters,” and since I just spent a semester with a grad student researching a bit of the inexhaustible history of flash fiction as a genre, other corner cutting clowns would include:

Margaret Atwood, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Dave Eggers (a ton here), David Foster Wallace, Tara L. Masih, Pu Songling, Kim Chinquee, J. G. Ballard, Jim Harrison, Kobo Abe, Primo Levi, Angela Carter, Max Steele, Barry Graham, Umberto Eco, H. H. Munro, Don Delillo, Mervyn Peake, Anton Chekhov, Kurt Vonnegut, Andrei Bely, W.B. Yeats, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Luigi Pirandello, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, John Steinbeck, George Orwell, Ander Monson, Mark Twain, Marianne Gingher, Wu Jingzi, Dubus (x 2), Vladimir Nabokov, Oscar Wilde, Molly Gaudry, Agatha Christie, Dr. Seuss, Jaroslav Hasek, Samule Beckett, Jeff Noon, Matt Bell, Aesop, Deb Olen Unferth, Patricia Highsmith, Emily Bronte, Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino, John Updike, Jill Christman, Julian Barnes, Richard Wright, Sherman Alexie, Sara Teasdale, Shane Jones, Diane Williams, Jesus H. Christ, Blake Butler, Maya Angelou, W. G. Sebald, Edmund White, Thomas Pynchon, Raymond Carver, Carolyn Forche, Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, Buddha, Dorothy Parker, Tao Lin (oh, fuck him [I kid]), Carol Bly, Russell Banks, John David Lovelace, Krishna, Richard Brautigan, Ezra Pound, Scott Garson, Michael Kimball, Jewel, Robert Olen Butler, Gertrude Stein, Alexander Pushkin, Joseph Young, Emile Zola, Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, Michael Martone, Hart Crane, Tania Hershman, Joyce Carol Oates, John Edgar Wideman, Rose Terry Cooke, Plato, Katherine Anne Porter, Kate Chopin, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez.

hanging out, corner-cutting...

I could go on, but it gets ridiculous the number of authors in the canon, and outside the canon, and shooting from a cannon (a la Hunter S.), that have worked in this genre, and didn’t I just say I was tired, and also I need my typing finger for clowning tomorrow morning.

I just got to clown, yo.

Wouldn’t want to be with that “impromptu” crowd, anyway, would you? What’s next, you start valuing other forms of brevity, like say oysters, shots of bourbon, sudden kisses, short films, or the well-cut diamond?

A writing exercise? Flash fiction is to a writing exercise as a haiku is to a pretzel. Something. I disagree, Robert Scott Leyse. And what if a flash WAS a writing exercise? What if someone wrote a story in the shape of an apartment building (Georges Perec) or as a travel guide (Martone) or I don’t know a freaking examination. On and on…or can stories only be one way, “love stories, at whatever…” etc.

[A red fox just loped across my backyard. Is it limping or loping? I mean loping is like attitude. Limping you probably got car-struck crossing highway 69]

Oh hell, I digress, and if you read this blog you know where I will digress to, like a ship drifting to harbor…1.) preheat oven. 2.) slice corn tortillas. 3.) Add cheese and “impromptu” toppings.

Well, I just had some kick ass nachos. It felt good. It didn’t take long, they are often listed as appetizer…so eat my board shorts (those are the very, very, very long shorts, sir, I think you will like them), Mr. Robert Scott Leyse.

(BTW, here is an exam, a writing exercise, as you would say.)

Well, what can you do? Not human at all, is it, the flash fiction above…drivel, really.

No, no, know.

Now?

I am going to go relax in the bath.

I will not! For me, a hot shower. I said hot.

And quick.

And good.

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Beer prices are going up. (again)

Here’s what the D-bag at Budweiser says: “The environment is very favorable, we think.” (He means for price increases.)

Here is the D at MillerCoors: “We have seen very strong pricing to date this year, and we are projecting a favorable pricing environment moving forward.”

Can you believe people who work at a brewery talk like this? I am done with these fools. Can you smell the cynicism in the voices of these guys? It’s micro-brew only now (was heading percentage-wise that way anyway). I mean I feel like I am buying my beer from an attorney, and he’s laughing right in my face. Going home and telling his wife about all the suckers he found today in his “pricing environment.”

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Kind words from The Prettiest Girl in School about Eggs here. Thank you for reading!

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S

The John Robert Colombo Page

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Barbara and James in Colorado

I am sitting in front of my computer in North Toronto and Barbara Wright is sitting in front of her computer in downtown Toronto, a distance of perhaps eight kilometres. We are twenty minutes apart by car, yet our communication is via the a geostationary satellite, with the signal travelling back and forth perhaps 500,000 kilometres in one or two seconds.

I reside with my wife Ruth in our three-bedroom suburban house in the city’s North York district, which is unequally divided between the Italians and the Jews, to such an extent the district is locally known as the “Kosher Nostra.” (The New York essayist Richard Kostelanetz once called our place “Colombo Central.”)

Barbara Wright – I’ll call her Barbara, as she is quite direct in manner – lives with her husband James (Jim) George in their suite in a highrise in the city’s downtown area. The balcony offers a sweeping view of the city’s exclusive Rosedale district, which Jim has known since his childhood.

The view is new to Barbara who was born in Colorado. She made California her home state for decades, at least until her late marriage, four years ago in San Francisco, to Jim. They make a formidable couple and their surroundings are awesome. The suite is richly decorated with works of Buddhist and Hindu art: statues, mandalas, rugs, paintings, etc. There is even a framed photograph of the smiling couple with a giggling Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, taken last year during a private session at the time of his last public visit to the city.

Perhaps I should recall that Jim served as Canada’s High Commissioner to India from 1967 to 1972. During his years in New Delhi he befriended two youthful spiritual leaders of the Buddhist-Bon tradition: the Dalai Lama and Chögyam Trungpa. The American disciples of the latter “crazy wisdom” lama accompanied him when he shifted his ashram from Boulder, Colorado, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he established a thriving centre for Shambhala studies. Today Jim is regarded as one of the elder statesmen of the Work in Canada, a group that includes Ravi Ravindra and Tom Daly.

As for their ages – Barbara is in her seventies, Jim is in his early nineties – think nothing of it. Both are healthy and look great. Together they generate more energy than do the hydroelectric power turbines at Niagara Falls, an ninety minutes south of Toronto by car.

Barbara and James with HH the Dalai Lama

Barbara has kindly agreed to my request to reproduce this photograph taken with the Dalai Lama who, years earlier, contributed the foreword to Jim’s recently reprinted book, Asking for the Earth: Waking Up to the Spiritual / Ecological Crisis. Jim’s current book is “The Little Green Book on Awakening,” a kind of primer on the climate crisis and work on consciousness. She has also agreed to answer one dozen questions. So here are my statements and questions, with her responses and answers.

Q. Three cities: Boulder – San Francisco – Toronto. Although I could connect these three cities with a straight line on a map, it would not occur to me to do so, but for the fact that you have an association with these three North American cities. Let’s begin with Boulder, which by synecdochy I associate with the rest of Colorado. I understand that you were not born in Boulder, a spiritual centre in Colorado, but that you were born in the city of Grand Junction. Were you educated there? Do you see yourself as a “midwesterner”?

Boulder is important because it’s in Colorado and my younger daughter lives there. Also, there is a Gurdjieff group there which I have visited regularly for over twenty years, and during that time, I have gotten to know the people in the group very well, and value them very highly. It’s true that Boulder is a kind of spiritual center, and we are very aware of that. In fact, by coincidence or whatever arranges such events, my visits often coincide with special Buddhist gatherings. For example, the Dalai Lama was in Denver once when we were having a special weekend; and last year, the new Karmapa was there at the same time that the Boulder group worked together over a four-day period of time.

Last May, since some of our people were interested in studying Chogyam Trungpa’s ideas on work in life — and since the Gurdjieff Work is described as “a work in life” — invited several friends of mine, who live in Boulder and practice Buddhism, to join us. That made for an interesting time. So we feel very lucky to be in such a place, which is not only a spiritual center, but very beautiful. In only a few minutes, we can be walking uphill on a mountain path. My husband, Jim, sometimes goes with me to Colorado, and he loves the mountains; even though he was born in Toronto, he has climbed the best and highest mountains. Of course, I love the mountains because they are an essential part of me. I was born at an altitude of a little over 5000 feet.

I was born in the city of Grand Junction, which is on the other side of the mountains from Boulder, on the Western Slope of the Rockies. Though it has about the same mile-high altitude, it had a different feeling from Boulder, Denver, or Colorado Springs, which are located on the Eastern Slope and are related to the Great Plains in the central part of the United States. It felt a little less sophisticated and possibly more genuine. A little more desert prospector or sheep herder and less like the gold or silver barons. This is in the process of changing now as the powerful homogenous force erases those kinds of differences. Now, Grand Junction is becoming well known for its wineries; the thought of which would have horrified the members of the twelve to fifteen Protestant churches in the city when I was growing up. (I believe that the members of the one large Catholic church did have a glass of wine from time to time, and probably more Protestants than we knew of did also.)

Grand Junction is high-desert country, only a few miles from Utah and its fantastic canyons and rock formations. Two rivers meet there, and the valley they form is fertile and known for its warm climate. It’s also quite a beautiful valley, surrounded on three sides by completely different and completely amazing landscapes. In fact, on a recent visit, I felt quite strongly that the beauty and grandeur of that valley somehow comprise my heritage.

