I suppose it’s all, at bottom, a category error; but UD is enjoying following the Krauss/Albert fulminating dust-up about science and philosophy.

I’ll admit I’ve never gotten far beyond scaring myself when thinking with any depth about why there’s something rather than nothing…

Not really scaring myself… Feeling very sharply the impossibility of moving my mind to the cosmological back-of-beyond.

As a literary type, though, I’ve loved nothingness poems and prose all my life. I’ve loved writing that captures the conviction and the feeling all thoughtful people occasionally have, that – in the words of Leopold Bloom, struck down for a moment in a Dublin pub by absolute nihilism – no one is anything. Everything depends on the nothing you are talking about, and I’m not talking about the nothingness that a field without particles might represent; I’m talking about the “death in the soul” Albert Camus felt in Prague. What Don DeLillo in Libra imagines Lee Harvey Oswald feeling in Texas:

He walked through empty downtown Dallas, empty Sunday in the heat and light. He felt the loneliness he always hated to admit to, a vaster isolation than Russia, stranger dreams, a dead white glare burning down.

What James Agee, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, felt, also on a Sunday, in Alabama:

… the subdual of this sunday deathliness in whose power was held the whole of the south… nothing but the sun was left, faithfully blasting away upon the dead earth…

In my next Faculty Project Lecture, I’m talking about three great nothingness poems – Auden’s Brussels in Winter, and Larkin’s Absences, as well as his Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel. And of course there’s Elizabeth Bishop’s Cape Breton.

I find a curious reassurance in these evocations of … psychic vastation? What to call it without sounding pretentious, ponderous? Everyone laughs when people say things like If you remember the ‘sixties, you weren’t there. But, you know, the business of not being there… that sense of suspension from yourself, the world, everything… It feels like a serious business, one with insights in it that might compete with quantum field theory.

… by cynical commercial interests in this country strengthens as the new Diagnostic Manual, with its piling up and pilling up on simple mourning, looms. What can we do to soften this latest blow to our emotional privacy, our right to our sorrow?

“I have my own cosmology of pain,” protests the writer Bill Gray in Don DeLillo’s novel, Mao II: ” Leave me alone with it.” But America’s famous pathetic drug deaths, coming in now at the rate of about one every couple of months, pierce through any denial we might entertain about the polis of polypharmacy, everyone here, it seems, a dispenser or devotee of anti-experience chemicals.

I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, eyes –

That was Emily Dickinson, expressing the sympathetic curiosity we all have about the grieving – wondering if the grief of others is like our grief; wondering about its origins, its intensity, its nature. Grief – the clean honest passion that hurled John Marcher, finally, onto the grave of his beloved and thereby told him, finally, of that love… Like Dickinson, he looks directly into the eyes of a fellow mourner at the cemetery, and he sees what grief is – he sees the having loved deeply that elicits it:

The stranger passed, but the raw glare of his grief remained, making our friend wonder in pity what wrong, what wound it expressed, what injury not to be healed. What had the man had, to make him by the loss of it so bleed and yet live?

We scrutinize our grief; we scrutinize the grief of others. We know that our grief is in some way – a way of which we can be proud – a measure of the love we were able to experience and express.

And though I may not guess the kind –
Correctly – yet to me
A piercing Comfort it affords
In passing Calvary –

To note the fashions – of the Cross –
And how they’re mostly worn –
Still fascinated to presume
That Some – are like my own –

Marcher, Dickinson, all of us: We observe the grief of others, and the grief that is our own. And from that we derive along with pain, comfort. Comfort because the grief of others, whatever its source, is mostly like our own — the capacity to grieve is in itself a form of reassurance, an admission into the human theater, an instance of solidarity, an encounter with what’s most valuable, really, in ourselves, and in others.

Yet now we read those initial lines differently:

I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, eyes –

Those are our pill dispensers, our under-informed, over-worked family doctors, glancing at the latest DSM on their desk as they measure our grief with narrow eyes and write a prescription for the Xanax on which Whitney Houston was so dependent.

