… inspired some great writing.

Here we go.

Author, David Rothkopf.

Yeah so there’s a few typos. So what? Fuggedaboutit.

… and the Inside Higher Ed piece that goes with it, not to mention the Cristina Nehring accompaniment, UD‘s moved by the love letters exchanged between Governor Sanford and Maria Belén Chapur. UD‘s moved by the explosion of passion in the life of a prominent buttoned-down public person.

Indeed the public/private life contrast has rarely displayed itself more sharply than in this tale of escape from official routine, and embrace of the strange freedom of lovers.

Here’s part of a James Merrill poem that seems to me to rise to the occasion.

It’s In Nine Sleep Valley, and it describes two lovers who’ve escaped to a cottage deep in the woods to be alone. The poet gazes at his lover, draped in a white sheet and sitting in a chair, preparing to get his hair cut by the poet.

The poet tries to interpret the lover’s smile: Is it debonair, narcissistic, enjoying the adoring attentions of the poet? Is the lover wondering more broadly what new sort of person the transforming alembic of love will make him? Is his smile an effort to stay in the vibrant eros of the moment, and keep off thoughts of death?

The poet himself, echoing Faust, indeed prays that this perfect moment of lovers’ private bliss, which he knows will wither, might somehow never end. Looking at his lover in his white sheet, he has a dark vision of a dead body, its hair grown out and tangled amid physical rot, and he knows that this “must in time be our affair.”

Or, wonders the poet, is his lover smiling as he contemplates the botched job the poet will do on his hair?

Well, the poet thinks, even if his lover is worried about his imperfections as a barber, the lover should know that even “the clumsiest love” makes the loved one beautiful.

Sit then, draped in a sheet whose snowy folds
Darken in patches as when summer comes
And sun goes round and round the melting mountain.
Smiling debonair

You maybe wait for some not seen till now
Aspect of yours to blaze from the alembic
While one of mine in robe and slippers cries
Ah stay! Thou art so fair!

Or else are smiling not to wince recalling
Locks the grave sprang open. Blind, untrimmed,
Sheeted with cold, such rot and tangle must
In time be our affair.

But should you smile as those who doubt the novice
Hands they entrust their beautiful heads to,
I want to show you how the clumsiest love
Transfigures if you let it, if you dare.

There was a day when beauty, death, and love
Were coiled together in one crowning glory.
Shears in hand, we parted the dark waves…
Look at me, dear one. There.

Toward the end of the poem, the poet wonders whether in time the lovers will “hunger for each other / When one goes north and one goes east” — and he answers himself in this way:

Enough for them was a feast
Of flaws, the molten start and glacial sleep, the parting kiss…

Centimeters deep yawns the abyss.

An awkward verse, a clumsy love, one the poet in his final lines offers the loved one as a schoolboy might offer a lover a silly flower he made out of paper:

Take these verses, call them today’s flower,
Cluster a rained-in pupil might have scissored.
They too have suffered in the realm of hazard.
Sorry things all. Accepting them’s the art.

… a new UD post at Inside Higher Ed will be appearing.

Subject: Letters between the governor of South Carolina and his lover.

****************************

Update:  Read Cristina Nehring in The New Republic for an excellent accompaniment to my Inside Higher Education piece on Sanford.

This wonderful example of straight-faced style is by Bob Geary, at IndyWeek.Com. UD and her sidekick SOS are absolutely unable to improve upon it. Bravo.

Timothy Johnson, the newly elected vice chairman of the state Republican party, is listed as “Dr. Johnson” on his and the state GOP’s Web sites. But he’s not a medical doctor or dentist. And he won’t disclose where he earned his Ph.D., leaving the impression that he got it from a now-defunct school once notorious as a diploma mill.

The Indy contacted Johnson to ask whether his claimed “Ph.D., Concentration in Total Quality Management, LaSalle University (2000)” was issued by the defunct LaSalle in Louisiana, the accredited La Salle University in Pennsylvania or another LaSalle.

Johnson responded in an e-mail, “I hope you understand when I say I am not going to answer any more questions about my military experience, education background or personal history.”

