Finished Suite Francaise. Moving, beautiful, heart-rending. Tremendous. Goes into "metafiction", as at the end you read her journal entries, in which she plans new sections of the novel (fascinating entry into compositional process), & comments with searing clarity, insight, irony, on the situation in France and her own impending doom (she was murdered, as was her husband, in Auschwitz). Astonishing story of this book's survival.

(Interesting to read this after having read H.L. Hymes' Underground City.)

J. Latta, everlasting Gracehoper. (I think I'm more of a left-handed Ondt.) Today's post transmits both downsides & upsides of "hobo-ing", by way of Pynchon. (& vicarious same.) Have a generation of poets been systematically "kicked to the curb", viz. Amiri Baraka? Seems more like the poets just reflect the trends at large. Settling into your computer cubicle & checking your investments. But he & John L. keep pointing to something outside ("old weird America").

(I'm a-goin' to write a comic novel in ol-wild-America fashion, about a salesman traveling through Harper's Ferry who gets taken hostage by a big fat Civil War re-enactor, in order so that the latter can publicize his belief that Abe Lincoln, as a crypto-Native American, deliberately selected the world's worst generals for the Federal side, so as to carry out a spiritual command to wreak Divine Judgement, fully, on both sides in the Civil War. It's a theory. hereby copyrighted @ Henry H. Gould.)

First some reviews by William Logan, then the book of essays by D. Justice, have got me looking in new directions. Reading Geoffrey Hill now, another powerful writer I've passed over for a long time. Forces me to focus more closely on the issue of rhythm.

Justice has also got me reading Sherwood Anderson, too. I may be the only person in America who never read Winesburg, Ohio in high school. It's a treasure.

Interesting op-ed piece in NY Times today about the value of fiction as opposed to (current favorite) memoirs.

I've tried doing that prose stuff, now & then. Started out writing short stories, in 8th grade or so. My first story was a satire on my school, The Blake School (which nomad Maria Damon visited recently). It featured a naive young knight named Miles Blakesley.

But I seem pretty addicted to poetry. It's the mumbling, I guess. Trouble is I'm scattered, numb from work, oldified, uninspired. Cain't make it cohere nohow, lately.

But I ain't given up, not just yet. Them Goulds is a stubborn bunch of mule-headed form farmers.

Josh Corey has been conducting an interesting improv on the differing time-effects in prose fiction & poetry. He suggests that good fiction involves an experience of "time-forgetting", whereas poetry always brings us up short with its focus on the fine grain of speech and language, the music of performance.

I've written some on this topic here at various times. What has struck me is that, while good storytelling does encourage us to lose ourselves in the story & forget time, nevertheless fiction tends to make time a theme of the story, so that the experience of reading it is double-edged : we lose ourselves (& time) in stories which describe the effects of time's power. The Odyssey and In Search of Lost Time are, I guess, the prime examples.

Poetry, on the other hand, does not simply intensify our experience of time : poetry changes the basic character of that experience. Prose may demolish our awareness of time; poetry seems to demolish time's very objectivity (as sequential, historical, impersonal phenomenon). Poetic time is a kind of performed Now, in which language spirals back reflexively on itself - and in the process, reshapes perception, knowledge, the sense of self and others.

I think it's worthwhile to emphasize these distinctions between the time-effects of prose fiction and poetry. And to repeat that the experience of a pleroma or a fulness of NOW (containing pasts and futures) - the recapturing and transmuting of past into present, chaos into order - is a theme of major narratives. Thus a notion of poetry is implicit or encrypted in the substance of fiction.

sent ms. Chapel Hill to a publisher last week. Novella, short story, poems. Has a certain plot. But the poems are not new (to me). & the whole thing was finished over 2 yrs ago.

... in the same issue yesterday (NYTBR), an essay by David Orr on 2 novels in which the perilous plot climaxes hinge on the recital of a poem. I thought Orr's argument about poetry's useful/useless-ness was sort of contradictory & over-subtle. He used the novelists' "application" to emphasize poetry's distance from any obvious utilitarian purposes, and he showed a familiar disdain for the general culture's misguided notions of poetry's therapeutic or "uplift" or political aspects.

