… writes Geoffrey Firman of the Mexican Day of the Dead in Malcolm Lowry’s novel, Under the Volcano.
Tonight children dressed as vampires will come to UD‘s house, and she’ll give them chocolates.
Tomorrow and the next day Mexico and other countries will celebrate and summon the souls of the dead.
The calm piety of the Mexican attitude toward death stirs Firman, an alcoholic and a depressive for whom the facts of human suffering and death are an intolerable bafflement and outrage. He thinks of his soul as
a town ravaged and stricken in the black path of his excess, and shutting his burning eyes he had thought of the beautiful functioning of the system in those who were truly alive, switches connected, nerves rigid only in real danger, and in nightmareless sleep now calm… : a peaceful village. Christ, how it heightened the torture … to be aware of all this, while at the same time conscious, of the whole horrible disintegrating mechanism, the light now on, now off, now on too glaringly, now too dimly, with the glow of a fitful dying battery – then at last to know the whole town plunged into darkness, where communication is lost, motion mere obstruction, bombs threaten, ideas stampede –
Under the Volcano is an extended day of the dead on which Firmin, killed in an act of violence he all but invites, is summoned back to life, reanimated as we read. Passages like the one I just quoted describe a person who has nothing to do with his hyper-awareness of being-toward-death but be tortured by it, to want above all to blot it out. The whole horrible disintegrating mechanism sickens him and makes the goods actual human life, such as it is, offers unreal to him. Here are his thoughts as he’s dying:
When he had striven upwards… had not the ‘features’ of life seemed to grow more clear, more animated, friends and enemies more identifiable, special problems, scenes, and with them the sense of his own reality, more separate from himself? And had it not turned out that the further down he sank, the more those features had tended to dissemble, to cloy and clutter, to become finally little better than ghastly caricatures of his dissimulating inner and outer self, or of his struggle, if struggle there were still? Yes, but, had he desired it, willed it, the very material world, illusory though that was, might have been a confederate, pointing the wise way. Here would have been no devolving through failing unreal voices and forms of dissolution that became more and more like one voice to a death more dead than death itself, but an infinite widening, an infinite evolving and extension of boundaries, in which the spirit was an entity, perfect and whole: ah, who knows why man, however beset his chance by lies, has been offered love?
In his final moments, Firmin’s remorse takes the shape of a dialectic involving reality and unreality. Whether any firm basis for the gesture in fact existed (“the very material world, illusory though that was…”), Firmin nonetheless always had the option to “strive upward,” to create the sort of “spirit” passionate human love represents.
But the compensations of the material world, and of love, were uncompelling to Lowry’s Faust; he preferred exploring infernal realms, which promised the deepest reality, the deepest knowledge, of all.
… is ambivalent about this latest homage, a portrait of the artist made out of tulips. It’s a co-production of the Dutch Embassy and the Irish Botanical Gardens, and all you can see right now (here’s another image) is Joyce as a bunch of bulbs and stakes.
The specific tulip in the design is a new Dutch cultivar intended as a gift to Ireland and named Molly Bloom.
I dunno. It’s a bit on the sweet side for Jamesy. Not as bad as, say, Prague creating a smiley-face balloon homage to Kafka, but similarly problematic.
What has happened to Hollywood Mack Brown? Here you have a five million dollar a year football coach at your typical American university, a model for universities all over the world, with its own television network wholly dedicated to filming every waking moment of its football team. There are hundreds of millions of dollars at stake in this wall-to-wall coverage, and pretty much the entire attention of the university seems riveted to practice sessions, pre-game interviews, games, and post-game interviews. As coach, Mack is a media darling, constantly on camera at the University of Texas Longhorn Network.
But all that money and attention still isn’t making him happy. Mack feels overwhelmed, feels his team is overexposed… He’s getting paranoid about opponents being able to watch every little thing his guys do on the field. He resents having to spend hours every week getting interviewed.
If you’re the Longhorn coach, life is one long makeup session. Here are some tips for him.
…UD went to Rehoboth Beach and watched the city replenish the beach. Now, from an apartment in Germantown, Maryland, she watches images of that just-dredged beach overwhelmed by waves, and she wonders if all that money was wasted.