He added: “It just doesn’t matter at this point. I am sorry, but enough is enough. Have a great weekend.”

His e-mail signature read: “Timothy F. Johnson, Ph.D.”

The accredited La Salle University, a Catholic institution with three campuses in Pennsylvania, confers a doctoral degree only in clinical psychology, according to its Web site.

The LaSalle in Louisiana, however, as the authoritative Chronicle of Higher Education reported in 2001, operated as a diploma mill from 1986 to mid-1997, essentially selling degrees (it advertised heavily on matchbook covers) until the FBI raided and shut it down. Its owner, Thomas J. Kirk, was imprisoned for mail and tax fraud, among other charges. That “university” employed no faculty, only secretaries to handle the paperwork and the money.

In late ’97, according to the Chronicle, the Louisiana LaSalle was purchased by seemingly “serious” owners including the then-chairwoman of the Louisiana Republican party. They later folded LaSalle’s assets into their newly formed company, the Orion Education Corp., after failing to win accreditation for LaSalle from the Distance Education and Training Council in 1999.

Johnson’s résumé is included on the Web site of Leadership 101, a company that offers him as its CEO and “lead consultant.” Leadership 101 lists its business is “training leaders for success in the 21st century.”

Johnson, the Web site promises, is “entertaining, thought-provoking and inspiring.”

Johnson is also employed as an adjunct faculty member at Shaw University’s Asheville campus. He was in the U.S. Army from 1984 to 2007 in active and reserve roles, starting as an enlisted soldier and retiring with the rank of major, according to a document he released prior to the state GOP convention when his military service was questioned.

The 1,600 delegates to the GOP convention in Raleigh this month chose Johnson as their No. 2 official, despite the news—widely circulated by his opponents and broken publicly by the Asheville media the week before the convention—that he’d pleaded guilty in 1996 to a felonious assault on his first wife. A resident of Cleveland, Ohio at the time, Johnson received an 18-month suspended sentence contingent on his relocating to Toledo, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported. (Johnson was then seeking an Ohio legislative seat as a Democrat.)

Johnson asked convention delegates to forgive his past mistake and, in accordance with his slogan (“It’s Time”), make him the first African-American officer in the state GOP since the 19th century.

On the floor of the convention, Johnson campaigned wearing his “Dr. Timothy F. Johnson” name tag despite the rumors already circulating that his doctorate was bogus. At the time, the rumors took a backseat to his criminal record, though, and most delegates seemed to be unaware of questions about his educational background when they voted.

Their attention, moreover, was on the hotly contested race for party chairman, won by former Raleigh Mayor Tom Fetzer. (See “The very, very, very small tent,” June 17.)

When he was elected chair of the Buncombe County Republican party in 2008, Johnson did not disclose his criminal record because, he told the Indy in an interview at the convention, it was “nobody’s business” except his second wife’s, and he did tell her.

Chris McClure, executive director of the state GOP, did not return a phone call or answer an e-mail asking the basis for the party’s listing of Johnson, its new vice-chair, as “Dr. Timothy Johnson.”

You’ve probably already seen this.

Be there or be square. June 13. Warwick. Remember: This year is the 350th anniversary of his birth.

They’re doing the song Sweeter Than Roses, which UD considers the sexiest song alive.

UD’s many Henry Purcell posts may be found here.

… where people pay good money for this sort of thing:

Writers at all levels of experience are invited to explore new creative territory at a retreat on June 20-22 offered by local writer/poet Lorraine Gane.

“This retreat will take participants to a deep creative space where they can open to the writing that speaks to them at this time,” said Gane, who has taught writing here and in Ontario for nearly 20 years.

“We’ll start with practices to relax the body and still the mind, then move into longer writing sessions in which participants can delve into memories, images and ideas that they’ve been wishing to get down on paper but for some reason have held back from this,” she says.

“By connecting to a deeper space, these inner walls will dissolve and participants can move beyond boundaries into writing that is often original and alive with their natural voice.”

