Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

I previously read The Fire This Time, edited by Jesmyn Ward, which included one of her essays. I have had Sing, Unburied, Sing on my list for years, but given the length of that list, well, it takes a while to get to stuff. 

 

I’ll say at the outset that this is not a pleasant or positive book. It is dark, full of generational trauma, Southern racial violence, and ghosts that won’t rest in peace. Also, domestic violence, drug use, child abuse, and police brutality. So, not light reading. 

 

It is fairly short, though, and moves fast, so it’s not an endless slog or anything. There wasn’t much humor to lighten things, either, so just expect that. It is an interesting look inside a complicated family dealing with the downstream effects of white supremacy - which hurts everyone, black and white. 

 

There are multiple perspectives in the book. The main narrative is told alternately by Jojo, the teen boy, and his mother Leonie. Later in the book, we get a third thread, told by Ritchie, the ghost of a young boy who Pop (JoJo’s grandfather) looked after when they were both in jail decades ago. 

 

There are other ghosts as well: Leonie’s younger brother Given, who was murdered by a white man jealous of Given’s archery skills. And, eventually, the ghost of Mam, JoJo’s grandmother, who dies near the end of the book. And a whole heck ton of other unnamed ghosts. 

 

And there are a handful of human characters. Pop and Mam, the most functional people in the book, the ones who are raising JoJo and his toddler sister Kayla. Leonie’s boyfriend - father to JoJo and Kayla - Michael, the white cousin of the man who killed Given. Michael’s viciously bigoted father, Big Joseph, and his mother who is trying not to be an asshole, and occasionally succeeding. Al, Michael’s lawyer and/or drug dealer. Misty, Leonie’s white coworker and friend, but also the one who got her into drugs. 

 

And everyone is complicated in this book, except possibly Big Joseph, who is the kind of pathetic old racist that we all have met at least once somewhere. Everyone else is a mix of good and bad. The good is predominant in Pop and Mam. And Kayla is just a kid. JoJo is at that awkward age of trying to become a man too soon. Michael and Leonie have serious demons that they can’t seem to shake. And no wonder with their traumas. 

 

The heart of the story is that Michael has been in prison for a few years (probably for drugs, but we never get the full story), and is now getting released. Leonie decides to go pick him up, taking Misty for moral support (her man - who is black - is also incarcerated, but not getting out yet), and dragging JoJo and Kayla against their will. 

 

There are lots of flashbacks and stories told by the characters to fill in gaps. Given’s life and death. How Pop got sent to jail for being in the wrong place. What happened with Ritchie. And a few others. 

 

I did find the story - stories really - interesting, and characters believable. Some of these situations were things that I grew up with in my neighborhood. We were the place kids would come crash when their parents didn’t come home due to a drug bender, or a bad fight between the parents. 

 

[Note: when I talk about how my parents have devolved, this is what I mean. They were really good people once, before Fox News and Bill Gothard and the rest of the white christian nationalist industrial complex ate them.] 

 

I didn’t note many lines in this book - it really is one more to just read and go with the flow. 

 

However, there is a quote from Eudora Welty on the cover page, and a line that really encapsulates the parts of the book involving JoJo. 

 

“The memory is a living thing - it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives - the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead.”

~Eudora Welty 

 

Once you read the book, you realize how this idea forms the basis of the book, its very bones. 

 

The quote comes during a section JoJo narrates, as he has been listening to Pop tell his old stories and give his generally solid advice. This is part of a longer monologue by Pop, about his own coming of age. 

 

“Some days later, I understood what he was trying to say, that getting grown means learning how to work that current: learning when to hold fast, when to drop anchor, when to let it sweep you up. And it could be something simple as sex, or it could be something as complicated as falling in love, or it could be like going to jail with your brother, thinking you are going to protect him.”

 

For JoJo, he is in many ways torn between his loyalties. He ends up choosing to protect Kayla, to a significant degree at the cost of his relationship with his mother, Leonie. Which is sad, but feels inevitable. And so the cycle of trauma continues. 

 

It’s an interesting book, and worth a read.

 

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Source of book: I own this

 

It has been a while since I posted. One reason is that my book reading ended up with me in the middle of several books all at once but not finishing one. The other was a certain amount of malaise (ongoing) around the state of our country. It’s too overwhelming to blog about right now, although I recommend following Heather Cox Richardson and Rebecca Solnit (on your preferred social media) if you want good analysis of Il Toupee’s latest unconstitutional actions.

 

This book was this month’s selection for The Literary Lush Book Club, our monthly gathering of friends to discuss books. I believe this is the first time the club has read Murakami’s fiction - we read Underground, his non-fiction account of the subway terrorism a couple years ago. Two of us are definitely fans, so we were excited to get to discuss this one with the others. I will list the links to my other Murakami reviews at the bottom of this post. 

 

Having read Kafka on the Shore, I think this will be the book I will recommend for first-time Murakami readers. While his most accessible is still definitely Norwegian Wood, that book is also somewhat uncharacteristic - it lacks the magical realism and the interconnected symbolism of his other books. Kafka contains all of the elements, but is of more moderate length than many of his books, and is tightly plotted, with fewer digressions and disconnected subplots. 

 

(That said, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a definite masterpiece.) 

Keep this handy when you read any Murakami novel...

 

Before getting too far into this post, I do want to mention a few things that might make this book problematic for some readers. 

 

First, Murakami is a Boomer male, which means he shares many of the faults of his generation of male writers throughout the world. Like Dickens, he struggles to write female characters well, and often treats them as “types” that exist mostly for the role they will play in the life of the male protagonist. (Ahem, David Copperfield…) 

 

Oddly, Kafka is better about this in some ways, and worse in others. On the plus side, he has multiple female characters that actually have a backstory and an inner life. That’s good! 

 

On the other hand, my GOD does he objectify breasts in this book. Seriously, dude, you come off as a horny old man writing about your fantasies of being a 15 year old boy again. So, read this book with your eyes open. Or not as you prefer. 

 

Second, and this is a serious trigger warning, Murakami’s books usually have one incredibly intense and disturbing scene in there. And they often come out of nowhere, getting really dark and horrible really fast. 

 

(As explanation: Murakami credits Stephen King as one of his major influences - and it shows at times. Most of this and his other books are not horror at all, but there are those scenes…) 

 

In this case, if cruelty to animals, including cat heads in the freezer, is too much for you, be warned. If you want to read the rest, skip chapter 16 and find a summary instead. 

 

Our club was torn on whether this scene was needlessly gratuitous or not. I tend to lean toward “not,” but your mileage may definitely vary. 

 

I also do want to mention one unexpectedly progressive element in this book, particularly considering it was originally published in 2002 (translation published in 2005.) There is a transgender character, who is mostly handled well. This character is given a history and an inner life, his trans-ness is not particularly important to his purpose in the book, and he has no unpleasant ending. He’s just an important and interesting transgender character who happens to be in this book. 

 

Kafka on the Shore contains many of the usual elements of a Murakami book: questions of identity, memory, history, free will, human nature, and the process of maturity. And the symbols: dry wells, cats, missing things, forests, libraries. 

 

Front and center in this one is one of Murakami’s favorite points: evil is often a lack of imagination. If we cannot imagine, we cannot understand morality let alone act morally. This is, more than anything, what separates us from other living things. 

 

The book contains two parallel narratives, which do not intersect in the real world (whatever that exactly means in this book.) They do, however, intersect in the dream world, the magical world, or whatever you want to call it. The characters are connected as well - a figure in the magical world will represent one in the real world, and a character in each thread can be a stand-in of sorts for one in the other. 

 

The first thread, which gets the odd-numbered chapters, has a rough plot as follows: A 15 year old boy, who has given himself the name of “Kafka,” runs away from home to escape the curse his father has put on him. This curse will seem familiar to any student of literature, because it is the Oedipus Curse: he will kill his father and have sex with his mother. And, in this particular twist, he will sleep with his long-lost sister as well. 

 

As we discover, Kafka’s mother disappeared when he was a small child, taking his older sister with her. No one knows where they went or what happened to them.

 

Kafka steals enough money to last for a while, and heads south. He eventually discovers a private library open for tours (which reminds me of a smaller version of a favorite place of my own experience, the Huntington Library.) There, he meets the middle-aged and mysterious Miss Saeki, in charge of the library, who he finds out has a tragic past. (Her boyfriend - from the family whose estate houses the library - is senselessly murdered in college, and she has never gotten over him.) 

