Sábado 20 de febrero, hora 8:00 p.m.
Variaciones sobre un tema de Bizet– León
Concierto para violín en re mayor, Op. 35 – Tchaikovsky -
Sinfonía No. 5 en re mayor, Op. 107 “La reforma” – Mendelssohn -
Orquesta Sinfónica de Colombia
Solista: Sasha Rozhdestvensky (Rusia), violín
Director invitado: Carlos Izcaray (Venezuela)
_________________________
We are getting together to study the Institutes that day from 4-6 or 7. We might have to bail out at around 6:30 and go concertward. The following week is Sibelius #2.
The trees stand out of slopes of varied brown. The rivulets are low or dry, the weeds and flowers tall and nodding sadly. The sunlight shines through dusty air. Autumn woods are full of repose, it seems to me. A leaf drifts down, a few of the fallen rattle on the forest floor, rustling idly. A bird cries dimly, distant, almost from another world, and the warm wind shakes the shriveled leaves overhead, scattering some more on the scentless air.
Only the insects are busy, indifferent to the mood of a dying wood. In a clearing there is some grass still green, cool to the touch and with chilly dirt underneath. A headstone leaning at an angle explains the clearing, and all around it the autumn wood sighs and whispers. A midnight raven cries from a nearby tree, then flings itself heavily through the mocking sunlight.
The Wind in the Willows consists of four major characters. In order of appearance they’re the Mole, the Rat, the Toad and the Badger. Fine fellows all of them, but highly distinct. I propose to describe each of them in turn.
The Mole, for instance is a quiet fellow. His home, we learn, is narrow and rather run down (strangely, Grahame manages by these descriptions to make us wish we lived there). Mole is not the most interesting of fellows, but he’s highly appreciative and his quiet and perhaps a little dim mind is filled with a great deal of unexpected good sense—from the stocking of his cellar to outwitting the stoats. He is an excitable creature, but not in the same way the Toad is—never grand.
The Toad is all the opposite of the Mole. The Toad is the great, incurable romantic of The Wind in the Willows. The Toad is highly erratic, impulsive, and not a little disastrous. He causes his friends a great deal of trouble. What the Toad has to learn is self-control through a lengthy ordeal, by being battered. What is wonderful about the Toad, however, is that none of the blows of fate are able to put him down for very long. He is incurably cocksure. In the end, what cures the Toad is that he sort of makes fun of himself by enjoying a great, boastful pretense, a sort of Aristotelian catharsis as the result of a closet drama (in which he stars).
The Rat is the cleverest and nicest of our chaps. He is easy going. He likes to have things done well: the picnics he puts on are a model to picnickers everywhere, his house appears altogether the best in scale and amenities (Toad hall is a good place, but it hasn’t the appealing seclusion, the hominess that you get from Rat’s establishment). Like his home, Rat is subject to floods. He is considerate but seems to have problems keeping his head in emergencies. He is a homebody and adventure and danger aren’t strictly in his line. When excitement comes, he can be deft and he can also be ridiculous.
The Badger is a very respectable country animal. The Badger is not sophisticated and doesn’t appear to hold with sophistication much. There are probably a whole lot of things the Badger doesn’t hold with, one suspects. What he is is impatient, deliberate, wise, prudent, fierce in battle, and the kind of person who generally lives very happily all alone. His admiration for the Mole, in their plans to deliver Toad Hall from its invaders, comes with the voice of authority, showing the reader in no uncertain terms who is the sensible chap and who (the Toad) is not.
The Wind in the Willows is a wonderful escape: there is always plenty of food, for the most part delightful things happen, in fact very magical and wonderful things happen, the ordinary things that happen are wonderfully desirable, full of ordinary magic, when there is snow there is a bright fire in the hearth, the seasons are relished, the field mice sing carols and it all ends happily. But I think my favorite part of it all is to watch the interplay of the characters: the slightly stuffy and boring, dear old Mole, the clever, interesting and amusing Rat, the Toad one has to be fond of all despite his occasional vulgarity, frequent excesses and ghastly boastfulness, and the reliable, gruff Badger.
I think The Wind in the Willows is one of the best books available to us in this world. Much of the enjoyment of small things you see in the Chronicles of Narnia or in The Hobbit you find here. Like Watership Down, you find what is unexpected, and enjoyably unexpected. One of the best things about The Wind in the Willows is the bogus lore, the preposterousness carried off with a high hand (like something committed by Toad) which adds the underlying laughter that makes the feeling of the book such a happy one. And yet it is the sense of tragedy, of evil in world and the end to good things somehow never far from their enjoyment that together with the underlying laughter makes the book have a certain inescapable poignant beauty. No doubt it is flawed, and someone can find for us the flaws and stack them up like lumber, but it is undeniably a very great achievement that well deserves to be on the shelves of at least those types of human beings represented by the characters dreamed up by Kenneth Grahame: fine fellows all.