As such, participants will be encouraged to let go of form during this initial stage of writing and concentrate on fully expressing themselves, said Gane.

Feedback on first drafts will help shape the writing into the most appropriate form, whether fiction, poetry or personal essays.

“The supportive environment will allow writers to take risks and venture into those areas they may have been avoiding,” she said.

“This can open up new energy for this writing and also add vigour to ongoing projects,” she says.

Gane’s other intention for the retreat is to incorporate some natural elements, such as gardens and forests, which abound at the Salt Spring Centre where the retreat will be held. [This is a Yoga center, though the article doesn’t mention it.]

Lunch and a consultation are included in the retreat, which can be attended for the full three days ($260), or Saturday/Sunday/Monday only ($88 per day).

Each day stands on its own, and the hours are 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday; and 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on Sunday and Monday…

Let’s relax our bodies and still our minds and review.

You pay $88 for five hours during which you compete with a bunch of other people (none selected with any consideration of their writing skill) for the retreat leader’s personal consultation. In only five hours, the instructor promises to take you into a deep creative space and dissolve your inner walls and allow you to take risks — something you’ve been trying to do on your own for decades.

Sign me up!

As you know (see this post), UD has begun a project – at the request of an entity which will for the moment remain anonymous – of writing about writing.

One initial point she’s already made, via George Orwell, about serious writing, is that it’s very difficult, its actual process often acutely unpleasant. Here’s more data along these lines, testimony from some very good writers:

Colm Toibin: “I write with a sort of grim determination to deal with things that are hidden and difficult.”

John Banville: “The struggle of writing is fraught with a specialised form of anguish, the anguish of knowing one will never get it right, that one will always fail, and that all one can hope to do is ‘fail better’, as Beckett recommends.”

Robert Greacen: Writing poetry is like “trying to catch a black cat in a dark room.”

Most university creative writing courses make it fun, because they make it about you. But Orwell, you recall, also said, “One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality.”

T.S. Eliot said something similar. “What happens is a continual surrender of [the writer] himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality… Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”

James Joyce, in the character of Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist, writes: “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

Let’s put these two things together:

1.) Writing is hell.

2.) Writing extinguishes the personality.

and suggest the following. Writing is hell because in order to get at and express the truth of some aspect of existence you have to get over yourself — an excruciating task. You have to be riveted to the world outside yourself — both the physical world of objects and other people, and the metaphysical world of history and, in particular, the world that is the history of the literature preceding you.

If you remain riveted on yourself, you produce, at best, sincere feeling.

And “All bad poetry,” Oscar Wilde notes, “is sincere.”

*******************

Update: Wow. These are really easy to find.

Joan Acocella in The New Yorker:

Writing is a nerve-flaying job. First of all, what the Symbolists said is true: clichés come to the mind much more readily than anything fresh or exact. To hack one’s way past them requires a huge, bleeding effort. (For anyone who wonders why seasoned writers tend to write for only about three or four hours a day, that’s the answer.) … Anthony Burgess [says] a writer can never be happy: “The anxiety involved is intolerable. And . . . the financial rewards just don’t make up for the expenditure of energy, the damage to health caused by stimulants and narcotics, the fear that one’s work isn’t good enough. I think, if I had enough money, I’d give up writing tomorrow.”

Acocella also quotes Elizabeth Hardwick: “I don’t think getting older is good for the creative process. Writing is so hard. It’s the only time in your life when you have to think.”

… with my interruptions. To see it in its pristine state, go to the post directly below this one.

HOW TO DO THINGS WITH TEARS

[Title’s clever, and makes an English major think of How to Do Things With Words, the philosopher J.L Austin’s book about how language performs. So a sensibility here of someone literate, playful…]

In thy springs, O Zion, are the water wheels
Of my mind! The wheels beat the shining stream.
Whack. Dying. And then death. Whack. Learning. Learned.
Whack. Breathing. And breath. Whack. Gone with the wind.

[Hm. Already much to note! Tone’s all over the place. It’s madness. Starts all formal and religious, invoking Zion as some essential body of water – a spring from which spring certain operations of the poet’s mind — operations he compares to water wheels. Bit confusing. But fun. Difficult, but seductive. We want to figure this out.

