Cream of crab soup
Salt and pepper calimari
How I survived The Blizzard of 2010

Yes, I could offer many haiku detailing UD‘s snowed-in week here at the Legacy Hotel in ‘thesda (She was just interviewed by the George Washington University newspaper, The Hatchet, which is doing a feature on “stranded professors.”), but I think I’ll stop with one, and turn instead to the consideration of a very fine poem about snow, Theodore Roethke’s The Far Field. It’s a bit long, so let’s take it section by section.

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I

I dream of journeys repeatedly:
Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel
Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,
The road lined with snow-laden second growth,
A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,
Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,
And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken.

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The initial stanza tells us we’ve got a lyric poem, autobiographical — I, I dream. The poet describes a recurrent dream of his in which he drives alone in the snow, no other traffic, himself carrying nothing of his life (without luggage) out to the end of a long peninsula; and when he gets to the point at which he can drive no further, he sits in his car while its stalled engine churns until everything shuts down — the headlights darken.

Such a dream, recurrent, seems suicidal, the poet drawn to an eerie narrative of a more and more narrowing world in which his mind – headlights – finally stalls and shuts off. Snow is all over this dream as the pall of coffined earth, covering the dying poet more and more as he moves forward.

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II

At the field’s end, in the corner missed by the mower,
Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,
Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,
Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,
Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery, —
One learned of the eternal;
And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by rain and ground-beetles
(I found in lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)
And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,
Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers,
Blasted to death by the night watchman.

I suffered for young birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,
My grief was not excessive.
For to come upon warblers in early May
Was to forget time and death:
How they filled the oriole’s elm, a twittering restless cloud, all one morning,
And I watched and watched till my eyes blurred from the bird shapes, —
Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean, —
Moving, elusive as fish, fearless,
Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end branches,
Still for a moment,
Then pitching away in half-flight,
Lighter than finches,
While the wrens bickered and sang in the half-green hedgerows,
And the flicker drummed from his dead tree in the chicken-yard.

— Or to lie naked in sand,
In the silted shallows of a slow river,
Fingering a shell,
Thinking:
Once I was something like this, mindless,
Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar;
Or to sink down to the hips in a mossy quagmire;
Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log,
Believing:
I’ll return again,
As a snake or a raucous bird,
Or, with luck, as a lion.

I learned not to fear infinity,
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,
The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,
The wheel turning away from itself,
The sprawl of the wave,
The on-coming water.

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Wait – I’ll post what I have so far. What with all the interruptions (along with the Hatchet reporter, La Kid called wanting to talk about Pride and Prejudice, and Mr UD called), I haven’t been able to concentrate on the poem’s second section.

I think Mr UD misses me. He said: “You are like Formula One racing. Maybe not so great for one’s longevity, but very exciting.”

A Texas writer grapples with the philosophical implications of Baylor’s conscience-of-a-nation president, the man who had WHAT to say about Bill Clinton’s fellatio with a White House intern, now clammin’ right up when it comes to his football players. Title of the writer’s article:

Ken Starr, Full Monty on Fellatio 18 Years Ago, All Shy Now About Baylor Rapes

When Lewinsky describes the sex she had back then, she says it happened because “I fell in love with my boss.”

When scads of Baylor women describe the sex they recently had, with members of the football team, they don’t talk about love. They just go straight to the police reports.

[Ken] Starr .. wanted to make fellatio a national issue … And now that Starr is president of a Baptist university, he and the regents of his school are cloaking themselves in legalisms and claims of privacy on the arguably much more urgent question of serial campus rape.

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To jog your memory:

Starr, whose main claim to fame at Baylor has been beefing up the football team and building a new stadium, now has two star players in prison for rape, a third about to be tried, another player expelled, a fraternity president arrested and charged. This occurs against a backdrop of foot-dragging on federally mandated anti-rape measures and a pattern of stony silence roundly decried by national and Texas media including even the university’s hometown newspaper, The Waco Tribune.

The Silence of the Starrs. We’ve had a lot of that, haven’t we? Brings to mind that Edgar Lee Masters poem…

I have known the silence of the Starrs and of their teams,
And the silence of the buck when it’s passed,
And the silence of the AD and the Assistant AD,
And the silence for which juries alone find the word,
And the silence of trustees before football season begins,
And the silence of boosters …

Laura Kipnis (see poem) is “cleared” of “wrongdoing.”

