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Apr. 18th, 2009 03:05 pm1. There are fewer books than you think.
2. A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Witch of Atlas, so often dismissed as trifles, are as profound as anything written down.
3. I read "Walking" right after waking from that dream - a 2nd reading, & one putting it firmly in my personal canon - but aspects of it now seem part of that dream. Perhaps above all else because there's this:
I took a walk on Spaulding's Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord, unknown to me - to whom the sun was servant - who had not gone into society in the village - who had not been called on. I saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding's cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision; the trees grew through it. I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters. They are quite well. The farmer's cart-path, which leads directly through their hall, does not in the least put them out, as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor - notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat-of-arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum - as of a distant hive in May - which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry was not as in knots and excrescences embayed.
But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out of my mind even now while I speak, and endeavor to recall them and recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I should move out of Concord.
How strong is this in Little, Big? Passim, but especially the house, more especially the later house of the conclusion (which I won't quote as some haven't gotten to it, but hope others will look up)? (Can't remember if Crowley's ever mentioned Thoreau, but it's difficult to imagine the author of Engine Summer and Solitudes could have not read him often and deeply once.)
4. The latter's also the noplace of Robinson's hill house, Kipling's path through the woods, and Housman's shire of lost content - scenes hollowed by nostalgia out of the decay of dark, thick-layered memories, but still/ambiguously also that of Thoreau (though there too there is a strange melancholy), a peopled version (see "Dream", see "Witch") of the hydraulic motion-scapes over, under or in the real found in various sublime moments in Anglamerican poetry: e.g. Simplon Pass, the Arve, "2 Rivers", "The River of Rivers in CT", the cold dark water at the Fish-houses.
5. Melville's most frequent metaphor, that of the sea being somehow the same as a field of wheat or wild grass in the wind (on land vice-versa), is a kind of chime to remind you to doubt whether a scene is occurring in an anchored place or this other kind. Which, since you don't know where it is, might be right here.
6. "The House of Asterion" makes such a place of the mind (Theseus is the death that will come to us - c.f. "in the East in the Far East" in Lynch and the analogous passage late in L,B) - which is amazing but not quite what those others were after. They mean it, it's outside us, or anyway in the outside part of us. "Asterion"'s more of a shaping of self-pity. (Which happens to be an emotion I honor, and am irritated when others don't. I guess the logic is that it can become an addiction or contagious or something - can, sure, but must? and like others can't?)
What can we say about the house in the forest, and its inhabitants who haven't been called on? What call it? Something ever more about to be? But that's not quite what Wordsworth saw at the pass. Maybe something more like Shelley's Demogorgon, a vision of unstable ubiquitous overlap so comprehensive that it might contain that too, that better, future us. A more-than-aleph - Garden of Adonis? - allthatmightbe.
2. A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Witch of Atlas, so often dismissed as trifles, are as profound as anything written down.
3. I read "Walking" right after waking from that dream - a 2nd reading, & one putting it firmly in my personal canon - but aspects of it now seem part of that dream. Perhaps above all else because there's this:
I took a walk on Spaulding's Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord, unknown to me - to whom the sun was servant - who had not gone into society in the village - who had not been called on. I saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding's cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision; the trees grew through it. I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters. They are quite well. The farmer's cart-path, which leads directly through their hall, does not in the least put them out, as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor - notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat-of-arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks. Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum - as of a distant hive in May - which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry was not as in knots and excrescences embayed.
But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out of my mind even now while I speak, and endeavor to recall them and recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I should move out of Concord.
How strong is this in Little, Big? Passim, but especially the house, more especially the later house of the conclusion (which I won't quote as some haven't gotten to it, but hope others will look up)? (Can't remember if Crowley's ever mentioned Thoreau, but it's difficult to imagine the author of Engine Summer and Solitudes could have not read him often and deeply once.)
4. The latter's also the noplace of Robinson's hill house, Kipling's path through the woods, and Housman's shire of lost content - scenes hollowed by nostalgia out of the decay of dark, thick-layered memories, but still/ambiguously also that of Thoreau (though there too there is a strange melancholy), a peopled version (see "Dream", see "Witch") of the hydraulic motion-scapes over, under or in the real found in various sublime moments in Anglamerican poetry: e.g. Simplon Pass, the Arve, "2 Rivers", "The River of Rivers in CT", the cold dark water at the Fish-houses.
5. Melville's most frequent metaphor, that of the sea being somehow the same as a field of wheat or wild grass in the wind (on land vice-versa), is a kind of chime to remind you to doubt whether a scene is occurring in an anchored place or this other kind. Which, since you don't know where it is, might be right here.
6. "The House of Asterion" makes such a place of the mind (Theseus is the death that will come to us - c.f. "in the East in the Far East" in Lynch and the analogous passage late in L,B) - which is amazing but not quite what those others were after. They mean it, it's outside us, or anyway in the outside part of us. "Asterion"'s more of a shaping of self-pity. (Which happens to be an emotion I honor, and am irritated when others don't. I guess the logic is that it can become an addiction or contagious or something - can, sure, but must? and like others can't?)
What can we say about the house in the forest, and its inhabitants who haven't been called on? What call it? Something ever more about to be? But that's not quite what Wordsworth saw at the pass. Maybe something more like Shelley's Demogorgon, a vision of unstable ubiquitous overlap so comprehensive that it might contain that too, that better, future us. A more-than-aleph - Garden of Adonis? - allthatmightbe.