 

He also is taken in by Oshima, a young transgender man who works as an assistant to Miss Saeki, who introduces him to classical music and literature. Oshima’s brother has a cabin in the forest on the coast, where Kafka stays on two occasions. 

 

Meanwhile, Nakata’s story fills the second narrative. We flash back to his childhood, during World War Two, when he is sent away from the city for safety, but then becomes part of a mysterious event where a group of school children all lose consciousness. Nakata is the only one who doesn’t regain consciousness within a few hours, and when he finally does, he has lost his memory and ability to read. But he does discover he can talk to and understand cats. 

 

Fast forward to the present, and Nakata is retired and on a pension (a Sub City as he calls it), and supplements his income by finding people’s lost cats. 

 

A particular case leads him to the harrowing scene I mentioned above, and he is practically forced to kill the cat-abuser, who calls himself “Johnnie Walker.” 

 

Later, we find out that this is the first intersection of the plots, and of the worlds. “Johnnie Walker” is killed, but in real life that turns out to be Kafka’s father. Nakata comes to after the murder, and finds there is no blood, no evidence it ever happened. Instead, it is Kafka, who, having lost consciousness, wakes up covered in blood. 

 

There are some definite Oedipus parallels in this entire narrative - the book is full of Easter Eggs like all Murakami novels. 

 

Shaken by this, and impelled on a quest that he cannot articulate beyond “must find the entrance stone,” Nakata hitchhikes his way south. Taking pity on him, and wanting a little vacation, is Hoshino, probably the best character in the book. Hoshino got in a little hometown jam, so they put a rifle in his hand - so to speak. His mild criminal history followed by a military stint, eventually led him to his present occupation as a commercial truck driver. 

 

The strange friendship between Nakata and Hoshino is what makes this narrative thread so delightful - and I think it is the best part of the book. 

 

I’ll leave the plot description there, in part because trying to explain it is difficult, and misses much of the magic of the writing. 

 

As is often the case, the ending is difficult to entirely decipher. What exactly happened? And, perhaps more to the point, what did all that mean?

 

Murakami wasn’t much help in this regard. He recommended that the book be read several times. The reader would then begin to see all of the interconnected riddles, and, perhaps figure out a solution. That said, Murakami also indicated that there was no one correct solution, and readers could discover or synthesize many. 

 

He also explained that he came up with the title of the book first, then the character of Kafka, then the other characters, and then he followed them to find out what would happen. How true this is can perhaps be debated given the tight plotting of the book. However it started, Murakami clearly went back through it and made sure everything connected and corresponded, because few if any threads are loose in this book. 

 

I ended up writing down lot of lines this time. There are so many good ones in this book, particularly of the philosophical variety. There are undoubtedly spoilers in here, so if you want to read the book first, then come back to this post, this is a good place to do that. 

 

Kafka has a kind of alter-ego he calls “The Boy Named Crow.” This is another literary in-joke. “Kafka” means “Crow” in Czech, something the OG, Franz Kafka, consciously used in his own writing. Crow is kind of a Tyler Durden sort (h/t to another book club member for that insight) - he both gives Kafka the courage to run away and take other actions but also isn’t exactly a great influence. Here is a particularly Durdenesque bit early in the book:

 

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. 

 

The flashback to the weird incident of the children is told through official reports. Which, as you might imagine, pose multiple levels of narrative unreliability. And they are often surreal, with the teacher (who is hiding some things) seemingly overly poetic in her descriptions. 

 

It was a very strange sight. The children had collapsed in an odd, flat, open space in the woods where it looked like all the trees had been neatly removed, with autumn sunlight shining down brightly. And here you had, in this spot or at the edges of it, sixteen elementary school kids scattered about prostrate on the ground, some of them starting to move, some of them completely still. The whole thing reminded me of some weird avant-garde play.

 

I mean, WUT?? And there is the parallel of this spot - in its own way like the bottom of a dry well - with one later in the book where Kafka has some crossover with the dream world, along with some leftover soldiers from the war. (That scene expressly describes the clearing as being like the bottom of a well.) 

 

Murakami loves libraries - and I agree with him. Kafka goes looking for a library for reasons that have drawn others since they were created. 

 

I decided to kill time till evening at a library. Ever since I was little I’ve loved to spend time in the reading rooms of libraries, so I’ve come to Takamatsu armed with info on all the libraries in and around the city. Think about it - a little kid who doesn;t want to go home doesn’t have many places he can go. Coffee shops and movie theaters are off-limits. That leaves only libraries, and they’re perfect - no entrance fee, nobody getting all hot and bothered if a kid comes in. You just sit down and read whatever you want. 

 

This is one reason the Right Wing is increasingly hostile toward libraries. As one of the few places you can go without being expected to spend money, they are a natural place for meeting, connection, and ideas, that cannot be monetized or controlled. 

 

There is also a fun conversation between Nakata and a cat, who he names “Otsuka.” 

 

“Otsuka?” the cat said, looking at him in surprise. “What are you talking about? Why do I have to be Otsuka?”

“No special reason. The name just came to me. Nakata just picked one out of a hat. It makes things a lot easier for me if you have a name. That way somebody like me, who isn’t very bright, can organize things better. For instance, I can say, On this day of this month I spoke with the black cat Otsuka in a vacant lot in the 2-chome neighborhood. It helps me remember.”

“Interesting,” the cat said. “Not that I totally follow you. Cats can get by without names. We go by smell, shape, things of this nature. As long as we know these things, there’s no worries for us.”

“Nakata understands completely. But you know, Mr. Otsuka, people don’t work that way. We need dates and names to remember all kinds of things.”

The cat gave a snort. “Sounds like a pain to me.”

 

One of my favorite passages in the book is the discussion of Adolf Eichmann. Kafka is reading one of the books in the cabin, and runs across notations by Oshima, including this one. The thing about the Eichmanns of the world is that they see life as just following orders, solving technical problems - and they have no imagination, or they would have empathy. 

 

It’s all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It’s just like Yeats said: In dreams begin responsibilities. Flip this around and you could say that where there’s no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise. Just like we see here with Eichmann.

 

This theme becomes a thread working its way through the entire book - both narratives. There is another fascinating scene in the Johnnie Walker chapter. Walker is himself involved in this grand project - one which is terrifying and evil - but which Walker himself complains nobody respects his project. He himself has grown tired of it, but fate compels him to continue it until stopped. By….someone. He can’t commit suicide for reasons, so he has to get Nakata to do it for him. (Definite shades of Oedipus here.) 

 

“But why - why ask me? Nakata’s never killed anyone before. It’s not the kind of thing I’m suited for.”

“I know. You’ve never killed anyone and don’t want to. But listen to me - there are times in life when those kinds of excuses don’t cut it anymore. Situations when nobody cares whether you’re suited for the task at hand or not. I need you to understand that. For instance, it happens in war.” 

 

And that really is the question of war, isn’t it? WHY do we have to kill? A war starts and it is kill or be killed. As Walker notes, “Human history in a nutshell.” 

 

There are several scenes which do feel like digressions - not specifically connected to the rest of the plot. I suspect they are intended to be part of the overall philosophical discussion, however. 

 

We learn that Oshima is transgender when a pair of ostensible “radical feminists” show up at the library to make trouble. And the main way they intend to make trouble is by essentially being TERFs. (I hate the term for reasons, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.) 

 

Specifically, they are furious that there is no designated bathroom for women at the library. What there is, because the library is small and has a small number of visitors, is a single unisex bathroom that all can use. 

 

Oshima tries to explain using some familiar analogies - bathrooms in an aircraft are all unisex, for example - but the women are determined to argue anyway. 

 

Finally, after pages and pages of their obnoxiousness, Oshima has had enough of the accusations that he is a male sexist pig, and explains in excruciatingly graphic detail about who he is, from genitals to sexual orientation to his experience of having a male brain. 

 

While I am sure that there are things to quibble with here in the way things are stated (and also in Kafka’s struggles to categorize Oshima in his own brain), there is a lot to like about Murakami’s respect for transgender people and identities. 

 

Where I think that Murakami shows his age and limited experience in this passage is that he almost but not quite understands that these women aren’t feminists - they are just bigots. (Hence why I love Elaine Castillo’s description of TERFs as “Trans-exclusionary non-feminists.”) 

 

What Murakami does get very right in this scene is the deliberately misleading and inflammatory rhetoric of anti-trans bathroom panic. The women claim that “the majority of women are reluctant to use shared bathrooms” and hints at the “all men - and especially trans women - are violent” argument as well. 

