I was just now watching, on YouTube, a very dull adaptation of To The Lighthouse. Mr UD called me, on his way back from evening mass at Georgetown University, and said Go outside and look at the moon. I’m becoming a moon worshipper.

As I walked out of the house, I saw, in the evening light, a blue jay feather on the doorstep. It looks exactly like this.

I continued out to the middle of Rokeby
Avenue to see the moon.

It looks exactly like this:

On a cool summer night with crickets.

The sky in the wee hours shone milky white, a cloud latte without celestial seasoning. Mocha sheep pastured below the froth and a toad belched. A cat, slinking along our shins, startled us.

The air was wet and cool and I didn’t miss the meteors since what brewed up in their place was this sweet evening with glimmering hosta flowers.

The bowl of the heavens was white, and white also (that last phrase was a verbal tic of James Joyce’s) were the low picket fences along the butterfly gardens.

So no dark sky, no black brew studded with stars, for ol’ UD last night. “Sorry about the rain!” wrote the cottage keeper in the note she attached to our breakfast basket this morning. She walked it down from her house (she wore a yellow poncho and a knee brace): A goat cheese frittata, sausages, cheese grits with bacon (“use green chili salt if desired”), date nut muffins, rhubarb tart, fruits, coffee, tea.

(As I write this, on the cottage porch, a hummingbird buzzes me.)

Strange that this place, Pleasant Springs Farm, is only fifteen minutes from the built-up suburb of Germantown. These thirty acres are tranquil, pristine, with all the rustic bells and whistles.

UD‘s insta-meteor blogging starts here, in this historically registered cabin on a Maryland sheep farm. UD has left ‘thesda for dark open sky, and so far things look pretty good. The cottage keeper prepared for us by setting two chairs out at the edge of the pasture. “Just be sure to lock the gate behind you.” Three sheep will share the star party.

It’s hot, I’m not gonna lie to you. Our walk across the pasture just now (it’s late afternoon) was sweaty and buggy. But a breeze is coming up, and it’s bound to be cooler at three AM.

Speaking of bugs, I saw, on my way to the creek, a gold and black horned spider at the center of a vast web. Must find out what it is. Also saw maybe a skunk? Not sure.

Butterflies are everywhere, of course – a big garden opens out from the cabin, and right now a lot of it is about blooming butterfly bushes.

The window unit here in the bedroom keeps things cool. There’s a musty smell all over and lots of exposed beams and a small library upstairs which includes a 2008 Critical Inquiry.

The plan is as follows: Les UDs go back down county for dinner. On their return, they sleep until midnight. Then they steal out to the pasture (scaring the shit out of the sheep, I guess), place their chairs in the center of the field, and look up.

This afternoon Les UDs travel to a cottage on a sheep farm near Sugarloaf Mountain. Late this evening they will leave the cottage with two folding chairs. They will set the chairs out on a pasture, and, lying back, they will see what perseids they can see.

Is the farm far enough from city lights? Will there be too much cloud cover? No sense worrying the thing. Do not ask what is it? Let us go and make our visit.

And speaking of T.S Eliot, there’s this excerpt on the dark from East Coker:

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

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

Dark is mental confusion, our brief weak being in the vastness. Dark is also our death, and dark is the apocalypse that will kill the earth forever; but meanwhile dark is consciousness – our living consciousness, but a consciousness that understands nothing. Darkness is where, unable to think, we do best to wait in the humility of not knowing. We do best to write poetry like this – poetry of still souls sitting in the stilly night, circling the same words — dark dark dark — to make a weak work of bricolage.

Or a frankly terrified work of bricolage, as in the Wallace Stevens poem, Domination of Black:

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

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

Same redundancy on the words, our marooned awareness circling the thin evidentiary setting of our mind’s and the world’s dark nature. The brilliant colors of the peacocks’ tails – the brilliant words of the poet’s beautiful and exceptional consciousness? – might lighten all of this. But no.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.

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

So again and again these repetitive bricolages are the poems of our climate, as in this contemporary one, by John Taggart:

Orange Berries Dark Green Leaves

We will not look up how they got their name in a book of names
we will not trace the name’s root conjecture its first murmuring
the root of the berries their leaves is succoured by darkness
darkness like a large block of stone hauled on a wooden sled
like stone formed and reformed by a dark sea rolling in turmoil.

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

Pure distilled Stevens: The list of negations, as in The Snow Man; multiple deflecting similes in place of any approach toward assertion; the absence of foundations, roots, meanings, and the presence only of a dark perennial unapprehended tumultuous process of existential forming and reforming; and of course the rolling repetitive style. We are here as on a darkling plain.

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

But here are meteors, light streaking across darkness, and we see our own light in them.

“They’re human souls,” I said, “tired of that dazzling dream,
Returning to the sweet, cool fields of earth.”

This line from a poem about watching the perseids is like Cathy’s dream in Wuthering Heights:

“Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels grew so angry that they flung me out onto the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.”

We see our imperishable earthly bliss in the meteors, as when Shelley saw Keats as “a dying meteor” that “stains a wreath / Of moonlight vapour.”

This is James Merrill, too, in Prose of Departure, contemplating, in a shop in Japan

… the most fabulous kimono of all: dark, dark purple traversed by a winding, starry path…

may be read as having emerged triumphant from the vats of night.

… Prudential Center, Newark, NJ…

… with the drummer from The Killers.
UD has not heard of The Killers, but
she is supposed to be ashamed of this fact
because they are famous. Maybe you have
heard of them. La Kid‘s the blonde.

Ha! UD just walked out of her Montgomery County house to sample the humidity (absurdly high) and instantly saw, clinging to her house, both a living humming red-eyed cicada (it flew off when I approached) and, inches away from it, a discarded cicada shell. She brought the shell in and put it on her writing desk and it looks exactly like this.