My education in Grand Junction gave me a pretty good start in life. We lived close enough that I could walk to and from school and come home for lunch each day, so the 3 schools I attended from grade 1-12 seemed like an extension of home life. Many of my teachers were highly educated in the now old-fashioned classics, probably similar to a Canadian education. And, I read a lot and was outdoors a lot.

For a town of around 28,000 people there many riches. For example, growing up in Grand Junction at that time provided special opportunities for anyone to study classical music that probably don’t exist now. Every elementary school, and the junior high and high school had an orchestra, a concert band, and a marching band, with very good teachers — several just back from WWII and one at least, a veteran of the Paul Whiteman orchestra that played for silent movies. I started piano lessons at five and violin at ten, and by the time I was in high school, I was taking violin lessons at the local college, playing in two symphonies, and performing chamber music in a string trio.

As to being a “midwesterner.” Very early in U.S. history, my ancestors moved from the British Isles, Germany, and Switzerland to Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and points farther east, and then to Missouri and Iowa and finally, just after the Civil War, to Colorado, leaving the southern part of the Midwest behind. Like them, I was and am a Westerner. Quite a different animal. Although I lived for six months in Iowa once long ago — and Iowa is definitely the Midwest — and I live now in Toronto — and Toronto is definitely the East — I remain a Westerner.

Q. Where and how did you first encounter the Work? Could you describe how its ideas and emotions initially affected you? Did it suddenly seem to you to answer your questions about life or did it gradually meet your inner needs?

I first encountered the work ideas in Grand Junction. A friend lent me a book by Kenneth Walker and I happened to notice the name Gurdjieff in it. Noticed and was galvanized. That’s the one, I thought. There was no reason; I simply seemed to recognize his name, just as I simply seemed to know that the ideas were true when I read them later on. The first work book I read was “Venture with Ideas” by the same Kenneth Walker, and while reading it, I really learned that I was asleep. While I was reading in the living room, too completely engrossed by new ideas and new possibilities, the water had been used up in the vaporizer I’d left running in my daughters’ bedroom, and it was beginning to overheat and starting to smoke. That was a definite shock. A wake-up call.

Another strong moment I remember was reading “In Search of the Miraculous” while waiting to have surgery the next morning. That book, and the particular passage I read that evening, also served as a call for a new way of living. Curiously, Jim and I are reading through “In Search of the Miraculous” with a small group of people, and a few weeks ago we read that very same passage. Again, a strong moment.

And I was lucky that my introduction to “Beelzebub’s Tales” was oral. The same friend who lent me the Walker books read the first chapter, “The Arousal of Thought,” out loud to me while I was ironing. It was amazing. To hear the words first rather than reading them was a very lucky event. Of course, I then read the book, as fast as I could, unintentionally reading it the way I would ordinarily read any book, in fact as Gurdjieff suggests.

Those books changed my life. The ideas seemed completely familiar, as if they spoke to my own experience and knowledge that had been forgotten. So many of my questions about my own and other’s behavior were addressed and the grandeur of creation and the living universe, which I had experienced myself in special moments, was evoked. I would describe the experience of reading these books as the experience of coming back to life. Of course, as the years went along, I discovered other needs within myself because the work gave me something in relation to those needs.

Q. San Francisco is the next city. What year did you move there? Did you raise your family there?

San Francisco was my home for forty-five years. It was there that I joined a group, met Lord Pentland and many other remarkable people, and of course, made many close friends in the work community there.

I moved to San Francisco in 1961, after going back to college in 1960 — I was one of two single mothers with kids, a rarity at the time — and getting a teaching certificate. My two young daughters and my twenty-one year old sister went with me. I was twenty-eight. In early September, we pulled a small trailer from Grand Junction to San Francisco across the desert and the Sierras, crossed over the Bay Bridge while reciting a little Hart Crane, and stayed the first night in a motel right on the beach south of San Francisco.

In the next few days, we found a place to live, a school for my older daughter and a babysitter for the younger one, and a job for my sister. I began my teaching career in a 6th grade classroom and felt very close to that class. We went to our first meeting on October 10th, with Lord Pentland and the leaders of the San Francisco work. Some notes from that first meeting are in the book Exchanges Within. That was the beginning of my work with the group in San Francisco.

Hopefully, my daughters were helped by our connection to the work. I had remarried, to an older man in the work, and we were very busy with groups and work activities. There were many people in and out of the house, and we were away a lot. But, we had music and crafts at home, and two dogs. Also, the city of San Francisco offered many cultural opportunities. There were many interesting people around our dinner table during those years. They never had what they considered a “normal” family life, but as adults they’ve realized that there is no such thing as the ideal, perfectly normal family. I’m hoping now that they feel their lives were very special, in good ways.

Q. I know you are a woman who cherishes family connection. Tell us the names of your children and grandchildren. Where do they live? Were they surprised when you informed them that you and Jim would live in Toronto?

My older daughter, Claudia, still lives in San Francisco and, along with her husband, is quite active in the Gurdjieff Foundation there. She is quite a good pianist and also quite a good poet. They have two daughters, Anne, just receiving her MSW from UC Berkeley in May, and Clara, an artist / poet who lives in Santa Cruz and is very active in community organizations. My younger daughter, Kristine, lives in Boulder with her husband. She is a healer, and uses flower essences, Jin Shin Jyutsu, and psychic healing to great and good results. Her daughter Jessamyn is finishing her third year of college and studying international law.

I do very much cherish family connections. After my mother’s death, I remembered conversations we’d had and after finding notes she had made in various books, I realized that my life, which had been so much about a search for meaning, was a continuation of hers. As is my sister’s. Now, as I get older and watch my daughters, and their daughters, becoming more and more wise, this continuity seems even more apparent. And, I wish for them all, wish that their own lives and their inquiries into the purpose of life can bring more freedom, wisdom, clarity, daring, and so on. The good things.

There were various reactions to my announcement that I was thinking of marrying Jim George. Surprise, certainly, because it all happened very quickly. Reactions ranged from excitement to opposition. A very positive Tarot reading from one granddaughter, a “Go for it, Grandma” from another, and a “You’ve got to be kidding!” from my younger daughter. Now, five years later, we’ve visited them and they’ve each have visited us in Toronto, and I think everyone agrees it’s been a good arrangement.

Q. Was it in San Francisco that you began your work as a Feldenkrais instructor? Are you still a practitioner?

In the late 70s and early 80s, Lord Pentland began using Feldenkrais lessons as part of his teaching. I believe that he could see that without real changes in the body, self development was mostly mental. Moshe Feldenkrais had been influenced by Gurdjieff and his teaching is highly appropriate for Gurdjieffians or for anyone interested in the development of the whole person. Those first lessons were astounding. I still remember the whole sensation and feeling of myself, of my whole self, as I walked down the hill after the first one.

About the same time, with his encouragement, I began to have lots of body work, which continued into the 90s. There was a double motive for this. Partly for deepening awareness and partly to improve a bad back that was the result of an early fall off a horse.

In 1992, I started my career as a free-lance editor, not only making a decent amount of money but also setting my own hours. By 1994, it seemed the time and the funds were right for me to take the Feldenkrais training in the Bay Area north of San Francisco. Again I was lucky. My trainers were excellent. They were Buddhists and tuned to the awareness aspect of the work. After four years more or less on the floor at least once a week and for longer periods several times a year, my back was many times better. Hopefully, the awareness was better also.

I graduated from the four-year training in 1999, and had quite an active practice, teaching classes in several locations, with a good number of private clients up until the time I moved to Toronto, but it’s been difficult to keep it going here. It takes time to be married! I taught some classes that met here in our condo for several months, substituted a bit at the Feldenkrais Center, and taught one at the Institute of Traditional Medicine on the Art of Sitting, in which I combined lessons for the body and sitting quietly together. I have had a few private clients, including a man who comes regularly when he’s visiting from San Francisco. Eventually I would like to be teaching more. The Feldenkrais Method is amazing.

Q. How long were you associated with the work in San Francisco? By the way, do you know Jacob Needleman, the philosopher who has published many work-related books?

I was associated with the Work in San Francisco for forty-four years — from 1961 to 2005, and I still travel to San Francisco and attend group meetings there when I can. I will probably always be related to the work in San Francisco. The San Francisco groups were begun by Lord Pentland around 1954 to 1957, shortly after Gurdjieff’s death in 1949. He continued almost monthly visits to San Francisco from New York, where he lived and where he headed the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York, the primary North American foundation.

The New York foundation had been organized by Gurdjieff himself during his last visits to the United States. Especially in the 60s and 70s, most of the leaders in the New York foundation were pupils of Gurdjieff. At the same time, there was a frequent exchange between New York and Paris, and Madame de Salzmann, and other pupils of Gurdjieff. Several times a year, some of us made trips to New York at Pentland’s invitation, usually when Madame de Salzmann was there. Often when he came to San Francisco, he brought people along with him from other work centers, like New York or Los Angeles, London or Paris. It was easy to feel part of a great, living organism, complete with a thriving circulatory system. The years until his death in 1984 were rich with opportunity to learn, study, explore and engage along with a group of like-minded, and like-hearted, people.