One more delivery we expect today. We purchased some sticks of furniture, having had a pretty lucrative week. No more computing on the ottoman while seated on a low, borrowed stool. It looks like we might be going to stay.
And the first delivery? The books! Thanks to the generosity of my relatives (mostly on my wife’s side; I’m glad some people in the OBF are still willing to fund my study) and the diligence of another native of that great oriental republic one of the shelves here is filled to capacity.
Tozer, and especially The Christian Book of Mystical Verse are here to dignify devotion, as well as the two volumes of Edwards and the complete poems of Henry Vaughan. I look at these and I think, I have such valuable books.
Barfield on Coleridge for the serious work that I need to do in that area, and Barzun on art: there are artists in our church, and I have pretty regular contact with some of them. I think we can develop things more stimulating with some of them. I would love nothing better than to learn to paint with watercolors and then paint the hills and valleys of the highlands here.
William Logan, as I have to become a master of what he is doing. He and Seamus Heaney were really my introduction into the serious study of poetry I’ve been working at for the past two years. Well I remember walking on a partially defrosted path and reading one or the other, rereading until I thought I understood the poem, and from there branching out, along with the criticism, to recover again Yeats, to explore Frost and Coleridge, Pound and Wordsworth, Hopkins and Thomas along with the occasional slender volume of contemporary verse. Got, by the way, Hopkins and Thomas too, and some Spires and Pound—why do I like Pound? I enjoy the chap awfully, though not in the more difficult bits.
Pieper and Plato came too, along with George Macdonald, teachers all. I don’t know what I’m more pleased about. Now for the rocker to arrive, and then to read.
I thought of this again this week, what with the thread on Remonstrans.
The shame of speaking unskilfully were small if the tongue onely thereby were disgrac’d: But as the Image of a King in his Seale ill-represented is not so much a blemish to the waxe, or the Signet that seal’d it, as to the Prince it representeth, so disordered speech is not so much injury to the lips that give it forth, as to the disproportion and incoherence of things in themselves, so negligently expressed. Neither can his Mind be thought to be in Tune, whose words do jarre; nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is preposterous; nor his Elocution clear and perfect, whose utterance breaks itself into fragments and uncertainties. Negligent speech doth not onely discredit the person of the Speaker, but it discrediteth the opinion of his reason and judgement; it discrediteth the force and uniformity of the matter and substance. If it be so then in words, which fly and ‘scape censure, and where one good Phrase asks pardon for many incongruities and faults, how then shall he be thought wise whose penning is thin and shallow? How shall you look for wit from him whose leasure and head, assisted with the examination of his eyes, yeeld you no life or sharpnesse in his writing?
Ben Jonson, found in Vol 5:7 of the Underground Grammarian and elsewhere.
When the matter is low or scanty, a dead language, in which nothing is mean because nothing is familiar, affords great conveniences; and by the sonorous magnificence of Roman syllables, the writer conceals penury of thought, and want of novelty, often from the reader, and often from himself.
—Samuel Johnson
A useful consideration in judging a variety of things. For example, Coleridge said that Spanish sounded magnificent, which leads one to wonder if he wasn’t acquainted with it as a person might be acquainted with a dead language. He may still be right, but I have the question.
It is such a satisfying theme, and I miss my accordion acutely thinking about it.
The flamboyant Hvorostovsky with very nice accompaniment.
Rebroff and the usual schmaltz, but he had a very large, deep voice.
Here are some goofy chaps. Easier not to watch, but then you’ll miss the accordions on view.
And a chaotic finale. Skilled barbarians; it fascinates me.
P.S. You should have the guy on the guitar, though it is an inferior instrument.
1 The events of the past few days have not benefitted the cause of leisure in my life. The opportunity arose to work, the phone sounded, and I, with the resignation with which one rises before dawn said, as the Colombian expression goes, Toca; I must. Six days shalt thou labor, says the Lord, and what began as a quiet Monday soon prolonged itself almost unremitting until Thursday afternoon.
2 Nevertheless I have observed, as a result, more than I would have otherwise. I’ve had a better glimpse into the life of the sons of the privileged. These I saw had a sort of uniform: a bright or dark, never pale and always colored shirt untucked, jeans, and the regulation black loafers. Polite fellows, and intelligent. I got a glimpse of Windows 7—and was not impressed. I saw a British looking woman at the BC, pale, stout and clad in tweeds, but definitely Colombian in the opening of her mouth. She was, in the Study Centre at the BC, loud and ubiquitous. I was twice nocturnally in ancient public transportation with interior decoration that can only have drawn its inspiration from the interior of a coffin: dark, quilted material, gleaming metal trim, dim lights and eerie, and all of it inexpressibly shabby, like faded luxury all jerking around in the habitual patterns of traffic here as if undergoing an eternally incipient rigor mortis. During the day I watched the driver of another such mini-bus sprawled, with vacant expression, seeming like nothing so much as an ugly, postmodern rock star being jerked along by the passions of the city. I saw loudly attired universitarians, heard their gabble, was able to talk to a frail and whiny, yearning colleague, had a conversation with an aspiring entrepreneuress whose eyes shone at the mention of happy memories. I have observed, the town has grown a little smaller and a little bit more rich as a result, and I have paid for it.