Oh thank you, thank you, Northwestern attorneys, for exonerating Kipnis from having written something that offended someone.

Good news for your struggling profession, no? Now that we know how easy it is for American professors to get hauled up on charges, all you have to do is advertise in campus newspapers. Have you ever been offended by one of your professors? Contact us NOW.

Before we look at a very good
snow poem, by G.E. Murray,
here’s a picture La Kid
just took of UD‘s morning
handiwork: A path through the snow
from our house to the street.

(She took it through a window,
etc., etc., so it’s a bit vague.)

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

The poem is from his Sequels to an Uncollected Winter.

4. The Certainties

Coon Rapids, Minnesota. January 1976

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Point One, pretty much all poets say the same thing about snow. Wind they’re divided about; rain can be new life or dreadful dullness, sunlight happiness or oppression… But snow for most is clearly death, the world whited out to reveal whether we like it or not “what’s really always there / Unresting death,” as Philip Larkin writes (not about snow, but same idea).

“All poems are elegies at their core, [Maxine Kumin] often said.”

So Murray’s poem, with its long lines drifting like the cattle, drifting like us into dangerous thoughts while we look at the snow, does that same death thing, follows the snow as it snakes toward a truth about the certainty of our oblivion. We’re kept animals, set adrift by the weather in the direction of morbid thoughts. The real animals, sad things, are indeed adrift, doomed to starve or freeze as they wander; we are figuratively driven from warm complacent ordinary thoughts by what’s happening outside. We get to stay in – truly kept animals – and from our windows watch the merest “residue of soul” that shows itself in expelled breath. And this tells us how at any moment we are, whatever the weather, barely existent, hanging on by a thread.

the hung
Bellies of cows lunge through drifts forming whale tracks, inching
Ahead, the beasts hopeful as drifters at the hiring gate.

Hung and lunge: This is an unrhymed but lightly metered poem with plenty of internal rhyme or near rhyme. Its mood is the ominous feel of being unmoored, so tight exact rhyme wouldn’t do; but on the other hand the poem’s not ultimately about random drift. It has both a nuanced parallel between animals and human beings to express, and a familiar trajectory to trace toward a familiar conclusion. So despite its snow drifts, the poem exhibits a certain solidity of form – all those long lines, more or less the same length.

The famous final paragraph of Joyce’s “The Dead” is the prose cousin of “The Certainties.”

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Murray writes:

Night-hammered,
Blizzard-ripe, we wait by the window with house plants, our fears
Nearly realized, a salt lick of faith turning to stone in our bowels.

Wonderful final lines, pulling forward the parallel with the beasts. We wake up having been hammered all night with snow, and we wait by the window with house plants and I ask myself why is house plants so brilliant? Why is that little phrase the genius, the elegiac core of this poem? Why in the world does it make me think of that song from Hair that starts

We starve, look at one another, short of breath
Walking proudly in our winter coats

I guess it’s one of those existential status lines – We, we, we. Let us look starkly, in the clarifying snow, at us, the human race, in a corporate, spiritual, sense. Our fragility, isolation, transience, efforts to continue to exist. Our cattle-like hopefulness despite our doom… On we walk, proudly, in our winter coats, despite gasping, starving…

The house plants are the perfect pathos-example. The poignant pathetic way we bring small doses of nature in, keep these teeny therapeutic helpings warm so they thrive. Kept things for kept us. They keep our delusions of safety alive. Except that now, with so much snow, our fears are very close to realized.

… says Malcolm Lowry’s autobiographical narrator in his story, The Forest Path to the Spring, and he’s right; but useful only if a writer can narrate the man’s experience well.

You know UD as a mad lover of Lowry’s despairing novel, Under the Volcano. She admires just as much the totally different Forest Path, an extended meditation on happiness.

Like Lowry during the 1940’s, the narrator is an artist who lives as a squatter in a shack on the water in Dollarton, Canada. He writes a strange story, with no real plot beyond a spiritual one which traces, through his general love of nature and his particular daily ritual of carrying a water canister through the forest to a spring, his recognition of the character of happiness.