But, you know, when I say sensibility I have in mind this rather weird, violent, disjunctive writing Grossman hits us up with right off. Now if it were just weird, it would be trifling; but in fact Grossman’s going to capture the complex truth of complex consciousness, as it moves from ancient pious formulations to Batman language and back…]

I am old. The direction of time is plain:
As the daylight, never without direction,
Rises in a direction, east to west,
And sets in a direction, west to east,

[Notice the control that the poem’s about to manifest. Having chosen an image – the water wheel – the poet will play that through to the end of the poem. But he has chosen another image for consciousness as well, that of a wandering traveler reckoning always with, fighting always against, the absolutely immutable movement of time toward the traveler’s death. And that image will also play itself out with careful thoroughness through the poem.]

Walking backwards all night long, underground;

[A wonderful image for morbid dreams or morbid night thoughts. Reviewing your life as you age toward death.]

So, this bright water is bent on its purpose—
To find the meadow path to the shore and then
The star (“Sleepless”) by which the helmsman winds

And turns.

[At some point those morbid thoughts become spiritual, and we’re searching for God.]

Zion of mind! This is the way:
Towards nightfall the winds shifts offshore, north by
Northwest, closing the harbor to sail
And it stiffens, raising the metal water

[The poet imagines his oncoming death, the shutting down of consciousness.]

In the roads. The low sun darkens and freezes.
The water shines. In the raking light is
Towed the great ship home, upwind, everything
Furled.

[That Old Ship of Zion. The reader may well at this point think of this great spiritual, in which the ship of God arrives at your death to take you home.]

And, behind the great ship, I am carried,

A castaway, in the body alone,
Under the gates of Erebus

[Here death’s imagined without spirituality, without transcendence, in the body alone. This is truly hell, the haunt of Erebus, where one is cast away rather than taken into the arms of God. Maybe this, the poet laments, is the truth of our end.]

—the meeting
Place of daylight underground and night wind
Shrieking in wires, the halliards knocking and

[The ships a mess. Everything’s come undone. Its loose ropes – halliards – are knocking against it. Great word, halliard. Probably had to look it up, no? Learning. Learned. We like that. Anyway, here the poet finds a brilliant figure for the failure of religious consolation, the mind unmoored.]

Ravelled banners streaming to the south-east
Like thought drawn out, wracked and torn, when the wind
Shifts and rises and the light fails in the long
School room of the setting sun.

[Light fails in the long school room of the setting sun. We learn a great deal as we age, but what we learn is that the light fails.]

What is left

To mind but remembrances of the world?

[All sorts of wonderful plays on “mind” here. What is left to take heed of. To beware. To take care of. To remember. And literally, what is left – as a sort of final gift – to the fading mind as it ages? Memories. As the old are notorious for being lost in memories. And yet again: We are earthly creatures. When we live and when we die we have only the earth. So when we begin to disappear, when, “on that green evening … our death begins,” it will be our love of the earth that we remember.]

The people of the road, in tears, sit down
At the road-side and tell stories of the world
Then they rise again in tears and go up.

[The poet imagines his funeral.]

The mill sits in the springs.

[Back to the mill. A formally clear and satisfying poem.]

Water wheels whack
Round: Alive, whack. Dying, whack. Dead whack. Nothing.

[After his lyrical journey round his morbid mind, the poet sinks again into the sardonic nihilism of that grinding mill: Old age as a painful assault by one meaningless moment after another, ending in nothingness.]

How, then, to do things with tears?

[Can I make something of my sorrow? My sadness for myself, for the world untranscended?]

— Deliver us,
Zion, from mist. Kill us in the light.