After 1984, at least once a month and for longer periods in the summer, Paul Reynard continued to visit San Francisco, until his death a few years ago, bringing his sensitive inner work in movements and with the ideas. He had worked as a very young man with Gurdjieff in Paris and has led the movements work in North and South America under Madame de Salzmann’s direction since the late 60s. I feel that the groups in San Francisco were given more than most of us can ever really make our own, and probably much more than we can share with others. This seems to be a theme of mine: we received many riches.

Jacob Needleman has been a friend since 1965. I value any opportunity to work with him, and admire him deeply. He has been able to find ways to bring finer, higher ideas into the main stream of life through his books and talks, and I know he continues this effort.

Q. The third city in your life is Toronto. I know why you came to this city: the catalyst was your marriage to Jim in 2006. Did you meet him in San Francisco at a Work function?

We were married on January 1, 2005, and it took me about six months to get things together for a final move to Toronto. As the third city in my life, as you put it, Toronto is very important to me, because this is the city where I live now, where my husband was born and grew up. It provides me with the opportunity to know a different set of human beings and to explore the ways they are the same and yet different from the people who live in San Francisco, New York, or Colorado. I have met some wonderful people here — especially some outstanding women, who are bright and intelligent — and have had the opportunity to widen my friendships to those not in the Gurdjieff work, which has been very good for me.

I had noticed Jim at various work functions and conferences over the years, but we had hardly had a conversation until 1999 when we were at the same conference in New York and had an opportunity to talk. Perhaps he noticed me earlier, but I wasn’t aware of it. Later, two of our granddaughters got to know each other and it was through this that Jim and I got better acquainted.

Q. You would expect that Toronto, a multicultural city with a population of more than three million people, close to half of its residents born somewhere else, would be particularly receptive to new ideas. In the 1920s it was hospitable to Theosophy. A Gurdjieff group was founded in the city in the early 1950s under the personal direction of Madame de Hartman. It was responsible for the publication of an index to “All and Everything” and also the Russian-language edition of that mammoth text. In the 1960s the city was recognized as the intellectual home of Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. Currently groups like Theosophy and Anthroposophy are languishing here. It is common knowledge that in the city the Gurdjieff work, like Caesar’s Gaul, is divided in three parts, if not more than three. Did this scattering of energies take you by surprise? Can you offer any reason for it? Is the situation likely to remain fragmented in the future?

Because the last split happened so soon after I moved here, it did take me by surprise. It also makes me sad whenever and wherever a separation takes place — and it does take place too often within work groups — and within many other groups, even one as small as two people, such as in a marriage. There is a small, sad statement about human beings in “Beelzebub’s Tales,” in the chapter about the destruction of Ashiata Shiemash’s labors: “And gradually, as it also usually happens there, almost everywhere beings became divided into two mutually opposing parties…. ” I’m reminded of a brilliant Aldous Huxley essay entitled “Usually Destroyed” that speaks to similar human proclivities.

Also, one could talk about the problem of the ego, and I’m tempted to talk about the male ego in particular. But, having a philosophical bent, I would have to say that the underlying reason for divisions, in the Work or in religions or families or nations, is the inexorable quality of the great laws of “world creation and world maintenance,” which must govern all of life. Implicit in these laws is the fact that everything happens, and no intentional result comes about automatically. In a simple way, one can see that effort is almost always required in order to carry out any real intention. Anyone who’s married knows this, at least if they are interested in keeping their marriage intact and thriving. It takes work.

A Gurdjieff group is not immune to the pulls and pushes of life. Individual initiatives can become all important. Individual power can become all important. The need for recognition, for place, and so on — all the ordinary desires that we know too well — all that becomes important. Surely every one of us can speak about that from our own experience in many different situations, but I hope that some of us have some experience of intention, and really working toward something.

Will it ever change here in Toronto? Each of the three groups has many wonderful people, and many wonderful initiatives. In my experience with each group, I could say that the work is alive in each one. Most separations remain separations. Some separations were obviously meant to be, just as some marriages seem destined for divorce and some for a fifty-year anniversary. One hopes that areas of mutual co-operation or mutual need might arise, and this might happen someday. I hope it doesn’t require a great emergency for this to happen. However, it’s important to remember that, in my experience, the movement toward unity is always uphill. It’s neither easy nor automatic. At the same time though, the tastes we have of wholeness or unity begin to reveal to us that this work is in fact a great service. That realization helps in the ongoing attempt to struggle with the arising of individual initiatives, in myself and in others.

Q. Over the years has there been a single teacher or a specific book that has been particularly meaningful to you? Is there a musical composition that you find yourself humming in tense moments – if you have tense moments?

There have been several teachers who have been meaningful to me, starting with my fourth grade teacher and going on through college. In fact, I consider myself pretty lucky in this respect. As a college freshman, I enrolled in three consecutive Humanities classes that Neal Miller Cross taught, using a book he coauthored called “The Search for Personal Freedom.” That was just what I needed at that point in my life. I was also lucky later on to take history courses with a man named Peter Szymanski, a brilliant, Russia-educated, French-trained Polish professor who was by his choice hidden away in the high mountains of Colorado.

From childhood, I loved the Sherlock Holmes stories and Zane Grey’s novels, and read and reread a dazzling little book called “The Hidden Hand,” written in the late 1800s — don’t ask me why — I still enjoy it. When I was twelve or thirteen, I read that huge, shocking, and thrilling book, “The Brothers Karazamov.” It made a huge impact on me and inspired a certain rapport with Eastern Orthodoxy, which persists to the present time.

I have many tense moments, but no particular musical compositions come to mind. There is very often a melody humming around in my brain, but usually the one of the moment is the one I listened to most recently, or most recently played on the piano. The Gurdjieff-de Hatmann music is particularly haunting. I do love Schubert, Bach, Mozart, Bartok, and Brahms for humming. But also I like contemporary music. For example, John Adams’ operas, and most anything by Elliot Carter. Amazing, but not too hummable.

Q. You have traveled quite widely and visited Work groups in numerous countries, for instance, England, France, and Australia, in addition to the United States and Canada. Do you find characteristic types everywhere? From your perspective, are there national or cultural differences in the Work to be detected?

First of all, I would like to say that in my opinion people who are attracted to the work often — very often — have certain similar characteristics. Keep in mind that this is only my opinion, which I’ve shared with many groups over the past few years. I suppose someone could do a kind of survey someday to see if my opinion holds any truth. So, in my opinion, there are a lot of good-looking people in the Work, no matter what country they live in. The women don’t always let their beauty shine out, but still, the beauty is often there. In addition, I notice that people in the Work are very often intelligent and well-educated, artistically talented, and often creative and resourceful. They are generally very good at washing dishes, too, and figuring out how to get one hundred people in a space that really only holds sixty. But these are my very subjective observations.

Certainly every country has its characteristics. For instance, the Australians are even more independent than Americans. It’s the island — and a fairly isolated island at that — mentality. Self-reliance is the thing. There surely must be Canadian characteristics, as well as Latin American, French, English, and so on. But everywhere one goes there are similar types: the natural leaders, the real seekers who find a work for themselves, the ones who find it difficult to speak, the ones who are only interested in the Ideas and the ones who are only interested in the Movements, those who proclaim their devotion to the search and who disappear without warning, the silent ones who after years explode in anger, the drinkers, the dutiful wives or husbands who sometimes end up more devoted to the Work than their partner, the Martha types and the Mary types, and so on. Probably any group has most of these types. When you are in a community for a long time, you get to know people pretty well. In fact, you know their kids and often their parents, you go through deaths and marriages, and you all get old together, so everyone goes on being an “older” person or one of “the young ones.”

Most important though is the experience I’ve had again and again of the similarities. The serious questions are the same, almost word for word; the feeling tone of the meetings are the same. There is a kind of taste or flavour, like a delicate scent that lingers in a room, which is the same in meetings in many of the groups I’ve visited, when the serious work appears, no matter where they meet.

But a little more on differences. Usually the main difference comes from which Gurdjieff pupil first brought the work to a group. There is loyalty to that person, of course, and a kind of imprint in the mind and heart from the way he or she presented the ideas and the work. This connects to your next question, because people in the Work need to find ways to work together in spite of quite natural loyalty and fealty, which is perhaps more often unconscious and therefore stronger than we think. We need to beware of imitation.

Q. Do you have a clear idea where the Work is heading, that is, where it will be in ten years time or in fifty years? Still alive and still working are some people – Paul Beekman Taylor and Patty de Llosa spring to mind – who, as children, recall meeting Mr. Gurdjieff. I keep meeting people who knew John Bennett, but I think Joyce Colin-Smith is the only person I know who actually met Mr. Ouspensky.

This is the question that keeps me up at night. I don’t have a very clear idea where the work is heading but I can share some rather muddled thoughts about it. Some of the best people I’ve know in the Work have branched out to fortify their work using other disciplines. Patty de Llosa is a good example. She has a very serious work with the Alexander Method, which seems a good support to her work with the Gurdjieff groups. Also, as she mentions in her book, she has a serious practice of Tai Chi, and in this way, she can share her knowledge and experience with a wide range of people, using knowledge and experience that is very much influenced by her years in the Gurdjieff work.

Others use their knowledge of science or the religions to find avenues toward explaining the ideas and practices of the Work. Of course, there is always the danger of diversion or of dilution. This can happen when other traditions are brought in to help deepen or broaden the understanding. Although the study of the specificity of the Gurdjieff Work is an interesting one, it’s not easy. It’s easier to say what it resembles than what it is, so this study is too often neglected now. It requires knowing the ideas in the books as well as in the memory of the oral teaching, and you could say, it requires real thought, which is pretty scarce these day. And often, people get too interested and leave the Work in order to practise one of those other traditions.

