(no subject)

Read Babel's Red Cavalry this week simultaneously with John Clare, and was bemused at their improbable resemblance. Then came on a remark in Ashbery's Clare lecture tonight where he speaks of his poems as "reports from the front." Which kind of made me wonder if he was thinking of Babel too because in isolation that's untrue of Clare, for whom nature was in no sense a battleground. But for Babel war was a sort of natural phenomenon. I don't mean he felt the causes necessarily recurred, but for whatever reason there they were - an innocent evil was born. This is bizarrely yoked to relentless, if opaque, satire, too. As though causes and blame had mattered shortly before and might come to again, but in the meantime were just the cracks through which the tide of madness broke that had since flooded the air. It's a disturbingly unique tone, to some extent based on Tolstoy's Sebastopol Sketches but stranger - in part because reporting these particular sights is so dangerous that it itself feels like a reckless sally at night among minefields and fire, in part because Babel is clearly viewing the whole experience as revelation. While as clearly having no idea of just what or from whom. There's a true guilelessness behind the designs beneath his surface naivete.

Is there any similar slyness to Clare's innocence? I'm not at my best in holy fool territory, but it does seem that in Clare's last poems a plank gives way and we're suddenly behind nature. And you look back at the earlier work, those thousands of pages of minutely followed birds and fields and step-altering weather, and wonder if we somehow were back then as well, and how that could be.

***

I'd picked Babel for how far he seemed from the Anglo-American texts I've been exclusively buried in, ironically. And because I'd read no short stories in months. Babel's effect on some of Calvino's early, WW2-centered writings becomes evident in retrospect. But The Kingdom of This World, and Blood Meridian? I'm wondering.

(no subject)

I do think that both, when you'd read enough to enter the zone they inhabit, had the remarkable virtue of recreating in their different ways a nakedness I used to feel fairly often. Maybe a lot of authors do, and it's just something you can't reexperience when you go back - you can forget all the lines, all the incidents and the text stays clothed regardless. I'd read the Odessa half of Babel and the madhouse portion of Clare, but hadn't seen much of these other selves, hadn't really met them.

I remember trying to explain the nakedness I mean when I was a kid. It was mostly a morning phenomenon where you put pants and a shirt on but still felt naked - the clothes were just on you, not part of you. Some kind of uncontrolled element proper clothing protects from seeped right through.

People would look at me funny when I said this to find out if they'd felt it too. They'd give me the same look when I tried to describe how my teeth and jaws sometimes solidified the world until it was part of them and hence me, and also when I'd talk about how different times had different flavors. It wasn't quite rejection, more like I was saying something just off enough from something they themselves recognized that the vocabulary gap put them in a state of hesitation about whether I was like them and they were like me deep enough in that some fundamental relations would need to be rewritten. I think I fell for literature as entirely as I did when I found it's about this class of sensations, that it could articulate them: Emerson's monad moods, Tennyson lingering on the lawn, Shelley in autumn. It was sad when I looked for nakedness, solidity, flavor I'd shared with Turgenev and found much of it was gone.

Though I'm kind of glad I don't feel naked in the morning anymore, even undressed. (Though the world does feel jarringly frameless when I wake at night, especially if the sleep has been short. Would I have associated those feelings once?) Or maybe it's that I got used to being naked? Hard to tell now just what I meant by the word, since the word itself is interfused so thoroughly with the now tattered memory of that feeling. If it had something to do with growing, of my body not being quite where I'd left it the night before, perhaps I'll experience it again as dilapidation accelerates.

And now part of me wonders if all I can attest is that the writings of Babel and Clare are intimate and awkward. The problem with internal difference / where the meanings are is that we use the same dictionary as elsewhere. Over and over we're shanghaied in the English of the day. And fail to notice just how cold that hillside is, once we've sprouted our grownup sweaters.