It’s not enough merely to protest, as Allen Frances and so many others are eloquently and ceaselessly doing, pharma’s theft of what’s most intimate and what’s best about us. We have to remind ourselves what grief is.

He’s still writing poetry. We’ve already considered a couple of his poems on this blog, but let’s go ahead and do yet another to mark the big day.

JUNE LIGHT

Your voice, with clear location of June days,
Called me outside the window. You were there,
Light yet composed, as in the just soft stare
Of uncontested summer all things raise
Plainly their seeming into seamless air.

Then your love looked as simple and entire
As that picked pear you tossed me, and your face
As legible as pearskin’s fleck and trace,
Which promise always wine, by mottled fire
More fatal fleshed than ever human grace.

And your gay gift—Oh when I saw it fall
Into my hands, through all that naïve light,
It seemed as blessed with truth and new delight
As must have been the first great gift of all.

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

Your voice, with clear location of June days,

[Like James Merrill, Wilbur’s good at finding words that hint at other words, words that don’t so much radiate out with meaning, as generate an inner, meaning-mingled heat. So take location. He’s setting the poem’s place in time – afternoon, June – so location has that straightforward meaning. But he begins with a reference to his lover’s voice, so part of our mind may well be registering, say, locution – especially with that word “clear” in front of it.

The setting is about clarity, with objects bright and clear in the summer light; but it’s also about the clear locution of the lover’s voice as she calls the poet, who’s inside, to come outside to be with her.]

Called me outside the window. You were there,

[You were there. The poem’s already beginning to build the idea of the brilliant, enthralling, absolute thereness of the loved one, her glorious radiant presence, her intense and delighting being in the world. This is a love poem — to the loved one, and to the loved world, and to the way the loved one’s charismatic and adored way of being, her intensified self-ness, her sheer miraculous outrageously exceptional placement on the earth, astounds and delights the poet, lifting him to positively religious heights of ecstasy.]

Light yet composed, as in the just soft stare
Of uncontested summer all things raise
Plainly their seeming into seamless air.

[The poem’s called June Light, so on one level this reference to light intends to describe the peculiarly intense and at the same time tranquil nature of early summer light. This isn’t oppressive light that bleaches out the visible world; on the contrary, it’s light that’s composed – calm, but also ordered, yielding a beautifully clear and fitting world whose objects – like the lover – burst out of the dull background world with hyper-dramatic being.

The lover too has this combination of brilliance and calm, radiance and soundness. She’s both exciting and pacifying.

The soft stare of summer is “just” – right, appropriate, undeniable (uncontested) – which is to say that – let’s put it the way Gertrude Stein might – there’s a there there. The world obviously and incontrovertibly exists.

Does this seem trite? The world exists. My lover exists. Big deal. These things are obvious.

But they’re so not obvious. The narrator of Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein is sitting in Paris, on a gorgeous June day, on the balcony of a grand hotel, with a view of the most stunning part of the city, and he thinks:

The gloss the sun puts on the surroundings – the triumph of life, so to speak, the flourishing of everything makes me despair. I’ll never be able to keep up with all the massed hours of life-triumphant.

I mean here he is, having el major peak experience, and he despairs! He despairs because he doesn’t have whatever inside of himself to be adequate to it — yet the world is trying so hard to give him his Wordsworthian spot of time, his Sartreian perfect moment! What is the matter with him?

But everyone knows what the narrator means. “Slowly, out of every bending lane, in waves of color and sound, came tourists in striped sneakers, fanning themselves with postcards, the philhellenes, laboring uphill, vastly unhappy,” writes the narrator of Don DeLillo’s The Names. Vastly? Unhappy? It’s a brilliant Athens day, and they’re going to see the effing Acropolis! The American narrator refuses to visit the Acropolis at all, even though he lives in Athens. Something about how the place is “daunting.”