3 The Colombians use the verb “Toca” to speak of an inevitable obligation. I’ve heard it in three contexts. Whenever a Colombian is forced by circumstances to undergo an awkward and lengthy transportation circumstance, they explain it and then say, Me toca; I ain’t got no choice.
After listening to a video in which a narrow, scholarly conclusion was advocated as a universal key to Scripture, I suggested to the Colombians watching it with me that the learned chap from the Infallible USA was actually not saying anything very meaningful or useful. Well, they said, in the mood of deliberation, Toca verlo otra vez; We have to watch the whole thing again, i.e. before judging it. They weren’t sure they had followed the intricacies of the argument (I was pretty sure it came entirely free of intricacies).
Two very old ladies were discussing the shower amenities at a retreat facility. Colombians shower every day and those who go to Europe sometimes tell stories that they almost do not themselves believe about the irregular practices of Europeans when it comes to this necessity. One of the elderly ladies was telling how she would get up before five to stand in line for a hot shower at the retreat facility. The hot water ran out, apparently, before the day even began. Well, the second replied, if there is only a cold shower, toca. Si claro, replied the other, toca.
4 What happened to me this week is like that cold shower, but it cleared the head and gave perspective. I find the attitude of Colombians expressed in the use of the verb Tocar useful in examining it. Everything comes to us in the providence of God: the consequences of our deliberate choices, good or bad, are all a part of it; they do not escape the ordering of his benevolence. Ours is to submit to circumstance, the way Colombians do to everything, with a sense of resignation. I have found the passivity of Colombians in the face of consequences, the getting on with what they have to do, instructive. I am for leisure, but when I have less leisure than formerly? Then the core of leisure becomes more valuable, its substance precious. In those moments I learn to use it better, and out of that precious core of leisure to make better use of its mysterious medium, time.
Leisure for us now is somehow an intersection of time and eternity, and we must make that nexus with our consciousness. And the effort of that nexus is, as Barfield likes to put it, a nisus—and a very useful word. We are struggling to emerge out of time, and only through time is time conquered.
One of the reasons the capable A. W. Tozer has been standing in for me on this blog is that I have been busy with an unanticipated eight hours of Aviation English (teaching hours, which took nearly twenty hours out of my week). One of the things Colombians do well is to put things off till the last minute and then pay for it without complaining.
It was in an awkward location, and as a result of the sheer effort I am heartily weary of Flight Level Two Niner Zero, Bravo X-ray Tree (not three, mind you) Fouwer (= 4) Eight, Aeroflot Six Six and One Two Zero Zero Zulu, never mind windshear, microbursts, PAN PAN, MAYDAY, leading edges, aprons and taxiway Tango. The interesting thing about my job is how much you learn about a variety of things, but sometimes the variety vanishes and things all stack up.
I don’t understand how people can learn doing it all without sleep and at the last minute. I have been sleeping less than my regulatory 8 hours (less than 7 actually, and that’s my minimum) and I am starting to feel sick. Of course, teaching takes more energy than studying and learning, so it may be that. But the culture of education in our day has something very wrong with it, as if learning were no longer considered an activity of leisure. It isn’t, I suppose. It is part of the rat race.
I’m part of the rat race, and I’m teaching jargon. But if my student passes the test and has to communicate in English in an emergency, I may also have saved some lives. Of course, it has earned me a bit of income, which is what it is really all about: the rat race.
If we buy some furniture, you are all invited to visit. Fly AeroRepublica!
A lot of leveling has been going on among us lately, but, as Dr. Samuel Johnson noted in his day, the levelers always want to level down to themselves, never up. And since most of our self-anointed levelers begin pretty well down to scale, the total effect on society has not been to elevate, but to degrade.
Everyone acquainted with the English language knows that the word common may also mean vulgar and often does. The vulgar person is one of low tastes who is not only coarse and boorish but enjoys being so, and because his kind is often in the majority he is also said to be common. And it is this common fellow who has, unfortunately, become the model for the masses in human society.
The present clamor after a college education by such large numbers of our young people suggests that perhaps people are getting tired of being common and aspire to loftier and nobler lives. But this is an illusion. Whatever advanced education may do for us theoretically, it is a fact that the stream of college graduates being poured each year into the social current is not having the slightest ennobling effect upon society. It is rather the other way around; society quickly brings the graduate around to its way of thinking and living.
Vulgarity is a disease of the human spirit and is not cured by education, or travel, or familiarity with grand opera or works of art. Vulgarity may speak good English and live in a split-level house, but it is known for what it is by its attitudes, its morals, and its aspirations, or lack of them.