A long story like this one, with little event, has to carry you along on the strength of its mood and language, and Lowry’s open-hearted, earth-besotted prose accomplishes this from the outset. (Another great example of this sort of story is Katherine Anne Porter’s Holiday.) We are accompanying a man whose mood is happy, first, because the woman he loves is with him and loves the water and forest and sky as much as he does. And he’s also happy because, engrossed in natural life, he suspends his customary anxious self-consciousness.

His awareness is overwhelmingly of the earth, the “ever reclouding heavens” which, when they finally clear at evening, reveal a stand of pines that “write a Chinese poem on the moon.”

Awareness itself – this astoundingly sharp perception of the natural world – is a symptom of his happiness, one that he sees too in his lover:

[I]t was … her consciousness of everything that impressed me …

“Joy,” wrote Simone Weil, “is the overflowing consciousness of reality.” That overflow is what the writer gathers when he goes to the spring. “Ah the pathos and beauty and mystery of little springs and places where there is fresh water near the ocean… [S]uch happiness… was like what is really meant by freedom, which was like the spring, which was like our love, which was like the desire to be truly good.”

The writer says the same thing at the end of his long story as he remembers his years in Dollarton:

[I]t was as if we were clothed in the kind of reality which before we saw only at a distance…

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Burdened, to be sure, by thoughts of the war in Europe (“The shadow of the war was over everything. And while people were dying in it, it was hard to be really happy within oneself. It was hard to know what was happy, what was good. Were we happy, good? Or, being happy at such a time, what could one do with one’s happiness?”), and, more immediately, by the gradual encroachment of the nearby city into his paradise, the writer nonetheless spends most of his time moving unselfconsciously through the natural world and reflecting upon that world.

His little community of fragile shacks and penurious squatters represents

something that man had lost, of which these shacks and cabins, brave against the elements, but at the mercy of the destroyer, were the helpless yet stalwart symbol, of man’s hunger and need for beauty, for the stars and the sunrise.

Part of the answer to the question of happiness has to do with the realization here of the perilousness, the jerry-built vulnerability, of oneself even as you brave the elements of mortal life. Part will have to do with – despite this – fashioning your life as “a continual sunrise… a continual awakening.”

An ideal of all-transcending serenity flickers occasionally in these pages – “the Tao… came into existence before Heaven and Earth, something so still, so changeless, and yet reaching everywhere, and in no danger of being exhausted…” – but the writer knows that he exists confused, in a human world of suffering. Like Thoreau, he also knows the extremity of his human-world-estranging gesture:

Often I would linger on the way and dream of our life. Was it possible to be so happy? Here we were living on the very windrow of existence, under conditions so poverty-stricken and abject in the eyes of the world they were actually condemned in the newspapers, or by the Board of Health, and yet it seemed that we were in heaven, and that the world outside – so portentous in its prescriptions for man of imaginary needs that were in reality his damnation – was hell.

He can’t keep his own hell off the forest path to the spring, though, and another part of happiness is somehow admitting into this new lucid consciousness one’s own ugliness:

Half-conscious I told myself that it was as though I had actually been on the lookout for something on the path that had seemed ready, on every side, to spring out of our paradise at us, that was nothing so much as the embodiment in some frightful animal form of those nameless somnambulisms, guilts, ghouls of past delirium, wounds to other souls and lives, ghosts of actions approximating to murder, even if not my own actions in this life, betrayals of self and I know not what, ready to leap out and destroy me, to destroy us, and our happiness…

These theatrics, though, these anticipated beasts, weren’t really what his unfolding spiritual life was about:

I became convinced that the significance of the experience lay not in the path at all, but in the possibility that in converting the very cannister I carried, the ladder down which I climbed every time I went to the spring – in converting both these derelicts to use I had prefigured something I should have done with my soul… [As] a man I had become tyrannized by the past, and… it was my duty to transcend it in the present.

Those derelict objects – his own dereliction – would not be rejected, avoided, denied, made ghoulish; they would be made useful in the capture of something beautiful.