So many of the Sandy images we’re seeing – of the Chesapeake Bay, Rehoboth Beach, Ocean City – show places flooded, if you will, with memories for old UD. Her father graduated from Ocean City High School. He spent summers working at his family’s businesses along the beach. Later, he bought a house on the Chesapeake, and UD went out fishing with him. Most of UD‘s summers for the last twenty years have taken place in Rehoboth Beach (see this blog’s category, Snapshots from Rehoboth). All of those boarded-up shops with their defiant messages to Sandy scrawled on window boards — she knows those shops, and the people who own them.
The storm was quiet here – some wind, some sound from the trees. UD’s Garrett Park house had a little basement flooding. No treefalls.
… in UD‘s sister’s apartment in Germantown, Maryland. I’m one floor up. UD‘s Garrett Park house lies at the bottom of a big hill.
My only companion at the moment is Shadow, a black cat.
UD‘s beloved Rehoboth Beach looks as though it might be exactly where the storm makes landfall. Her friends the Elkins were there for the Sea Witch Festival. They emailed her about it after they came back to Washington.
We could hear the wind howling and see the waves getting rather too close to the boardwalk for comfort. We read after we got back to DC that there was mandatory evacuation for Rehoboth and the beach was flooded. I dread to hear what’s been happening since.
Mr UD remains in Garrett Park, having decided to go down with the ship.
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Update: Local Delaware reporting:
The winds could exasperate flooding along the coast.
… I go looking for a good poem. A poem with rain in it. Here’s one, by B. Nurkse. A very good one.
The Simulacra
They were driving into the mountains, suddenly married,
sometimes touching each other’s cheek with a fingernail
gingerly: the radio played ecstatic static: certain roads
marked with blue enamel numbers led to cloud banks,
or basalt screes, or dim hotels with padlocked verandas.
Sometimes they quarreled, sometimes they grew old,
the wind was constant in their eyes, it was their own wind,
they made it. Small towns flew past, Rodez, Albi,
limestone quarries, pear orchards, children racing
after hoops, wobbling when their shadows wavered,
infants crying for fine rain, old women on stoops
darning gray veils — and who were we, watching?
Doubles, ghosts, the ones who would tell of the field
where they pulled over, bluish tinge of the elms, steepness
of the other’s eyes, glowworm hidden in its own glint,
how the rain was twilight and now is darkness.
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This shows the best of what a lyric poem can do, a poem concentrated in a few beautifully written lines of implication conveying truth. This is a dreamy spin into mountains, or merely into a dream, or memory. All of its images involve vagueness, disintegration: screes, clouds, shadows, veils, twilight, tinge, hiddenness, padlockedness, dimness. A flickering scene seen while sleeping, or seen at the cinema, or knitted (darned) from fragments of one’s past, or fragments of one’s fantasies.
the wind was constant in their eyes, it was their own wind,
they made it
Just married – suddenly, passionately, acutely married, they begin with a fragile but sharp clarity, those fingernails against each other’s cheeks. Driving their passionate lives forward into the heights of feeling and understanding, they hear the ecstatic radio… But it’s not music – it’s just sound, just static; and already the idea of unclarity and paralysis appears. The rest of the poem will play this out, this idea of life as at best twilight, life as having nothing to do with true light, illumination, invigoration.
More later. Must do a few errands before the rain and the darkness.
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They’ve put their own static, their own barriers to clarity, in front of their own eyes: they made the raveling wind. Something in them made a world always halfway there, always speeding past in images unable to accumulate meaning. See how these great lines amass enigmas:
certain roads
marked with blue enamel numbers led to cloud banks,
or basalt screes, or dim hotels with padlocked verandas.
All these gorgeous surreal dead-ends! The way from the word certain he has us in uncertainty, each magical turn in the road a journey into clouds (the road’s hard numbering is just a directional come-on), or onto volcanic shards, or (an image out of Nabokov) toward the locked porches of shadowy inns. The liquidity of all the Ls in these lines lulls the scene to sleep: blue, enamel, led, cloud, basalt, hotels, padlocked. Lala land.
We’re not getting anywhere, in other words. We set out, suddenly married, bolt upright, ready for Event, and then before you know it life with its inchoate windy strangeness intervenes and things erode into screes before our eyes.
infants crying for fine rain, old women on stoops
darning gray veils — and who were we, watching?