There are others still alive who met Gurdjieff, but surely the future of the work does not depend only on having met him or Ouspensky. The future of the work will depend on what has passed from person to person. Gurdjieff uses the image of a staircase, and you can’t go any higher on this stairway until you’ve placed someone on your step. And that person must place someone on his step, and so on. Of course, we hear this and think it’s simple and straightforward.

The problem I’ve encountered is that one really does not know what that next higher step will entail, what will be required of one, having placed someone else and having moved up a step. We forget that each step is new territory, and I suspect that it is the shock of finding oneself in new territory, alone, so to speak, that may stop the development needed to help everyone ascend. It’s too easy to drift along using past methods. Imitation only works up to point. I have been very glad to hear reports about the next generation in San Francisco. It sounds like they learned something over the years and now feel the obligation to pass it along.

Up to now the Work has served as a kind of pollinator. Hundreds of people have passed through its groups and back into life. When I look at old group lists, it’s quite amazing how many people have come and gone. Once in awhile, in San Francisco, I was stopped by someone on the street who would say he or she used to be in my group twenty-five or thirty years ago, and is “still doing the morning work and / or reading ‘Beelzebub.’” The Work will probably never be huge, but I do very much wish and hope that it remains alive, even in people who no longer attend groups. It’s very much needed.

Q. That’s eleven questions. My twelfth question is the following: Is there a question I should have asked you but didn’t which you yourself would like to ask and answer?

I’d like to paraphrase Gurdjieff and be asked, Have you met any remarkable men or women through your association with the Work? The answer is yes, indeed. I never met Gurdjieff himself, but like so many of my generation, through a close association with two remarkable people who had worked with him, I felt something of the unique and specific force that Gurdjieff generated.

Since moving to San Francisco in 1961, many special people moved through my life. Some I met in the Work, others I met because of the Work, usually at special events — luncheons, lectures, and so on. Laurens van der Post, Carlos Casteneda, James Hillman, and Father Thomas Keating are only a few of the latter group who come to mind. There were many others, and many other remarkable men and women who had worked with Gurdjieff.

I heard Krishnamurti speak twice and feel fortunate to have witnessed his presence and clarity in person. I had a life-changing exchange with Muktananda in northern California, a special introduction and conversation with Chogyam Trungpa in San Francisco, and a surprisingly live connection with Lama Zopa. Also, more recently, through Jim, I have met the Dalai Lama and Chogyam Trungpa’s son along with several well-known Canadian persons of importance.

Even more important though are the people I’ve “grown up with” in the Work. There are maybe 150 people, in various locations, whom I know and care for — people I’ve worked with and now their children — and almost every one of them is remarkable.

All in all, so far, a rich outer life. As to the inner life, it is filled at best with many questions, and at worst with dreams of all that has gone before and that which will come later. But there’s always room for more.

No more questions … thank you!

Barbara Wright

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John Robert Colombo is a Toronto-based author and anthologist who is nationally known as the Master Gatherer for his compilations of Canadiana. In his latest book of essays called “Whistle While You Work,” he has combined consciousness studies with Canadian references. From time to time he reviews Work-related publications for this website.

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Yes, light. And it is always
always, always the eternal rainbow
And it is always the day, the farewell day unkind.

Hart Crane. “The visible, the untrue”.

Echar luz sobre las cosas no significa decir la verdad.

Hablar sobre las largas horas en la carretera, el sábado por la tarde, de ningún modo arrojaría la menor claridad sobre lo sucedido.

Y me refiero a nuestro truncado viaje a Almería: pues no conseguimos llegar más allá de El Campello.

El motor de la furgoneta prestó su último escopetazo al rodar cansado de los ejes de las ruedas y el alborozo del humo, como último llanto, y el olor a quemado… la desdicha. Y quietos los ejes de las ruedas,

para cuando la furgoneta dijo:

“Basta!”

Varada, más apoltronada que yerma, la Mercedes blanca y sus casi treinta años de historia rodante por las carreteras de España y Europa…
Se detuvo a las dos y media del mediodía.

Una ballena todavía con la arrogancia del surfero, la Mercedes blanca, desflecada, herida, molesta por saberse en su inutilidad, cierto;

sensible empero, sí, incapaz de defenderse. Sí. Pero majestuosa en su tragedia, en sus esputos cariñosos de humo y calor y renuencia a decir basta.

Porque a pesar de no poder ir avanzando cordialmente, como ha venido haciendo en los últimos treinta años, su corazón de hierro y aceite hirviendo seguía rugiendo con el fervor del adolescente.

Su corazón mecánico seguía latiendo; es decir, quería latir.

Así que lo intentamos: llevarla adelante

Pero se encendían loa indicadores, alarmantes, alertando de que caso de seguir con aquello

(me refiero a hacer caso a la bravura de la Mercedes blanca)

y continuar carretera, hubiera devenido la gesta en implacable incendio, explosión y catástrofe.

Y aun así hubo dos intentos.

Roncos y valientes,

del modo como hacen los guerreros heridos en combate, cuando todavía su mano izquierda agarra la espada gallarda y salta torpe contra las hordas enemigas y se tropieza y cae, pero todavía grita.
Así el incuestionable arrojo de la Mercedes blanca, hasta dos veces lo intentó, hasta que aquello olía ya como el azufre que precede al infierno del desguace de coches.

Así que se hizo necesaria una evaluación de las circunstancias.

Y se hizo evidente que o elegíamos el reposo y la cura para la furgoneta blanca, la majestuosa Mercedes Benz, o le acontecería allí mismo la muerte.

Allí se quedó pues,

la ballena que todavía no ha perdido felizmente el aliento, a pesar de saberse vieja, a pesar de tenernos a nosotros pateándola con esos silenciosos insultos velados que fueron nuestros ojos escrutando sus entrañas.

Exigiéndole, ¿por qué? ¿por qué justo ahora?

Sin comprenderla

Porque.. ¿acaso somos capaces de comprender el sufrimiento ajeno?

La Mercedes blanca se quedó justo al frente de una restaurante erigido sobre un acantilado, cuya especialidad era la ensalada O.V.N.I

Las jarras de cerveza a tres euros aliviaron pues la decepción. Y la espera.

Y nos sacaron unas inestimables risas, necesarias.

Pues no habría concierto, no, no al menos esa noche. Pero la furgoneta volvería a casa sana y salva,

y así volvió: a los lomos pacientes de una grua roja de MAPFRE.

Y nosotros adentro de ella. Escondidos en la profundidad de la noche. Como los ejércitos troyanos que esperan para la invasión de la ciudad fortificada.

Esperando por el próximo concierto feliz de Los Alaridos Salvajes.

Deseando la pronta recuperación de la Mercedes Benz blanca.

Y que así lo vean mis ojos.

Las mujeres y las niñas miran desde la ventana la calle, el Manhattan de los años 4o. Juegos infantiles en Nueva York. Helen Levitt miraba también desde la ventana, metía su cámara entre los rostros y las peleas. En 1929 Hart Crane  había escrito “El puente”; el hundimiento de Wall Street llevó a los años negros de la Depresión, a los parados, a los comedores populares que describe Thomas Wolfe en su obra. En 1930 Paul Morand había publicado su “Nueva York”. Mientras tanto, a lo largo de los años, los niños juegan. Helen Levitt los observa y los deja inmortales, con sus movimientos y sus gestos en el aire.

“¡Calle de la mañana, calle de la esperanza! ¡Calle de la frescura y la luz oblicua, del precipicio frontal y la sombra azul y empinada – escribe Thomas Wolfe en  “Los cuatro desaparecidos” (“La orgullosa hermana Muerte“) ( Ediciones Librerías Fausto) -, calle del oro matutino de las aguas que danzan sobre mareas azotadoras, calle de los embarcaderos herrumbrados por el tiempo, calle del ferry de nariz achatada que echa espumarajos con su sólida pared de pequeños rostros blancos y mirones, silenciosos y atentos, vueltos hacia tí, calle orgullosa! ¡Calle de los aromas apetitosos del café recién molido, del grato olor del dinero recién impreso, de los crudos olores semidescompuestos del puerto con toda la evocación de sus mástiles dispuestos y sus marejadas de barcos, gran calle!”.

(Pequeña evocación a la memoria de la gran fotógrafa norteamericana Helen Levitt, fallecida el 29 de marzo de 2009 en Nueva York)

(Imágenes: fotos de Helen Levitt.- 1.-Nueva York, 1942.-masters-of-photography/ 2.-The New York Times/.-3.-Nueva York,1945.-masters-of-photography/3.-Nueva York, 1945.-masters-of-photography/ 4.-The New York Times/ 5.-The New York Times/ 6.-The New York Times)

On the wrong side of a debate with Henry VIII regarding the authority of the Pope, Sir Thomas More, the author of Utopia, was found guilty of treason on July 1, 1535. He was beheaded and his head was fixed on a pike over London Bridge for a month—the normal custom for traitors at the time.

The Bridge of Sighs in Venice passes over the Rio di Palazzo and connects the interrogation rooms in the Doge’s Palace with the prison. The bridge was named by Lord Byron who imagined that prisoners would sigh at their final view of Venice—and freedom—before being taken into their cells.