[Yes, I can do something. I can rage against death in life. I can rage against blindness…

You’re right. We’re landing somewhere in the vicinity of Dylan Thomas here. But Grossman’s better than Thomas, because he’s not a sentimentalist. His consciousness is more interesting, more challenging, more strange. Both poems want you to die, as you have tried to live, in full possession of your faculties. They want you to die in the truth. Never to lie to yourself in order to console yourself. But for me at least Grossman captures the battle as it rages far better than Thomas. Thomas merely exhorts his poor father to keep fighting as he lies on his deathbed; he rather mindlessly assumes the absolute value of life over death. Grossman ain’t so sure — that’s what the water wheel’s doing in the poem.]

The piece this comes from is a bit treacly, but the sentence itself deserves a closer look.

Mainly because of the word cerebral. Great poetry has to have an idea.

It also has to have a sensibility.

And it has to be written well.

I think the hardest of these three to accomplish, actually, is sensibility. The consciousness the poem expresses has somehow to be strikingly original. Strange, original, but also immediately recognizable as true — as like our own, as possibly our own, as a form of consciousness we, influenced by the reading of a certain poet’s body of work, might even in some sense make our own.

See, I think superficial readers of poetry (like the writer I talk about in a recent post titled Nothing’s More Reactionary than Mental Confusion) are getting excited about a sensibility. They pick up on the liberation in the loose lines of Ginsberg, and they like that feeling of freedom; but they don’t really get the cerebral part, let alone the intricacies of style. They don’t pick up on the study and suffering and seriousness that gets you to where Ginsberg’s consciousness has gotten. If readers like this aren’t careful, they end up fans of bad poets like Charles Bernstein, without ideas and without interesting language, but loose-limbed.

The most notorious recent bad poem, the Obama inaugural poem, lacked all sensibility; and though its language was also dull and its ideas shopworn, it might have succeeded had it been able to infuse its language and ideas with sensibility.

**********************

The most recent winner of the Bollingen Prize, Allen Grossman, shows you how it’s done.

HOW TO DO THINGS WITH TEARS

In thy springs, O Zion, are the water wheels
Of my mind! The wheels beat the shining stream.
Whack. Dying. And then death. Whack. Learning. Learned.
Whack. Breathing. And breath. Whack. Gone with the wind.

I am old. The direction of time is plain:
As the daylight, never without direction,
Rises in a direction, east to west,
And sets in a direction, west to east,

Walking backwards all night long, underground;
So, this bright water is bent on its purpose—
To find the meadow path to the shore and then
The star (“Sleepless”) by which the helmsman winds

And turns. Zion of mind! This is the way:
Towards nightfall the winds shifts offshore, north by
Northwest, closing the harbor to sail
And it stiffens, raising the metal water

In the roads. The low sun darkens and freezes.
The water shines. In the raking light is
Towed the great ship home, upwind, everything
Furled. And, behind the great ship, I am carried,

A castaway, in the body alone,
Under the gates of Erebus—the meeting
Place of daylight underground and night wind
Shrieking in wires, the halliards knocking and

Ravelled banners streaming to the south-east
Like thought drawn out, wracked and torn, when the wind
Shifts and rises and the light fails in the long
School room of the setting sun. What is left

To mind but remembrances of the world?
The people of the road, in tears, sit down
At the road-side and tell stories of the world
Then they rise again in tears and go up.

The mill sits in the springs. Water wheels whack
Round: Alive, whack. Dying, whack. Dead whack. Nothing.
How, then, to do things with tears?—Deliver us,
Zion, from mist. Kill us in the light.

************************

… Hokay. I’m gonna tell you what the hell all that’s about, but I’m busy gchatting with my old ‘thesdan playmate, David. Hold on. Next post.

A poem about love?

I believe that’s already been done.

How about, instead of a poem about human romance, a prose passage of surpassing beauty about love of the world?

It’s by John Malcolm Brinnin, a writer who lived in Key West for many years, and died there a decade ago.

Brinnin described Key West as “a town at the end of the line that reveled in squalor, cultivated waywardness, and, calling itself Conch Republic, regarded Florida as an enemy country, somewhere toward the north.”

Here he recalls a high point from his life of travel on board ships. The passage starts with the September date. He’s on the Queen Elizabeth.