Somehow I think he may have missed the real point the novelists (through their characters) were making : which is that on some basic simple & essential level, we are all poets : we think poetically, we want words which work poetically, we read life itself poetically. I was reminded inevitably (by the fictions' plots) of the woman in Georgia a few weeks ago, taken hostage by a man who had just shot to death 3 people at the courthouse, who talked him into surrendering to the authorities, by reading to him from an inspirational book. Everyone is a poet on some level, it's a human trait.

The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.

- Wallace Stevens, from "Men Made Out of Words"

Reading Oblomov. The scenes between Oblomov & his servant Zakhar. A serf/aristocracy system had so many "natural" qualities; it was a long-lived adaptation to necessity, by which a few lorded it over the rest. Bizarre society based on false (master/servant) values. Comedy of Oblomov : the pathetic lovable ineffectual master; the pathetic lovable hopeless servant. (ie., eternal Russian paralysis.)

Anthropology of aristocracy : the big smart primates rule, & enjoy the fruits of dominion. Everybody else fits in as needed, in their humble subordinate way.

The anthropology of misplaced value : religions mirror hierarchical, authoritarian social arrangements. People desire to love and serve - but what do they choose as the object of their desire?

Power & dominion. Pecking orders. Celebrity.

The revolutionary concept of the common good, and the value of service to same, rather than dominion. "The greatest among you shall be your servant."

Am reading Hermann Broch's novel Death of Virgil. Very absorbing, beautiful writing. Translator seems to be echoing Whitman (a lot of anaphora - repetition of words at beginning of sentence or phrase (along with vast cosmic-natural imagery). Wonder if it's that way in the original).

Started writing a novel myself on Saturday. When I was done (with a couple pages written) I learned that the Pope had died. It's been a strange Easter/Passover time this spring, the past week or so.

I went to church yesterday. It was my turn to read the Prayers. So I included John Paul II in them (I'm Episcopalian).

Odd time in the church year, when you're confronted intellectually with the mystery of the Resurrection. It affects the sermons. It's something that the intellect & common sense cannot accept, that is, on a rational plane.

A season when the gulf between faith & scepticism yawns widest.

Are we confronted here with a primitive remnant, something from a previous phase of the human mind? Or is there an aspect of willed or motivated contradiction at play? That is, with the mystery of the Resurrection, a line of estrangement is drawn between God and the world, between spirit & flesh. A veil, wrapped around a single person, a single individual (Christ). Which in turn "personalizes" the relationship between Spirit & humanity.

From another angle, the Resurrection "naturalizes" - even "historicizes" - a spiritual reality which is familiar & accessible through many religious traditions (orthodox & fringe) : the reality of "cosmic consciousness". The idea that the end of the physical body is not an absolute end : that, in some unknowable dimension, there is no death : that the soul is immortal. "What will be is only a promise." I think of certain Yeats poems.

(Riddle of the icon - the representative figure ("the Son of Man"). A unique person is commissioned to undertake a collective, historical role. Archetype. It's like an Escher drawing - a "figure/ground" problem in continual oscillation or reversal.)

Which reminds me of this spring poem, one of Mandelstam's last:

To Natasha Shtempel

 
I
 
Limping against her will over the deserted earth,
with uneven, sweet steps,
she walks just ahead 
of her swift friend and her fiance.
The restraining freedom 
of her inspiring disability pulls her along, 
but it seems that her walking is held back
by the charity of a concept:
that this spring weather
is the ancestral mother of the grave's vault, 
and that this is an eternal beginning.

 
II
 
There are women, who are so close to the moist earth,
their every step is a loud mourning,
their calling is to accompany the resurrected,
and to be first to greet the dead.
It is a crime to demand kisses from them,
and it is impossible to part from them.
Today angels, tomorrow worms in the graveyard,
and the day after, just an outline.
The steps you once took, you won't be able to take.
Flowers are immortal. Heaven is integral.
What will be is only a promise.