—A. W. Tozer
Whether we affirm or deny the statement of the title, we still must begin by asking, What is decency? I would like to proceed by anecdote—two, in fact, and along the way multiply footnotes.
Last Friday I became aware of another passenger when he brushed me brusquely, rubbing my fur the wrong way. I twisted to see what the matter was and by means of touch and sight observed how he shoved himself through the crowd ungently, wore a fishing hat, a sour look, and went clutching a book—perhaps a tourist.* Eventually the upheaval passed down-bus and the intruder positioned himself awkwardly, much to the annoyance of his fellow travelers. When the doors opened and the crowds stirred uneasily, he bumped and turned and managed to become further wedged and worse off. By this time I had become an avid fan of this presumptive tourist, and it was just in time to watch the exciting finale. He decided to exit, but managed to do it so obnoxiously that the people coming into the bus blocked him and nearly pushed him back. I was laughing by the time he won through. But there is also some instruction in this. The man obviously hated the crowds, as most of us do, but he also behaved as if the crowd did not exist. It is one thing to believe a crowd should not exist, it is another to deny its existence when you are in the midst of it. He failed to consider the individuals in the crowd around him, that they were responsive and living.
My second anecdote occurred on a Tuesday. It was a fellow who understood that in a crowd one has to proceed with regard to the individuals of the crowd around him. I heard him apologize when he inadvertently overextended the imaginary bounds allotted to himself, and then when the people were passing through, like decent people everywhere, he endeavored to make himself small or to lean out of the way any time somebody signaled an intention to pass.** There was nothing servile or undignified with what this person was doing, of course. He was just making sure he was considerate with the wishes of others and taking the circumstances under consideration. He was a decent fellow.***
You can see how decency excites admiration. One might say, based on my anecdotes, that decency is the resulting behavior when persons and circumstances are taken into best consideration. It makes for harmony in difficult circumstances and is therefore to be admired and emulated.
_____________________________
*In countries in which few persons fish, the waters being foul, the fish scarce, and the practice entirely in the hands of commercial endeavor, a fishing hat is almost a certain sign of a tourist. Clutching a book the way this person was is usually not a good sign if one is charitably attempting to exonerate the suspect from the charge of tourism.
**Signaling one’s intention to pass is easy, providing people are decent. It makes one wary of making a false signal and putting a decent person to the trouble of obliging for nothing at all. All one has to do is whisper “permiso” or even just rearrange one’s grip so that it indicates a forward advance: decent people will usually notice this.
***This said decent fellow also had the decency of small feet. Colombians generally do: they take up less space. I think it is for this reason they have generally preferred tighter to looser pants. Sometimes, you see, in an excess of decency they grow feet that might be said to be disproportionately small. In order to balance again the proportions, they wear pants that leave little play around the ankle, as in the case with our decent fellow.
I have a couple of degrees from the Central Baptist Seminary of Minneapolis. I have a few friends there still, so the news that it was merging with another seminary in Iowa (known as Faith in Ankeny) was of interest to me because, among other things, it may provide some of my friends a ticket out of fundamentalism while there is still time.
It has been important for fundamentalism to have various and sundry institutions because, after all, not everybody has the correct nuance on standards. I’ve been to a fundamentalist institution where the girls were allowed to wear jeans (the place has since folded, not surprisingly) and so, you see, there has to be an option for persons with standards which might be . . . more in line with the teaching of Scripture.
I am pretty sure that the merger will not result in anybody wearing jeans to anything but neo-evangelical debates attended out of curiosity, though occasionally on a weekend you may see persons in such habiliment because they’re in a great hurry. But I think it is interesting that the options are narrowing. I remember when the BJU representative came to our high school chapel and pretty much demonstrated by Scripture and reason how it was not God’s will for anybody to go to college at an institution he did not represent. In those days there were a few daring souls who went to a college in Florida called Clearwater (I understand it still exists), but the majority went to the BJU unless they came from neo-evangelical backgrounds and ended up going to Cedarville which resided under a black cloud somewhere in southern Ohio. All this, of course, has been changing, and people have been sending their children to elect universities less and less, it seemed, and more and more to community colleges, State universities, and even to Catholic universities, though I have not heard of any of them attending the BYU. And today, I can’t think any of my friends who would send their children to any of the universities of fundamentalism—and I can think of at least one who is rather baffled at the thought of sending his children to any university, something which ought to be taken into consideration (you might also consider that my friends are also people that frequently come across as a wad of eccentrics).
So the situation has improved. And of course, we are talking about seminaries here, not colleges, which is a different thing. I’m glad they’re merging, if nothing else for the sake of the faculty they can have and what these can provide to the students. At one point at Central we had three faculty with terminal degrees in OT and none with a terminal degree or even an advanced degree in NT, though I believe there were a few students in the ThM program with NT concentrations.
