I dreamt furniture here and there on the field, stray like constellations. It might have been that same morning I woke up with my ideas for a short study of Virgil and My Antonia to relate to the I am a Town poetry workshop, which is like what Virgil did for Rome and what Tolkien initially intended doing for England, and also like what I would do with the neighborhood, much as Joyce and Proust and Garcia Marquez have done for theirs--and why are they so lauded and largely unread except by professors, while Tolkien is widely read and derided by supposedly serious scholars? The stuck-up gatekeepers--that same argument Olsen pointed out in the intro to the Fairy Course was employed by the Guardian culture columnist in his dismissal of Pratchett, and probably a good place to start the Discworld course as any. To say a book or a writer is bad in the same breath as saying you haven't bothered to read them. About time to start taking notes, too, even if you won’t make a proper start to recording and all till having read all the books again, if ever! So that’s high on the docket. But I thought this piece on Virgil ought to have some input from James and Matt and Caley, and then for My Antonia of course James and Ed Denny must say their piece again, and maybe Eli or Lea. So then I thought, why not make it all a conversation in recordings? So this goes up there, too, with talking to Elliot and Michael, the monks.
Connected with one or both or all these things, then, is a brief review of Amadeus, another in this series of responses to works well-known in their way but obscure as far as timeliness goes, totally out of the loop. But it does seem like there is something interesting about the portrayal of court composer Salieri and Mozart, the pathos of both, their ridiculousness, their mediocrity (in art and in life) and their sublimity (as musical genius and patron of mediocrity, respectively)--something which captures the weighty mantle the artist comes to bear in the West, which has finally made all greatness suspect, if not quite sunk. But which in turn allows the ridiculous--Sir Terry rises again--to be recognized as wonderful and profound in its own right. And I thought Dr Fimi might have missed this in her dichotomy, with its neat space for Tolkien in the middle way: placing Joyce and Dada on the same pole, way over on art, seemed to ignore how fundamentally playful they were, and not only pretentious. Besides, they are communicating that playfulness itself, something which can only be communicated in just that artful a way, as is the case with all good poetry.
And last for now but not least, this question posed on Ben Tansey’s facebook about the five books you’d recommend someone you considered intelligent yet disagreed with on almost everything, so as to represent your worldview--something like this--and I replied briefly with my five, but would have liked to say much more. I said The Golden Compass (audio, preferably, I think), The Little Prince, Platero and I, Chekhov’s story of Easter Night, and the Winter’s Tale. Or else maybe whatever five books I’d read most recently. And that it was a great question, well-formulated.
A kind of instructive case for thinking about what makes a good question, in fact, with the contextualizing carried within it, the hypothetical meeting up against the actual, the way it requires something limited yet which must be the token of much more behind it, the way it gets at what shapes you and your most generous and judgmental of perceptions, of what accounts for the limits within which and language with which you read the world, your assumptions about intelligence, your interest in disagreement, your desire to be understood and share in someone else’s or many other people’s thoughts on these topics.
As for the books, if we may move away from the question and its ramifications awhile: maybe no reading experience has had such a profound impact on me as that of picking up Platero y yo, in excerpted form with the Chosen Pages of Juan Ramon, browsing one day in the Miller Library, and reading those first few chapters, first few lines--the way their music enchanted me while much of the meaning escaped, just how Pullman speaks of encountering Paradise Lost in the reading aloud of his wonderful teacher Enid Jones, so that what was imprinted most was a sketchy track toward an irrecoverable mystery on a thread of intelligibility, spurred by desire, and content to wander. Hardly read all the words in this book still, much less deeply analyzed it, yet it remains my dearest treasure for that experience, blending with the travels and perspectives and people it’s led me to since, via the Spanish language. Sparing me from a fate as a mediocre English professor lost in the PhD milieu, or writing very ordinary but markedly pretentious novels, or both. For all that part of me wishes I could have gone that route, too, and had a Dr by my name already and publications which someone, if only the editor of the periodical, had read with a modicum of interest.