… meteor shower drags on, with Les UDs spending the night of August 12 somewhere in the mountains around here (or near the Chesapeake Bay) in search of a dark sky.

Les UDs are, this time of year, usually at their way-remote houselet in Upstate New York, where the night skies are amazing and where UD has indeed (wrapped in a sleeping bag and leaning back in a lawn chair) seen her share of meteors… But nothing you’d call a shower…

However life-altering or bitterly disappointing this year’s local outing, UD will of course blog it.

For the last two days, UD has been here, helping her aunt settle in. While not quite as opulent as a football facility at the University of Oregon, it’s certainly beautiful and peaceful and full of kind people.

The landscaping is terrific.

All the butterflies are out.
(UD‘s sister took this picture.)

Yesterday afternoon, the director of life enhancement stopped UD while UD was wheeling her aunt around the campus and escorted UD and her aunt to a little concert in a nearby building. A quartet of scruffy amusing fiftyish guys with guitars and drums led the way-oldies in a singalong. UD‘s aunt tapped her toes a bit, and UD belted out Those Were the Days My Friend plus the Beatles and Elvis.

Even the audience members who happened to be awake had very weak voices, so it fell to ol’ UD plus the staff, which circulated among the residents grabbing their hands and swinging them up and down to the beat, to carry off the singalong. It fell to UD and the staff to do the life, never mind the life enhancement.

As in those Roethke lines —

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling…

— UD felt herself a ridiculous impertinent envoy from life, self-deputized to make everyone care whether they lived or died.

La Kid, on the left, kisses Aoife,
a look-alike Dublin friend,
at La Kid‘s going-away party
last week. One of the guests brought
an American flag.

UD‘s neighbor in Summit, New York – just a bit further up Seven Ponds Road, in the house Wojtek Fangor used to own – is Yasuo Minagawa. He’s featured in today’s Wall Street Journal.

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

UD thanks her sister-in-law, Joanna, for the link.

La Kid, last month.
Giant’s Causeway in the rain.

… has made a remarkable film about mass killings in Indonesia. It is echt postmodern in being a surreal reenactment – by the killers themselves – of long-ago events altogether too real. Hyperreal.

“The Act of Killing” becomes a complex rendering of men for whom guilt has no normal way of expressing itself, and for whom killing was, from the very start, a kind of theatrical performance.

I think there’s a link between this film and the uproar over the adorable rock and roll photo of Tsarnaev on the cover of the latest Rolling Stone. Those who massacred in Indonesia did so in part under the glamorizing influence of American gangster movies. The editors who cynically aestheticized Tsarnaev’s image on their cover did so under the influence of the same violence-glamor, violence-voyeurism.

In his basically positive review of Josh’s film, the New Yorker‘s Anthony Lane says he doesn’t understand what Oppenheimer means when he calls The Act of Killing “a documentary of the imagination.” But what’s not to understand? Does Lane have trouble with

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare…

also? Sometimes historical conditions make it possible for people to act out their most brutal fantasies; sometimes things get so sick that we glamorize the most brutal among us. Humanity’s self-alienation, Walter Benjamin wrote in 1936, “has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” Without artists like Oppenheimer (and, say, writers like The White Hotel‘s D.M. Thomas, and other filmmakers like Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, who made Hitler: A Film from Germany) we’d get even more lost in that funhouse than we are.

I

Doldrums

From her chilled house with condensation on all its windows, UD contemplates her privilege.

Yesterday through the watery streaks she saw – she thinks – a small bear at the top of her property. It was too small to be a deer – she thinks – and had a hunched crawling way about it … There are bears, now, in Bethesda, and what better place for them to gather than the long field and forest behind UD‘s house.

Inside this house are all the goods of interior existence, the sort of existence you lead when the exterior is unbearable. Meals are brought to the door. The air is chilled.

UD plays Purcell on the baby grand, and sings. Music for a while shall all your cares beguile.

Late afternoon, before night falls, UD cuts back her garden, rampant with hot sun and night storms. When, overheated, she reenters her house, it feels antarctic.

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

II

An Update

** UD has been invited to teach in India next year. She is looking into it.

** UD will speak about women and technology (in particular, MOOCs) at the next Modern Language Association convention, in Chicago.

Saturday, 11 January

651. Women in the Expanding University: Global and Local

5:15–6:30 p.m.

Program arranged by the MLA Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession

Presiding: Rebecka Rutledge Fisher, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Speakers: Diana Elizabeth Henderson, Massachusetts Inst. of Tech.; Teresa Mangum, Univ. of Iowa; Margaret Soltan, George Washington Univ.; Catharine Roslyn Stimpson, New York Univ.

Women are often at the center of debates about technological pedagogy. Taking women and the “expanding university” as our framework, we will address pedagogical strategies, forms of community engagement, and prospects for women’s activism offered by new technologies. This forum promises to open a space for critique of emerging technologies even as it identifies new avenues of innovation.

** UD was interviewed twice last week, first by a freelancer pitching a story about MOOCs to Poets & Writers, and then by a reporter at the Argus Leader. He’s doing a piece about a local dignitary who has a degree from a diploma mill. I’ll link to these articles when/if they appear.

… Jerzy Soltan, shows up (painted) at 4:42 in this film about the Polish painter Wojciech Fangor. Les UDs have inherited some Fangor paintings (including a number of his famous circles). UD has great memories of summers in upstate New York at the Fangors’ farmhouse.

The excellent website culture.pl features a good biography of Woytek, as well as a series of photos of his work, him, and his wife Magda.

La Kid, Tower of London.

July 10, 2013.