I do wonder what advantage the two campus system gives them: two libraries when the opportunity arises to perhaps achieve one good one? (The glory of Central Seminary—the local youth pastor told me once—is its library. One of the faculty happened to be nearby and he emended the statement to: the glory of Central Seminary is its faculty. He knew that when we had to write a paper we ended up going to Bethel’s library.) The nice thing about getting rid of some administration and perhaps some of the faculty will be the extra office and classroom space, but if you end up with a lot of space you might start thinking . . . two campuses? One of the best things that could happen would be if they put Bauder (now, alas, the president of Central Seminary, but cunning enough to use the opportunity to abolish the role) in the classroom more, especially in the post-graduate classroom.
Well, we alumni will speculate, of course, especially if in our lives we ever want to use our degree for anything else, though it should still count (if you haven’t lost it in the Colombian postal system like I did!). I mean, what if they want to know the standards of the place and they think the looser standards of Faith in Ankeny were those you attended under? That could look bad.
My penetrating question is, however, will the new conglomerate still allow women to pursue and achieve an MDiv? We had girls at Central (not the kind that wore jeans to school, I hasten to add) but I’ve never heard of a girl with an MDiv from Faith in Ankeny.
Oh, I almost forgot! What about the radio station? Will this mean the prolonged death agonies of that venerable institution will finally culminate?
One of the criteria for good poetry is that of truth. It is the criteria for good anything, really. We recognize truth by its resonance, and we know this resonance because there is a correspondence. Truth is when something of which we are in possession corresponds to reality. Truth is a function of propositions, certainly, but in poetry the propositions are a bit more than bare statements of fact. The insight of the words, the mood, the conclusions drawn given the premises on which the poem operates (a function of its coherence) are those things in which the resonance of truth is known.
Thomas Hardy wrote good poetry. While not usually known for his poetry, since he wrote so much fiction, yet a good amount of the last years of his life was dedicated to poetry. Hardy was a master of words and he practiced a lot before becoming serious about poetry, and then he wrote a lot of poetry, much of it good. He was particularly deft at his use of meter and its effects. Of course there has to be more than meter and effects, there have to be worthwhile insights achieved by his language and the effects, and when you read Hardy you have the sense that his insights are worthwhile besides being well-made.
It therefore follows that his poetry was somehow true. But simply to say it was true is not enough: it has to be shown how it was true, and on the way I’d like to also show you something of his ability.
Let me begin with some contrasts. Unlike Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins was a poet of rapture. Hardy was never glad the way Hopkins was. Hardy was a poet of melancholy. Another contrast is that Hardy lacked Hopkins’ faith, and it is not unlikely that these two points of contrast are related.
Another contrast is that unlike Hardy, William Butler Yeats rejected the materialism of his age with a great vehemence. Yeats was melancholy like Hardy, but Hardy’s melancholy was more passive than Yeats’. He was poignantly dismayed by the implications of the materialism scientists and thinkers of his day propounded, but he did not seem able to reject them with great, romantic convulsions.
I think Hardy was unhappy because he found the positivism of his age inescapable. Owen Barfield explains the positivism of that age as a sort of dead-end of the Scientific Revolution that tinged the thinking of 19th Century, and names its leading exponent as Auguste Comte. It was a sort of absolute materialism, a naturalism that had no place for spirit or for the supernatural.
Hopkins had faith to give him a spiritual realm and the supernatural. He was happy because the world was full of the grandeur of God. Of Hopkins’ blessed hope Hardy was unaware. Yeats had his occult researches, the unassayable evidence of the supernatural and spiritual in paranormal phenomena and the mists of Ireland, things which science could not adequately explain and which Yeats observed and pursued. But Hardy could only regard these things as quaint, his sense of wonder does not seem to have been romantic.
Hardy was fascinated by the material exchange of decomposition. This is the subject of “Transformations:” “Portion of this yew/is a man my grandsire knew.” Hardy repeats this idea often in his poetry. Let me add an aside about his skill: study the meter for a while, and notice how he creates the sense of rising with the yew, and falling with the thought of the man buried under it. The emphasis of the rhyme, coming as it does after the rushing anapest, is to settle the word ‘knew’ much deeper in the voice than the word ‘yew.’ And the initial anapestic foot of the second line seems to slide down after the discovery in the first line that not trochees but iambs are afoot. Just try saying it and pitching ‘knew’ higher than ‘yew.’ You can’t do it with any dignity; the construction of the lines require we descend.
But back to the fascination.
Proud Songsters
The thrushes sing as the sun is going,
And the finches whistle in ones and pairs,
And as it gets dark loud nightingales
In bushes
Pipe, as they can when April wears,
As if all Time were theirs.
These are brand new birds of twelvemonths’ growing,
Which a year ago, or less than twain,
No finches were, nor nightingales,
Nor thrushes,
But only particles of grain,
And earth, and air, and rain.