Having, on the path, encountered and to some extent calmed these ghouls, the writer enters into a lucid stillness in which

I dreamed that my being had been transformed into the inlet itself… so that I seemed to contain the reflected sun deeply within my very soul, yet a sun which as I awoke was in turn transformed … into something perfectly simple, like a desire to be a better man, to be capable of more gentleness, understanding, love –

It is the same selfless stillness that Norman Maclean describes at the end of A River Runs Through It:

Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

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The Dollarton shacks. Long bulldozed; now aestheticized.

“[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.

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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.

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“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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

From an interview with Zadie Smith a few years ago:

… [T]here were many things about academic life that I found unbearably oppressive and absurd. There’s so much of one’s real lived experiences that you have to leave at the gates. There’s something about English departments in particular—a kind of desperate need to be serious, to be professional, to police this very ambiguous and necessarily amorphous act, reading—that I find hard to deal with.

English, as a subject, never really got over its upstart nature. It tries to bulk itself up with hopeless jargon and specious complexity, tries to imitate subjects it can never be. I always feel a disappointment coming out of English departments, as if all these brilliant people are gathered and poised to study something and all they have to study is . . . these things? Novels? But they’re so . . . smooshy. It’s as if, at some fundamental level, they consider the novel beneath them. They want something more macho, harder, with a more rigorous structure. It depresses me, how embarrassed some people seem to be about novels, how much they want them to be something else.

The flip side of that experience is finding a professor here, a professor there, who is absolutely willing to engage with everything a novel is and face up to its strengths and failures as a human product and allow students to express their most intimate intellectual and emotional experiences of reading. When that happens, there’s no better place to be in a university than in an English department. But when someone is spending a semester explaining to you why Adam Bede is an example of the nineteenth-century pastoral fallacy, that’s a little demoralizing. To me, a university is one of the most precious of human institutions; that’s why when they fall short of their own ideals, you feel so cheated.

How did I get onto this page, this particular Zadie Smith interview?

Via Roger Deakin, via Iris Murdoch, via scribbling in my journal while I was coming home on the train from the university this afternoon, even via the burqa…

Well, I’ll try to straighten it all out. But it’s got something to do with this quotation from Murdoch. Smith cites it in her interview:

The chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy, the tissue of self-aggrandising and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what there is outside one. . . . This is not easy, and requires, in art or morals, a discipline. One might say here that art is an excellent analogy of morals or indeed that it is in this respect a case of morals.

Real lived experiences… intimate intellectual and emotional experiences… Smith is after these, and she rightly identifies the university as a bastion of actuality, a much-evolved, much-elaborated truth-seeker. The university embodies, ideally, Murdoch’s discipline of seeing what there is outside one, tearing the tissue of self-centered fantasy in order to attain what Murdoch elsewhere calls the “merciful objectivity” at the core of morality.

Deakin? In the few days since I discovered this British environmentalist and nature writer (he died five years ago), I’ve experienced the same excitement I felt first reading James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and Albert Camus’ Lyrical Essays, and George Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London,” and Jan Morris’ essay “La Paz,” and quite a few other great works of descriptive prose. Like these writers, Deakin has the gift of writing outside of himself, the gift of merciful objectivity, which he trains on the natural world.

This is from his book Waterlog:

Natural water has always held the magical power to cure. Somehow or other, it transmits its own self-regenerating powers to the swimmer. I can dive in with a long face and what feels like a terminal case of depression, and come out a whistling idiot. There is a feeling of absolute freedom and wildness that comes with the sheer liberation of nakedness as well as weightlessness in natural water, and it leads to a deep bond with the bathing-place.

Most of us live in a world where more and more places and things are signposted, labelled, and officially ‘interpreted’. There is something about all this that is turning the reality of things into virtual reality. It is the reason why walking, cycling and swimming will always be subversive activities. They allow us to regain a sense of what is old and wild in these islands, by getting off the beaten track and breaking free of the official version of things. A swimming journey would give me access to that part of our world which, like darkness, mist, woods or high mountains, still retains most mystery. It would afford me a different perspective on the rest of landlocked humanity.

One writer, remembering Deakin, singled out his “enormous exuberance and anarchic life.” He said of Deakin that “The poems of Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and Coleridge were as immediate to him as today’s newspapers.”

