tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68504239925143684572024-02-19T03:01:49.619-05:00David Prashker's Private CollectionDavid Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.comBlogger86125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-47331805644707691652018-02-07T08:54:00.001-05:002018-02-07T08:54:51.540-05:00Epitaphs<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1QnvSC5qE7qBW6oirI2lKcmWkQwLaHMFxFsqwUahvgwhCSM2TtPnt17SECmOdtRitLgJRQh7XC0gVMh9r2jATeApeEL9V2UjU0N2YtIcE68gj_7c4c0i6pn3x2M6OQBtdpQu58wgiBxk/s1600/My+Gravestone+%2528option+2%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="894" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1QnvSC5qE7qBW6oirI2lKcmWkQwLaHMFxFsqwUahvgwhCSM2TtPnt17SECmOdtRitLgJRQh7XC0gVMh9r2jATeApeEL9V2UjU0N2YtIcE68gj_7c4c0i6pn3x2M6OQBtdpQu58wgiBxk/s200/My+Gravestone+%2528option+2%2529.jpg" width="177" /></a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">All my life I have arrived early. Some people never do, but I invariably do, for planes and trains and dates and interviews, sometimes for ideas as well, and back in the 1990s most definitely for recognising the new world that technology was introducing. Now, as I get older, and death does not seem so far off, I am determined that, for this one event at least, I am going to be as late as possible, fully aware that, once gone, I will be remembered for all time as that one thing that I never ever was: the late David Prashker.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But if the life has been really, truly, deeply worth the living, if the tracks made in the sand run deep enough to endure the sandstorms of time, if carpe really has been diemmed, then, even despite the fact that life is ultimately meaningless, and what we may have achieved will probably be admitted to oblivion with our bones - can we not still say "better late than never"?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Like <a href="http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/from-complete-works-of-anonymous-2.html" target="_blank">Riddles</a>, Epitaphs are a much overlooked literary genre, unlike those Elegies and Obituaries which have made such enormous contributions to our reading pleasure, and assisted our mis-remembering of great men and women, and charcoal-fuelled our ability to laugh back at Death by fantasising immortalities. An epitaph is usually less than a haiku, less even than a Tweet. Though there are exceptions.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCNbWGBTmDyqbT6EswD1u_WF317sIdoFAU5D9AyOsxmNnyngr27NM1RZZ448gXaw7ZQQCLwHAj2HJECE4nHu3pAmHjQxTUSIa1lGNgwuN74ZHothgY_9vEtrcX_95eSOK-TpwG0o5hI0g/s1600/For+Epitaphs+2.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="341" data-original-width="621" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCNbWGBTmDyqbT6EswD1u_WF317sIdoFAU5D9AyOsxmNnyngr27NM1RZZ448gXaw7ZQQCLwHAj2HJECE4nHu3pAmHjQxTUSIa1lGNgwuN74ZHothgY_9vEtrcX_95eSOK-TpwG0o5hI0g/s400/For+Epitaphs+2.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Sir Walter Raleigh's self-written epitaph has its own page elsewhere in this blog (click <a href="http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/epitaph-for-buccaneer.html" target="_blank">here</a>), as does W.H. Auden's extended epitaph for W.B. Yeats (click <a href="http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/in-memory-of-w-b-yeats.html" target="_blank">here</a>), but I must confess (confession is generally understood to be a good thing before entering the fields of death) that I like best the clever one-liners. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">H.G. Wells for example: "Goddamn you all: I told you so". Or Dorothy Parker's "Excuse my dust". Or: </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Here lies W. C. Fields. </span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">On the whole I would rather be living in Philadelphia." Few </span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">better than Alexander Pope's</span><br />
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<span style="color: #783f04; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Epitaph on Sir Isaac Newton</span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">(died March 21, 1727)</span></span></div>
<span style="color: #783f04; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <br /> NATURE and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night:</span></div>
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<span style="color: #783f04; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">What else is there to say?!</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtFLzdX5fZGNofRVyUhoGsXsiJmORY434HxfrlGkj8kRuVgLglA58Epe_A_G5LkvI8asCdOzb-JmMfWCajK8REe3Ak89Pmsg0TBo68DbXzMX3aPqi3RMXE_F8zwWT8OUpKES7pTig6BjQ/s1600/For+Epitaphs+%2528Houdini%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="390" data-original-width="650" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtFLzdX5fZGNofRVyUhoGsXsiJmORY434HxfrlGkj8kRuVgLglA58Epe_A_G5LkvI8asCdOzb-JmMfWCajK8REe3Ak89Pmsg0TBo68DbXzMX3aPqi3RMXE_F8zwWT8OUpKES7pTig6BjQ/s400/For+Epitaphs+%2528Houdini%2529.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Harry Houdini's grave. Can we assume he is not in there?</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Several of the poems collected in this blog are elegies or obituaries, rather than Epitaphs - </span><a href="http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/poems-from-death-camps.html" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Celan</a> <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">and Sachs'</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> witness-testimony from the Holocaust, </span><a href="http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/dulce-et-decorum-est.html" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Owen's</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> war-poetry, Lowell's graveyard in </span><a href="http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/robert-lowell-quaker-graveyard-in.html" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Nantucket</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">, Yevtushenko's "</span><a href="http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/babi-yar.html" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Babi Yar</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">". But elegies and obituaries are not the same as Epitaphs because, like Thomas Grey's </span><a href="http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">, there is no specific honouree, but only the infinitude of Unknown Martyrs, Unknown Victims, Unknown Soldiers, the mass of anonymous individuals and the mess of thousands of undeserving square miles of otherwise perfectly innocent, decent land, needed to feed the survivors not to shroud the pointlessly dead: the graveyards of graveyards, so to speak.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Which
