… UD‘s beloved Henry Purcell’s Cold Song.

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

Its meaning? The long-dead – frozen-dead – Spirit of The Cold has been called back to life by Cupid (the song appears in Purcell’s opera King Arthur, first performed in 1691). Having been comfortably dead for a long while, however, The Cold finds thawing into life again excruciating. Having enjoyed

A Quartz contentment, like a stone

The Cold is not at all sure he wants to “rise unwillingly and slow from everlasting snow.” He’s no longer “fit” to bear the “bitter cold” of human life; he prefers to “freeze again to death.”

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

Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow

Same deal.

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

Or, as Adam Phillips more prosaically says:

The reason that there are so many depressed people is that life is so depressing for many people. It’s not a mystery.

Very thoughtful essay on the big new Diagnostic and Statistical sampler, bursting with psychiatric diagnoses for everyone in the family. Like Adam Phillips (“[H]appiness is the most conformist of moral aims. For me, there’s a simple test here. Read a really good book on positive psychology, and read a great European novel. And the difference is evident in one thing — the complexity and subtlety of the moral and emotional life of the characters in the European novel are incomparable. Read a positive-psychology book, and what would a happy person look like? He’d look like a Moonie. He’d be empty of idiosyncrasy and the difficult passions.”), Patricia Pearson perceives the philosophical destitution of a culture that’s handed the task of self-consciousness over to clueless family physicians — nice people desperately paging through the DSM for tranquilizers. To be sure, the difficult passions are difficult. That doesn’t mean you should pill them away.

… the new film based on Don DeLillo’s novel of that name —

Cronenberg focuses on the psycho-biological forces that resist a man’s best-laid plans: the lust for chaos and destruction latent in an optimized order, the need for degradation that’s fed by a rigid discipline of self-exaltation, the sickness manifested in an excessive concern for health, the trend to self-mutilation in obsessive grooming, the hunger for colossal failure in the drive for success and for death in the vigilant and violent defense of life all emerge in the course of the film and invest it with an oppressive tension that Cronenberg maintains skillfully.

— reminds UD of these lines from Adam Phillips, a British psychoanalyst:

There are parts of ourselves – that don’t want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail… [T]here is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project.

… a bunch of oldies so the rest of us can avoid their fuckups. From the hundreds of accounts he received, he concludes a bunch of things about how to live happily and well.

One theme that runs through his list is drift. You don’t want to sit around vaguely thinking about yourself all the time; you don’t want to think of time as an aimless flow; and you don’t want to be a “rebel and …outsider. The most miserable of my correspondents fit this mold. They were forever in revolt against the world and ended up sourly achieving little.”

UD thinks that Brooks must mean drifty outsiders, people sort of meaninglessly at odds with their culture. To be meaningfully at odds is to be D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Norman Mailer, Morrissey, Christopher Lasch, Christopher Hitchens, Doris Lessing, Lenny Bruce and tons of others who achieved much. Were/are these happy people? Recall what Adam Phillips says:

Sanity involves learning to enjoy conflict, and giving up on all myths of harmony, consistency and redemption… A culture that is obsessed with happiness must really be in despair, mustn’t it? Otherwise why would anybody be bothered about it at all? It’s become a preoccupation because there’s so much unhappiness. The idea that if you just reiterate the word enough … we’ll all cheer up is preposterous… The cultural demand now is be happy, or enjoy yourself, or succeed. You have to sacrifice your unhappiness and your critique of the values you’re supposed to be taking on. You’re supposed to go: ‘Happiness! Yes, that’s all I want!’ But what about justice or reality or ruthlessness – or whatever my preferred thing is?

The reason that there are so many depressed people is that life is so depressing for many people. It’s not a mystery. There is a presumption that there is a weakness in the people who are depressed or a weakness on the part of scientific research and one of these two groups has got to pull its socks up. Scientists have got to get better and find us a drug and the depressed have got to stop malingering. The ethos is: ‘Actually life is wonderful, great – get out there!’ That’s totally unrealistic and it’s bound to fail.