In “Proud Songsters,” only animals make the exchange, and yet how poignant it is. Notice how deftly he turns the whole poem toward meaning with the very last word. It would not be the same if he had not used the word “rain” with all the melancholy of the sense of a weeping world. It turns the bare observation into a subtle lament. That is Hardy’s gift.
Now consider this from “Rain on a Grave.”
Soon will be growing
Green blades from her mound,
And daisies be showing
Like stars on the ground,
Till she form part of them –
Ay – the sweet heart of them,
Loved beyond measure
With a child’s pleasure
All her life’s round.
You see his fascination with the material exchange as his beloved becomes part of the landscape. The point is the intimacy of the transformation as his beloved becomes the sweet heart (don’t let my observation cheapen the masterful way in which he transforms those words in the poem: sweet-heart) of the daisies.
This is irrational, but it shows how the thing haunts him. He has the sense of more, of ghosts, of spirit, but seems entirely unable to find another world for them. He can’t separate matter and spirit though he seems to know something of a distinction between them. If he did not, there would be no point in writing such a poem, no poignancy in the transformation he describes.
So Hardy was haunted by ghosts he did not believe in. That is paradoxical, though it is nothing new. Bringing truth out that way is, as G. K. Chesterton more or less remarked, simply a matter of the view you take on things.
Here is a poem that explores in a different way how the ghosts haunt Thomas Hardy.
The Walk
You did not walk with me
Of late to the hill-top tree
By the gated ways,
As in earlier days;
You were weak and lame,
So you never came,
And I went alone, and I did not mind,
Not thinking of you as left behind.
I walked up there to-day
Just in the former way;
Surveyed around
The familiar ground
By myself again:
What difference, then?
Only that underlying sense
Of the look of a room on returning thence.
You sense there the emptiness death leaves behind. It is demonstrated peculiarly by that odd, ending blankness. He expected the unexpected and only got the expected, which he did not expect. (That which I just did is a terrible thing to do to a poem, but it has the advantage of being clear, and clearly, the poem is more.) But what he does is show how pervasive the sense of loss is, how it penetrates everywhere and the deceased now strangely haunts all the world.
Notice how he elaborates on that in this poem.
Drummer Hodge
They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined – just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.
Young Hodge the Drummer never knew –
Fresh from his Wessex home –
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.
Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge forever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellation reign
His stars eternally.
Again you have the transformation, and the sense of place is fixed by the stars. And yet what Hardy writes about is the wrongness of that place, even though Hodge has been transformed into a part of the scenery. It is done by the sense of his home juxtaposed with his grave far from home. That it should be significant, that it should mean anything strange and somehow tragic is the thing that gets Hardy’s attention, and the thing he shows us.
That transformation is material, and you’re left with a sense that while Hardy could not escape the positivism of the learned of his age, he was still not able to escape the sense of spirit in the world.
The truth of Hardy is that the material world is not all, cannot be all, even if your premise is that there is nothing else. His observations would not have the poignancy they do, there would not be the tragedy or pathos he leaves as a ghost after his poem if the assumptions of materialism were not juxtaposed with his intuitions of immateriality.
A further development: a dialogue of inanimate objects.
The Two Houses
In the heart of night,
When farers were not near,
The left house said to the house on the right,
“I have marked your rise, O smart newcomer here.”
I interrupt here, and summarize. The gist of what the house on the left says to the house on the right, which has rather disparaged the house of the left’s aged appearance, is that having been full of life is better than being new.
“–Will the day come,”
Said the new one, awestruck, faint,
“When I shall lodge shades dim and dumb -
And with such spectral guests become acquaint?”
“–That will it, boy;
Such shades will people thee,
Each in his misery, irk, or joy,
And print on thee their presences as on me.”
Even inanimate objects take on their significance from a world of meaning: the impressions left to them, the memories haunting them, the immaterial riches the lives of spiritual beings leave to them. And though we don’t believe in talking houses, what they say is perfectly true. Spirit leaves its print on the material world.
The world of spirit, of qualities, has to be the realm of poetry. It is the only realm in which Hardy could have been successful laboring as a poet. Anybody, for that matter, but you see how keenly poignant it was for Thomas Hardy.
Here is a further development.
The Shadow on the Stone
I went by the Druid stone
That broods in the garden white and lone,
And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows
That at some moments fall thereon
From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,
And they shaped in my imagining
To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders
Threw there when she was gardening.
I thought her behind my back,
Yea, her I long had learned to lack,
And I said: ‘I am sure you are standing behind me,
Though how do you get into this old track?’
And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf
As a sad response; and to keep down grief
I would not turn my head to discover
That there was nothing in my belief.
Yet I wanted to look and see
That nobody stood at the back of me;
But I thought once more: ‘Nay, I’ll not unvision
A shape which, somehow, there may be.’
So I went on softly from the glade,
And left her behind me throwing her shade,
As she were indeed an apparition—
My head unturned lest my dream should fade.