ones then to include here? Swift's shouldn't really be, because he wrote it himself,
and incomprehensibly, but every human being should be able to claim what he claims here (though alas very few can), and so I am including it anyway.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIt0MMYbIDKPw_49hNgasR06-YqoL4WfjNffv9xQzOfZ5n_NMh4rTs6dZjTBOsdh0MY4DaHCsgQfRv_EGDSR_UXasm9zmnjylqk6BV2iDbZGVB6HkZzc7dEQ8LU6BrAKc2muqWPrCGID4/s1600/My+Gravestone+%2528option+3%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="990" data-original-width="1022" height="308" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIt0MMYbIDKPw_49hNgasR06-YqoL4WfjNffv9xQzOfZ5n_NMh4rTs6dZjTBOsdh0MY4DaHCsgQfRv_EGDSR_UXasm9zmnjylqk6BV2iDbZGVB6HkZzc7dEQ8LU6BrAKc2muqWPrCGID4/s320/My+Gravestone+%2528option+3%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Swift's Epitaph</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">SWIFT has sailed into his rest;</span></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Savage indignation there</span></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Cannot lacerate his breast.</span></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Imitate him if you dare,</span></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">World-besotted traveller; he</span></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Served human liberty.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The
great Irish poet Edmond Spenser certainly did not write this himself:</span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Here lyes<br />
(expecting the second Comminge of our Saviour Christ Jesus)<br />
the body of Edmond Spenser, the Prince of Poets in his time;<br />
whose divine spirit needs no other witness<br />
than the works he left behind him.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">which is not all that different in conceit from the lines on the gravestone of his near-contemporary John Donne:</span></div>
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="color: blue; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Reader, I am to let thee know,</span></div>
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span>Donne's body only lies below;</span></div>
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span>For could the grave his soul comprise,</span></div>
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span>Earth would be richer than the skies. <br /><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggVH1aZOGlFxwHgg4OKWtwqa9PmjuPBVstVtymjD-CgnkFjEoU04zR6IXuycJ1FwoVW9dCKELNYJRP_uwYyBzaBQ0kH_RqxGkxYyS2oPzttHU1BTvy7MysjvyTj1hPoiLJYZK9NCmdH7A/s1600/For+Epitaphs+%2528Yeats%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="324" data-original-width="611" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggVH1aZOGlFxwHgg4OKWtwqa9PmjuPBVstVtymjD-CgnkFjEoU04zR6IXuycJ1FwoVW9dCKELNYJRP_uwYyBzaBQ0kH_RqxGkxYyS2oPzttHU1BTvy7MysjvyTj1hPoiLJYZK9NCmdH7A/s400/For+Epitaphs+%2528Yeats%2529.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Shakespeare's "Sonnet 81</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> is an epitaph - indeed, it was from this Sonnet that I drew my own "<a href="http://davidprashkerssongsandpoems.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/homage-to-william-shakespeare.html" target="_blank">Homage to William Shakespeare</a>", echoing him back to himself.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">SONNET 81</span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Or I shall live your epitaph to make,</span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><span style="color: #274e13; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Or you survive when I in earth am rotten;</span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><span style="color: #274e13; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">From hence your memory death cannot take,</span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><span style="color: #274e13; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Although in me each part will be forgotten.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Your name from hence immortal life shall have,</span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> T</span><span style="color: #274e13; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">hough I, once gone, to all the world must die:</span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> The earth can yield me but a common grave,</span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Your monument shall be my gentle verse,</span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read,</span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,</span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> When all the breathers of this world are dead;</span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> You still shall live (such virtue hath my pen)</span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><span style="color: #274e13; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Shakespeare's own grave in Holy Trinity Church, in Stratford upon Avon (unlike his v</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ery boring monument in Westminster Abbey, which simply quotes something obscure from "The Tempest") has this:</span></div>
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<span style="color: #783f04; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">William Shakespeare (1564-1616)</span></div>
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<span style="color: #783f04; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">GOOD FREND FOR IESVS SAKE FORBEARE</span></div>
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<span style="color: #783f04; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">TO DIGG THE DVST ENCLOASED HEARE</span></div>