Darwinian psychoanalysis would involve helping you to adapt, find a niche and enable you to reproduce. Freudian psychoanalysis suggests that there is something over and above this. There are parts of ourselves – that don’t want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail. Freud is saying there is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project. That seems to me to be persuasive.

One of the things I value about psychoanalysis is that it acknowledges that there are real difficulties in living, being who one’s going to be, and that no one’s going to be having a lobotomy. There isn’t going to be a radical personal change, which doesn’t mean that people can’t change usefully, but really that psychoanalysis is against magic. Ideally it enables you to realise why you’re prone to believe in magic and why you shouldn’t, because to believe in magic is to attack your own intelligence.

[S]uffering is not essential. It’s just unavoidable. All forms of suffering are bad but some are unavoidable. We need to come to terms with them or be able to bear them. …[Y]ou really did have those parents, you really did make of it what you made of it, you really did have those siblings, really did grow up in that economic climate. These are all hard difficult facts. Redescribed, they can be modified, things can evolve. But it isn’t magic.

Happiness is fine as a side effect. It’s something you may or may not acquire, in terms of luck. But I think it’s a cruel demand. It may even be a covert form of sadism. Everyone feels themselves prone to feelings and desires and thoughts that disturb them. And we’re being persuaded that by acts of choice, we can dispense with these thoughts. It’s a version of fundamentalism. [H]appiness is the most conformist of moral aims. For me, there’s a simple test here. Read a really good book on positive psychology, and read a great European novel. And the difference is evident in one thing — the complexity and subtlety of the moral and emotional life of the characters in the European novel are incomparable. Read a positive-psychology book, and what would a happy person look like? He’d look like a Moonie. He’d be empty of idiosyncrasy and the difficult passions.

“[A]s one gets older, and parents and peers begin to die, and the obituaries in the newspaper are no longer missives from a faraway place but local letters, and one’s own projects seem ever more pointless and ephemeral, … moments of terror and incomprehension seem more frequent and more piercing, and, I find, as likely to arise in the middle of the day as the night,” writes James Wood, in a New Yorker review of a book about secularism.

Like André Comte-Sponville, who, in The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, celebrates as ‘atheist spirituality’ the experience of Rilkean moments of self-dissolution which allow one to feel the true being of the world and one’s natural place in it, the contributors to The Joy of Secularism (its cover archly done up to resemble The Joy of Cooking) argue that secularism is “not a negative condition, not a denial of the world of spirit and of religion, but an affirmation of the world we’re living in now; that building our world on a foundation of the secular is essential to our contemporary well-being; and that such a world is capable of bringing us to the condition of ‘fullness’ that religion has always promised.”

One of Joy‘s contributors, Bruce Robbins, extends Comte-Sponville’s ecstatic immanence, his worship of the earth and of humanity’s habitation upon it, beyond the mystically experiential, arguing that religious fullness – of meaning and value – may be derived from social action. Wood writes:

[Robbins] faults Charles Taylor for assuming that modern secular life “is beset with the malaise of meaninglessness.” Weber’s word for disenchantment, Entzauberung, actually means “the elimination of magic,” but it is a mistake to infer the loss of meaning from the loss of magic. If a malaise besets contemporary life, Robbins writes, it may have been produced not by the march of progress but by the faltering of progress — “by the present’s failure to achieve a level of social justice that the premodern world did not even strive to achieve.”

Here, Robbins, like many secularists, aligns himself with Camus’ existential defiance of meaninglessness through the free, creative, ascription of meaning to a Sisyphean world – a meaning which, founded on the human, and on the love of the human, would inevitably have social justice at its core.

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

But Wood points out that all the secular – indeed, all the religious – affirmation and comfort in the world can’t really stop us asking our “tormented metaphysical questions.” (Why is life so short? So inexplicable?) As Adam Phillips, a contributor to the Joys volume, says elsewhere:

There are parts of ourselves – that don’t want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail… [T]here is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project.

