… has UD picking among poems that have something to do with the wind. There are approximately 150,000 of these. She has winnowed the number down to one, “A Day on the Big Branch,” by Howard Nemerov. Let’s take a look. You can listen to Nemerov read it, too.
It’s a pretty straightforward narrative of a midday fishing trip on a river in Vermont with friends, after a night of poker. It’s written in rough iambic pentameter, so there are nice neat chunks of poetic prose on the page. Bricks. Or, more appropriate to the poem, rocks – six stanza rocks – of roughly equal size. They move us, step by step, through the narrative of the day’s events.
Still half drunk, after a night at cards,
with the grey dawn taking us unaware
among our guilty kings and queens, we drove
far North in the morning, winners, losers,
to a stream in the high hills, to climb up to a place
one of us knew, with some vague view
of cutting losses or consolidating gains
by the old standard appeal to the wilderness,
the desert, the empty places of our exile,
bringing only the biblical bread and cheese
and cigarettes got from a grocer’s on the way,
expecting to drink only the clear cold water
among the stones, and remember, or forget.
[First part of Rock #1 is an extremely long sentence, in which we’re with the guys in their car driving to the river “with a vague view” of… hills? No, the poet means the figurative, not the literal view: We had some vague idea of purging the heaviness of confusion and loss and guilt after last night’s excesses by a clarifying, forgiving, return to nature. Monks now, they’ll drink “only the clear cold water / among the stones,” and they will meditate.]
Though no one said anything about atonement,
there was still some purgatorial idea
in all those aching heads and ageing hearts
as we climbed the giant stair of the stream,
reaching the place around noon.
[Climbing with effort to the “empty places of our exile,” they replay the “old standard” of labored effort up Transcendence Mountain — think of Mount Athos — in order to purge themselves of last night’s poisons and, while they’re at it, of fallen existence.]
[Next up, the stanza that describes their destination, their having reached the natural divinity they’re after:]
It was as promised, a wonder, with granite walls
enclosing ledges, long and flat, of limestone,
or, rolling, of lava; within the ledges
the water, fast and still, pouring its yellow light,
and green, over the tilted slabs of the floor,
blackened at shady corners, falling in a foam
of crystal to a calm where the waterlight
dappled the ledges as they leaned
against the sun; big blue dragonflies hovered
and darted and dipped a wing, hovered again
against the low wind moving over the stream,
and shook the flakes of light from their clear wings.
This surely was it, was what we had come for,
was nature, though it looked like art with its
grey fortress walls and laminated benches
as in the waiting room of some petrified station.
But we believed; and what it was we believed
made of the place a paradise
for ruined poker players, win or lose,
who stripped naked and bathed and dried out on the rocks
like gasping trout (the water they drank
making them drunk again), lit cigarettes and lay back
waiting for nature to say the last word
—as though the stones were Memnon stones,
which, caught in a certain light, would sing.
[This stanza is a lala rock, all liquid l’s as the poet evokes the lullaby wonder of the setting, the setting that promises to lift them from their dulled fallenness and make them dragonflies with “clear wings.” Four times in this stanza he uses the word “light” and he deepens it with “lit” cigarettes. The world in this “enclosed” place is alive, beautiful, it speaks to the guys, even sings to them, as did the ancient Memnon stones. So they get comfortable and “wait for nature” to tell them what they need to know to become simple clear and alive again — to become things of nature, like the dragonflies.]
The silence (and even the noise of the waters
was silence) grew pregnant; that is the phrase,
grew pregnant; but nothing else did.
The mountains brought forth not a mouse, and the rocks,
unlike the ones you would expect to find
on the slopes of Purgatory or near Helicon,
mollified by muses and with a little give to ’em,
were modern American rocks, and hard as rocks.
Our easy bones groaned, our flesh baked
on one side and shuddered on the other; and each man
thought bitterly about primitive simplicity
and decadence, and how he had been ruined
by civilization and forced by circumstances
to drink and smoke and sit up all night
inspecting those perfectly arbitrary cards
until he was broken-winded as a trout on a rock
and had no use for the doctrines of Jean Jacques
Rousseau, and could no longer afford
a savagery whether noble or not; some
would never batter that battered copy of Walden
again.
[Well, it’s The Ballad of the Sad Young Men, isn’t it, and UD has, from the age of fifteen or so, loved Roberta Flack’s drawn-out notes as she describes the sodden depressives in this poem. Having labored and set the scene and given nature every opportunity, the guys find that nature has absolutely nothing to say to them. The poignantly self-ruining limestones of Egypt might have allowed them to romanticize their decline; but here in Vermont it’s just “modern American rocks, and hard as rocks.” So “each man / thought bitterly about primitive simplicity / and decadence, and how he had been ruined / by civilization.” Something has happened, and they’re not sure what, but it’s got something to do with the maturation into a civilized being… I suppose if they’d been reading Civilization and Its Discontents instead of Walden they’d have been better prepared for this bitter outcome, in which even a steep river in Vermont can’t undo the cost of assimilating to culture.]