Deakin was Zadie Smith’s ideal English department. He had what Murdoch calls the discipline of art as well as the amorphous smooshy exuberance of real experience. Because he wasn’t landlocked in his own dreams, or in the virtual dreams of technolife, he was able to see the world of nature and people with great clarity, and this clarity compelled his morality, his environmental work which continues after his death to change the world:

“The writer needs a strong passion to change things, not just to reflect or report them as they are.”

Umbrage, high dudgeon, the taking of offense, the mounting of one’s high horse, Up Yours!ism, Well, I Never!ism — SOS has warned you against this sort of writing for years. She has directed you to this Onion article as a cautionary tale. She has provided real-world examples of what she calls Harrumphs.

Harrumphs are often letters to the editor, in which writers, offended by bad reviews, lose all restraint (Emotion, SOS always says, is the enemy of good writing.) and let their wounded egotism rip. If you want your writing to work for you, to persuade your audience to take your side, it’s a good idea not to reveal yourself to the world as an arrogant thin-skinned fool.

Here’s a recent rather amazing Canadian Harrumph, from Victoria’s poet laureate.

An English professor from Camosun College reviewed the laureate’s latest book of poetry (It was a perfectly ok review… thorough, not particularly exciting… critical here, admiring there…), and the laureate blew a laurel.

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I wasn’t going to dignify the badly written, inaccurate and savage review of my book Muscle Memory in last week’s Times Colonist with a response. [Harrumphs always, always start like this. I wasn’t going to write! I have better things to do than stoop to that! I’m busy doing the Lord’s work!]

I considered the source and decided to ignore it. [Consider the source — a playground cliche.] The record speaks for itself. It is the first negative poetry review in a lifetime of writing and most of the poems have been published elsewhere and won national and international awards. [Never got a negative review, eh? Think that’s a sign of a strong poet, do you? Along with all the awards you just boasted about?]

… That the Times Colonist would publish hate mail in the form of a book review at a time when the world is focused on the devastation of lives in Haiti is in appalling taste. [Now we’re right round the bend. What does this sentence mean? Can you figure out what she’s saying? I can’t. It’s absolutely mad.] The newspaper insulted the suffering [and] insulted the city that has chosen me to be poet laureate …

Longtime readers know that UD likes to make poems out of words and phrases in newspaper articles.

Here’s one. Article first.

Quiet please — Britain’s Queen Elizabeth is preparing to have her swans counted.

Buckingham Palace has announced that the annual Swan Upping, a tradition dating back to the 12th century which involves a census of the swan population on the River Thames, will be conducted by the queen’s official Swan Marker from July 20-24.

“With the assistance of the Queen’s Swan Warden, Professor Christopher Perrins of the University of Oxford, the swans and young cygnets are also assessed for any signs of injury or disease,” Buckingham Palace said in announcing the count.

The process involves the Swan Marker, David Barber, rowing up the Thames for five days with the Swan Warden in traditional skiffs while wearing special scarlet uniforms and counting, weighing and measuring swans and cygnets.

It may seem eccentric, but it is very important to the queen.

According to custom, Britain’s sovereign owns all unmarked, mute swans in open water, but the queen now exercises the right only on stretches of the Thames and its nearby tributaries.

In medieval times, the Swan Marker would not only travel up the river counting the swans, but would catch as many as possible as they were sought-after for banquets and feasts.

This year, the Swan Marker and the Swan Warden are particularly keen to discover how much damage is being caused to swans and cygnets by attacks from dogs and from discarded fishing tackle.

It is also an important year because Queen Elizabeth has decided to join her team of Swan Uppers for part of the census.

She will follow them up the river and visit a local school project on the whole subject of swans, cygnets and the Thames.

“Education and conservation are essential to the role of Swan Upping and the involvement of school children is always a rewarding experience,” Buckingham Palace said.
 

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Swan Upping

Up the Thames the Marker rows,
Swans and cygnets counting.
Buckingham’s announcing
This year the sovereign follows.

Swan Warden, particular keen,
Eyes discarded tack,
And signs of dog attack,
On the mute unmarked of the queen.

Swan Uppers when medieval
Sought after fowl for feast.
Now they assess disease
On tributary travel.