Indeed we prove recalcitrant even to the foundational project of spiritual calming, or at least spiritual clarity; we continue to harbor hatred of, and rage at, our stingy, undisclosing world. Wood quotes a passage from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse:

For one moment she felt that if [she and her companion] both got up, here, now on the lawn, and demanded an explanation, why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable, said it with violence, as two fully equipped human beings from whom nothing should be hid might speak, then, beauty would roll itself up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return. “Mrs. Ramsay!” she said aloud, “Mrs. Ramsay!” The tears ran down her face.

Beautiful, joyous, vigorous, wise Mrs. Ramsay must be summoned from the dead to share her wisdom about life, and to tell us why she, so vigorous and good, had to die; yet she stays as silent as the friend Donald Justice addresses in his poem, Invitation to a Ghost:

Whisper to me some beautiful secret that you remember from life.

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

“The main condition of absurdity,” writes Thomas Nagel in a 1971 essay, The Absurd, “is the dragooning of an unconvinced transcendent consciousness into the service of an immanent, limited enterprise like a human life.” He anticipates the problem with Comte-Sponville’s atheist spirituality: we simply seem constituted toward transcendence, toward the positing and sensing of so much more than this. We try to allow ourselves to be dragooned (a gloriously absurd word, that) back into the limited enterprise of a human life, but we remain unconvinced; as soon as we get there, a collision occurs “between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding everything about which we are serious as arbitrary, or open to doubt.” When we’re truly earthbound, our curious but rather impressive “capacity to see ourselves without presuppositions, as arbitrary, idiosyncratic, highly specific occupants of the world, one of countless possible forms of life” is activated.

Hence our absurd predicament: We may have trouble believing in heaven, but we are, most of us, entirely unable to believe exclusively in earth. For us, things seem always to ramify, things are fraught, things are always spiraling outward with transcendent implication. Caught on an earth which ever catches us up, we’re in a predicament, writes Nagel, both “sobering and comic.”

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

If there’s not much disentangling absurdity discursively, there’s its aesthetic treatment (hence Wood’s recourse to Woolf), in which this dilemma is staged in ways that elucidate it and reconcile us to it.

In his preface to a selection of Philip Larkin’s poems, Martin Amis attempts to account for Larkin’s status as the best-loved of post World War II British poets. It’s odd that he’s so loved, given his sour – even ugly – personality, and what Amis rightly calls the “militant anti-romanticism” of the poems.

Seamus Heaney’s misgivings are probably representative: Larkin is “daunted” by both life and death; he is “anti-poetic” in spirit; he “demoralises the affirmative impulse.”

Yet of course Larkin, more powerfully than any other poet of his time, places himself precisely in the thick of absurdity; he is the emblematic sober and comic stick in the mud.

His greatest stanzas, for all their unexpectedness, make you feel that a part of your mind was already prepared to receive them – was anxiously awaiting them. They seem ineluctable, or predestined. Larkin, often, is more than memorable. He is instantly unforgettable.

We absorb him like that because he captures our recalcitrance to our projects, and even makes this recalcitrance sing. We recognize ourselves in Larkin’s resigned irony because so often that is exactly where we are. Larkin doesn’t whisper to us beautiful secrets; but he whispers our strange and even somehow beautiful truths.

… who regularly link me to items of interest, I’ve got three things — a poem, and two opinion pieces — rattling around my headlet this morning. They all seem to have to do with the humanities, defense of. Let us see if we can organize them in order to make a point or two.

First, here are the items:

1.) A David Brooks column in today’s New York Times.

2.) A Stanley Fish column in the same newspaper.

3.) A poem by Delmore Schwartz called The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me.

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

Brooks wants to “stand up for the history, English and art classes,” even though few students are interested in taking them. (Students only get excited about econ and related fields that will make them rich.) The Brooks defense of the humanities rests on this:

… Over the past century or so, people have built various systems to help them understand human behavior: economics, political science, game theory and evolutionary psychology. These systems are useful in many circumstances. But none completely explain behavior because deep down people have passions and drives that don’t lend themselves to systemic modeling. They have yearnings and fears that reside in an inner beast you could call The Big Shaggy.

… Technical knowledge stops at the outer edge. If you spend your life riding the links of the Internet, you probably won’t get too far into The Big Shaggy either, because the fast, effortless prose of blogging (and journalism) lacks the heft to get you deep below.