The other maybe unlikely choice there, Chekhov’s Easter Eve or however it should be translated, eked out the place over Dubliners for a similar reason, because of how little I really know the story, but how fond I am of regarding it as the promise of a whole world of stories I may or may not ever read, but love all the same. I’d have to study Russian for years, I know, to have any chance--and German, Latin, and Greek still would probably come first, a year or two each, at minimum, intervening, then--a whole possible life again, very plausibly overlapping with the PhD route, also evidently not wholly abandoned yet among my castoff ambitions, aimless pursuits of happiness inherited from others’ imagined worlds. Consider the way the story matches Bede;s account of Caedmon, for instance, or the image of the ferryman juxtaposed with the communal resurrection of Easter light. And how the Folio Society copy is so different from that chance pulling of the tattered Paginas edition off the shelf, and how reading it in your bedroom was placing it squarely within the privileged realm of what you new must be good, and how in your own hours spent writing you strove so consciously to gain admittance there yourself, that what you wrote, things like the video game philosophy, the lego-based video game, the story of old folks in the garden, and the various abortive versions of the beach or the wolf or the penguin, those elaborations of visions complete in themselves, yet longing to give them narrative flesh and bone, or poetic music or plastic form--they couldn’t help but fall flat, woefully short, and yet hope springs eternal--they could still be salvageable all the same! Your open letter to the city workers at Duval Park imitating Tristram Shandy, your imaginary love letters to girls you were too timid to talk to, formed of immature readings of Shakespeare, Joyce, and Proust, in short, reading and agonizing over writing when you were much better off going out. But still a kind of foundation was laid there, perhaps, and you’ll yet have your cakes and ale and eat and drink them, too!
For this optimistic track, then, over Joyce’s ineffable paralysis, I hold up this story, but a word must be said about that compound of activity and potential which Dubliners in turn represents. Like it or not, this has characterized me most of my life: early addicted to the allure of reading, aficionado of its fascinations in adolescence, precocious but not diligent or dedicated enough in college perhaps, and in adulthood still not resigned--because to truly dedicate yourself to reading and writing you’d say is to forego further Spains, further Uruguays, for something like Phoenix--drudgery, however rewarding, in a place that may as well be no place for all you can appreciate it, and on top of that instead of friends, cut-throat competitors visible and unseen, submitting their work, their wicked critiques, withering insights and knife-wielding words--and to commit all to proving you can compete on that grounds--so Annapolis without friends or prospects again. Trying to recapture that total entregment of oneself a child has reading, as Pullman describes, and as you experienced in the The Golden Compass, in its sequels, too, and knowing now what you are going to be missing in so doing. Hence the paralysis; a long-winded word it was.
Instead, you’d want Spokane to be a better Boston, an outgrowth of home, natural and unforced, taking its own time. With a Winter’s Tale choice, there’s quite a lot at stake. The thought process there, after all: have to have something by Shakespeare, only not one of the tragedies, so Antony and Cleopatra is out; well, then which one will be a little more original? so not Twelfth Night of the Tempest or As You Like It--oh yeah, there’s some lines in The Winter’s Tale I loved at first sight! Better be that one. And from that summer when I read everything by Shakespeare except King John and Henry VIII--which I still haven’t got around to yet--these passages of the so-called romance are what stay with me the most now and what most transported me then, before I’d had the full bardolatry treatment from academics, but already knew of him that he was a writer beyond any other, in himself a kind of Bible, a Renaissance Homer, given the Borges story. Normally in questions like this you set Shakespeare and the Bible aside, as if taking it for granted that anyone would already have read or be expecting to read them anyway, but I wonder if instead a favorite play and book from each should be required. For me, it is The Winter’s Tale and the gospel of John. There is that stage direction exit, pursued by Bear, which I think Chekhov remarks upon somewhere; the thief-trickster character; the simile of the wave on the sea; and of course the surprising resurrection: “she’s warm!” Maybe this is how I wish I could write more than anything, with assured realism and miracle, fantastic scoffing at conventional styles, thoughts, inventiveness at the level of characters’ expression while adapting to new purposes old materials. And of course, providing the reader or playgoer with infinite and endless possible readings, the Globe the whole world, and also the world outside it seen anew. This is to paraphrase Montaigne’s “wavelike and diverse”; to acknowledge that with Shakespeare one also accepts the world of scholarship, the intertwinings of the great books and the labors of countless people to make a living by reading them, and occasionally managing to get someone else to listen to their ideas about them: as for me Barzun was so revelatory, pointing out this passage in Montaigne, and all the editors of the Bard, particularly Johnson and Bloom, conspire to make his infiniteness both comprehensible and even more multidimensionally wondrous still by the acumen oozing from their claims.