Sheepish, in the thrall of sentiment, the sentimentalist joins other sentimentalists on board to stand and stare with reverence at a sudden brilliant break in the seamless immensity of the ocean… You see I’m using his phrases, his beautiful words… How does he make his little narrative so beautiful?

First, concision. Each perfect-length paragraph contains only the moments and images and sentiments necessary to convey his exultation, his adoration of a world of stillness and a world of sublime interruptions of stillness.

[UPDATE: Here’s a little something I’m adding a day after I posted this.

Note one important reason Brinnin’s able to keep things tight and brief: His feelings don’t predominate. Nowhere will you find I felt; my heart went pitapat; I was reminded of my Aunt Tillie, my first sexual encounter, the Titanic, the souls who’d died in the construction of those ships; the majesty of God … Like all great writers, Brinnin knows that it’s mainly about the world outside yourself. You can certainly earn narcissism points. UD ain’t saying you can’t talk about yourself at all. But you’ve got to earn those points. And best of all is not having to do narcissism at all, but somehow letting the way you describe the world outside of yourself convey your history and consciousness. That‘s the ticket. Few people are naturals at this. That – aside from the intrinsic pleasure of the activity, of course – is why a serious writer will want to read someone like Brinnin.]

Next, close and sensitive observation of human emotions. I know so well that sheepishness, that sly glancing at other people gathered, like you, at a transcendent event. You know you and the others will stand there for hours if you need to, into the very late night if you need to, because you’re passionate about this experience. You want it very badly. Your passion somewhat embarrasses you, since it feels extreme, and intimate — private to you and your aesthetic and even spiritual obsessions. Yet here are these other strange folk who seem to share your strangeness… In few words, Brinnin captures the combination of determination to see, and awareness of how odd you are for the fierceness of the determination.

And then, you know — the prose.

They stand apart from one another and do not speak, their eyes fixed on the visible horizon to the west as the vibration of the ship gives a slightly stroboscopic blur to everything they see.

After the strobe goes off, and moving objects are suddenly stationary, they make a weird blur against a white screen… And this idea of pausing things, of the greatest experiences actually being those not of dynamism, but of the earth stopping for us, so we can really look, so we can for a privileged moment take in the truth of reality — this will be the central idea of the passage, and of Brinnin’s essay altogether about the wonder of travel.

The paradox of travel, as he would have it, is that by incessant motion we press toward immobility, toward Wordsworth’s spots of time in which things become clear.

But in terms of style: Notice the repeated use of the letter B: visible, vibration, stroboscopic, blur. Subtle, but it creates a soothing rhythm.

The mid-Atlantic sky is windless, a dome of hard stars; the ocean glows, an immense conjunction of inseparable water and air.

See the poetic glory of this prose: mid/is/wind… The internal sounds that gently repeat, creating a floaty trance-like effect in us, as we stand alongside the writer on the floaty trance-like ship. And then five one-syllable words: a dome of hard stars, their monolithic feel spectacularly right for the simple uncrackable hardness of that upper dome. The sound of the O‘s in the ocean glows… And then the idea of conjunction, natural conjunction between water and air, but also the conjunction the writer is about to witness, between the two enormous ships.

These ten or twelve of the faithful in their shadowy stances might be postulants on a Vermont hillside, waiting in their gowns for the end of the world.

Still the self-ribbing about the deep sentiment of the occasion. For clearly this is a religious moment, though the writer seems a secular person. He deals with his inner dissonance, if you will, by mild humor at his own expense.

Notice also, in terms of the greatness of the prose, the oddity of certain choices: Vermont, gowns.

Almost as if she were climbing the watery slopes of the world, the oncoming Queen shows one wink at her topmost mast, then two.

Well, so, this is brilliant, if you ask me. He’s already given us Vermont, so the slopes, even in the flatness of his surroundings, seem weirdly okay. And then we get this amazing fanciful image: climbing the watery slopes of the world. The watery slopes of the world! Climbing water. So strange, and so beautiful. I’ve never seen that image, that thought, before.

The huge funnels glow in their Cunard red, the basso-profundo horns belt out a sound that has the quality less of a salute than of one long mortal cry.