But over the centuries, there have been rare and strange people who possessed the skill of taking the upheavals of thought that emanate from The Big Shaggy and representing them in the form of story, music, myth, painting, liturgy, architecture, sculpture, landscape and speech. These men and women developed languages that help us understand these yearnings and also educate and mold them. They left rich veins of emotional knowledge that are the subjects of the humanities.

… If you’re dumb about The Big Shaggy, you’ll probably get eaten by it.

Here we get the humanities as cautionary tale. Know thyself. If you don’t, you’ll make terrible mistakes in life.

Brooks cites a couple of recent, representative mistake-makers: “[A] governor of South Carolina [who] suddenly chucks it all for a love voyage south of the equator, or …a smart, philosophical congressman from Indiana [who] risks everything for an in-office affair.”

Who says these were mistakes? Maybe they were true love for all Brooks knows. Was the Tipper/Al marriage a mistake? It failed. Did it fail because they failed to understand the big shaggy?

UD doubts this. She proposes that the Gores understand the big shaggy pretty well.

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

We all know people with very highly educated emotional knowledge who are fuckups.

We’re all fuckups of one sort or another, no?

So what if he has led a stupid life? Anyone with any brains knows that he is leading a stupid life even while he is leading it. Anyone with any brains understands that he is destined to lead a stupid life because there is no other kind.

Go ahead and disagree with this statement from Sabbath’s Theater, by Philip Roth. I’ll press on.

Here is a comment from Adam Phillips, a British psychoanalyst: “There are parts of ourselves – that don’t want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail. …[T]here is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project.”

I mean, this is your emotional knowledge, no? Part of it? Not that you won’t get eaten by the big shaggy, but that you won’t be entirely assimilated into it when it starts chomping? That you might get a little leverage over it, eventually?

In his defense of the humanities, Fish cites Martha Nussbaum.

[Nussbaum writes that] “abilities crucial to the health of any democracy” are being lost, especially the ability to “think critically,” the ability, that is, “to probe, to evaluate evidence, to write papers with well-structured arguments, and to analyze the arguments presented to them in other texts.”

Here we shift to a humanities defense based not on mental health, but on civic health.

Developing intelligent world citizenship is an enormous task that can not even begin to be accomplished without the humanities and arts that “cultivate capacities for play and empathy,” encourage thinking that is “flexible, open and creative” and work against the provincialism that too often leads us to see those who are different as demonized others.

Nussbaum, like Brooks, defends the humanities as a force toward the creation of an organized and critical mind. I’m with them on this, although I think that some science and social science courses do the same thing. But as with the humanities as a pipeline to better mental health, I’m less convinced by the argument that a deep knowledge of Henry James will make you anything as grand as an intelligent world citizen. I think it’s liable to make you more tolerant and less provincial, because it will make you feel the vulnerability, variety, and complexity of human beings. But I also think that a true immersion into the humanities will make you very cautious about making big claims about outcomes. Many of the meanings we derive from deep humanistic study, after all, are quite disturbing, and even demoralizing.

Remember what William Arrowsmith wrote (I’ve already quoted him on this blog):

[The] enabling principle [of the humanities is] the principle of personal influence and personal example. [Professors should be] visible embodiments of the realized humanity of our aspirations, intelligence, skill, scholarship… [The] humanities are largely Dionysiac or Titanic; they cannot be wholly grasped by the intellect; they must be suffered, felt, seen. This inexpressible turmoil of our animal emotional life is an experience of other chaos matched by our own chaos. We see the form and order not as pure and abstract but as something emerged from chaos, something which has suffered into being. The humanities are always caught up in the actual chaos of living, and they also emerge from that chaos. If they touch us at all, they touch us totally, for they speak to what we are too.

Note that Arrowsmith’s understanding of the humanities is far more modest than that of Brooks or Nussbaum. For him, a prolonged encounter with the humanistic tradition amounts to a more and more sensate anguish at the recognition of our own chaos (this chaos is what Roth calls stupidity, and Phillips recalcitrance). The form and order of a great poem or a beautiful argument, we come to understand, suffer into being, emerge from the chaos of another consciousness. Which is to say that these accomplished objects, these solid touchstones, are not touchstones at all, but fragile occasional formal gatherings… The form and the order of literature and philosophy, in other words, can be thought of as a thin crust lying atop a deep fault line. We value many literary works precisely to the extent that they manifest the fault, the underlying chaos.