Okay so Wilbur is simply saying that the life force of the loved one represents a brilliance he can approach, a world-intensifying, clarifying force that doesn’t daunt. As a result, instead of joining the depressives in Bellow and DeLillo, for whom the sheer force of the physical and metaphysical world in its most beautiful, meaningful, and intense realizations is just too much, the poet revels in his access to that force. It is all thanks to the lover.

Seeming and seamless are nice too, eh? The quality of the light transforms the seeming, difficult to grasp world we live in most of the time, to a seamless, composed, real world.]

Then your love looked as simple and entire
As that picked pear you tossed me, and your face
As legible as pearskin’s fleck and trace,

[She wanted him to come outside because she wanted to toss him a pear she just picked. It’s beautiful, ripe, she wants him to see it and feel it. At this amazing moment of earthly and human clarity, when the world under its June light, and the lover under the influence of the June light, suddenly both take on absolute irrefutable acute being, what shines out most clearly is the fact of the lover’s love for the poet. The well-wrought, perfect ripeness and particularity of the pearfruit is the lover, in her fully manifest (legible) being, a higher being, if you will, brought into existence by virtue of her love for the poet.

In short, she’s happy to see him.

He can read who she is, what she’s feeling, from the lines of joy on her face, just as we can trace natural images on pearskin.

Sometimes the world, and the people we love, shine forth with entire vivacity and truth. As in the moment that ends Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, a memory of his brother fishing that “remains in my mind as if fixed by some chemical bath.”

He never stopped to shake himself. He came charging up the bank, showering molecules of water and images of himself to show what was sticking out of his basket, and he dripped all over us … Large drops of water ran from under his hat onto his face and then into his lips when he smiled.

I can never get to the word lips in these lines without feeling the almost unbearable intensity of Maclean’s love for his brother.]

Which promise always wine, by mottled fire
More fatal fleshed than ever human grace.

[I’m not sure what these lines mean. I think they mean something like this: The gorgeous flesh of the pear will become pear wine; or will be burned away in order for the pearfruit to become pear wine. The pear is even more vulnerable to the processes of time and transformation than we (more fatal fleshed); but although we have a longer earthly run (human grace), the pear certainly reminds us of our vulnerability toward death, the shutting down of all this being.]

And your gay gift—Oh when I saw it fall
Into my hands, through all that naïve light,
It seemed as blessed with truth and new delight
As must have been the first great gift of all.

[Yes, blessed, and the first great gift of all, and grace — You can read religion into this poem if you’d like, though frankly it seems more on the pagan side to me … Maybe that’s just me…

But anyway. 99.9% of poems these days are falling over themselves to capture these moments, and you can get knockoffs quick and cheap from a poet like Ted Kooser. But why not get the real thing?]

In the 234 years since Boswell knocked at Hume’s door, we have moved, if only in the way we talk about it, from death’s centrality to its banality.

Robert Zaretsky talks death and religion.

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

And listen – If it’s banal talk about death you want, there’s no better door to knock at than Don DeLillo’s White Noise.

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

“Cotsakis, my rival, is no longer among the living.”

“To be so enormous. Then to die.”

[Tom Stoppard’s play Rock ‘n Roll] starts in a Cambridge garden in 1968 with a piper playing the Syd Barrett song, Golden Hair.

Barrett, the Pink Floyd writer and singer, appears now and then in the play, a figure for the seductive, subversive glory of art…

Golden Hair. It’s Barrett’s song, but it’s James Joyce’s poem.

The charismatic rock star undone by drugs (In Stoppard’s play, we see him in his mother’s Cambridge garden. Barrett retreated there, mentally broken, in the mid-seventies, and stayed until his death not long ago, at the age of sixty.) took the James Joyce poem, Golden Hair, from Joyce’s 1904 collection Chamber Music, and in 1969 set it to stark guitar, stark voice, cymbals, and a low drone.

Here are Joyce’s words.