But all the same,
the water, the sunlight, and the wind
did something; even the dragonflies
did something to the minds full of telephone
numbers and flushes, to the flesh
sweating bourbon on one side and freezing on the other.
And the rocks, the old and tumbling boulders
which formed the giant stair of the stream,
induced (again) some purgatorial ideas
concerning humility, concerning patience
and enduring what had to be endured,
winning and losing and breaking even;
ideas of weathering in whatever weather,
being eroded, or broken, or ground down into pebbles
by the stream’s necessitous and grave currents.
But to these ideas did any purgatory
respond? Only this one: that in a world
where even the Memnon stones were carved in soap
one might at any rate wash with the soap.
[Even so, the calming effect of the wind, water, sunlight and rock is to infuse in the guys some sense of equanimity; to help them accept their own getting older and broken, the loss of youthful savagery and simplicity. The stream of life is ultimately after all a grave, and it’s really accommodation to life’s “necessitious… currents” they’re after. (The weird word necessitous is great – it has a sort of ridiculous high dignity to it, and this poem is in part a sermon; but also the whispering incessant sss of the river’s in there.)]
[In the next stanza, their tongues loosened by nature, they state their destinies, their quandaries: They will spend their lives in this sad-young-man condition, dulling with games and liquor the pain of having become civilized. And then, finally:]
Climbing downstream again, on the way home
to the lives we had left empty for a day,
we noticed, as not before, how of three bridges
not one had held the stream, which in its floods
had twisted the girders, splintered the boards, hurled
boulder on boulder, and had broken into rubble,
smashed practically back to nature,
the massive masonry of span after span
with its indifferent rage; this was a sight
that sobered us considerably, and kept us quiet
both during the long drive home and after,
till it was time to deal the cards.
[Well, this is a sobering final view. One wants to think of the stream of life as reasonably gentle, of life as at least for some years a reasonably equal battle between the stream’s erosive effect upon you, and your capacity to have some control over life, to impose some of your will, some of yourself, upon it before you vanish. Yet here you’ve had three human efforts to encompass the stream, to span it, and that stream turns out to be violently, inhumanly powerful, totally destructive of all efforts to domesticate it. No wonder the guys heard nothing from nature. Turns out it ain’t your friend.]
…headlines the Brown University newspaper which, while it’s at it, reminds readers that this is really a kind of beat-goes-on story for Brown’s, uh, very interesting board of trustees:
[Steven] Cohen is not the first Corporation member to come under investigation for potentially unethical financial dealings. Former Corporation fellow Steven Rattner ’74 P’10 P’13 P’15, a former Herald editor-in-chief, was barred from the securities industry for two years in November 2010 as part of a settlement after his private investment firm, Quadrangle Group, was scrutinized for a pay-to-play pension fund scheme.
See but that one’s former… This one is like get on your pony and ride! Ride your pony! Stay in the saddle! Don’t issue any statements… Just sit there and pray Cohen dodges yet another bullet from the SEC…
Meanwhile, if I were a Brown student, I’d take a look at the rest of the trustees. If the university is comfortable with Cohen, there’s no telling what else you’re going to find, is there?
…Andrew Hudgins, a friend of this blog.
**********************************
Our Father, thank you for all the birds and trees,
that nature stuff. I’m grateful for good health,
food, air, some laughs, and all the other things
I’m grateful that I’ve never had to do
without. I have confused myself. I’m glad
there’s not a rattrap large enough for deer.
While at the zoo last week, I sat and wept
when I saw one elephant insert his trunk
into another’s ass, pull out a lump,
and whip it back and forth impatiently
to free the goodies hidden in the lump.
I could have let it mean most anything,
but I was stunned again at just how little
we ask for in our lives. Don’t look! Don’t look!
Two young nuns tried to herd their giggling
schoolkids away. Line up, they called. Let’s go
and watch the monkeys in the monkey house.
I laughed, and got a dirty look. Dear Lord,
we lurch from metaphor to metaphor,
which is—let it be so—a form of praying.
*************************************
The whole poem can be found here.
You really don’t want to know how they’re made. I mean, good ol’ Auburn’s looking for a couple of trustees at the moment — dumb as a goal post Auburn, which is about to get hit by the NCAA again — and I can tell you (if you really want to know) the mix they’re looking for. A guy, a local yokel, who played football for Auburn coupla decades ago and graduated with the sort of higher level understanding of the world you’d expect from a jock who took scads of independent studies with some of Auburn’s finest – like say Thomas Petee . Basically Auburn’s looking for two of the most feeble-minded football freaks it can find. Luckily, the school has graduated many of these, so the search will be a cinch.
You want to know how Penn State makes its sausages? Its thirty-two sausages?
Well, take long-term trustee (since 1997 – wouldn’t want any new blood) Carl Shaffer. Carl’s formal education stopped in high school. He is an impressive farmer, but there’s nothing in his description to suggest knowledge of universities. Or for that matter of public relations. Interviewed about changes to the BOT recommended in the wake of Sandusky (for instance, reducing the number of them to 21), Shaffer said
“This is our university — this university is unique in a lot of ways from other universities … I think it’s up to this board to decide how we’re going to take this university forward.”