 

Oshima correctly notes that this is literally not an issue. The number of actual bathroom assaults by transgender women is nearly zero, and in any case FAR LESS than the number committed by Republican congressmen. I mean, right now, being a sexual predator is practically a requirement to serve in the Trump Administration. 

 

So, while not perfect, Murakami actually handles this…pretty well. Kafka indicates he doesn’t quite know how to understand Oshima, but that he accepts him fully. 

 

“I appreciate it,” Oshima says, and lays a gentle hand on my shoulder. “I know I’m a little different from everyone else, but I’m still a human being. That’s what I’d like you to realize. I’m just a regular person, not some monster. I feel the same things everyone else does, act the same way.” 

 

This is the truth, even if the Right Wing prefers to demonize and inflict violence on transgender people (and indeed anyone different from them.) 

 

“I’ve experienced all kinds of discrimination,” Oshima says. “Only people who’ve been discriminated against can really know how much it hurts. Each person feels the pain in his own way, each has his own scars. So I think I’m as concerned about fairness and justice as anybody. But what disgusts me even more are people who have no imagination. The kind T. S. Eliot calls hollow men. People who fill up that lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, not even aware of what they’re doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don’t want to. Like that lovely pair we just me.” 

 

Oh yes, I know too many people like that, who cannot (or will not) imagine transgender existence. Or the experience of discrimination for that matter. It is endemic on the Right these days, with its turn toward open fascism. A lack of imagination. Hollow men. And thus, gross immorality. 

 

“Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe. Of course it’s important to know what’s right and wrong. Individual errors in judgment can usually be corrected. As long as you have the courage to admit mistakes, things can be turned around. But intolerant, narrow minds with no imagination are like parasites that transform the host, change form, and continue to thrive. They’re a lost cause, and I don’t want anyone like that coming in here.” 

 

Sigh. This is why I feel that my former religious tribe is a lost cause. And why I have given up on my parents ever admitting they were wrong and correcting their intolerant and judgmental minds. That whole passage describes the systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, and religious bigotry that parasitized their minds over the last several decades, destroying the good people they were. 

 

Before ending up with Hoshino, Nakata catches a variety of rides. On one of them, he finds himself hearing the life story of the driver, who admits “I’ve never talked to anyone like this before.” Each of the people who come in contact with Nakata feel strangely comfortable around him, perhaps because of his simplicity and lack of judgmentalism. Or, maybe people are like cats, and can sense the right sort of person. 

 

Oshima gets a lot of the best philosophical lines. I wonder if a literary reason he is transgender is to fill the role of the sexless (eunuch?) wise man - he isn’t old or a real guru, but he is definitely a character who thinks a lot. Here is another great passage by him. 

 

“Listen, Kafka. What you’re experiencing now is the motif of many Greek tragedies. Man doesn’t choose fate. Fate chooses man. That’s the basic worldview of Greek drama. And the sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist’s weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I’m getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex being a great example. Oedipus is drawn into tragedy not because of laziness or stupidity, but because of his courage and honesty. So an inevitable irony results.”

 

This is part of a larger conversation about the murder of Kafka’s father. Because Kafka has an iron-clad alibi, he isn’t a suspect, but he is wanted for questioning. The problem is, in some non-linear way, Kafka did kill his father. In a dream? In the magical realm? By somehow taking possession of Nakata? Oshima calls this “poetic responsibility,” which is an interesting idea.

 

And then there is the problem with Kafka falling in love with the ghost of the 15-year-old Miss Saeki. (Yeah, it’s….complicated, and leads to some icky sex.) 

 

As Oshima says, “For a fifteen-year-old who doesn’t even shave yet, you’re sure carrying a lot of baggage around.” 

 

Believe it or not, there is yet another magical character who manifests as and calls himself “Colonel Sanders.” Who describes himself as “an idea” - not a god or being per se, and also being, of all things, a pimp. And his role in this drama is to take Hoshino to find the “entrance stone” that Nakata needs to do…whatever it is that he is supposed to do. (And if you can figure out exactly what the ending means, bully for you. I’ve read several possibilities and they are all plausible.) 

 

One of the most hilarious lines in the book comes from Sanders: 

 

“This time I decided to take on a familiar shape, that of a famous capitalist icon. I was toying with the idea of Mickey Mouse, but Disney’s particular about the rights to their characters.” 

 

No kidding. Don’t ever mess with the mouse. 

 

As if a pimping Colonel Sanders wasn’t enough, Hoshino ends up arguing with him about the existence of God. 

 

“Yeah, but the stone is owned by God, right? He’s gonna be pissed if we take it out.” 

Colonel Sanders folded his arms and stared straight at Hoshino. “What is God?”

The question threw Hoshino for a moment. 

Colonel Sanders pressed him further, “What does God look like, and what does He do?”

“Don’t ask me. God’s God. He’s everywhere, watching what we do, judging whether it’s good or bad.”

“Sounds like a soccer referee.” 

“Sort of, I guess.”

“So God wears shorts, has a whistle sticking out of His mouth, and keeps an eye on the clock?” 

 

This then leads into a discussion too long for this post, about the role of the gods in Japanese life, and the way the emperor ceased to be a god because General MacArthur said so…

 

Throughout the book, Kafka never truly puts down roots - he carries his backpack with him whenever he goes out. (Until the ending dream sequence - another symbol perhaps.) Again, Oshima has a fascinating observation. 

 

“That backpack’s like your symbol of freedom,” he comments. 

“Guess so,” I say.

“Having an object that symbolizes freedom might make a person happier than actually getting the freedom it represents.” 

 

Hello, America and its gun problem? And so many other things. The symbol creates the happiness more than the actual thing would. 

 

“Perhaps,” Oshima says, as if fed up,” Perhaps most people in the world aren’t trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It’s all an illusion. If they were really set free, most people would be in a real bind. You’d better remember that. People actually prefer not being free.” 

 

Unfortunately, this is all too true. And people who do not wish to be free resent those who do prefer freedom.

 

And later, “This is pretty obvious, but until things happen, they haven’t happened. And often things aren’t what they seem.” 

 

There are a few things in this book that are startling reminders that the setting is different. Japan is not America, for sure. I smiled at this line, from the rental car guy:

 

“How about a Familia? A very reliable car, and I swear nobody will notice it at all.”

 

The Mazda Familia was better known to us as the 323. Ironically, here, it kind of stood out as a bit less anonymous than the ubiquitous Accords and Camrys. 

 

On the other hand, the mention of a No Fear shirt sure brought me back to the 1990s. And to the heyday of T & C Surf Co. shirts - a big thing here in southern California when I was a certain age. 

 

I mentioned that music tends to be a crucial part of any Murakami book. Here, it plays a role in Kafka’s coming of age - Oshima introduces him to classical. Later, Hoshino is introduced to music, giving him and Oshima something in common when they finally meet. Hoshino asks if Oshima believes that music has the power to change people. For Oshima - and for Murakami himself, the answer is yes. 

 

(Like The Violin Conspiracy, this book has an online playlist - as do most Murakami books.) 

 

I have to mention the book’s description of mosquitoes. The whole “hiking in the woods” stuff is interesting writing, and the last scene is evocative, if a bit hazy on its meaning. 

 

Huge black mosquitoes buzz me like reconnaissance patrols, aiming for the exposed skin around my eyes. When I hear their buzz I brush them away or squash them. Whenever I smush one it makes a squish, already bloated with blood it’s sucked out of me. It feels itchy only later. I wipe the blood off my hands on the towel around my neck.

 

During the long march to the dream city, or whatever it is, Kafka does a lot of thinking. 

 

Why do people wage war? Why do hundreds of thousands, even millions of people group together and try to annihilate each other? Do people start wars out of anger? Or fear? Or are anger and fear just two aspects of the same spirit? 

 

I wonder that too. Probably all decent people do. 

 

And more:

 

A question. Why didn’t she love me? Don’t I deserve to have my mother love me?

 

Another one I often wonder about. Why was I so easy to throw away? Was it too much to ask to be accepted for who I was, not a fantasy of how I would fix her daddy issues?

 

After everything is done, Oshima has a final word that has stuck with me. 

 

“Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that’s where I imagine it - there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live forever in your own private library.” 

 

That’s a taste of what is in this book. I happen to enjoy Murakami, and definitely this book, despite its defects. 

 

The translation is by Philip Gabriel, who I think captured the spirit of the writing well. (I have read translations of Murakami’s other books by Jay Rubin and Alfred Birnbaum, and I think Gabriel’s flows the best.) 