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<span style="color: #783f04; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">BLESTE BE Y MAN Y SPARES THES STONES</span></div>
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<span style="color: #783f04; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">AND CVRST BE HE THAT MOVES MY BONES </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Ben Jonson famously wrote an epitaph for his drinking-companion and writer-rival Will Shakspeare (click <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44466/to-the-memory-of-my-beloved-the-author-mr-william-shakespeare" target="_blank">here</a> to read it), but it is this farewell to his 7-year-old son that seems to me more memorable:</span><br />
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Farewell, thou child of my right hand and joy;</span></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy,</span></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Seven years thou wert lent to me and I thee pay</span></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Exacted by thy fate on the just day.</span></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> O, could I lose all father, now. For why</span></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Will man lament the state he should envy?</span></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> To have so soon scap'd World's and flesh's rage,</span></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> And, if no other misery, yet age?</span></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Rest in soft peace and ask'd say here doth lie</span></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Ben Jonson his best piece of poetrie.</span></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such</span></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> As what he loves may never live too much.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Byron’s Epitaph to his Dog surely merits inclusion:</span><br />
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<b style="color: #783f04; font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> Boatswain</span></b><span style="color: #783f04; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> (1803-1808)</span></div>
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<span style="color: #783f04; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"> </span></b><i style="font-size: 12pt;">Dog of Lord Byron</i></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Near this spot</span></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"> </span></b><span style="font-size: 12pt;">are deposited the remains of one</span></div>
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<b style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"> </span></b><span style="font-size: 12pt;">who possessed Beauty without Vanity,</span></div>
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<b style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"> </span></b><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Strength without Insolence,</span></div>
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<b style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"> </span></b><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Courage without Ferocity,</span></div>
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<b style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"> </span></b><span style="font-size: 12pt;">and all the Virtues of Man without his Vices.</span></div>
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<b style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"> </span></b><span style="font-size: 12pt;">This praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery,</span></div>
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<b style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"> </span></b><span style="font-size: 12pt;">if inscribed over human Ashes,</span></div>
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<b style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"> </span></b><span style="font-size: 12pt;">is but a just Tribute to the memory of</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><b style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"> </span></b>Boatswain, a </span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">DOG</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">who was born in Newfoundland, May 1803,</span></b></div>
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<b style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"> </span></b><span style="font-size: 12pt;">and died at Newstead, Nov 18, 1808.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I particularly like the next one, because we remember the man for his politics, but he wanted to be remembered for his profession, which was a printer of books:</span></div>
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<b style="font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: #666666;"> Benjamin Franklin</span></span></b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: #666666;"> (1706-90)</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><b style="color: black; font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"><span style="color: #666666;"> </span></span></b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">The body of</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><b style="color: black; font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"><span style="color: #666666;"> </span></span></b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">Like the cover of an old book</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><b style="color: black; font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"><span style="color: #666666;"> </span></span></b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">its contents torn out,</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><b style="color: black; font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"><span style="color: #666666;"> </span></span></b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">But the work shall not be wholly lost,</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><b style="color: black; font-family: "courier new", courier, monospace;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"><span style="color: #666666;"> </span></span></b><span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">for it will, as he believed, appear once more,</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Which goes well with this, a rather sadly negative farewell for one of America's great authoresses:</span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Mrs. Aphra Behn (1640-89)</span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be</span></div>