… Shaffer said Penn State’s size and location are what make it different: “A lot of things might not fit for us,” he said.
So the same board of trustees that oversaw Sandusky, Graham Spanier, Joe Paterno, Timothy Curley, and Gary Schultz, should be left alone to work out Penn State’s problems because… we’re unique! There’s no one else like us! And how are you unique, Carl?
Well, there’s our location.
You mean you’re the only university situated in the place where you’re situated? Yes, Carl, true; but I can name, oh, hundreds of thousands of universities — all of them, really — unique by virtue of existing on terrain on which no other university exists.
And your size? Let’s see. You have a large student body scattered among many campuses throughout the state. That’s because you’re a land-grant university.
Sometimes one or another guy in one of my classes hangs around after class and doesn’t say anything but sort of looks sideways at me and I sort of smile at him, encouraging him to ask a question or make a comment or something. But he doesn’t say anything, and I gather my notebooks and walk out; and he follows me for a little, at some distance, and then, rather sadly, goes his way.
I don’t know what it means, but I’m moved by it, and I wonder if there’s a maternal something I’m giving off in class, and, if so, whether these young men, missing their mothers, want to be around a certain warmth they’re perceiving. Is the effect – I go on to speculate, wildly – deepened by my talking in literature classes about confusion and suffering and longing?
Literature classes are special, Mr UD often reminds me; they’re not like his political science classes, where they cozy up with constitutions and international law. Not even philosophy has these embodied characters aching for clarity and thrown back on mysteries.
This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for the strange intensity of the literature classroom – an intensity to which my students are highly responsive… That is, I mean to say, I’m grateful to my students.
I’m grateful for their resistance to me – the way a few of them will always, all semester, have a cocked head and skeptical eyes; how some of them will say “Why are all the stories you’ve chosen so dark?”
Which will make me think, and think hard: Am I choosing dark? I riffle through the table of contents of the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, desperately looking for happy stories I’ve missed. I want there to be a world in which that student is right, and serious art is as joyous as it is tragic. But even the one story that ends with a reasonably unclouded epiphany – Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” – gets there by way of the evocation of a fully despairing form of life.
I’m grateful for the class sessions when discussion is just dynamite — ideas and questions and jokes and anecdotes blasting away for an hour and fifteen minutes. Afterwards, my blissed-out head spins. My brain’s lit up. I feel the same way I do when at the piano I play non-stop – with some fluidity, some feeling, and even some proximity to the piece as written – through a longish composition. I’ve been engaged – with energy, precision, rapidity, nuance – and the result has been rather beautiful.
I’ve formed lifetime friendships with a surprisingly large number of my students. I’m grateful they let me watch their passion and disillusionment and then their rebuilding of passion. Some of them have terrible crises in which they sit in their stopped cars for hours staring through the windshield and wondering what they’ve missed out on and if they’ve made disastrously wrong decisions about what to do with their lives. I tend to tell them to calm down; that they’re still ridiculously young, and there’s plenty of time to make more mistakes… I try to make them laugh. They do laugh.
On the simplest level, I’m grateful to them because they’re so beautiful. I mean, just beautiful to look at as they gallop their city campus in skinny jeans and low boots. Their faces are ruddy with life.
But the deeper gratitude, the one I’m mainly trying to convey, involves what you might call intellectual vulnerability. It glitters in their eyes as they sit in front of me and begin to take in, in a disciplined way, the difficulty of being human.
Hell it’s just pourin’ out … Slopping over the sides… Sheeit!
… For winning 15 games and losing 21 times over the past three seasons, Derek Dooley walks away from Vol Ball with $5 million in parting gifts. In January, Dooley will start collecting monthly installments of $104,166.66 through 2016.
… [Assuming] Jim Chaney is not retained by the next head coach, he is owed about $645,000. Seven other current assistants are working under multiyear contracts and would be owed a combined $3.71 million…
… When Dooley canned [wide receiver coach Charlie Baggett] after last season, Baggett walked away with $425,000, which is being paid in 24 equal installments.
… The school still owes Phillip Fulmer one more installment on the $6 million exit fee he got after being fired in 2008…
… Despite the fact that he was fired after lying to NCAA investigators, ex-Vols basketball coach Bruce Pearl kept getting $50,000 a month from UT until the pipeline ran dry in July.
… The man who hired those coaches and brokered those deals, former Athletics Director Mike Hamilton, walked away with $1.335 million after what was termed a “negotiated resignation.”
… When Buzz Peterson was fired as Vols basketball coach after the 2005 season, UT had to take out a loan to cover the $1.39 million it owed him within 29 days of his ouster. Why? Because UT was still on the hook to Peterson’s predecessor, Jerry Green, for $200,000 at the time. The short-term loan cost UT almost $80,000 in interest.
… All told, the extreme makeover of UT athletics during the past five years could wind up costing more than $20 million in buyouts.
************************
David Climer, The Tennessean