 

I read the book in hard copy, but other members of our club listened to the audiobook. Particularly good things were said about the one with two narrators, one for each thread. I can’t remember the names, but presumably you can discover that with a bit of looking. 

 

***

 

The Murakami List:

 

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Norwegian Wood

Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

The Strange Library

Underground

 

The Invisible Pyramid by Loren Eisley

Source of book: I own this

 

I previously read another of Eisley’s books, The Unexpected Universe. I have more biographical stuff in that post, so I won’t duplicate it here. 

 

The Invisible Pyramid was written soon after the first moon landing, but for reasons I will explain, feels more relevant than ever. It is a collection of essays on the general topic of man in the universe, and our fragile planet. 

 

The Space Race era was one of optimism in the United States. Some of that optimism was warranted, as within a few years, Jim Crow had been abolished, the Great Society was addressing gaps in health care, and soon environmental laws would be enacted. 

 

However, there was also a certain completely irrational optimism about the future of our species, one that is enjoying a resurgence among the billionaire class. Namely, many believed that humankind would soon be zipping around the galaxy, colonizing additional planets. 

 

As Eisley pointed out then - and it bears repeating now - unless some form of energy we are unaware of appears, or some way of violating the laws of the universe becomes possible, there is no possible way for humans to achieve interstellar travel. The thermodynamics simply do not work. The energy requirements far exceed what we have available, and human lifespans are not compatible with the time and distances involved. 

 

Instead, we are “stuck” where we are - on a planet that gave us birth through evolution over millions of years. Already, Eisley could see that our unsustainable use of fossil fuels and pollution of the environment were putting us on a path to extinction, and pie-in-the-sky ideas about finding a new environment were not helping us face our own issues. 

 

As always, Eisley writes like a poet, not an academic. His prose goes down so easily, even as his pleas for responsibility to our descendents stir the heart. I wish more had listened to him then, or would listen to him now. 

 

The framing of the book is Halley’s Comet - he saw it with his dad in 1910, although he did not live to see it return in 1986. This serves as a springboard for the discussion as well as his own metaphor of his life journey. 

 

The book opens with this short poem by John Neihardt. 

 

Once in a cycle the comet

Doubles its lonesome track. 

Enriched with the tears of a thousand years,

Aeschylus wanders back.

 

And then, an amazing first paragraph.

 

Man would not be man if his dreams did not exceed his grasp. If, in this book, I choose to act in the ambivalent character of pessimist and optimist, it is because mankind itself plays a similar contradictory role upon the stage of life. Like John Donne, man lies in a close prison, yet it is dear to him. Like Donne’s, his thoughts at times overleap the sun and pace beyond the body. If I term humanity a slime mold organization it is because our present environment suggests it. If I remember the sunflower forest it is because from its hidden reaches man arose. The green world is his sacred center. In moments of sanity he must still seek refuge there.

 

Eisley takes a tour back in time, progressively looking at our increasingly distant ancestors, all of whom saw the comet. Eisley was an anthropologist, but his description is poetic rather than literal in some facets. 

 

Farther backward still across twin ice advances and two long interglacial summers. We were cruder now, our eyes wild and uncertain, less sure that we were men. We no longer had sewn garments, and our only weapon was a heavy pointed stone, unhafted and held in the hand. Even our faces had taken on the cavernous look of the places we inhabited. There were difficulties about making fire, and we could not always achieve it. The dead were left where they fell. Women wept less, and the bands were smaller. Our memories consisted of dim lights under heavy sockets of bone. We did not paint pictures, or increase, bu magic, the slain beasts. We talked, but the words we needed were fewer. Often we went hungry. It was a sturdy child that survived. We meant well but we were terrifyingly ignorant and given to frustrated anger. There was too much locked up in us that we could not express. 

 

He later talks about the Darwinian revolution, and its (still incomplete) upending of our beliefs about ourselves and the universe. 

 

To see his role on the world stage, Western man had twice to revise his conception of time: once from the brevity of a few thousand years to eons of inconceivable antiquity, and, a second time, with far more difficulty, to perceive that this lengthened time-span was peopled with wraiths and changing cloud forms. Time was not just aged rocks and trees, alike since the beginning of creation; its living aspect did not consist merely of of endless Oriental cycles of civilizations rising and declining. Instead, the living flesh itself was alterable. Our seeming stability of form was an illusion fostered by the few millennia of written history. Behind that history lay the vast and unrecorded gloom of ice ages inhabited by the great beasts which the explorers, at Thomas Jefferson’s bidding, had sought through the blowing curtain of the dust. 

 

And some more on evolution and time:

 

Biological evolution could be defined as one long series of specializations - hoofs that prevented hands wings that, while opening the wide reaches of the air, prevented the manipulation of tools. The list was endless. Each creature was a tiny fraction of the life force; the greater portion had died with the environments that created them. Others had continued to evolve, but always their transformations seemed to present a more skilled adaptation to an increasingly narrow corridor of existence. Success too frequently meant specialization, and specialization, ironically, was the beginning of the road to extinction. This was the essential theme that time had dramatized upon the giant stage. 

 

Where does humankind fit in this? Eisley offers one idea. 

 

After three billion years of biological effort, man alone had seemingly evaded the oblique trap of biological specialization. He had done so by the development of a specialized organ - the brain - whose essential purpose was to evade specialization. 

 

Modern times have seen an acceleration of this, for better and worse. 

 

The long, slow turn of world-time as the geologist has known it, and the invisibly moving hour hand of evolution perceived only yesterday by the biologist, have given way n the human realm to a fantastically accelerated social evolution induced by industrial technology. So fast does this change progress that a growing child strives to master the institutional customs of a society which, compared with the pace of past history, compresses centuries of change into his lifetime. I myself, like others of my generation, was born in an age which has already perished. At my death I will look my last upon a nation which, save for some linguistics continuity, will seem increasingly alien and remote. It will be as though I peered upon my youth through misty centuries. I will not be merely old; I will be a genuine fossil embedded in onrushing man-made time before my actual death. 

 

Another passage is all about the role of language in human nature. That whole chapter is fascinating for its synthesis of philosophy and science. Definitely worth reading. 

 

Valuable as language is to man, it is by very necessity limiting, and creates for man an invisible prison. Language implies boundaries. A word spoken creates a dog, a rabbit, a man. It fixes their nature before our eyes; henceforth their shapes are, in a sense, our own creation. 

 

Another chapter looks at humankind in light of the more realistic future of space travel: humankind as spores. Which is certainly more plausible than any kind of personal interstellar journey.

 

It came to me in the night, in the midst of a bad dream, that perhaps man, like the blight descending on a fruit, is by nature a parasite, a spore bearer, a world weather. The slime molds are the only creatures on the planet that share the ways of man from his individual pioneer phase to his final immersion in great cities. Under the microscope one can see the mold amoebas streaming to their meeting place, and no one would call them human. Nevertheless, magnified many thousands times and observed from the air, their habits would appear close to our own. This is because, when their microscopic frontier is gone, as it quickly is, the single amoeboid frontiersmen swarm into concentrated aggregations. At the last they thrust up overtoppling spore palaces, like city skyscrapers. The rupture of these vesicles may disseminate the living sports as far away proportionately as man’s journey to the moon. 

 

This leads eventually into a discussion of the over-consumption and pollution of advanced industrial nations, particularly the United States. 

 

Experts have been at pains to point out that the accessible crust of the earth is finite, while the demand for minerals steadily increases as more and more societies seek for themselves a higher, Westernized standard of living. Unfortunately, many of these sought-after minerals are not renewable, yet a viable industrial economy demands their steady output. A rising world population requiring an improved standard of living clashes with the oncoming realities of a planet of impoverished resources. 

 

Um, yeah. The American Right Wing can be in denial of this all they want, but we are seeing the results. But go ahead and drill, right? The future of your grandchildren (if you even ever get to have them) be damned…

 

Unfortunately, humankind has been better at gaining power rather than gaining wisdom. (Perhaps this is the real meaning of the metaphor of The Fall.) 

 

Man, in retrospect, seems almost predestined for space. To master the dream in its entirety, however, man had to invent in two categories: inventions of power and inventions of understanding. The invention of the scientific method itself began as an adventure in understanding. Inventions of power without understanding have been the bane of human history. 