Hardy even goes so far as to fear a world without ghosts! Notice, by the way, the line with the rhythmic swing, how the meter and rhythm conspire, how the consonant cluster slows you down and underscores what he’s saying. It is also a climactic poem in the train of thought I have been trying to develop, or to demonstrate; it underscores what I’m saying. It is the fear of the materialist which haunts Hardy because he knows that the most valuable things are immaterial, and he is struggling to reconcile what he believes from science with what he understands through poetic insight.
One can’t help feeling he could have used a book of two by Owen Barfield. Indeed, the evolution of consciousness, the renewed and different awareness of withinness can be seen in poems such as “On the Way” and “Romantic Day” which show how we live in a world of our own perceptions (and this is what the haunting in all his other poems implies). You see there how the spiritual world is the inside of the material world, and how our consciousness is a nexus. At the same time one is glad Hardy did not have Barfield to read, because if he’d had a solution, what would he have written about?
So this is chiefly what I enjoy about Thomas Hardy. This is the truth that makes his poetry good, which resonates: his resistance of materialism even at the point of capitulation, his grasp on truth through poetic insight warring with the cosmos of the implications of his day’s collective representations. When science was emphasizing quantity above all, he still retained and preserved for us the vital sense of quality in his peculiar way.
The modern fixation on the term and concept of fairness is to solipsism what HIV is to AIDS. There is a meagerness of world about somebody who complains that things are not fair, like the petty laborers in our Lord’s parable who failed to see the justice and complained of the unfairness of getting the wage to which they agreed.
I have to work with a lot of people who are very stuck on the notion of fairness, and the appalling thing is that their concentration on fairness leaves out the claims of justice. I think the problem is a problem of scale: their consciousness lacks the magnitude of reality, it is small and sentimentally concentrated on themselves.
I was having an imaginary argument (I don’t seem to have outgrown them yet) in which I rather reasonably (as is usual in my imaginary arguments) pointed out to my interlocutor that it seemed to me he was a man without a religion. He wanted to pour something like religious fervor into something with no transcendental value: his job. Not that there is lacking a weight of glory, that every moment of our lives is not fraught with consequences with ramifications that continue into eternity. This is because of the reality of the four last things. Yes, every moment carries with it a weight of glory, and this dignifies our labor for otherwise temporal ends. But the ends are temporal, earthly and mortal, and pouring ourselves into such things with a devotion that only corresponds to that which is eternal, celestial and immortal, in other words, laboring for imminent goals as if they had transcendent value lacks the proportion of proper judgment. There is in it no justice.
We are unjust people (having imaginary arguments strikes me as a bit lacking in proportion, not so mention meagerness of world), and so we are continually confused into failing to give unto each thing its due. And the trouble with modern man is that having given up the belief in transcendent things, he still has inside of himself a sense of transcendent obligations. It is confusing and darkening, and a man made to live in a world with transcendeltal ramifications is too big to live comfortably in the small cosmos of such beliefs.
You can try and download a film about Barfield here, if you’d like.
Barfield wrote more fiction that just The Silver Trumpet. The Rose on the Ash-Heap, Night Operation and Eager Spring are titles one day I’d like to get for myself. The latter two are reviewed here.
I was trying to dig up some more Charles Williams on the internet (some poetry) and found more of his works are back in print, but not the poetry, it appears.
At the end of a session of haggling, both parties are supposed to leave pleased. That means not only with regard to the price, but with regard to feelings.
The guy wanted to charge me 90,000 COPs for some shoes. I was dubious about shoes with velcro, though ready to put that prejudice aside as long as the shoes were not from Wal-Mart. (Colombians make shoes and take pride in it. They don’ t have a huge market of made in China shoes.) But I was not prepared to spend over 50,000, and had hoped to spend only 45,000. But the woman who’d given me that price was not present and this guy was.
So we went down in shoes and price and in the end I got a pair that tie—to my great relief. He wanted 60, but I would smile and shake my head and kind of laugh at him. I was ready to walk out and he could tell. So he let me have them for 55,000.
I told him he was leaving me no money for lunch as I handed over the money, which of course he did not believe. I think he was very pleased with the transaction. I was too, if nothing else because the haggling went so well. We’ll see how they last.
A calamity of sorts took place not too long ago. We have a handbook at work, but it was never showed to teachers when I was hired. We also have a good and very intelligent new director who has gone about things in a way I highly approve, but has, among other thing, updated the handbook and disseminated it. He’s from England and rather more natty than not—pin stripe suit every day. The calamity is that we have to dress up to teach.
I don’t mind wearing better clothes (though I don’t mind not wearing better clothes), and actually I just have to change two things. One of the changes will be that I can’t wear jeans all the time. I feel less safe on the Transmilenio when wearing other pants because of the way the pockets of jeans are, but that is something I think I can deal with—though prohibiting jeans strikes me as a bit silly, considering the times. The problem, though, is the shoes.