In 19^th Century novels in Britain, bridges appear as a motif in literature to represent the best fate for fallen women. It also reveals the Victorian ambivalence towards sex even when it occurs in marriage. In George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), Mirah, on being forced into a loveless marriage, contemplates throwing herself into a river, reinforcing the Victorian prejudice that falling into death is preferable to falling through sex.

In The Ambassadors (Henry James, 1903), Lambert Strether has been duped into believing that what exists between his soon-to-be stepson, Chad Newsome, and the French woman Marie de Vionnet is entirely pure. On a small tour to the French countryside before his return to America, he walks across a footbridge and sees Chad and Marie drifting in a small boat on the river. In a moment of shock, he recognises the true nature of their involvement.

One of my favourite novels and one that influences my current work is The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) by Thornton Wilder. It’s the story of a Jesuit friar who witnesses the collapse of a rope bridge in the mountains of Peru, plunging five travellers into the gorge below. The shaken friar . . . .

continue–>

A better title for this would be: the beautiful problem of literary intractability.

Reading Speech and Phenomena, as most people are occasionally wont to do, I can’t help but consider a question that’s been breaking in from elsewhere (namely, from four years of struggling with the momentary and siren-slick break-ins of meaning that come–and come lately, or more often, don’t come at all, but tease within the promise of a faked memory of having-come, promising-to-return–from meditation and bad married like with troubled poems. Cf., Hart Crane’s The Bridge). What on earth are we doing reading difficult texts? I could attempt to answer a thousand-odd questions here, foremost (and most annoying) of which is that perennial, Bloom-esque question about canonization and difficulty, &c &c. Have you heard of Alain Bourdieu? Have you taken him out for tea? (He’s dead.) Have you heard the sociology students complain about him in the halls? (He grows more dead.) Alain, I’m going to leave you alone for now–kudos to your graphs and charts, your ability to distinguish among fine jazz, but I don’t really think what’s at stake in a — my, this — question of literary intractability is really a question of cultural power, insidious capital, or the things that Rockefeller bequeath’d unto the generations. So. I bracket you! (Now please go back to the basement.)

How do we see and get around lacunae in our reading? How, especially, since coming to see these lacunae, in a fairly (unrigorous) Hegelian sense, is the act that is itself the moment of, the process of, overcoming? Seeing our own difficulties is a monument to getting beyond them–once we know them, we’re not there. (Once)(If) we can speak them, we’re carving on a grave–Here my textual difficulties used to be,/ dead for my (surprise!) having come (now!) to see. Easy enough, right? This seems like a simple question of contextual literacy, right? Pay attention and the meaning will come home to you, right? Sleep in your bed and smell like a soldier, right? But does it really work like that? Does meaning, if it returns to you at all, really remember your name? Can you actually sleep with your difficulties, hold their stupid wooden claws at the ferris wheel deck? Or is the closest that we can come the act of burial, the choice of hymns as testament to our knowing them, to what we thought we knew?

Clearly, this is not just a simple question of literacy. (I am lying to you right now. I am lying to you with my rhetoric.) This is not just a simple question of literacy because there are no simple questions of literacy–there are, I would suppose, simple speakings of questions of literacy. There are utterances which simplify, which ‘give clarity.’ But we must remember that they do just that: add on clarity–clarity as supplement, as additive–more like a transparent veil than like a dissolving away. And isn’t what we want the dissolving away?

I’m not lying anymore–what I’m attempting to configure may be fairly familiar: we think that the text ‘knows’ something (something something–a secret substance, a secret message–something…about itself?) that we do not. We think that we are caught up in the interim, knee-deep in the swamps, standing in the vine, distracted by the neighbor’s mare, pulled back to our Uncle’s house because cherubim was a word he used to use. We think it’s us, and not the text, that’s lost in the mire of it. We think it’s us, moreover, who need to get free of it–out from our confusion, the world, the embodiment of our readership, all of those unsightly little traces of our finite specificity, in order to be with the text. It’s like a story my friend once told me, about a book I swore I’d never read (and never have): once in Arabia there was a young girl in a brothel who kept herself pure and bathed with myrhh (and probably birch beer) every night, in preparation for the arrival of her Lord. All of the other whores eventually gave in, and took lesser suitors with bright suits and…well, presence. They were around; whoever she was waiting for obviously wasn’t coming, on account of his always having been not-here-yet. But the young not-whore under the mark of the whore persisted–resisted? endured?–and, eventually, her Lord came. And presumably ravaged her. (Also, I think his name was Jesus, but this part of the story was highly unclear. Perhaps it was because we were both sixteen, and in a car.) Insofar as there is an ethics–some element of responsibility–to the project (who would even call it that? do we dare? with what consequences) of readership, it’s one of the order of the parable: to prepare ourselves, in what Heidegger would call anticipatory resoluteness, for the coming of the unknown God.

The trouble with this expectant-pietistic approach towards reading is that we’re not exactly waiting for whatever it is that’s to come. We’re expecting to better be able to explicate what’s already there. In short, we’re affecting a sort of perfectionist archaeology under the neon lie of futurity. Nobody waits on the text–not like Jeeves waits on the table or Heidegger’s shepherd-watchmen keeps vigilant over the land. If we bow before the text, it’s not to kiss or feel–it’s to scratch.

What is this scratching? What marks it as practice? Most notably, this hermeneutics of scratching manages to both be preemptive and defensive. We keep both eyes closed. As Walker Percy argues in “The Loss of the Creature,” we lose the dogfish for the lab manual. At the price of our own encounter with the text, we enter into an economy of exchange. The boon? Strategies, methods; codes of signification, a fluent recognition of chunks of form and meaning. We get: Strophe! Trochee! Allegory! Slant rhyme! And what we lose are our own eyes–eyes that have already been places, seen things like texts before (and even, I hope, things unlike texts)–eyes that, even if ‘impurely,’ could stand to be up for the task of reading. Thus armed, the text does not reveal itself to us. It sits closed up inside its openness because we dig with tools that order and arrange, that see based on a predetermination of the scope of recognition. We develop a thousand measurements for the shell of the clam–how long would it take us to forget that we could pry it, eat it, break our small feet into it, or drop it back and free?

What drives us out from the garden and into this bear market? A certain fear. But–a fear of what? Surely not of the text, and surely not of our own eyes. What seems to mediate here is instead a certain horizon of expectation–a publicness that makes demands of what is worth seeing and what is not worth seeing. (That’s how we read it, anyway. I’m going to argue that most demands that look like claims of value and worth may well just be descriptive sediments of historical occurrence–how we have read. Not that tradition’s descriptions don’t [leer/glow] with the power of the normative!) To be more explicit: we scratch at texts because we’re taught that we’ll be dumb if we’re not to. We scratch at texts by a shadow power that twins the “anxiety of influence” that Bloom argues holds sway among authorship, and accounts for the coherence (and, not quite sui genersis, but creeping close, its formations) of the literary canon: there exists an anxiety of readership that makes our primal (ontically primal–not ontologically primordial) encounter with the text an encounter with two questions: is this good? and is this how i’m supposed to be doing this? Under the pale of this anxiety, the reader encounters no text: she encounters herself, threatened, desperate for evidence but too terrified to look.

How do we see a text, then? How do we read?

(1) First, a detour: we have to be careful how we (even) ask these questions. I almost wrote–and still want to write–something like the following: How do we really see (the) text? How do we (come to) actually read?

These questions assume a whole lot of presence on the part of the text. As Derrida argues, probably through Freud or experiences with his own faeces, these questions are themselves symptomatic of the anxious disease that still grips the reader. It’s sort of like how John Keats coughed up his lungs–what we think we want is actually what’s killing us.

So we won’t ask those questions. And thus–of course, I mean, this blog has a picture of a bear in a canoe on it–this means we’ll have to dispense with all delusions of mastery or univocity. If we can’t ask about the way to read, or the real way to read, what on earth are we doing? I almost feel that…no, it couldn’t possible be that…: yes, we’re just making shit up. The methods aren’t less clear, so of course I can’t yet tell you if it’s true. Anyway, that’s not my horizon: bottoms-up, let’s just hope this thing is useful. It’s rather long, so it had better be at least as useful as your time. In fact, your time is the usefulness of this exercise. Clap your hands.

(2) Jesus was said to have said something about how “he who loses his soul will gain it.” I don’t have a citation for that, which will either tell you something about what sort of a Religious Person I am or what sort of a scholar I am not, but it’s important: it seems that, if we let go of the Ideal of the Pure Presence of the Textual Object as something Pre-Endowed with a Coherent and Self-Contained Meaning that can be Explicated By the Well-Training Scholar (er, Formalist), we’ve got to let go of something bigger (in the general sense). In order to (begin) read(ing), we must abandon the text.

We must abandon all ideas of what a text looks like and does. We must face it as we’d face death. What do we know about how we face death? What I know about that is that I’ve a whole lot of ridiculous fears and crazy assertions (and a collection of fairly vivid images), none of which connect up in any sort of particularly compelling system, and almost all of which exist in bizarre juxtapositions of contradiction and affect. I see chains and hell, I am a strange vantage from a cloud, I remember Harding’s tomb, or how I was made to dress as a clown for my grandmother, dying; I remember the chipmunk that I buried and dug up three times one spring, because my mother let me. I can’t sort through these notions in any conventionally “productive” way. That is, I can’t make decisions among them, or judge which to adhere to, which to let scare me, which to let stand hopeful in the citadel of my (postmodern) heart–at least not in any conventionally coherent way. That is, to use some Husserl-via-Derrida, there is no immediately available object of experience (my death; O ma-mort!) to fulfill my tentative judgments, to allow me to cast some to the dustheaps and some (for later use) to the broom closet. I’ve got to deal with the mad pick of faith, or with contingency (or aesthetics, maybe–more on that later).