 

Another chapter recounts a conversation that Eisley had with a coroner - he had been consulted regarding a skull discovered. The two end up talking about the erasure of history and memory. A line in there by Eisley seemed particularly appropriate to our own times.

 

“There are times of social disruption when they grow tired of history. If they cannot remake the past they intend at least to destroy it - efface the dark memory from their minds and so, in a sense, pretend that history has never been.”

 

This is the core of the MAGA movement: as our nation has attempted, fumblingly, to come to terms with our history - largely as the result of women, minorities, and LGBTQ people asserting their own voices and perspectives - many wish to forget - and destroy - a past they cannot remake. 

 

The title of the collection itself comes not from a single essay, but from an idea that runs through several of them. Humankind has a tendency to make monuments - pyramids on multiple continents, for example. But Eisley suggests that there is a less visible version of this striving toward what we can never fully achieve. 

 

Suppose that greater than all these, vaster and more impressive, an invisible pyramid lies at the heart of every civilization man has created, that for every visible brick or corbeled vault or upthrust skyscraper or giant rocket we bear a burden in the mind to excess, that we have a biological urge to complete what is actually uncompletable. 

 

In a later chapter, he explores this idea a bit more. 

 

There is another aspect of man’s mental life which demands the utmost attention, even though it is manifest in differing degrees in different times and places and among different individuals; this is the desire for transcendence - a peculiarly human trait. Philosophers and students of comparative religion have sometimes remarked that we need to seek for the origins of the human interest in the cosmos, “a cosmic sense” unique to man. However this sense may have evolved, it has made men of the greatest imaginative power conscious of human inadequacy and weakness. There may thus emerge the desire for “rebirth” expressed in many religions. Stimulated by his own uncomplicated nature, man seeks a greater role, restructured beyond nature like so much in his aspiring mind. 

 

And later:

 

Man’s life, in other words, is felt to be unreal and sterile. Perhaps a creature of so much ingenuity and deep memory is almost bound to grow alienated from his world, his fellows, and the objects around him. He suffers from a nostalgia for which there is no remedy upon earth except as it is to be found in the enlightenment of the spirit - some ability to have a perceptive rather than an exploitive relationship with his fellow creatures.

 

Yes, this is indeed how I feel. And I think many of us share this longing for transcendence, and for a non-exploitive relationship with the earth and our fellows. 

 

I’ll end with a rather harrowing passage, which includes a quote from a NASA administrator who echoed others in claiming that man needed to escape earth. The fears and oddly unpleasant emotions behind these seems familiar from the Elongated Muskmellons of our own time. 

 

It was a strange way to consider our planet, I thought, closing the magazine and brooding over this sudden distaste for life at home. Why was there this hidden anger, this inner flight syndrome, these threats for those who remained on earth? Some powerful, not totally scientific impulse seemed tugging at the heart of man. Was it fear of his own mounting numbers, the creeping of the fungus threads? But where, then, did these men intend to flee? The solar system stretched bleak and cold and crater-strewn before my mind. The nearest, probably planetless star was four light-years and many human generations away. I held up the magazine once more. Here and here alone, photographed so beautifully from space, was the blue jewel compounded of water and of living green. 

 

Indeed, these are questions I have asked too. I love the planet that gave me birth, and I want to see it preserved for my children. I do not understand this weird anger that Eisley describes, but I certainly see it in so many. 

 

Eisley’s writing is beautiful and thoughtful, and he is right a lot more than he is wrong, even these 55 years later. We need more of his kind - and less of the angry man-child-with-too-much-money sorts in our world. 

Confronting the Classics by Mary Beard

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

I had read a few articles by Mary Beard previously, and figured I’d give one of her books a chance. She is an academic with the classical Roman and Greek eras as her specialty, and her writings on history and culture are always enlightening. Plus, as a feminist and a woman in a male-dominated field, she has taken some nasty attacks from bigots over the years. 

 

That said, this book was not at all what I was expecting. This is probably not her fault so much as the practice of blurbing books without reading them. 

 

What this book is, is a collection of book reviews for books about the various topics she covers. It is not, as teased, a particular examination of the controversies in various areas of classical studies. So, an unusual book, and not quite what I was expecting. 

 

The good news is that within these reviews (which have been reworked a bit for the book, adding, among other things, the connections between the different people, places, and events discussed), are contained a wealth of information about the topic. 

 

So, for example, in the review of books about Cleopatra, you get the background of what we actually know from primary sources, and what is later myth. This is the case for every topic in the book. Thus, I learned a lot, even if of most of the books she reviews (and sometimes eviscerates), are at an academic level above my usual reading. 

 

The book is divided into five sections, based on a combination of eras and topics. The first is all about the ancient Greeks. The second, the Republican Era of Rome. The third, the Roman Empire. Fourth, the lower and middle classes in Rome. Fifth, the modern era - all the people who appropriated the trappings of Empire, the tourists, the archaeologists, and so on. 

 

There are a total of 31 chapters, plus an introduction and afterword to tie things together. I can’t even begin to explain the scope of the book, but anyone who finds history fascinating will probably find something to like in this book. 

 

I’ll share a few bon mots from it. 

 

The preface talks a bit about the purported “death of the classics” - which is a trope every bit as classic as Aristotle’s whinging about young people having no manners or respect. If anything, the Greek plays are having quite a revival both on stage and on screens. In this section is an on-point observation. 

 

What has caused this decline attracts a variety of answers. Some argue that the supporters of Classics have only themselves to blame. It’s a ‘Dead White European Male’ sort of subject that has far too often acted as a convenient alibi for a whole range of cultural and political sins, from imperialism and Eurocentrism to social snobbery and the most mind-numbing form of pedagogy. 

 

This isn’t wrong, as she notes. Particular the use of Greek and Latin as gatekeeping for social distinctions in the British Empire. Which is why certain “classical education” advocates seem to be a bit too nostalgic for Empire and white supremacy. Beard also points out that this meant a shockingly narrow education, with everything from math to science to anything modern in ideas left out. (Brownie points to her for an excellent dig at notorious nativist Victor David Hanson in this section…) 

 

Beard also looks at the nostalgia for the past that obscures just how big the gap in values and culture between our world and the ancient one really is - an issue for religious nostalgia as well. 

 

The sense of loss and longing that I described is, to some extent, for the culture of the distant past, the fragments of papyrus from the wastepaper baskets of Oxyrhynchus. But not solely. As the nostalgic rhetoric makes absolutely clear, the sense of loss and longing is also for our predecessors whose connections to the ancient world we often believe to have been so much closer than our own. 

 

Moving on to the actual reviews, one that stood out was on the question of Thucydides. Considered one of the first true historians - if one who repeated rumors and made stuff up to suit his purpose - the question of translation is the most difficult. His writing is ridiculously convoluted, and its meaning is unclear to literally anyone who has tried to read it. And this isn’t just because of the time gap. Even in his day, critics complained about it. Beard quotes this gem. 

 

But however we choose to excuse Thucydides, the fact remains that his History is sometimes made almost incomprehensible by neologisms, awkward abstractions, and linguistic idiosyncrasies of all kinds. These are not only a problem for the modern reader. They infuriated some ancient readers too. In the first century BC, in a long essay devoted to Thucydides’ work, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a literary critic and historian himself, complained - with ample supporting quotations - of the ‘forced expressions’, ‘non-sequiturs’, and ‘riddling obscurity’. ‘If people actually spoke like this,’ he wrote, ‘not even their mothers or their fathers would be able to tolerate the unpleasantness of it; in fact they would need translators, as if they were listening to a foreign language.’

 

Another review looks at different books on the assassination of Julius Caesar. Part of Beard’s approach looks at the problem of taking sides. There really are no good guys in the story, and it is difficult to find any evidence of what the average Roman thought of the whole affair. Certainly there are those who try to build a case that the common person would have approved of the murder. 

 

We should probably distrust this kind of conservative wishful thinking. A vociferous section of the political elite may have felt excluded, even humiliated, by Caesar’s increasing control over the institutions of state. But Caesar’s reforms, from corn distribution to settlements for the poor overseas, were popular with most of the inhabitants of Rome, who no doubt regarded elite ideas of ‘liberty’ as a convenient alibi for self-advancement and for the exploitation of their less privileged fellow citizens. 

 

This seems rather apropos. I seriously distrust those who most blither on about ‘liberty’ in a way that makes it clear they use that term to mean their right to exploit their fellow humans. 

 

The chapter on the books about Cleopatra also contains a gem, quoted from Stacy Schiff’s book. 

 

‘Luxury is more easily denounced than denied.’