I’ll turn to the Schwartz poem in a moment. Time to post this.

… anything but happiness.

On the matter of happiness, she’s with Adam Phillips, a British psychoanalyst. Here are some Phillips snippets:

Sanity involves learning to enjoy conflict, and giving up on all myths of harmony, consistency and redemption… A culture that is obsessed with happiness must really be in despair, mustn’t it? Otherwise why would anybody be bothered about it at all? It’s become a preoccupation because there’s so much unhappiness. The idea that if you just reiterate the word enough … we’ll all cheer up is preposterous… The cultural demand now is be happy, or enjoy yourself, or succeed. You have to sacrifice your unhappiness and your critique of the values you’re supposed to be taking on. You’re supposed to go: ‘Happiness! Yes, that’s all I want!’ But what about justice or reality or ruthlessness – or whatever my preferred thing is?”

“The reason that there are so many depressed people is that life is so depressing for many people. It’s not a mystery. There is a presumption that there is a weakness in the people who are depressed or a weakness on the part of scientific research and one of these two groups has got to pull its socks up. Scientists have got to get better and find us a drug and the depressed have got to stop malingering. The ethos is: ‘Actually life is wonderful, great – get out there!’ That’s totally unrealistic and it’s bound to fail.”

“Darwinian psychoanalysis would involve helping you to adapt, find a niche and enable you to reproduce. Freudian psychoanalysis suggests that there is something over and above this. There are parts of ourselves – that don’t want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail. Freud is saying there is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project. That seems to me to be persuasive.”

“One of the things I value about psychoanalysis is that it acknowledges that there are real difficulties in living, being who one’s going to be, and that no one’s going to be having a lobotomy. There isn’t going to be a radical personal change, which doesn’t mean that people can’t change usefully, but really that psychoanalysis is against magic. Ideally it enables you to realise why you’re prone to believe in magic and why you shouldn’t, because to believe in magic is to attack your own intelligence. [S]uffering is not essential. It’s just unavoidable. All forms of suffering are bad but some are unavoidable. We need to come to terms with them or be able to bear them. …[Y]ou really did have those parents, you really did make of it what you made of it, you really did have those siblings, really did grow up in that economic climate. These are all hard difficult facts. Redescribed, they can be modified, things can evolve. But it isn’t magic.”

“Happiness is fine as a side effect. It’s something you may or may not acquire, in terms of luck. But I think it’s a cruel demand. It may even be a covert form of sadism. Everyone feels themselves prone to feelings and desires and thoughts that disturb them. And we’re being persuaded that by acts of choice, we can dispense with these thoughts. It’s a version of fundamentalism. [H]appiness is the most conformist of moral aims. For me, there’s a simple test here. Read a really good book on positive psychology, and read a great European novel. And the difference is evident in one thing — the complexity and subtlety of the moral and emotional life of the characters in the European novel are incomparable. Read a positive-psychology book, and what would a happy person look like? He’d look like a Moonie. He’d be empty of idiosyncrasy and the difficult passions.”

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

All of which is why reactions to the decades-long Harvard Grant Study, which followed a group of Harvard undergraduates throughout their lives in terms of their happiness, have been like this:

♦ The lives were too big, too weird, too full of subtleties and contradictions to fit any easy conception of “successful living.”

♦ Their lives were too human for science, too beautiful for numbers, too sad for diagnosis and too immortal for bound journals.

♦ Education, marriage, moderate alcohol intake, and exercise are fairly reliable predictors of happiness; so are certain “mature adaptations” taken in responding to challenges, such as maintaining a sense of humor and channeling aggressive feelings into more healthful channels like athletics. As for offering any definitive answer as to how to live the good life, no convenient elixir is forthcoming. To deny the Grant Study its ambitious objective to pinpoint the causes of happiness has a whiff of the wet blanket about it. But there’s something even more miserable about thinking that our happiness can be defined by the jobs we choose, or what we eat for breakfast, or how many miles we run each week. Freud himself pointed out that the only thing normal is pathology, which makes applying a bell-curve-style prescription for joy more than a little reductionist. Even if all the indicators in our lives point to success, a craving for something indefinable may persist.