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Defence enough against Mortality.</div>
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</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Shelley on Keats really deserves to be included, but alas it's way too long - you can read it by clicking <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45112/adonais-an-elegy-on-the-death-of-john-keats">here</a>. The same is true of the Scots poet <a href="http://www.robertburns.org.uk/Assets/Poems_Songs/holy_willie.htm">Rabbie Burns</a>, whose "Holy Willie's Prayer" might allow me to draw what started satirically to a conclusion in the same vein. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Except that ends require monuments, not satires. And where better to go when you want a great monument in England, than to the office of Sir Christopher Wren, architect? And he will happily provide, found where he is buried, in
his greatest achievement, St Paul's Cathedral. So perfectly succinct. So obvious. The carpe fully diemmed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b style="color: purple;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Sir Christopher
Wren</span></span></b><span style="color: purple; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> (1632-1723)</span></span></span><br />
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<i style="color: purple; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Si monumentum requiris circumspice</span></i></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">[If you require a monument, look around.]</span></div>
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David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-10115823983030950212018-02-06T10:44:00.001-05:002018-02-06T10:44:29.356-05:00Advice to the Writer and the Reader<div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Ruskin and Rilke</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3SNl-7K5fbKT9tQK6FDFscdocCdV4rRoofwWNuWqaR9bP08LJlOdpXO-nNAHfi9Xmy39fSSwx6Iu42X9U-e08kM0l8epb1RakmCxyU4nqNdakBL48ZMg2WUcH2kxBzObeOwJoakud3u8/s1600/Ruskin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="244" data-original-width="166" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3SNl-7K5fbKT9tQK6FDFscdocCdV4rRoofwWNuWqaR9bP08LJlOdpXO-nNAHfi9Xmy39fSSwx6Iu42X9U-e08kM0l8epb1RakmCxyU4nqNdakBL48ZMg2WUcH2kxBzObeOwJoakud3u8/s1600/Ruskin.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">1. John Ruskin</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">A good writer requires a good reader</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">From "Sesame and Lilies".</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"Do you long for the conversation of the wise?" asks John Ruskin, in the first of his two lectures delivered in Manchester in 1864 and published as "Sesame and Lilies" the following year; and then, having dismissed the vast majority of the conversations that we have each day, at home, at school, at work, over the dinner table or in the hair salon, he insists that </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">there is a society continually open to us, of people who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rank or occupation; talk to us in the best words they can choose, and of the things nearest their hearts.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> The beauty of such conversation is that we can </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">listen all day long, not to the casual talk, but to the studied, determined, chosen addresses of the wisest of men.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Ruskin loves books. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="color: blue;">"A book is written,"</span>he tells us,<span style="color: blue;"> </span><span style="color: blue;">"</span><span style="color: blue;">not to multiply the voice merely, not to carry it merely, but to perpetuate it. The author has something to say which he perceives to be true and useful, or helpfully beautiful. So far as he knows, no one has yet said it; so far as he knows, no one else can say it. He is bound to say it, clearly and melodiously if he may; clearly at all events. In the sum of his life he finds this to be the thing, or group of things, manifest to him; - this, the piece of true knowledge, or sight, which his share of sunshine and earth has permitted him to seize. He would fain set it down for ever; engrave it on rock, if he could; saying, 'This is the best of me; for the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved, and hated, like another; my life was as the vapour, and is not; but this I saw and knew: this, if anything of mine, is worth your memory.' That is his 'writing'; it is, in his small human way, and with whatever degree of true inspiration is in him, his inscription, or scripture. That is a 'Book.'</span><span style="color: blue;">"</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But Ruskin is more concerned with how we read than how the writers write.</span></div>
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Do you long for the conversation of the wise? Learn to understand it, and you shall hear it. But on other terms? No. If you will not rise to us, we cannot stoop to you. The living lord may assume courtesy, the living philosopher explain his thought to you with considerate pain; but here we neither feign nor interpret; you must rise to the level of our thoughts if you would be gladdened by them, and share our feelings, if you would recognise our presence.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">How can you do this?</span></div>