I wonder if that’s enough said about all this for now, and I should pass to the LIttle Prince. In one of my many efforts at more systematic disciplined study, I started with St-Exupery’s short novels and intended to read everything I could of his and better internalize him so as to be able to really read Terre des Hommes and Le Petit Prince, which occupy a similar place for me, and have a story similar to Platero’s, only in this case I had heard of the author before. His life impinges so much on the book that we are tempted ot give up the distinction between living and reading which has given us so much angst, if only a fully enreadened life could retain the eternal mystery of the word--incarnation. After all, the author was shot down in the war and yet lives on, even once they finally found the wreckage of his plane. In the relationships to his words, he lives on even more surely with us than in the uncertainty of his impossible escape by parachute, or by flock of birds. No more beautiful reading experience exists for me, too, than the internal relationship here between the words and pictures--the possible exceptions crowding fast being the Moomins, or, in a different direction, the Studio Ghibli movies, or Earthbound. His nostalgia for learning to draw, and his theory of right interpretation depending on purity of listening and questioning of the sort manifested in the child in the desert, tell us how to read without telling us what anything means. A picture is a kind of definition, or at least a connotation, giving to the language of the story its internal richness, and again, in this case, an extra feeling for what has been lost, and how far it can be recaptured, and thus also something more that is gained.
Philip Pullman also has made drawings for his books, and probably for the plays he wrote for the schools where he worked. It would be interesting if he ever recorded his recitations of the myths or any of his lecture material from the college where he taught, or said more about workshop practices with his writing students, but there are some indications there, anyhow, of what his apprenticeship consisted in. As the pilot has the Prince to talk to, as Lyra has Pan, so we have our stories to write to: imaginary friends who are nevertheless real. This is reduplicated again in the Prince’s story of the Rose and the Fox. Surely there is some shiny bit of story there to incorporate? The brittle and ostentatious Rose is also Dante’s celestial Rose, after all, in the way that religion is made trite, and even evil in Pullman’s world, but its beauty and its protectiveness of love and of its thorns, too, to the point of worshipping it, reifying it or personifying it, is indisputably there in the background of all these books. The flights we contrive for ourselves by our science and technology are apt to fail at any time and throw us back on this older humanism--we are continually relearning the same old stories, (do the Redoubt need teachers, or shoot us on sight?) making of ourselves meaning, as the fox among foxes and the child among mankind and the Rose among the gardens.
Then there is the Golden Compass: it’s fall again, so the time is right to revisit, reread or relisten to some of it. What better book to take for emulation during nanowrimo? It taught me to love stories for more than the contentment of being absorbed in them, that delight in exploring worlds and internalizing them that video games also offered in their visceral way. It gave me the sense for the story’s transmission of some truth too embodied to be communicated in any other way--a sense of the poetry of stories, of their mythic quality, and the great significance for real life of questioning and investigating these truths that were embodied all around and I hadn’t known it. In the process, I was drawn to the craft of telling stories in a more conscious way, and set about all these projects in earnest which occupy me to this day. Some of them, no doubt, could reasonably be converted to short children’s fictions or plays for voices, stubs of games and sketches of comics on the chalkboard with the narration and accompanying music read over the drawings. The dream of total art, the incorporation of more sorts of concealing and revealing clothing for more sorts of truths of innocence and experience, the desire to be a renaissance man of music and drawing, as well as a poet and storyteller and memoirist whose life would be worth telling about, as well as a scholar of recondite sources in von Kleist and Blake and the King James Bible--in short, the dream of total life, the stakes of which were coming clearer, the cost of failing in attempting some of all this and the intimations of the way to recovery in continual practice with words--I had the feeling all this belonged to me.
Now, because Pullman is so adamant about the storyteller not telling anyone how the book is supposed to be read, I was seduced by any statements which he did divulge, and by his polemical arguments, but never so much that i ignored the hints laid down in the stories themselves pointing to how they would like to be read. For all that Pullman professed his democratic agnosticism once the book was in readers’ hands, he maintained his right to be a tyrant in the shed in the yard where he wrote, religiously, his three pages a day. The virtues of lying and pride, of passion and intelligence, are painted in the story as vividly as Northern Lights, but the particles of Dust that manifest in this way are still loyalty, friendship, courage, love, and the yearning for truth is haunted by theology, made beautiful and terrible by the old paradox: the truth incarnate, the word.