(Sorry, I don't know who translated this. This poem does strange things to me, like certain passages in Beethoven. It brings tears to my eyes.)

Finished Yourcenar's The Abyss over the weekend. I can't remember reading a better historical novel. & it's more than an "historical novel".

Set in mid-1500s. Makes you realize very clearly why Pilgrims etc. came over here (& of course everything was sweetness & light, over here! like in Salem!). Pure hell of religious wars, totalitarian empires, persecution of science, free thought... she piles on layer after layer of human folly.

Her gift for depth of detail, characterization. The dialogues read like a very good play.

Out of the blog loop (or "bloop") these days. Poem (which I've been excerpting here) somewhat in abeyance, have been working on novel novel idea. Using index cards, it feels right. Also reading a lot of Melville & other boat books.

Wrote here a few weeks ago about the book Hamlet's Mill, which explores the links between archaic star-mapping and storytelling (myths). Melville basically replicated this process in his odd puzzle-novel Mardi. All the characters, all the events in the book are personifications of astronomical-astrological readings using the typical star almanacs of the time (an 1845 almanac, to be precise). Mariners were the last great Babylonian star-gazers. This is all brought to light in Maxine Moore's study, That Lonely Game (Missouri UP, 1975). ("That lonely game" is solitaire, or sol-itaire, or writing.)

Busy working on a novel these days. Mother is the invention of necessity. Don't really want to go back to the library, mine exquisite golden cage. & haven't, or haven't applied, any other socially-useful skills lately (like teaching). Wish to write myself out of a hole, or try. It's silly & hopeless, but heck, I can't think of anything else at the moment.

Tempted to talk about it, but afraid to give away secrets of the craft. A story is a gizmo.

Am reading a long Dutch novel called The Discovery of Heaven, by Harry Mulisch. Does this mean I am working on a long Dutch poem? No.

Finished novel (novella?) today. It's about war & peace, only shorter. Calling it Chapel Hill. Now wez muh agent.

I can't stop reading JF Powers. I would say in my critical acumestitation he is 115.7 times better than Flaubert. He's not French but I won't hold it against him.

Funny scene in JF Powers novel, Wheat That Springeth Green. Father Joe has new young assistant-curate, but Diocese didn't bother to tell him his name. Joe doesn't want to embarrass him by asking, or embarrass himself by calling the Diocese, so he calls the police & asks for the name of the owner of the curate's VW parked in rectory driveway. Police won't give out the info. Curate listens in from other room, leaves poorly-typed note (curate is learning how to type) later in Father Joe's desk: "THe info you re quested : William Aloysius Schmidt".

Then follows dialogue likes of which I've never read before: Father Joe, trying to figure out how to deal with this without giving anything away, pretends that the curate must have called for the info about a third party. Curate plays along (he only confronts Joe later). So the two of them have this straight-faced discussion about this make-believe third person. . .

Had to be there. It's a wonderful novel.

Wrote yesterday about Bellow coming from generation that blurred fiction & autobiography (Mailer, et al.). But Ravelstein is done so gracefully, it's further evidence (in my book) that reality is occasionally fabricated in advance for fiction or art, that the model finds the painter.

Wonder if Valery has anything to say about this.

Finished Ravelstein. Bellow's character certainly not "effete", edit that out. Maybe occasionally peevish. & Ravelstein, the stand-in for Allan Bloom, not an "intellectual snob". He has the attitude of a big academic, screening out the students who don't make his grade, sometimes in an unkind way. Not the same as snobbery.

Started reading Closing of the American Mind. Wish I'd read it 10 yrs ago when it came out, & followed the controversy more closely. But then I just wasn't interested. It's a polemic. Am just getting into it. He sharply contrasts the older notion of equality based on natural rights, the basis of the Constitution & Declaration of Independence, with the newer ideology he calls "openness", which promotes the dignity & autonomy of diverse cultures over the universality of human nature. Very controversial at the height of the culture wars.