Lean out of the window,
Golden-hair,
I hear you singing
A merry air.

Singing and singing
A merry air,
Lean out of the window,
Golden-hair.

Barrett changes the words in the first stanza a little:

Lean out your window
Golden-hair
I heard you singing
In the midnight air.

Barrett makes of this poem (which, in its pull toward the passion of art and away from the chill anxiety of intellect, has much in common with the Yeats poem about Fergus that echoes through Ulysses) a very private chant. His notes go nowhere; he ventures only one or two changes. His song is musing, minimalist, hesitant, circular, self-absorbed, even though the poem’s content is clearly celebratory, the speaker energized by the fire of the woman’s singing to throw away his book, leave his room, and beg her to lean from her window, so he can see her.

Barrett isn’t going to the woman. He isn’t going anywhere. He even brings his voice down, decisively, in the last line, as if to close out any possibility of release from his trance.

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

With Bloomsday coming up, UD ponders not only the generativity of art, the way Joyce’s work sings through the work of Syd Barrett, Samuel Barber, Kate Bush, John Cage, Jefferson Airplane, and many others (to note only his musical influence), but also the suffering of the artist, the suffering out of which art emerges. Stephen Dedalus, on June 16, 1904, is going the way of Barrett, after all, drinking himself to an early grave if he doesn’t watch out… Like Barrett, he’s acting outrageously, self-destructively, getting into fights…

And certainly part of what our hero Bloom attempts to convey to Stephen is how deadly intellect, understood as a kind of arrogant self-absorption, can be to the creation of art. Art’s passion is a human passion, and Dedalus isn’t human enough yet. Hasn’t loved. Holds himself aloof from humanity. Bloom humanizes Stephen by embodying for him the capacity for selfless love. Bloom barely knows Stephen, but intuits, as a compassionate and perceptive human being, the depth of his suffering. He follows him around late at night in Dublin, worried that Stephen will get into trouble.

Stephen duly gets into trouble, and Bloom gets him out of it, takes him to his home, gives him hot chocolate, talks to him late into the night, escorts him out of the house (Stephen politely declines Bloom’s invitation to stay the night), and watches with him, from the yard, the quiet spectacular starry sky. This night sky watching produces one of the most famous lines from Ulysses:

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

The line incorporates much of what one loves in Joyce’s prose: Neologisms (Nightblue is a kind of partner to skyblue; and, no, night isn’t black, or it’s not always black. Night and day aren’t always all that different; in Key West, I was amazed at how white clouds appeared in the sky late into the evening…Heaventree is heavenly. We might also hear lemontree. ). Assonance (humid nightblue fruit). Metaphor (The constellations make trees; each star is a fruit on the tree). Alliteration (heaventree, hung, humid.)

More deeply, there’s something exhilarating about the implicit humanizing, naturalizing, worlding, call it what you will, of the entire universe in this sentence. The distant, enigmatic, intimidating stars which make us feel small and transient are in this sentence gathered into our earth, made an extension of our trees and forest, our earthly garden. There’s a sort of heady insolence about this Romantic gesture, this pulling of the heavens down to earth, this re-sizing of the cosmos to fit us. This is Walt Whitman, claiming the universe, embracing all in his human arms.

More than anything, perhaps, we love the way this famous line seems ineffably balanced, as the stars seem balanced on the heaventree; somehow in the very composition of the sentence, in its smooth stately self-control, God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.

But of course this is the power of the artist, the power of art, that we’re registering. To be lifted up by a perfect phrase or sentence is to hear the piper in the Cambridge garden and follow him. It is to hear the woman singing through the gloom and follow her.

Barrett and Dedalus — and Bucky Wunderlick, the rock star in Don DeLillo’s novel Great Jones Street (a character in part inspired by Barrett) — these people, these fictions, draw our attention not so much to our own experience of aesthetic rapture, as to the cost to the artist of aesthetic creation.