 

Another one I found particularly interesting was the chapter on Boudica and the British rebellions against the Romans. Again, Beard has a nuanced view of history, which refuses to glorify any one side. 

 

This is a world in which Romans and British mix and depend on each other, and it is hard to be certain exactly which side anyone is on. But even if there is a smattering of good Romans and bad natives, there is no doubt at all which side the reader is meant to be on. I found myself not so sure. [Manda] Scott makes it impossible to back the Roamns, who - as an occupying power - rape, pollage, and exploit. But at the same time, Breaca’s shamanistic weirdos (not beyond some horrible acts of violence themselves, when it suited) only confirmed my view that life in Britain under the rebels, had they been successful, would not have been much fun either. All too often, even the most glamorous rebels are just as unappealing, under the surface, as the imperialist tyrants themselves.

 

If anything, this book certainly points out the flaws in any glorified view of ancient human nature. And also seems to parallel all too much in our own times. On the point above, neither the French colonialists nor the Khmer Rouge were particularly fun to live under, to use just one example. 

 

Another great line comes from the chapter about the turbulent days of the Empire after Nero’s death. Due in part to the lack of clear rules of succession, four emperors ruled briefly, before being bumped off in turn. Beard mocks the way historians insist on the euphemism of “The Year of the Four Emperors” to avoid say what this really was: a civil war. 

 

Speaking of snarky lines, the chapter on Hadrian’s Villa contains this one:

 

The question is partly where (or how) to fix the dividing line between the upmarket elegance of an emperor and the decadent vulgarity of a tyrant. 

 

I mean, we can generally agree on where Trump’s taste falls on this line, but what about Hearst and his Castle? 

 

A bit of snark is directed at historical writers who need to fill space where there is little evidence to go off of. 

 

Where has all the information come from? Quite simply, how has he filled the pages? The way historians of the ancient world have always done, by a combination of scholarship, conjecture and fiction. 

 

The chapters on commoners in the Roman world are pretty fun too, and both illustrate how little we know, but also how much humans are humans throughout time. I mean, fart jokes transcend time and place. Anyway, this bit about how soldiers were kept out of the city itself has a great line. 

 

True, under the one-man-rule of the Empire, there was a small special militia stationed in the city: the Praetorian Guard, whose job it was to protect (or sometimes assassinate) the ruling emperor. 

 

I’ll end with a musing on why the old writings still fascinate us. Beard doesn’t exactly dismiss the universality of the masterpieces of the past, but she does speculate that they have influenced us in ways we do not always acknowledge. 

 

It would have been useful to get a glimpse of some opposition to the current theatrical enthusiasm for all things Hellenic. What of the argument, for example, that ancient tragedy is more the problem than the solution, and that part of the reason why Western culture deals so ineffectively with the horrors of war, or the inequalities of gender, is that it cannot think through these issues outside the frame established in Athens more than two millennia ago? 

 

Definitely something to think about. (And also, check out my index of poetry and drama for my thoughts on the various Greek plays I have seen over the course of this blog…) 

 

I suspect this book won’t be for everyone, but I found it quite interesting, if not exactly what I expected. Beard is incredibly knowledgeable about her history, and makes it come alive for the reader. 

 

20th Century American Poetry (DOB 1897-1899)

Source of book: I own this

 

This particular book is volume two of the set of 20th Century American Poetry. So far, there are only two volumes, but clearly at least two more will be needed to fill out the eventual collection. I own the first as well, but decided to read a portion of this one first. 

The books are laid out in an interesting manner. Rather than alphabetically by author, or in the order the poems were written or published, LoA decided to organize them by the year of the author’s birth. This volume begins with 1894 and e e cummings. These are large books, in this case containing nearly 900 pages of poems, followed by more than a hundred pages of short biographies and notes. I arbitrarily decided to read a bit more than one hundred pages, and end with a particular year. 

This is my second post regarding this collection. You can read the first here. 

 

While I will not discuss every single poet, here is the list of who was included in the section I read:

 

Louise Bogan, Emanuel Carnevali, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Walter Lowenfels, David McCord, John Wheelwright, Stephen Vincent Benet, Malcolm Crowley, Harry Crosby, Horace Gregory, Melvin B. Tolson, Leonie Adams, Hart Crane, Thomas A. Dorsey, Hildegard Flanner, Janet Lewis, Joseph Moncure March, Vladimir Nabokov, Lynn Riggs, and Allen Tate.

 

These were all born between 1897 and 1899. As with the previous selection, this one includes both well known and readily available poets, and some that are more obscure and even unavailable in print. 

 

Three names dominated this particular selection, in terms of the number of pages dedicated to their work: Louise Bogan, Stephen Vincent Benet, and Hart Crane. 

 

I’ll start with Louise Bogan, as she was the first in this selection. I was not that familiar with her, although she was a Poet Laureate and part of the literary circle of her time. As usual, there is probably a significant degree of sexism involved here. Female artists of all sorts tend to be underappreciated during their lifetimes, and forgotten after their death unless someone with influence works to preserve their legacy. 

 

In the case of Bogan, I think her work equals any man of her era, and I found it to be more to my taste than Ezra Pound, with whom her style is often compared. In fact, I liked it enough to add her collected poems to my library. 

 

It was very difficult to choose which of her poems to feature, as I really could have gone with any of them. 

 

Here are the ones I liked the most this time through, starting with some more traditional forms:

 

Knowledge

 

Now that I know

How passion warms little

Of flesh in the mould,

And treasure is brittle, -

 

I’ll lie here and learn

How, over their ground,

Trees make a long shadow

And a light sound.

 

And this one:

 

The Alchemist

 

I burned my life, that I might find

A passion wholly of the mind,

Thought divorced from eye and bone,

Ecstasy come to breath alone

I broke my life, to seek relief

From the flawed light of love and grief.

 

With mounting beat the utter fire

Charred existence and desire.

It died low, ceased its sudden thresh.

I had found unmysterious flesh - 

Not the mind’s avid substance - still

Passionate beyond the will. 

 

And this, one, which I think is gorgeous:

 

Late

 

The cormorant still screams

Over cave and promontory.

Stony wings and bleak glory

Battle in your dreams.

Now sullen and deranged,

Not simply, as a child,

You look upon the earth

And find it harrowed and wild.

Now, only to mock

At the sterile cliff laid bare,

At the cold pure sky unchanged,

You look upon the rock,

You look upon the air. 

 

And finally, one with a more modernist form:

 

The Dragonfly

 

You are made of almost nothing

But of enough

To be great eyes

And diaphanous double vans;

To be ceaseless movement,

Unending hunger

Grappling love.

 

Link between water and air,

Earth repels you.

Light touches you only to shift into iridescence

Upon your body and wings.

 

Twice-born, predator,

You split into the heat.

Swift beyond calculation or capture

You dart into the shadow

Which consumes you.

 

You rocket into the day.

But at last, when the wind flattens the grasses,

For you, the design and purpose stop.

 

And you fall

With the other husks of summer.

 

Yep, Louise Bogan is a keeper - I definitely plan to explore her work more. 

 

Another poet that I rather liked - although only a handful of his poems are in this collection - is Emanuel Carnevali. In particular, he wrote some truly striking lines. 

 

Sermon

 

Chao-Mong-Mu freely laid his hands over the sky:

You do not know how to lay your hands over the breasts of your beloved.

 

Chao-Mong-Mu made the tree dance at his will:

You do not know how to hug a rough tree and say “darling” to it.

 

Chao-Mong-Mu magnificently ran a shaft of sunlight to smash against the treetops:

You walk carefully, carefully, and fend off the sunlight with your grey clothes, although you’re very poor. 

 

Chao-Mong-Mu painted a sky that was a pink-fleshed vase; then he became a very small thing and hid in the vase:

You build yourselves immense houses to live in, and you are afraid even there. 

 

I was unable to find any information on “Chao-Mong-Mu” - he may be made up, or the reference may be too obscure for my search skills. In any case, the images in this poem are incredible. I particularly like the idea of building immense houses, yet remaining afraid. In general, this is how the love of money works. You build what you think will be your safety and security, and yet it is never enough. 

 

Here is another rather philosophical poem that I liked:

 

Almost a God

 

I am dying under this heat

but there may be worse.

 

I love my wife

but I should love her more.

 

I love my sweetheart but her love should be more universal.

One word describes her but I do not know which word.

 

All shorter than something else:

All is more God-like than something else.

 

There is competition in the chaos,

which is very foolish.