One walks a lot, and I walk quickly when it is not sunny. Besides that, the pavements of Bogota are unpredictable. I’m not awkward or clumsy, but I like to go lithely and dodge about (it is the same sort of thing as driving efficiently and leaving everybody behind, something I just like to do mainly for the leaving everybody else behind part). I hate the idea of having shoes whose main function is to look decorative or uniform. I have shoes I can wear with the new regulations, but they’re my old, brown Dexter deck shoes that have been my fancy shoes for lo these ten years. I hate to have to wear them daily for three reasons: first, they do not grip the foot the way tennis shoes do. Shoes with any little bit of play leave sore feet, and one feels foolish as a result (like people who don’t wear enough clothes in winter ought to). Second, the soles are not really good rubber, like the Adidas, and slide on some pavements. These two combined mean the shoe is not practical for intense walking, can betray a person and will always leave one feeling like a twit, though they’re fine for Sundays. The third reason is that I hate to wear them out as if I don’t appreciate them. They have been very faithful shoes to me and comfortable. How can I just wear them out that way? I hope they stay with me for another ten years—and the nice thing about Bogota is that you can get them resoled easily if you need to.
So I have to buy shoes. What I find happy is that without a great deal of trouble I think I found them. Looks like they’re a sort of modern blend of a tennis shoe and something more dressed up: rubber sole—I hate the notion of a sole that isn’t practical since all it does is bite the dust, and nothing else can be so comfortable, no ostentatious brand showing, and actually cheaper than I thought. Nicely cheap, actually, and because they’re black I can wear them will all five pairs of fancy pants I own. There is a lot of foolishness in shoes nowadays, and ever since reading something where it was suggested the automobile is too often the instrument of displaying an opulent vulgarity (which made a lot of sense) I have taken a dim view of highly polished, shiny shoes as opulent and vulgar like rings and watches often are, so this solution I find exceedingly congenial.
Most congenial, but the best part is that I didn’t have to do any dreaded shopping around. I stopped at a place while charging through downtown, looked them over while the lady spoke on the phone, got the price, liked it, and then told her I’d be back when I had the money. I might go out of my way tomorrow just to pick them up.
Go, go, quiet folies, sugred sin,
Shadow no more my door;
I will no longer Cobwebs spin,
I’m too much on the score.
For since amidst my youth, and night,
My great preserver smiles,
Wee’l make a Match, my only light,
And Joyn against their wiles;
Blind, desp’rate fits, that study how
To dresse, and trim our shame,
That gild rank poyson, and allow
Vice in a fairer name;
The Purles of youthfull bloud, and bowles,
Lust in the Robes of Love,
The idle talk of feav’rish souls
Sick wiht a scarf, or glove;
Let it suffice my warmer days
Simper’d, and shin’d on you,
Twist not my Cypresse with your Bays,
Or Roses with my Yewgh;
Go, go, seek out some greener thing,
It snows, and freezeth here;
Let Nightingales attend the spring,
Winter is all my year.
—Henry Vaughan
A week without as much music, and now the baroque winding of oboes is pleasant.
* * *
I like twittering. Can’t help feeling Gerard Manley Hopkins would have found it congenial.
* * *
Not sure I’ll ever write another long paragraph again. Why bother?
* * *
A busy week that left me glad, if you’d like to know.
* * *
Time for some reading and some less idiosyncratic blogging, though . . . some observations on Hardy working their way along.
* * *
I enjoy Hardy, you know? Like rain: low, dim, melancholy, whispering and quiet, effective effects.
In February’s New Criterion is included an article by William Logan which represents a lot of work on his and another person’s part and which exposes a great deal of neglect in yet a third person’s work. The transcripts of Robert Frost’s notebooks were released by Harvard in hardcover a while back. They were an atrocity of careless work if Logan is to be believed (he’s pretty convincing in the article). Logan had to check up on the chap, of course, in order to let him have it, which meant examining the hand writing—which had apparently deteriorated from the days when in New England Jonathan Edwards wrote fairly illegibly. Now, Harvard has put out a paperback edition in which many of the errors were corrected but without announcing that this and without fixing a great deal of the original problems still. So William Logan went to work and produced another article, and one can’t help thinking as one reads that it constitutes a significant labor, that second, never mind the first.
The question is, why? Why go to all that trouble to expose a lousy edition made by a man who, if Logan is to be believed, is incompetent and from the publishing house of something as shameless and degraded as a modern-day ivy-league university?
The answer is that poetry matters.
It is interesting to me what must be done, and it is interesting to me how little it is understood (I allude to the way Harvard press has behaved—again I say if William Logan is to be believed, but I don’t say that because I don’t believe him). It seems to me that if things were treated the way William Logan treats things that affect those things he believes matter, we would live in a different world. And I can’t help thinking it would be nice to try.
