(no subject)

...strength alone though of the Muses born
is like a fallen angel: trees uptorn,
Darkness, and worms, and shrouds, and sepulchres
Delight it; for it feeds upon the burrs,
And thorns of life; forgetting the great end
Of poesy, that it should be a friend
To soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.

I wonder if this spurred Dickinson to write poems specifically about arboreal uptear and darkness and worms and shrouds and sepulchres.

As for this:

Where is thy misty pestilence to creep
Into the dwellings, through the door crannies
Of all mock lyrists, large self-worshippers
And careless Hectorers in proud bad verse?
Though I breathe death with them it will be life
To see them sprawl before me into graves.

A misty pestilence sure got Byron, as well as his kid and a couple of Shelley's; but for the second part, the curse might seem to have redounded--with the cursed even getting to miswrite Keats' epitaph.

Fall of Hyperion was published right when Dickinson started writing. New work by your favorite poet will get your close attention, and these passages fed the thoughts that became her tomb poem, I think. As did, perhaps, the "loading rifts with ore": with Shelley following the advice a year or so on. At any rate she'd appreciate the conceit.

(no subject)

Swimming by Night, James Merrill

A light going out in the forehead
Of the house by the ocean,
Into warm black its feints of diamond fade.
Without clothes, without caution

Plunging past gravity--
Wait! Where before
Had been floating nothing, is a gradual body
Half remembered, astral with phosphor,

Yours, risen from its tomb
In your own mind,
Haunting nimbleness, glimmerings a random
Spell had kindled. So that, new-limned

By this weak lamp
The evening's alcohol will feed
Until the genie chilling bids you limp
Heavily over stones to bed,

You wear your master's robe
One last time, the far break
Of waves, their length and sparkle, the spinning globe
You wear, and the star running down his cheek.


[This one I do love completely, and how it seems to lose grammar.]

(no subject)

Great movies:

49 Up, of course. (Start with 28, of course.)
Aguirre, the Wrath of God

(no subject)

Did finish Underworld a week or two ago. I loved almost every episode but I'm not sure I have the whole thing in focus. I wonder if Delillo did?

For example, if the unterwelt's what's repressed, is it so in the sense that everyone's anxiously ignoring the main facts (of imminent mortal threat and runaway consumption) or in the sense that the main facts (gov't, military-industrial complex, major media) are ignoring everyone? Surely it can't be both, as the two underworlds are two different sets, beneath the different overworlds of personal and cultural mindsets. Or I suppose the big rug could sweep all the little rugs under it, which could in turn do some kind of anthropomorphic Fantasia-style sweeping of dust under themselves.

Perhaps if he'd stuck with an individual's story: how one of us saw the light of the bomb. Or committed more fully to panorama: how the bomb saw us. As it is there's a great confusion of lights and levels--which I admit is interesting in itself. But we want to pull it all together. There's a reason books are shaped like little boxes.

It does sometimes feel disquietingly personal, too, no? Presumably Delillo never killed anyone but I wonder if he sees some central aspect of his life as having been hijacked by sudden complicity (ambiguously guilty) in a great assault, after which nothing was the same. Life was lived, but off-kilter, S/M, requiring obsessions and hobbies and sins to vent bad air and relocate limits. And the post-'91 life descriptions are reminiscent of the flat affect and quiet pliability following PTSD spasms.

And to the extent it is personal, how much does that compromise it as an analysis of our history and culture? How much of it is a Wordsworthian gilding of youth, made troublesome by incomplete awareness of being such a gilding, and of a season rather than a numerable year?

Have to give Roth credit, in hindsight, for merging the two Falls seamlessly in American Pastoral. His opinions about how his life and times were related are probably as complex and ambivalent as Delillo's, but the emotional push of his story wasn't. Roth's so good at the shuffleboarding, the central movement of his novels--his best novels. Even his less good ones tend to fall apart into a handful of independently excellent pushes. Delillo, I don't know (yet he's frequently Roth's superior, I'm surprised to grant, in many narrative capacities: telling details, dialogue, authenticity of texture). Maybe Underworld should be seen as more like Dubliners or Turgenev's Hunter's Sketches, a collection of stories cutting through the same world at different angles.

Still, the central conceit, or thinking about what the central conceit might be, is totally fascinating. The earth full of missiles and garbage and secrets and lost selves. And there was that great anxiety, of which I'm sure I only tasted a corner but that was more than too much. And that great relief, he gets that right at the end. Most of us were still riding it in early September, 2001.

I think what I need is a phrase, something to illuminate all the happenings and figures at once. And I have maybe the nouns of such a sentence, maybe the verb, but can't quite say it. A bit like those awful French dreams I used to have.