Doubles, ghosts, the ones who would tell of the field
where they pulled over, bluish tinge of the elms, steepness
of the other’s eyes, glowworm hidden in its own glint,
how the rain was twilight and now is darkness.
Crying for milk, that is – for the O thou lord of life, send my roots rain sustenance that will set them up for Life; but the old women know better, and darn gray veils to keep us from our own failure. To pull off of this mountain road and try instead truly to encounter the “steepness” that is another person’s unreachable mystery is to re-tell the old tale of a whole life lived in partial darkness (twilight) and then resolving into darkness itself.
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Update: Rereading Erich Heller’s little book on Kafka (UD took all of Heller’s courses at Northwestern University when she was a college kid), UD finds this passage:
Deeply problematical though Kafka’s love [for Felice Bauer] was, it was not more so than his attitude toward his writing; and this is why the true executor of his “will” – the will that decreed the destruction of his manuscripts – would have had to be a magician, the producer of a sequence of mythical scenes where Kafka’s works, after being burned, would rise again from the ashes purified, in unheard-of beauty and perfection, consisting of nothing but “sheer light, sheer freedom, sheer power, no shadow, no barrier.” Another absolutist in the history of German literature once described in this way his highest poetic aspiration; to attain to it, Schiller said, he would gladly spend all the spiritual strength of his nature even if the effort “were to consume me entirely.” And Kafka, after completing his story “A Country Doctor” in September 1917, confided to his diary that writing such stories could still give him “passing satisfaction,” but happiness he would know only if he succeeded in “raising the world into the pure, the true, the immutable.”
The first words I heard on the radio this morning were Pumpkins may become airborne.
So with skies darkening, and with anxious pips coming from the cardinals, I picked up each pumpkin and put it well back on the front stoop. I also took away the two butterfly chairs, and weighted – with stones I’ve collected from Rehoboth Beach over the years – container plants that seemed light enough to be lifted by the coming winds.
Even now the winds don’t seem so far away, as I sit shivering in an old Adirondack chair next to the puffball mushroom woods. The puffballs have gone gray and dented. The winds will finish them off and scatter their spores.
The winds are here already, hissing in the trees and making the air colder by the minute. The leaf fall is like a rainfall.
I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to blog the storm. We’ll almost certainly lose power in a few hours.
Yesterday we hauled out a ladder and cleaned our gutters. Mr UD tossed down what looked like cow patties and I swept them into our très riche compost pile.
(Tightening my scarf around me here. Should really go inside for a sweater.)
… that when she was a teenager she sang (standing with her guitar on the front porch of a house down the block from the house on Rokeby Avenue where she now lives) at a McGovern rally… And that she thinks she sang There But for Fortune...
It also reminds UD how impressed she was with the writing of this Laura Blumenfeld Washington Post article about McGovern’s daughter’s alcoholic death. It’s got precision, clarity, narrative shapeliness, and an attitude that’s humane but not sentimental. You remember writing like this, years and years later.
She was intelligent, funny, generous, charismatic, tender. She was a flop-down doorstep drunk.
All his life, George McGovern has been a textbook liberal, either an idealist or a sap, depending on your politics. He believes that human beings are improvable, that good intentions translate into good policy. He believes it is possible to intervene to solve people’s problems. He does not believe, did not believe, that at some level life is just a cold, lonely fight.
… NORTHEAST US.’
So, what’s it like? you ask.
Well, at the moment we’ve got a lovely mild evening, so one sort of stands out in the garden looking at the sky and thinking what a sneak it is. So calm, so lovely, a thin little moon, everything very still except the crickets, and yet it’s all a ruse. Out in the garden you somehow already feel the rain and the wind, already see the ripped power lines and the tree limbs all over the street.
“Hey,” says UD to Mr UD. “I have an idea. Let’s leave. Let’s drive west for a few hours and find a nice inn and stay there.”
He doesn’t go for it. There’s a stream of rational reasons against it coming out of his mouth but I’m not listening.
“Hey. I’m willing to wait a couple of hours after we lose power – in case there’s a miracle and it comes back on. But after two hours I’m outta here. Hotel.”
Ominous silence from It’s Good for the Soul to Rough It Mr UD.
“And if all the hotels around here are fully booked, I ask that we continue driving until we get to a region with available hotels.”
Silence.
But anyway. We’re calm in the calm before the storm.