To approach a book like death, then, means to feel the weight of all of our unfulfilled expectations. This isn’t just neutral weight, either–it’s the stammering weight of a thousand demands on us, from us, from elsewhere. When we withhold our inclination to scratch, to-read-as-to-dig, to read as teacher taught, we are the being that confronts those expectations. We gain our subjective readership back when we abstain from reading as such. There is first an ‘I’ that declines; then there is the ‘I’ who might begin to cast off; and through (and only through) this casting off of the heavy husks and holding armors of reading strategy (the most insidious code word ever for “bad gift from the public nowhere”) we might start to read. (Of course, we can’t really give any of that up. But it’s only by engaging that fantastic possibility that we can know the weight of what constrains us, that we can learn to shift it, or even–hold pause, hold pause–to begin to use it. To really use it!)

But that’s just part of it.

Parts of the text will still confound me–me, conscious-of-tradition me, me, the subject suspicious of my own historicity. But we want it that way. This is the specific difference that makes literature literature. Literature offers us a theory of the useless–a sort of post-childhood myth of the holding room for lost objects, for the lost parts of experience, for the differences that ‘bounce’ and seem not to register.

Parts of the text just won’t make sense. Most of these parts may confuse me or bore me–these I’ll weigh in the moment. Parts of the text will break in on me violently–this is how Faulkner moved me before I knew anything about the differences in narrative monologue, or how Joyce took away an entire April when I was fifteen. As Robert Hass once said, “It hardly had to do with her.” What got me in those books was the intractability of the strangeness, the irreducibility particularity and will-to-stick-together of certain persistent phrases: Quentin’s “Oh. Abestos,” his tripping over Dalton’s name (“Dalton Ames Dalton Ames Dalton Shirt Dalton Ames”–another day, we’ll re-read this passage as the breaking-in of the material, but I’m much too hungry and tired, and I’ve already typed James Agee’s name too many times and too superficially this weekend to justify any further violence. Well, of that sort, anyhow–); or Joyce’s “agenbit of inwit” (which, it turned out, meant just that). Poems, too, may mean in all sorts of ways, but the ones that I remember had quivering voices in them: my tenth-grade English teacher’s impassioned bass over the last lines of Keat’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”–how interpollated, and willfully, I felt in that instant!–or Marilyn Brownstein’s strange treble as she closed her eyes over the cusp of morning and into the final hopes of Ashbery’s “Hop O’ My Thumb.” Affect. Their voices, breaking, broken in on, softened, modified, made strange by the occasion. My body riveted, the trace of the voice in my head longing to speak.

Rhetoric’s got a name for that (I’ll look it up for you)–an utterance, the sole purpose or effect of which is to drive its audience to speak. Boom: now you want to make a sound too. If it’s a good boom, maybe you want to make a sound just like mine. Maybe you want to read my poem–this very one I’ve just read. Maybe you’ll shout it alone in the shower. The so-called “affective theory” of readership has its numerous proponents–in fact, who could really object to what Richard Eldridge, via Houlgate and Stanley Cavell, calls the “sensuous immediacy” of the reading experience as a part of the reading experience we wouldn’t want to forget? Importantly, then, affect is the bearer of memory: I remember Ulysses having been that way, and if I really clear my hopes, and can reclaim that attic, I think that Moby Dick–different, yes, but in the order of the same, strange enough to be a neighbor–might be that way for me, too.

The question about affect, then, concerns its situation: how much does strategy hollow out, or pre-prescribe, our ability to be affected by a text? If there’s some bare wax stratum of how we read–some tabule rasa awaiting Locke’s pen, the realtor’s mark of closing, my name and my education–then won’t the cuneiform of my education and my anxieties come to compete with whatever fire might jump up from that block upon meeting John Updike or Jack Gilbert or William Gass? Are these experiences of “pure affect” every really pure? I mean, is my ability to read fucked up because I’ve read all this criticism? Can I ever get back John Donne without the chiasmus, Dickinson without the slant? Enough to discover–oh, Lord; to re-discover?–the crossings in him, the difference of her rhyme?

Yes, and no. As I’ve said (everybody’s spit in my mouth), we can’t ever get out from our worldliness–from tradition, from our mother’s cooking, from our father’s stubby eyelashes that are glued all over our goddamned pug-nosed faces. There’s going to be a fight anyway, so there may as well be a feasting. What I mean by that is this: literary criticism is important. The act of literary criticism (writing it and reading it), far from inscribing strategy, is actually the ‘dissolving agent’ which saves reading. Actually, I’ve lied again: it does both. It puts us back in the circle of readership, the inevitable hermeneutics of always already looking for and being anxious about something. (Meaning’s like my kindergarten teacher told me about her leprechaun sighting: there it is! Gone around the corner of the building.) And, by being woken up in that circle, by looking at those scores and marks on our little wax blocks of readerly substratum (“after the virgin, before a discourse,” quoth Kristeva), we prepare the ground for the arrival of new affect, for the awakening of our ability to be affected, which has been scored up, marked down, long slumbering under the brighter demands to find metaphor and is that part about the thighs going walking metonymy? Let me say it again, louder: you can’t get it back! You can go home again! But you can’t get it back. It might not be your home. In the case of my home, it is my willow tree; but it is also fifty-five ugly condominiums and streets named after the adult children of the neighbors who betrayed my family in a time of zoning-related crisis. So, I mean, like I said, you can go home again. But you’re not going to get rid of the marks. You’re going to soften them, make them transparent sometimes, as they would have made you transparent before. You’re going to pay attention, to be vigilant. You’re going to have to fight with yourself sometimes, to say, I like this part best, where Olson says “fish fish fish,” and I don’t even care why.

It’s sort of like how Jesus comes into the hearts of the sinners and knocks on the closed doors first. Because, really, where are there any opened doors? Where are we looking, save empty ideality, we when (I) utter this awful deferral: really?

So you’re a reader now. One question remains (again– for later): do you write about it? If you yourself turn the critic that you already are, do you write about it? What do you write about? Do you tell us about Olson and his fish? Do you get them into the open? Do they dry up under the weight of the apparatus? Are they augmented by it? Do you cook them on the fires of your longings, on the spurs of your application of continental hermeneutics? Are they good for that? Are they better than that? Are they fish anymore? Are they beautiful?

But now we’ve got to talk about blind spots–I’ve almost forgotten them three times now, and that’s the only way I’ll remember. (Write it down: about the forgetting.) All of this is well and good: beautiful fish, and the occasional annoyance (acrostic poetry) or bad memory (teaching Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Recuerdo” to seventh-graders for an entire summer, some of whom insisted that “Recuerdo” was a poet who had a whole bunch of interesting stuff to say about New York and her mother).

But most of it isn’t at all. I’d proffer that a whole lot of the average (and even above-average: yes, academia, I am talking at you) reading experience doesn’t register at all. We lose what we don’t understand–we can’t even see it, so how could we register it as loss? All our songs of mourning look towards whatever’s just passed–those scant few agenbits and angels that catch on the lip of our fleeting incomprehension. But most of it we don’t see, and don’t remember. And this, I think, is the more interesting problem with textual difficulty. Am blind, but now: to see?

The trouble with blindness–and we, I, must be careful with this metaphor, since it is only impartially ripped from the real, and both junctures are a wound–is precisely that: one can’t see, one cannot know (insofar as seeing ever constitutes knowing; consult John Berger or Martin Jay on that one) the things one’s not seeing. I mean this in two ways: literary blindness–the regular aporiae of the everyday reading experience–covers over what’s there to see, and also the fact of our own blindness or concealing-ness, which we might otherwise expect to appear relationally, through contradistinction. This becomes even more seamy when we deal with so-called “difficult texts” (Rilke in the German or Crane in the English) because we do still receive affect: not “from” the text, in any transparent or incarnadine way, but from the near side of our blindness–from our frustration. 

Now, I guess I’ve given it away with that little architectonics of différance in the phone–phone–phone–telephone wires. (Whew, got there!): I’ve sewed you up a strawman. But I’m no worse than most metaphysicians (not that that ever convinced St. Matthew.)(I am, however, marginally better than most highbrow comediennes. I’ll defend that margin.) So, really, truly: we must decide what blindness concerns. Is blindness about the things to which we are blinded, or about the us blindered from the things of our desired, blocked seeing? It seems, here, that we can’t have the one without the other: neither the sight of things or my sighted being become present to me in the moment of my blindness. There’s a boon, though. This blindness is not without knowledge: what returns to me, a battered loot, is the knowledge of my own blindness. Which is really (once more) two separate knowledges: the knowledge of what I want to know, the imagination or ideal construction of what I think I should be seeing; and the blockage. 