The ocean glows, the funnels glow — the world as an immense conjunction of inseparables aglow. Seeing the whole thing. The thing whole. Huge, Cunard, profundo, salute — playing out the long cry of the letter U as he then turns to the cry of the horns. A human cry as well as a non-human — a world in which all is conjoined.

As the darkness closes over and the long wakes are joined, the sentimentalists stand for a while watching the ocean recover its seamless immensity. Then one by one, like people dispersing downhill after a burial, they find their ways to their cabins and close their doors.

The Vermont hillside again, and people walking down the hill at the end of their vision. Yet still conjunction, as the long wakes are joined. And the word wake joined with the idea of burial makes us think of the two meanings of the word… This is an experience which has jolted sleepy people late at night on a soothing ship awake; but they have also just witnessed the end of something. They are standing at the wake of the final meeting of the two ships; they have just marked that burial. The flat ocean again covers all in its seamless immensity — a seamlessness that seems to shut us out. But the watchers have for a moment felt the earth and the ocean embracing them, taking them into a heart-stopping brilliance.

… has died.

*****************************

So I walked out in the snow to pick up dinner and go to the library, and at the library I took out a couple of Updike books: Problems and Other Stories and Bech: A Book.

While waiting for my pizza I opened the short stories and found them both beautifully written and hilarious.

As always when hovering above the dim oval of porcelain, he recalls the most intense vision of beauty his forty years have granted him. It was after a lunch in New York. The luncheon had been gay, prolonged, overstimulating, vinous. Now he was in a taxi, heading up the West Side Highway. At the 57th Street turnoff, the need to urinate was a feathery subliminal thought; by the Seventies (where Riverside Drive begins to rise like an airplane), it was a real pressure; by the Nineties (Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument crumbling, Riverside Park a green cliff looming), it had become a murderous imperative. Mastering shame, the man confessed his agony to the driver, who, gradually suspending disbelief, swung off the highway at 158th Street and climbed a little cobblestone mountain and found there, evidently not for the first time, a dirty triangular garage. Mechanics, black or blackened, stared with white eyes as the strange man stumbled past them, back through the oily and junk-lined triangle to the apex: here, pinched between obscene frescoes, sat the most beautiful thing he ever saw. Or would ever see. It was a toilet bowl, a toilet bowl in its flawed whiteness, its partial wateriness, its total receptiveness: in the harmonious miracle of its infrangible and unvariable ens. The beautiful is, precisely, what you need at the time.

Or take this sentence – what a marvelous sentence – from Nevada:

The Humboldt River, which had sustained the pioneer caravans, shadowed the expressway shyly, tinting its valley with a dull green that fed dottings of cattle.

… to get us going for the New Year.

“If one follow Blake’s mind through the several stages of his poetic development it is impossible to regard him as a naïf, a wild man, a wild pet for the supercultivated. The strangeness is evaporated, the peculiarity is seen to be the peculiarity of all great poetry: something which is found (not everywhere) in Homer and Æschylus and Dante and Villon, and profound and concealed in the work of Shakespeare—and also in another form in Montaigne and in Spinoza. It is merely a peculiar honesty, which, in a world too frightened to be honest, is peculiarly terrifying. It is an honesty against which the whole world conspires, because it is unpleasant. Blake’s poetry has the unpleasantness of great poetry. Nothing that can be called morbid or abnormal or perverse, none of the things which exemplify the sickness of an epoch or a fashion, have this quality; only those things which, by some extraordinary labour of simplification, exhibit the essential sickness or strength of the human soul.

… Blake …  knew what interested him, and he therefore presents only the essential, only, in fact, what can be presented, and need not be explained. And because he was not distracted, or frightened, or occupied in anything but exact statement, he understood. He was naked, and saw man naked, and from the centre of his own crystal. To him there was no more reason why Swedenborg should be absurd than Locke. He accepted Swedenborg, and eventually rejected him, for reasons of his own. He approached everything with a mind unclouded by current opinions. There was nothing of the superior person about him. This makes him terrifying…”

T.S. Eliot,  The Sacred Wood