… beautifully about Don DeLillo:

… Of all our novelists, Don DeLilllo is perhaps the most priestly; indeed, it is his example of high-minded renunciation that makes any literary behavior but the writing of rigorously modernist texts seem at best a vulgarity, at worst a betrayal. He is the most purposefully removed of our novelists this side of Thomas Pynchon or Philip Roth; and yet because he is concerned with a very specific condition of modernity — private befuddlement in the face of incomprehensible public events — he is engaged to the point of being oracular. Thanks to his unsurpassed talent for capturing and conjuring free-floating dread, he even has the reputation of something of a prophet; there can be no event so horrific but that DeLillo seems to have anticipated it, from 9/11 to the financial collapse and now to the spill or the blowout or the hemorrhage in the Gulf.

No, he has never written about Top Kills and Junk Shots and the odd flutter of hope elicited by the words “Containment Dome.” But in their suggestion of corporatized violence and above all in the violence they do to the language, they are DeLilloesque. In what is known as his breakthrough novel, 1985’s White Noise, he made his signature contribution to the American language when he wrote of an “airborne toxic event” that results from an accident of chemical cars in a trainyard. The chemical that he created for the occasion, Nyodene D, is less important than the fact that the airborne toxic event is just that — an event that people talk about, argue about, even as it tragically envelops them. And of course what they talk and argue about most of all is what to call it: “They’re not calling it the feathery plume anymore,” one character says. “They’re calling it the black billowing cloud.”

What DeLillo understood, long ago, is the end of the world would be experienced not as the end of the world but rather as a way of thinking and talking about the end of the world. What he understood is that the toxic cloud that has our name on it would be defined by its lack of definition; that we would never have as much information about it as we need to have or that someone else has; that it would turn into a free-floating void, exactly as withholding as it is encompassing; that it would become part of the landscape and that the landscape would become part of it; and that, of course, there would be footage, endlessly recycled but ultimately inconclusive.

No, Don DeLillo has never written about what about BP, Transocean, the MMS, and our thirst for oil have wrought in the Gulf of Mexico. But 25 years ago he imagined the name for a disaster that would come with its own excruciating and tantalizing Zapruder, and that would allow us to talk it — and ourselves — to death:

The underwater toxic event.

… the University of California Riverside professor who wrote a generous blurb for Jenny’s and my book, has died.

… Mr. Elliott grew up in a three-room apartment in a gritty Baltimore neighborhood. His father drove a truck. His mother operated a loom that produced corporate emblems.

After earning his bachelor’s degree, his family’s first college degree, from Loyola College in Baltimore, he got his master’s degree from Bowling Green State and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

After 17 years teaching at Princeton, he came to UCR for the opportunity to shape a growing campus, he said in a previous interview.

… Liam Corley, who earned his Ph.D. at UCR in 2004 under Elliott’s guidance, also remembered him fondly. Corley, an assistant professor of English at Cal Poly Pomona, is deployed to Afghanistan with the Navy.

“Emory was a selfless man,” Corley wrote in an e-mail to UCR officials after they informed him of Elliott’s death. “He was always in high demand as a mentor, teacher, speaker and scholar, but he had the generous gift of always paying attention to the person before him.”

… The Airborne Toxic Event, a Los Angeles band that takes its name from UD‘s adored White Noise, by Don DeLillo. In this interview, the band’s leader explains how he chose the name.

I read that you took your name from the novel White Noise by Don DeLillo. For those of us who are unfamiliar with the work, what is that referring to?

In the novel, the Airborne Toxic Event is a big cloud that is a result of a giant chemical explosion. The huge poisonous cloud threatens a nearby town. The hero, Jack, gets exposed to it. He’s told by the doctors that he’s going to die. When he asks when, the doctor says, “You may live a week; you may live 40 years.” Which is really unhelpful because that is true for everyone. The Airborne Toxic Event [evokes] his fear of death. It changes him in these really important ways. The same thing happened to me in [the] year I formed the band, with my mom dying and my own health problems.