Now, you may be starting to see something peculiar: from this, it looks like we may well be able to read texts blind. How’s that? Well–we ignore the blockage, and make due with the strong imagination of what we think we should be seeing. I know this well: I used to suffer from a persistent dream, in which I’d be on my side, in a forest, some yards away from a riverbank. People were always doing something in the river–talking, laughing, yelling. Sometimes terrible things were happening to them. I always had my head turned away, right eye (the riverside eye) closed. I could see–the forest, my hand, perhaps, a rock– and I could hear just about everything that came from the river (the invitations; the cries for help), but I could not, for the life of me, open up that right eye to the river. The sight I had didn’t help me deal with the sound, and the sound just called me to want that blinded-out sight. But I knew the names of the characters. I could eavesdrop well. And I knew that I was in a wood. So I always spent the rest of my dream, lying still and half-blind on the dank leaves, reconstructing the story against the pain of the acknowledgment that I could not participate. (Or fully participate, rather–participate in the way I was imagining, was desiring to imagine; for all I know, I could have been the centerfold, the real heart of the scene).

I tell this story because I think it is also an unexpected antidote. We could read, as before, bracketing off the foundational substratum of our blindness, reducing the movement of the différance that is our (impossible) desire to see texts clearly, to read books purely, to become the body of the virgin hermeneutics, forgetting, willfully, that frustration that troubles us. Or we could read like I was forced to read the riverbank: frustrated, blind but with an eye to what I did see before me, entrenched in the difference between sight and sound, desiring my own intended participation while suspicious of my prostrate involvement. 

Can you hold two balls at once? Have you ever approached a house from two directions at night and failed to see it cohere? Do you remember the narrator’s initial confusion in Bruce Springsteen’s My Father’s House? I ask that you bear with me for a moment, because Heidegger is needed here to clarify an important structural component of this blindness-difficulty, but I’m going to have to split apart from myself (kisses, temporality) to try to do the trick. You’ll notice something about the structure of the blindness described above: it is doubled, split from itself within itself, at the very seat of itself. (So too, for Derrida, is différance itself the very movement of the split origin, the root that roots its identity in difference, its sameness in temporal-spatial discontiguity. Différance lives everywhere, but only in the between. If it could be anything, it would be the voices in the telephone wires–differing, distancing, deferring, delivering.) We can’t see (1) the stuff that we want to see, and we can’t see (2) the “fact” that we cannot see, our “blindness itself.”  In “The Turning,” Heidegger further elaborates the structure of the “Concealed” which is the secret, mysterious realm of Being. Man is usually so concerned with the setting-forth of the demands of the order of science (stellen)–putting the material of the world to human uses for purposes, as could be defended by reasons–that he loses himself in the order of the Unconcealed. In wanting desperately to unconceal, man suddenly encounters only himself–without the Concealed, what else remains for him to order, to explicate? But, Heidegger turns back: here, setting-forth man, technological man, does not really encounter himself everywhere. In fact, quite the contrary: man sees, finds himself nowhere. This is because technological man, in setting stuff forth for purposes, forgets himself–as Heidegger phrases it, he forgets that he, uniquely, is the claimant of being. Man has been chosen by Being to do Being’s work. How can man know what work there is to be done? How can he play the midwife to a Being that is Concealed, and that does not speak his language? Heidegger gives us only this: be vigilant. 

Later, in his essays on language, Heidegger matches this ocular admonition with the aural: he modifies the “anticipatory resoluteness” of Being and Time to “anticipatory listening.” Man shepherds Being by listening carefully, openly–for whatever comes next, for whatever is to come. (More on this, with some Benjamin and more of my lapsarian-literati nonsense, avenir!) That’s beautiful. That’s true, that’s Good, that’s Just. And that happens all the time! Not. Heidegger’s not shy to point out that man lives and breathes and dies (not consciously, of course) in the slime and muck of his own forgetting. I bring this up because it brings us to completion of the first half of the magic trick (remember that? It was the yellow handkerchief–): forgetting, for Heidegger, also has a double structure. At the end of “The Turning,” he tells us of the double falling-off of awareness of the Concealed as Concealed: 

The coming-to-pass of oblivion not only lets fall from remembrance into concealment; but that falling itself falls simultaneously from remembrance into concealment, which itself also falls away in that falling (Turning, 46).

So it all falls apart–and not just apart, but away. Heidegger’s double falling (perhaps an infinite falling?) strikes me as incomprehensibly sad. It is a warning against a slumber from which we cannot awake–a deafness which learns no other signs, a blindness that does not goes on, ripping up the earth and ravaging the page, as if it were sighted. I once dreamed a dream that fit this sadness–there was simply a single mule, standing, eyes closed. The mule rotted away to dust before my eyes–no blood, no maggots, just dust. I struggle to describe it: it was as if he simply slept into himself. Or sloughed off into himself. Or forgot himself, but heavily. Heavily, because, I think, he was still there, and just too tired, too already fallen in, to take responsibility for that last thing: his body, his rotting, his death. 

What might this–O mule of clay, O time that slows and then eats us–have to do with an ethics of reading? It articulates a fear: mine, Heidegger’s, maybe your own. This is the fear that we cannot be converted. This is the fear that our deaf hunger to listen better will prevent us from hearing. This is the fear that our blindness will make us pretend we are sighted so that we are blinded a second time to what the text might do for us. This is the fear that I’ll run from the parts of Stephen Dedalus’s monologues that I don’t understand; this means that, when my Gadamer comes in the mail, I leave it sitting by my bedside, every day waiting, wanting, everyday cowering in fear of its supposed “difficulty.”

This, you’ll note, is still a provisional approach. I’ve circled around, but cut the tractor across the middle: we’re back to boring aesthetics thesis no. 1: literary criticism is good for us. But–I keep forgetting! Before I forget for good!–I want to carry us back to the hopeful messianic ethics of reading formulation; which we will call, after the miracles of the New Testament, second sight. (I’ve just recalled–much forgetting tonight–that Ricouer looks for a “second naiveté”–I suppose I’m not so clever.) I promised two moments of Heidegger. So too did Heidegger promise some hope: he said that the moment of forgetting, when it becomes really bad (and the text is silent here, so note that I’m improvising)–when the atom bomb comes, or when my death breaks in on me because my elbow has shattered extraordinarily while I was on my most living and ordinary way–calls us by two names: the danger and the saving-power. They go together, structurally, like Heidegger’s ontic and ontologic, or the estranged-loving movements of Derrida’s différance; and they are important for ethical readers: the danger is the saving-power. Working our way out of our blindness–my sound and fury, the spittle of my insignificant, unsignifiable struggles at the site of Absalom, Absalom!–does not require the mediation from some above. Wayne Booth won’t help us; not, at least, until we help ourselves. 

So what do we have in our old-tool kit, ready-at-hand in those moments of being assailed by a text’s difficulty? What about the times when I hate Charles Olson–radically hate him, hate him for his passenger’s lists, hate him for his dumb travails around Gloucester, hate him because he gives me those moments of clarity, I sd, like mountain flowers so rarely–and have, want,  nothing to do with him? I could pretend that it was beautiful. I could try to see it differently. I could pray. I could talk about it. I could make recourse to criticism. 

Of all of these options, only the latter two are “concrete.” The first, I think, happens more often than we would like to think it does; the second, too, but often violently. These first two strategies, I think, are the medium of a whole lot of the comments that get piped up in undergraduate literary classrooms, where expectations of some mysterious but deeply felt obligation to “get it right” (seem to) howl louder than ghosts in the attic. The third, I think, happens least of all. In Biblical scholarship, yes. (It might, after all, do us some good to remember that hermeneutics comes out of Biblical hermeneutics–it was only after some folks made a fuss about and dismissed the primacy of the Bible as an absolutely locked system of signification that angsty folks like Bakhtin and Eagleton and Greenblatt moved on to other fullnesses.) 

How can reading be prayer? First, I want us to look back at all of those possible responses–which I’m sure are only some of the possible responses to these moments of absolute frustration with difficult texts. What do they have in common. As per my (now almost-forgotten; I am constantly rescuing things from the quick-falling sediments!) question, what tools do we have at hand, in the throes of the text, when the text isn’t there? Our frustration. 

I repeat: you, reader. You own your frustration.

And here’s where prayer comes in. It would seem that if you sit in that for awhile–it’s trouble, I know–and meditate on that trouble; if you ask out, with or without address, and love that frustration through the focusing struggle of a prayer or question’s asking; you will get an answer that changes the substratum of the question. You will change your expectations. Perhaps we will all become numinous with patience. We will find that our shovels have changed into our opened ears. 

What all of that means may be mightly “unclear”–and, my friends, perhaps it must be that way. I fought with Heidegger for weeks over this line of solution. He calls it meditative thinking. It is the way of thinking of prayer, of the question. God might live there is God lives still; the poets, too. He sets it apart from calculative thinking. This latter kind of thinking builds factories and drains the swamps, builds fine cities and is Jane Jacobs; the former tends and cultivates, is with the self-presencing of meaning as if the thinker weren’t there at all. Thus, techne is a form of physis in which the watchmen of being–us, Dasein, men, you, you and your hipster running shoes–effaces himself, in love, in partnership, in–necessity. He sinks, like a positive image of my tragic dream mule, into the surety of his claim. He has been chosen. The poet, thus, fades–and helps Being become. 