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">You must, in a word, love these people, if you are to be among them. No ambition is of any use. They scorn your ambition. You must love them, and show your love in these two following ways.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">First, by a true desire to be taught by them, and to enter into their thoughts. To enter into theirs, observe; not to find your own expressed by them. If the person who wrote the book is not wiser than you, you need not read it; if he be, he will think differently from you in many respects.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Second: </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Very ready we are to say of a book, 'How good this is - that's exactly what I think!' But the right feeling is, 'How strange that is! I never thought of that before, and yet I see it is true; or if I do not now, I hope I shall, some day.' But whether thus submissively or not, at least be sure that you go to the author to get at HIS meaning, not to find yours. Judge it afterwards if you think yourself qualified to do so; but ascertain it first. And be sure, also, if the author is worth anything, that you will not get at his meaning all at once; nay, that at his whole meaning you will not for a long time arrive in any wise. Not that he does not say what he means, and in strong words too; but he cannot say it all; and what is more strange, will not, but in a hidden way and in parables, in order that he may be sure you want it. I cannot quite see the reason of this, nor analyse that cruel reticence in the breasts of wise men which makes them always hide their deeper thought. They do not give it you by way of help, but of reward; and will make themselves sure that you deserve it before they allow you to reach it. But it is the same with the physical type of wisdom, gold. There seems, to you and me, no reason why the electric forces of the earth should not carry whatever there is of gold within it at once to the mountain tops, so that kings and people might know that all the gold they could get was there; and without any trouble of digging, or anxiety, or chance, or waste of time, cut it away, and coin as much as they needed. But Nature does not manage it so. She puts it in little fissures in the earth, nobody knows where: you may dig long and find none; you must dig painfully to find any.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">To read a good book requires effort: </span><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And it is just the same with men's best wisdom. When you come to a good book, you must ask yourself, 'Am I inclined to work as an Australian miner would? Are my pickaxes and shovels in good order, and am I in good trim myself, my sleeves well up to the elbow, and my breath good, and my temper?' And, keeping the figure a little longer, even at cost of tiresomeness, for it is a thoroughly useful one, the metal you are in search of being the author's mind or meaning, his words are as the rock which you have to crush and smelt in order to get at it. And your pickaxes are your own care, wit, and learning; your smelting furnace is your own thoughtful soul. Do not hope to get at any good author's meaning without those tools and that fire; often you will need sharpest, finest chiselling, and patientest fusing, before you can gather one grain of the metal.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And, therefore, first of all, I tell you earnestly and authoritatively (I KNOW I am right in this), you must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable - nay, letter by letter. For though it is only by reason of the opposition of letters in the function of signs, to sounds in the function of signs, that the study of books is called 'literature', and that a man versed in it is called, by the consent of nations, a man of letters instead of a man of books, or of words, you may yet connect with that accidental nomenclature this real fact:- that you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough), and remain an utterly 'illiterate', uneducated person; but that if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter - that is to say, with real accuracy - you are for evermore in some measure an educated person. The entire difference between education and non-education (as regards the merely intellectual part of it), consists in this accuracy. A well-educated gentleman may not know many languages, may not be able to speak any but his own, may have read very few books. But whatever language he knows, he knows precisely; whatever word he pronounces, he pronounces rightly; above all, he is learned in the PEERAGE of words; knows the words of true descent and ancient blood, at a glance, from words of modern canaille; remembers all their ancestry, their intermarriages, distant relationships, and the extent to which they were admitted, and offices they held, among the national noblesse of words at any time, and in any country. But an uneducated person may know, by memory, many languages, and talk them all, and yet truly know not a word of any, not a word even of his own. An ordinarily clever and sensible seaman will be able to make his way ashore at most ports; yet he has only to speak a sentence of any language to be known for an illiterate person: so also the accent, or turn of expression of a single sentence, will at once mark a scholar. And this is so strongly felt, so conclusively admitted, by educated persons, that a false accent or a mistaken syllable is enough, in the parliament of any civilized nation, to assign to a man a certain degree of inferior standing for ever."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">click <a href="https://archive.org/stream/ruskinssesamelil00rusk/ruskinssesamelil00rusk_djvu.txt" target="_blank">here</a> for a full text of "Sesame and Lilies"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">2. Rainer Maria Rilke: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">A good </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">reader </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">requires a good </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">writer</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">From "Letters to a Young Poet"<br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Originally published, in German, as "Briefe an einen jungen Dichter", they were genuine letters, a private correspondence between the twenty-seven year old Rilke and the nineteen year old Franz Xaver Kappus, who in the autumn of 1902, was about to join the Austro-Hungarian military, but suspected, or at least hoped, that his destiny lay elsewhere, in poetry. He included several poems, inviting Rilke's critique. What he got was a five year long correspondence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">What Rilke thought of his poetry remains unknown, as do the poems, because none were ever published, and Kappus stayed in the military for fifteen years, serving on the eastern front in the First World War. Wounded and decommissioned, he married the nurse who had saved his life, in Stuttgart, and from 1917 edited the Belgrade News, as well as a volume of Rilke's poetry (click <a href="https://rilkepoetry.com/letters-to-a-young-poet/introduction-by-franz-xaver-kappus/">here</a> to read his introduction), and his own book about Rilke, published in 1929. He later published other of his own poetry, as well as short stories, prose sketches and screenplays, and founded the Free Democratic Party in Berlin after the end of the Second World War. He died in 1966.