 

I am in doubt as a bent willow branch

nodding to the water.

 

I admire the devil for he leaves things unfinished.

I admire God for he finishes everything. 

 

There aren’t as many song lyrics in this particular section of the book, but there is one that I did want to mention. But just typing the lyrics out won’t really capture the essence. Bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson is best heard in his own voice. 

 

Long Distance Moan

 

I’ll also quote a short bit of doggerel from David McCord that made me smile.

 

History of Education

 

The decent docent doesn’t doze:

He teaches standing on his toes.

His student dassn’t doze - and does,

And that’s what teaching is and was. 

 

Next up is John Wheelwright, perhaps known as much for his founding of the Trotskyite party in America these days, but he did write some interesting poetry. I selected a few that I liked the most. 

 

Would You Think?

 

Does the sound or the silence make 

music? When no ripples pass

over watery trees; like painted glass

lying beneath a quiet lake;

            would you think the real forest lay

            only in the reflected 

            trees, which are protected

            by non-existence from the air of day?

Our blood gives voice to earth and shell,

they speak but in refracted sounds.

The silence of the dead resounds,

but what they say we cannot tell.

            Only echoes of what they taught

            are heard by living ears.

            The tongue tells what it hears

            and drowns the silence which the dead besought.

The questioning, circumambient light

the answering, luminiferous doubt

listen, and whisper it about

until the mocking stars turn bright.

            Tardy flowers have bloomed long

            but they have long been dead.

            Now on the ice, like lead

            hailstones drop loud, with a rattlesnake’s song.

 

It is a haunting poem, and is multivalent as so many great poems are. 

 

This next one is expressly political, and in an unusual format. It seems relevant in our own time, nearly 100 years later. 

 

Come Over and Help Us

A Rhapsody

 

I.

Our masks are gauze / and screen our faces for those unlike us only,

Who are easily deceived. / Pierce through these masks to our unhidden tongues

And watch us scold, / scold with intellectual lust; / scold

Ourselves, our foes, our friends; / Europe, America, Boston; and all that is not

Boston; / till we reach a purity, fierce as the love of God; - / Hate.

Hate, still fed by the shadowed source; / but fallen, stagnant fallen;

Sunk low between thin channels; rises, rises; / swells to burst

Its walls; and rolls out deep and wide. / Hate rules our drowning Race.

Any freed from our Tyrant; / abandon their farms, forsake their Country, become American.

 

We, the least subtle of Peoples, / lead each only one life at a time, -

Being never, never anything but sincere; / yet we trust our honesty

So little that we dare not depart from it, - / knowing it to need habitual stimulation.

And living amid a world of Spooks, / we summon another to us

Who is (in some sort) our Clown, - / as he affords us amusement.

O! sweet tormentor, Doubt! longed-for and human, / leave us some plausible

Evil motive, however incredible. / The Hate in the World outside our World

(Envious, malicious, vindictive) / makes our Hate gleam in the splendor

Of a Castrate / who with tongue plucked out; / arms, legs sawed off;

Eyes and ears, pierced through; / still thinks / thinks

By means of all his nutriment, / with intense, exacting Energy, terrible, consuming.

Madness, we so politely placate / as an every-day inconvenience

We shun in secret. / Madness is sumptuous; Hate, ascetic.

Those only who remain sane, / taste the flavor of Hate.

Strong Joy, we forbid ourselves / and deny large pleasurable objects,

But, too shrewd to forego amusement, / we enjoy all joys which, dying, leave us teased.

So spare us, sweet Doubt, our tormentor, / the Arts, our concerts, and novels;

The theater, sports, the exotic past; / to use to stave off Madness,

To use as breathing spells, / that our drug's tang may not die.

If with less conviction, / with some result, some end, -

So pure ourselves; so clear our passion; / pure, clear, alone.

 

II.

The New Englander leaves New England / to flaunt his drab person

Before Latin decors / and Asiatic back-drops.

Wearies. / Returns to life, -life tried for a little while.

A poor sort of thing / (filling the stomach; emptying the bowels;

Bothering to speak to friends on the street; / filling the stomach again;

Dancing, drinking, whoring) / forms the tissue of this fabric.-

(Marriage; society; business; charity; - / Life, and life refused.)

 

The New Englander appraises sins, / and finds them beyond his means, and hoards

Likewise, he seldom spends his goodness / on someone ignoble as he,

But, to make an occasion, he proves himself / that he is equally ignoble.

Then he breaks his fast! / Then he ends his thirsting!

He censors the Judge. / He passes judgment on the Censor. / No language is left.

His lone faculty, Condemnation, -condemned. / Nothing is left to say.

Proclaim an Armistice. / Through Existence, livid, void, / let silence flood.

 

Ask the Silent One your question. / (He is stupid in misery

No more than the talkative man, who talks through his hat.) / Ask the question.

If he replied at all, / it would be to remark that he never could despise

Anyone so much as himself / should he once give way to Self-pity.

A different act of faith is his, - / the white gesture of Humility.

He knows his weakness. / He is well-schooled / and he never forgets the shortest

Title of his Knowledge. / The jailer of his Soul sees Pride. / He sees

Tears, never. / The Silent One is so eaten away

He cannot make that little effort / which surrender to external Fact

Requires, / but looks out always with one wish, - / to realize he exists.

 

Lo! a Desire! / A Faint motive! / A motive (however faint) beyond disinterestedness.

Faint. / It is faint. / But the boundary is clear. / Desire, oh desire further!

Past that boundary lies Annihilation / where the Soul

Breaks the monotonous-familiar / and man wakes to the shocking

Unastounded company of other men. / But the Silent One would not pass

Where the Redmen have gone. / He would live without end. That, - / the ultimate nature of Hell.

                                                           

Seriously: read that in light of the MAGA movement and its ass-clown king. 

 

The final one by Wheelwright is essentially a sonnet, although it is unrhymed. I’m a sucker for a good sonnet, and this one caught my eye. 

 

Esprit d’Escalier

 

That drop of sweat which is sliding down my mount

tastes like a tear. Is my lip cut? was her cheek?

It was a tear, fool. Fool, you did not see

once through empty freight train conversation

her Jack and Jill tears fall down to defer

breaking that telegram her pulse was ticking

to her ears. They were, then, sweat and blood? Her tears

taste, in my mouth, of death and birth and salt.

 

I, when she ask me a question or make reply

think only what I think; while she is thinking

our future, past, our present one dimension.

O! everything I’d say cuts with primal woe;

nor shall I ever tell the taste of my own sweat

from the tang of tears or blood, or taste of that spit. 

 

The next poet I want to talk about is Melvin B. Tolson, one of the lesser-known of the Harlem Renaissance poets. A lot of his poems are apparently in a longer form. This book chooses excerpts from some of those longer works. Even the excerpts are a bit too long to quote, but I will mention Harlem Gallery as an excellent free-form poem, with some great lines. Here is one I jotted down:

 

Listen, Black Boy.

Did the High Priestess at 27 rue de Fleurus

assert, “The Negro suffers from nothingness”?

Hideho confided like a neophyte on The Walk,

“Jazz is the marijuana of the Blacks.”

In the tribulum of dialecticts, I juggleed the idea;

then I observed,

“Jazz is the philosopher’s egg of the Whites.” 

 

Next up is another poet laureate, Leonie Adams. She ran in the same circles as Bogan, and also had a long academic career. 

 

The Moon and Spectator

 

In the dead of the night

I got up from my bed;

The air stretched hollow,

A theatre of the dead.

 

The night was half sunk and the wind gone,

The passions of the wind had gone down;

But the boughs shaken a little, blanched a little,

Spectrally, by the moon.

 

The moon performed her march fantastic,

The harrier of clouds, a flame half seen,

Or full in the high sky, the royal sables being spread,

A withered queen.

 

The moon, that chill frame, I saw enact

Her rite commemorative of a bound ghost,

And thought of a night wildly born, outliving storm,

And its tears lost.

 

Almost without pulse, a spectator to the moon,

A dream of some fashion set the body awake,

But called to the heart in the deeps of sleep how rising

From sleep again it would break.

 

Hart Crane is one of those poets I think that people have heard of, but never really read. Perhaps his dramatic life and early death gave him that extra glow, but really, his poetry is excellent as well.

 

Crane was born gay in an era when the permissiveness of the 19th Century was giving way to a wave of persecutions, from the declaration that any sexual orientation other than strict heterosexuality was a mental illness (leading to things such as Alan Turing being tortured, despite his crucial role in winning a war), to the outright criminalization of relations that had, at least in America, been left mostly as a moral and religious issue. 