Reading Saul Bellow's Ravelstein. Because he's fun to read, most of the time, and because the novel is an homage or roman a clef of sorts for his late friend Allan Bloom, author of Closing of the American Mind. My curiosity piqued by Times article outlining the genealogy of the neo-conservatives around Bush & Pentagon "descended" from U. Chicago philosopher Leo Strauss (Joe Duemer & I talked around this a few weeks ago). Strauss, I think, is the character "Davarr" in the novel, though he's only mentioned in passing. Pentagon's Wolfowitz was a student of Bloom.

Bellow is "philosophical" in the pleasure he takes in big questions & big ideas, the way he addresses them both directly & obliquely, and the way he makes them accessible through humor, irony, and plain speaking. He comes from a generation of novelists that blurred fiction & autobiography; his character "Chick" is transparently Bellow himself. This leads to some self-indulgent writing, but Bellow's role, as a serious "thinker" in fiction, adds an extra dimension in a novel about a figure like Bloom, an educator so concerned with Platonic dialogue, the classics & the function of cultural heritage in thought & inquiry. "Chick" is the poet in Bloom's philosophical grove.

Interestingly, as Ravelstein is dying, his concerns turn from "Athens" toward "Jerusalem", as his conversations with Chick begin to focus on the fate of Jews in the 20th century. Through an episode about another thinly-disguised U. Chicago prof, a famous mythographer with a Nazi-sympathizer past (Mircea Eliade, I think), Ravelstein speaks about the Jewish sense of shock & isolation in a 20th-century in which the world seems eager to destroy them all; the great demonic ideologies of Stalin & Hitler, & the millions who gave their silent or vocal assent to them.

This reality underlies some of the multiple paradoxes in a novel about a Jewish classicist "invert" (his term) calling for a return to Western civilized values; another is the interplay between philosophical "clear-sightedness" and human cold-heartedness (Ravelstein's intellectual snobbery; the narrator's exhausted, somewhat effete disdain for the "rabble" of the underclass). Both characters come across as complex - humane & cold, warm & full of joie de vivre, hope, self-doubt. Not despair, though.

Is it possible that the neo-con emphasis (descended from Strauss?) on moral certainty, absolute vs. relative good & evil, could lead to a realpolitik in which ends justify the means (a sort of "moral hardheadedness" which is actually inhumane)? That would be an ironic twist. But I haven't even read Bloom's book (now I want to), nor do I really understand the innards of neo-con policymaking (sorry, Joe).

I wonder where Bellow came up with the name Ravelstein. Reminds me of course of my mother's unusual maiden name, Ravlin. I always thought it was a variant of Rawlin or Rawlins, maybe old french in origin? Dunno. Stubborn Grew & sequels are on one level a memorial to several Ravlins. The books were triggered by a simple elegy for my uncle James Ravlin (who was the same generation & could have stepped straight out of a Bellow novel), & turned into a complex elegy for his daughter Juliet.

Have been away in Minnesota for a few days.

May just stay away.

The Romans put a rose over the door to indicate "do not disturb" or secret, hence the term "sub rosa". I didn't know that when I wrote this old thing, back in the 70s.


HUE

Words kind as rain pour down
from mothers and fathers of gentle eye.

Bees have hidden in the hive's head
a little sunlight fallen on the field.

Small planets hover in the immense
blue Pacific of starlit. . .; morning

mumbles rustling branches of night
into morning glories, and a rose

resides, lightly bearded with snow,
on the ancient wall above your door.

*

My parents live near the River Road in Minneapolis, along the Mississippi, only a block or so from where they both grew up. Circles in nature.

The height of my novel-devouring period was when I was about 16. I loved the smell of a new paperback, lingered over its shape & size & lettering. Tin Drum, & . . .

May quit blogging & try to close that circle myself. Don't feel like this is my world, really, gang. Back in RI, sub Rhody, sub-sub-sub-librunque.