Now goodness, I’m all creeped out. You’ve gone and turned all objectivist on me. I’ve gone and turned all formalist on you. No, no–we’re still pals. Here’s why: just as the poet fades in and out of the poem, just as our self-conscious subjectivities (our persistent myths of the self-present now, God bless us all and our lies and our time!) are by this season lucid, by this season pale, so too is man-the-shepherd never gone for good. It’s like Rilke says (and I hate this poem; it just happens to be so damned illustrative):

The Archaic Torso of Apollo
Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

So: let’s get things straight. You’re still a subject (phew!); you are helping Being do its thing; you are hopeful and skeptical, just like the movement of différance; you are trying to get open, to be awake, to hear the specificity of the text–its difference, its difficulty. You give it your face when it plagues you. It is unknowable other: what do we do with Rilke’s Apollo, with brilliance or marble or fur? And what do we do with the fact that, from that, we’ve received this directive?:

You must change your life.

I suppose that we do. We try. Letting texts change us–letting their difficulties be beautiful and frustrating, letting them break in on us–requires an open comportment. Although this open comportment–the open ear of tolerant readership, which sounds alot less like trumpets and strident than ethical reading; but I think the soft underbelly of justice is very important–demands a future-orientation, a smile for future struggle (and it will come), one can’t “get” open by struggling into it. I think Heidegger’s right here–at least for reading: getting open may well look like a “letting go,” a breath out, a letting being be. Does that mean that we must abandon all rigor when we read? No. That we must conflate our precise practices with the structure of the koan, the attitude (but not “logic”) of “beginner’s mind”? Yes. That too. Both and. 

If we could only get open. My friend Liza wrote that in a wonderful poem about a trip in a car with her father. It’s funny what we remember from poetry. That seems about right. It’s a little thing, and it’s everything. Or, Jack Gilbert on the devil: 

But saved there, too. Paying attention. To details. Learning the word that you hear that you can’t say. It took me two months in the classroom to realize that Tschüss was just that. There are other words that I have carried for years–sometimes mistaking them, sometimes making the other mistake of carrying them sleeping, of sleeping when they are so awake and full of the fragile spice of other places. Or was it me who was fragile? Who must be afraid of the fragility of difference? The reader, or the text? Poems–novels too, probably–get their form, their book, by a miracle. That difference is sedimented. It’s not going anywhere. It’s probably not talking straight, either. But this is OK–and important for an ethics of readership. Because an ethics of readership, one in which we’ve concomitantly given up and been given our shovels for ears, is more or less an ethics of preparation. As in, get out the brooms and sweep the temple porches. As in, read as much as you can, listen to as much as you can, because there are all sorts of differences. As in: pay enough attention so that you can be arrested by the idiom, so that you can repeat it in justice or keep it as its secret-need demands.

“Make every moment the straight gate through which the Messiah can enter.” A professor of mine always said that. He attributed it to Derrida, but I think it really comes from somewhere else. Someone Derrida read, or talked to. I always blanched at this mistake; but I now wonderful if it was not intentional. Even if not intentional, it seems somehow still (yet) necessary. 

So reading: how do we do it? Is it too mystical to say that the text has a strange grace? A grace that it holds tightly, that it bestows, not as a mica its shards, but like a glow that reduplicates. The thing about grace (I’ve been told) is that you can’t work for it: it comes over you. It assails you. But, not entirely askance, we can work for one other thing that helps for grace. We can do this by acknowledging that we’re working within it: patience, that responsibility that hones our waiting. 

And if the text does not come? Does not throw up its full meaning? This is beginning to sound more and more like a primer for the taming of wild animals. The thing is, they’re always running away. You are going to be approaching a fleeing object. What you will be possessing will not be the woman in the next room–maybe you will be in the room, and she outside without you. Desire is different than getting. Of course you can’t have it to keep. Look at your body. Look at what’s left of Plato. The intractability of the literary is not the closed door of the house of meaning. That strange and drawing sign–Hass’s blackberry, Ashbery’s Undine, the “plastic parts of poems” that cannot be reduced–it is not a wreath on the door. 

But you’re outside? The poem, then, has evicted you from your house of meaning? Look up. Derrida, via Benjamin, speaks of the structure of the “weak messianic”–this is to prepare the tomb for the king who has fled for the return of the unknown king, who may be the same, who may be iterated differently, who may yet come, who may defer infinitely in coming.

But this preparation is itself a way. We have forgotten the Sumerian votaries–those painted without eyelids. We may never know “who squired the glacier woman down the sky.” But in waiting for that to come we make ready our ears and eyes in the present. In waiting, hoping, listening, are we there? Are we (finally) ready to read?

Well, maybe reading on Perseus isn’t all that bad after all, except for their sometimes confusing punctuation. I was excited to come across the source of the epigraph to “Atlantis” from Hart Crane’s The Bridge in Eryximachus’ speech:

καὶ ἔστιν αὖ μουσικὴ περὶ ἁρμονίαν καὶ ῥυθμὸν ἐρωτικῶν ἐπιστήμη

And to round off the afternoon, I am discovering Beethoven’s A minor quartet (op. 132). I first heard it in that movie, Copying Beethoven, but I preferred the B-flat quartet at the time.

(Found out why Perseus pages of Symposium are so slow and take so long to load: someone thought it was a good idea to put notes to the text on the same page under one of those collapsable tabs they have, but no one bothered to split up the notes so that, say, only notes to Stephanus page 180 are displayed with page 180, but all the notes for the whole work are downloaded and displayed on every page. Also, it’s hard to tell the breathing marks, especially when it’s under a circumflex.)

An interview with Brian Culhane, winner of the 2007 Emily Dickinson First Book Award for a poet over the age of 50.

By Tim Appelo
Poetry Media Services

Tim Appelo: Your poetry is grounded in the classics. On your way to writing about that subject, did you go through other distinct literary phases?

Brian Culhane: A Miltonic one in my 20s. His sonnets led me to write early poems that were gnomic and dense. One falls under the spell of these great presences. I wrote a long poem called “The Bridge” in allusive, crabbed lines on a metropolitan theme and handed it to my roommate. He said, “Didn’t Hart Crane write a long poem called ‘The Bridge?’” Stanley Kunitz was my thesis advisor. He’d scrawl on a poem, “This is Lowell. The worst of Lowell.” I also had the good fortune to have James Wright as my teacher: a puffy face and slit eyes and big thick glasses—a minatory presence, even though he was a gentle man. I’d written an exam on a typical Wright question: “It has been said that poetry is no better than push-pin. Explain.” Wright was quoting Jeremy Bentham, who argued that both poetry and push-pin, a child’s game kind of like the modern pick-up sticks, are equally valuable if they produce the same degree of pleasure. On my exam, Wright wrote, “Cool-hane, no one will ever take your ideas seriously until you learn how to spell.” I’d gone to Manhattan private schools when they didn’t teach spelling.

TA: “The King’s Question” refers to Croesus, who (Herodotus says) asked the oracle at Delphi what would happen if he invaded Persia. The oracle said he’d destroy a great empire—only he didn’t realize it’d be his own, not Persia. But in your poem, Croesus’s question is lost; we don’t know what it was. Why?

BC: The past throws out to us lifelines, messages. What is left out is interesting. The poem imagines that we didn’t ever hear that story, and that would make sense—Sophoclean dramas were all lost, except for a handful. Why did I change what we know from Herodotus’s story of Croesus? Most of his history is taken from oral tradition, which can easily change in the retelling. Maybe Herodotus got the story wrong. Was that really the question Croesus had in mind? Is that what we would ask the oracle in our own lives? How many questions do we have in us, great ones?

Today, we’re not writing questions and sticking them into the wall at Delphi anymore. In the Manhattan neighborhood I grew up in, the correlative for the priestess talking with the vatic utterances was the psychotherapist.

TA: I love that the shrink is knitting.

BC: That brings up Clotho.

TA: One of the Three Fates of Greek mythology, spinning the threads of life. Spinning your fate. Your fate seems to have been spun by libraries.

BC: I like libraries, and tend to do my best research when I’m not researching. I spent years in a library researching a dissertation on the epic. Once in a while I’d simply wander the library and pluck a volume, and become inspired—it was one of those aleatory combinations of time, place, and book. All first lines are accidents.

TA: Many of your poems read like a scholar’s reverie. You write in “Library”:

That fable
Of an infinitely circular Library of Babel
Borges saw as self-referential: nooks
Corridors, dead ends, twisting stairwells:
Bibliographic cargo cults and infidels.

You go on to compare libraries in this poem to the supernatural cargo cults formed by remote Pacific islanders awed by World War II GIs dropping crates full of wonders from afar.

BC: I’m misconstruing, comically from one perspective, tragically from another. What we cast off, what washed ashore because of the wars we fought with machines, these people could make no sense of. I’m also alluding to the coming tide of change, which the islanders can’t do anything about.

TA: How old or new is the work in your book?

BC: “Estrangement in Athens” is my first published poem, which makes it about 30 years old. About a quarter of the poems were written in the last four years. I’m happy that no book came to fruition until now. The book is a lot better for being winnowed. There’s a pressure on poets to publish too early.

TA: Now that you’ve done this, does that change your practice?

BC: No. The muse is an intermittent visitor. If I could speed up the process, I would. Maybe when I’m 75 there’ll be another prize—for the second book of a poet who’s not published a second book until he’s 75.

Tim Appelo has been an editor at Amazon.com and a contributor to the Washington Post and the Timeses of New York, LA, and Seattle. This article first appeared on www.poetryfoundation.org. Learn more about Brian Culhane, and his poetry, at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by Tim Appelo. All rights reserved.