Here’s an example of how weird, strange, disturbing, and difficult we are:

[P]eople tell psychologists they’d cross the street to avoid someone who had given them a compliment the previous day.

In fact, [explains one of the Harvard Grant Study researchers], positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs — protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections — but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his “prize” Grant Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. “On his 70th birthday,” Vaillant said, “when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. “George, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read it.” “It’s very hard,” Vaillant said, “for most of us to tolerate being loved.”

Amen, brother. Some of UD‘s most difficult moments in life involve her confrontation with extremely high appraisals of UD.

Don’t get her wrong. She wouldn’t trade these beautiful appreciations — often written as if after lengthy consultations with UD‘s most embarrassingly grandiose narcissistic fantasies about herself — for the world.

But since she knows herself to be much less impressive and much more unpleasant than what she’d like to think she is, part of her responds to beautiful appreciations with fear. “If you only knew,” she wants to say to the writers. “If you only knew, you’d be so bitterly … so vengefully? … disappointed.”

I think that’s why we cross the street.

UD returned to her Garrett Park garden from a week at the beach to discover, on a long curved strand of one of her grasses, the white husk left by a dethroned monarch. A facsimile is on the far right of this image; and

She found a very good poem with the word chrysalis in it; in the first line! It’s by John Unterecker. Title: …Within, Into, Inside, Under, Within…

UD will interrupt each of its five parts (each word of its five-word title corresponds to a form of movement in each part) to comment in brackets.

I

Beginnings: a chrysalis improvisation
in the wings, roles
taking on flesh before a role begins…

as light begins in the elm,
pushing the long elm branches into night,
a ghost light pressing sky…

or actors, swollen with strange selves,
distended to the edges of tight skin,
a brightness under moth-wing fingertips.

White arms stretch out toward truth.
The stage is full of light.
Your brightness gloves my skin.

[Soooo – Here you have a poet considering the mysterious elasticity of identity — in particular, the way an actor can become, can embody, an entirely other identity from her own. A bizarre human metamorphosis, getting inside another skin, goes on, and no one, including the actor, has much of an idea how it’s accomplished. She waits in the wing (wonderful pun!), improvising this new role before she even steps on the stage to perform it. And it’s like – how does the tree become rooted and become a tree and grow into a full-bodied elm under the influence of the sun? How does that start, that ghost light casting existence on something that’s still nothing? … Grappling here, in other words, with nothing less than the mystery of creation as well as the mystery of multiple identities — the question of why and how there’s something rather than nothing, how a ghost takes from the light in some way and stops being a ghost and assumes not merely existence, but several forms and attributes of existence.

How? Haven’t a ghost of an idea. As in a more famous formulation of this problem —

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

(Unterecker wrote a guide to Yeats.)

But – yes – we do have a ghost of an idea, which somehow in Unterecker’s poem successfully becomes a fully formed idea. This poem has an idea. An idea which, as the poem proceeds, branches out like an enormous elm.

In embodying that new role, that new identity, the actor conveys to the audience the mystery and excitement and illumination of being and becoming: Your brightness gloves my skin.]

II

Alice, grown huge, swollen to fit of the tunnels,
tiny, unable to reach a gold key,
knew what gardens were for—

yet never knelt in tunnels of rough sunlight
to will flamboyance from green buds.
The swollen poppy twists within its cap,

a pink invention wrestling light.
How often I think of tunneling roots,
curtains of roots, white ropes

that stroked our hair when we entered tunnels.
Here, we are rubbed on gold.
This wedge of pink beginnings troubles gardens.