 

Two incidents appear to have been instrumental in Crane’s dramatic suicide. First, he came out to his mother. It did not go well. They fought, she cut him off, and they never saw each other again. Second, Crane attempted a heterosexual with Peggy Crowley, the ex-wife of a friend. It did not go well either - it did not “cure” him of homosexuality, and he fell into a despair. Enroute back to New York from Cuba, he stepped off the boat into the Gulf, saying, “Goodbye, everybody.”

 

One wonders if, in a less bigoted era, he could have survived and thrived. 

 

In any case, the poetry he left behind is impressive, and I enjoyed it. Here is one of his shorter and best known poems. 

 

Repose of Rivers

 

The willows carried a slow sound,

A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead.

I could never remember

That seething, steady leveling of the marshes

Till age had brought me to the sea.

 

Flags, weeds. And remembrance of steep alcoves

Where cypresses shared the noon’s

Tyranny; they drew me into hades almost.

And mammoth turtles climbing sulpher dreams

Yielded, while sun-silt rippled them

Assunder…

 

How much I would have bartered! the black gorge

And all the singular nestings in the hills

Where beavers learn stitch and tooth.

The pond I entered once and quickly fled -

I remember now its singing willow rim.

 

And finally, in that memory all things nurse;

After the city that I finally passed 

With scalding unguents spread and smoking darts

The monsoon cut across the delta

At gulf gates … there, beyond the dykes

 

I heard wind flaking sapphire, like this summer, 

And willows could not hold more steady sound. 

 

The poem that some consider to be Crane’s masterpiece is in one long poem, “The Bridge.” It can be seen either as a collection of lyrics bound together by a theme, or as a long epic. It is dedicated to the Brooklyn Bridge (which I got to walk across this year!) and is a bit of an ode to America, in all its aspirational goodness and practical messiness. 

 

While I thought there were some weaker sections, overall, the poem is pretty badass, and worth reading. Just to give a taste, here is a bit of the third part, “Cutty Sark,” a reference to the famous clipper ship, but it goes…a few different directions. The poetry is pretty nifty. 

 

I met a man in South Street, tall - 

a nervous shark tooth swung on his chain.

His eyes pressed through green glass

- green glasses, or bar lights made them

so -

            shine -

                        GREEN -

                                    eyes -

stepped out - forgot to look at you

or left you several blocks away - 

 

in the nickel-in-the-slot piano jogged

“Stamboul Nights” - weaving somebody’s nickel - sang -

            O Stamboul Rose - dreams weave the rose!

                       

                        Murmurs of Leviathan he spoke,

                        and rum was Plato in our heads…

 

Part of the fun of “The Bridge” is that the form and style changes between sections, giving a completely different experience. 

 

Next up is one by Hildegarde Flanner, who I had never heard of. Although maybe I should have, because in addition to her poetry and essays, she was an influential conservationist. Maybe I have seen her name in that context? Anyway, here is one of her poems. 

 

Dumb

 

Silence braided her fingers in my hair

And put her ankles close to mine in bed.

She hushed a silver sparrow in his song

And laid against my throat her fragile head.

 

“I conquered today,” she said, “as yesterday,

And now we two shall rest as one tonight.

A girl with silence in her arms,

(Lie quietly!) is a lovely sight.”

 

And so I rest with silence in my arms,

Her hair across my breath when I would weep.

I cannot even force my tongue to pray

That she will leave me in my sleep.

 

I appreciate that Library of America makes sure to highlight women and minorities in its collections. There are a number of female poets whose name recognition - or its lack - might lead to them being overlooked. 

 

Another one of these is Janet Lewis. She made it to age 99, was married to Yvor Winters, but should also be remembered for her poetry and novels. The most famous of the latter was The Wife of Martin Guerre. I could have picked any of her poems, but two were my favorites. 

 

The Reader

 

Sun creeps under the eaves,

And shines on the bare floor

While he forgets the earth.

 

Cool ashes on the hearth,

And all so still save for

The soft turning of leaves.

 

A creature fresh from birth

Clings to the screen door,

Heaving damp heavy wings.

 

 And, in a very different vein, this one. I am reminded in a way of C. S. Lewis’ unfinished story about the older years of Helen of Troy - although the two Lewises go very different directions. 

 

Helen Grows Old

 

We have forgotten Paris, and his fate.

We have not much inquired 

If Menelaus from the Trojan gate

Returning found the long desired

Immortal beauty by his hearth. Then late,

 

Late, long past the morning hour,

Could even she recapture from the dawn

The young delightful love? When the dread power

That forced her will was gone,

When fell the last charred tower,

 

When the last flame had faded from the cloud,

And by the darkening sea

The plain lay empty of the armed crowd,

Then was she free

Who had been ruled by passion blind and proud?

 

Then did she find with him who first she chose 

Before the desperate flight,

At last, repose

In love still radiant at the edge of night,

As fair as in the morning? No one knows. 

 

No one has cared to say. The story clings

To the tempestuous years, by passion bound, 

Like Helen. No one brings 

A tale of quiet love. The fading sound

Is blent of falling embers, weeping kings. 

 

I’ll end with a poem by Allen Tate. I have mixed feelings about Tate generally. It is pretty clear that he held typical Southern White Guy of his time, both praising Langston Hughes as an artist, while refusing to socialize with him across the color line. 

 

On the other hand, particularly later in life, he supported voting rights for African Americans - although in a weird twist, he opined that he thought the Supreme Court got it backwards, integrating schools by court ruling rather than opening voting so that black voters could vote for integration. A bit complicated, I suppose. 

 

Some of the poems in this collection were from the Southern perspective, although hardly a hagiography. For the most part, I felt they were okay, but not great. With the exception of this one poem that re-read a few times, because it really made an impression. 

 

Tate captures the frustration many of us feel about the awkward blindness of upper-class white liberalism. So, while I tend to agree with many of the more leftist (by US standards at least) approaches to tackling social problems, I wince at the lack of actual understanding of the complexities that require actual social interaction with those you wish to help. 

 

This poem in part irritates me because it sounds like the disingenuous right-wing criticism of liberalism. But if you let it sink in, and sit with the nuance, it is far more complicated. There is a good kernel of truth in this poem. 

 

The Ivory Tower

 

Let us begin to understand the argument.

There is a solution to everything: Science.

Separate those evils strictly social

From other evils that are eventually social,

It ends in all evils being social: Deduction.

Is not marriage a social institution,

(un contrat social) Is not prostitution 

An institution? Abolish (1) marriage, (2) poverty.

We understand everything: Dialectic.

We who get plenty to eat and get it 

Advertising the starvation of others

Understand everything not including

Ourselves: we have enough to eat. Oedipus

Was necessarily an example - everything

Is an example - of capitalism pooped

By decay; King Lear, of neurotic senility

Bred of tyrannous escape from reality;

Cleopatra, of the unadjusted girl.

Everybody but us is an example of capitalism.

We are understanding the argument 

That we have got to make men slaves 

Of their bellies in order to get them fed.

The sole problem is the problem of hunger

(Or the distribution of commodities)

And a beast came out of the sea

And a fire came out of the night

To them that were not hungry

The commodities being well distributed

And the prostate thrives a little, then delays,

The hour of light is brief, then decays;

But light must be a social institution

Even if we are not sure what the other

Is (pro, forth; stare, to stand).

We know everything to know on sea or land.

And on the mountains by the sea

There was enacted tragedy

(Or maybe in a hollow by a tree),

Both man and woman were well-fed

When he had brought her hot to bed

But he was largely make-believe

And she no better than a sieve;

Soon the uneconomic woe

That love engenders crushed them, so

That every time they drank or ate

They cursed the board where food was set.

Axel’s Castle, the text they took,

Was a most remarkable book

But yet in spite of Mr. Wilson

Beef and cheese washed down by Pilsen

Did not adjust the sexual act

To truths of economic fact,

So was produced this tragedy

In a far tower of ivory

Where, O young men, late in the night

All you who drink light and stroke the air

Come back, seeking the night, and cry

To strict Rapunzel to let down her hair. 

 

In some ways, it is fascinating to see how many different styles were used by poets all born within three years of each other. This whole period was a time of ferment and experimentation, which is why the classic exists alongside the avant garde. 

 

I am enjoying working my way through this sampler, adding additional poets to my own collection. Stay tuned for future installments.