[Well, he would think of Alice, wouldn’t he? Her surreal metamorphoses in wonderland amplify in vivid dream the dreams of all of us — to be human is to sleep and watch oneself in dream contort to the dimensions of various spectral tunnels and rooms and lakes and caves and bridges. A reassuring exercise, perhaps, in the business of possibility, enterprise, strategy, reincarnation, foxiness. Alice understands that gardens stage the impossible overabundance of being, and she floats around in them throughout the adventures; the poet, however, is a material, sublunary sort who gets his knees dirty as he plants pink poppy seeds in a mood of desperate hope that these lowly tiny dark nothings will somehow morph into flamboyant color, insanely infused being. Let’s make this happen, people!

And now a tendril of Roethke appears as the poet goes deeper, recalling the creepy/delightful feel of dangling roots against your skin in the dark, in tunnels (UD, a snorkeler, thinks of the skin-crawling/fantastic feel of seagrass) — all that dark life suddenly welling up out of the dark and fingering you.]

III

A robin listens to darkness.
I think of worms, grubs, moles,
the slow ballet of rootlets twisting down,

of cave fish, blacksnakes,
and, asleep at Nieux, the great black bulls
that thunder on dark walls.

When we wear another self,
do our souls darken? On a bright stage,
do we enter darkest places?

[Robins feed by listening for worms underground; UD watches them do this every day. So an expansion of the poet’s theme – life lurks, crawls, twists, unaccountably begins, in darkness, and we listen for it. A beautiful line occurs in this part of the poem:

the slow ballet of rootlets twisting down

All those L‘s – their gentle insinuating liquidity – somehow enact the strange grace (ballet) of organic processes… Yet the poet is after not merely passive, natural, coming to life; the reference to ballet reminds us that he’s keeping going at the same time a meditation on art as the active, deliberate, human instance of this earthy alchemy. Think of the palaeolithic caves at Niaux (the poet has incorrectly rendered the town Nieux). You can burrow down there and think you’re simply getting deeper into the earth; but we’ve taken our animating and transformative energies even there, and made of dead walls immortal, thundering art.

So is the actor who assumes new being in fact consorting with – listening like the robin to – these deeply rooted, mysterious, even insidious places? The question, for those who think about the incomparable, enigmatic, transformative power of art, welling up from our depths, answers itself.]

IV

There is darkness clinging to the undersides of leaves.

For we are entering darkness. It skuffs along cave walls,
stumbling and skuffing fingertips.
At Mycenae, it is a heavy must,
a musty heavy breath in the hundred-step cistern.

They wait, dark passageways in old houses, their worn
silence frayed under a blur
of footsteps. Our stretched-out hands
manipulate evasive cellar shadows.

Within the garden, silence darkens windblown leaves.

[The eggs of the butterfly cling to the undersides of leaves. We can’t see them, they rest in darkness, but they live a vivid life in that shade. So too the long-resting-in-darkness ruins at Mycenae, whose deep cistern the poet visits, thinking as he moves along its walls of all the life – the generations of human breath – hidden in it. See here, also, this poem; and this one.]


V

Oh I think of Alice gone down, down
under groundcover dreams,
a man’s tunneled night.

Who are these actors? On dream stages, I forget
lines. My tongue-tied
silence foundering…     Stage props
mumble rigidities.        The audience…

I think of silences at Nieux,
at Mycenae, the tourists
gone, guides returned
to wives, houses….

And those silences of capricious light.
The calex splits, an abrupt pink flame.
Orpheus’ torch descends and still descends through
    arias of reddest blossom.

[And how does the poet conclude? He brings all his images and allusions together (Alice, dream, theater, ancient caves with paintings of bulls in them, the Mycenae cistern, the poppy) and gets personal, takes us into his own not at all Carrollian dreamlife, where his all-too-human, pre-aesthetic reality is just a blurry mess: Who are these people I’m seeing in this dream? What was I supposed to say in this dream? Why are the objects around me silent and dead rather than expressive and figurative?

Hopeless. Niaux and Mycenae, left to themselves alone, are also silent…

Yet even abandoned by tourists and guides, they breathe the bright aura of all those artists and audiences along the walls; the dark poppy’s calyx suddenly falls off and out flashes bright pink… And yes, art is the torch that takes us down there, Orpheus in the underworld scoping out amid the dreadful chaos high-builded arias.]