</span></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must", then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.</span></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But after this descent into yourself and into your solitude, perhaps you will have to renounce becoming a poet (if, as I have said, one feels one could live without writing, then one shouldn't write at all). Nevertheless, even then, this self searching that I ask of you will not have been for nothing. Your life will still find its own paths from there, and that they may be good, rich, and wide is what I wish for you, more than I can say.</span><br />
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Read as little as possible of literary criticism. Such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are clever word-games, in which one view wins , and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them. Always trust yourself and your own feeling, as opposed to argumentation, discussions, or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.</span></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Here, where I am surrounded by an enormous landscape, which the winds move across as they come from the seas, here I feel that there is no one anywhere who can answer for you those questions and feelings which, in their depths, have a life of their own; for even the most articulate people are unable to help, since what words point to is so very delicate, is almost unsayable. But even so, I think that you will not have to remain without a solution if you trust in Things that are like the ones my eyes are now resting upon. If you trust in Nature, in what is simple in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.</span></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Think, dear Sir, of the world that you carry inside you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you.</span></div>
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David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-17872416970557394972018-02-03T11:23:00.002-05:002020-07-28T12:46:13.034-04:00Requiem<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicwI13JY0esHQbuL0sqUIMhtI9fgpqIxhWxhlCf8xKp2xfl6M3ApEZGH2adPKRRj9vlaID8UV7cb1w3JbVKV83k_LoLhGy9nkHfEvz9iy8KonOZRkb19Tzkokbwrt-MmcTaBaGEs92bjc/s1600/Olivier+Greif+-+young.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="460" data-original-width="500" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicwI13JY0esHQbuL0sqUIMhtI9fgpqIxhWxhlCf8xKp2xfl6M3ApEZGH2adPKRRj9vlaID8UV7cb1w3JbVKV83k_LoLhGy9nkHfEvz9iy8KonOZRkb19Tzkokbwrt-MmcTaBaGEs92bjc/s200/Olivier+Greif+-+young.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Olivier Greif</span><br /><br /><br />Amongst the many pleasures of re-exploring old diaries are the reminders of some of the great moments, and great people, who get forgotten, simply because one moves on, and nothing in the daily world causes them to become remembered. So, looking up my July 2001 visit to Albi in south-west France </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">for a piece in my "Book of Days" </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">- Albi was the locus of the Albigensian Crusade, another of the many "heresies" wiped out by the Catholic church in the Middle Ages - I was reminded of </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">the wonderful Olivier Greif, who I first discovered at a concert of his music in Albi at that time, a tribute concert following his death the previous year. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">Now, seventeen years later, a simple click on a YouTube search button took me to his extraordinary "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXwCqHbHw50" target="_blank">Sonate de Guerre</a>", one of the most desolately (and desolatingly) angry pieces of music ever written, performed here with splendid exuberance by one Aline Piboule - yes, but was all that sneezing, coughing, chair sliding and general noise also scored, deliberately to load an extra tier of fury onto the nerves of the unquietened listener, or was it just mal-chance that the audience was packed with ignorami on the night Mlle Piboule performed? In a moment, nearly a hundred other pieces in which what takes place in the auditorium is fundamental to the act of composition; but first, because that diary entry ended with a question that I never got around to answering, and I don't like leaving things unfinished: why was it that Olivier died so young?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;"><br />Or maybe he didn't die. The Olivier Greif (I keep mis-typing that as Grief; I almost can't help myself) Ensemble has a <a href="http://www.oliviergreifensemble.com/" target="_blank">website</a>, whose home-page (it may have been updated since my writing this) notes:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia, serif;">MAY
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<span style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 11pt;">For the 17th anniversary of Olivier Greif's
disappearance (13 May) we celebrated by releasing the video of the world
premiere of his Danse des Araucans op.89 for two pianos and
percussion; result of another pretty fruitful collaboration with Andrew Levine,
our sound engineer!!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;"><br />Disappearance? In America, where I lived for many years, no one ever dies, they merely enter into a state of permanent euphemism - they "pass", they "move on to the afterlife", they become "late" (and hopefully, if they have left deep enough tracks in the sand to merit the remembering, with the accompanying epitaph "better late than never"), but I have never come across "disappear" in any context beyond the political opponents of certain South American regimes. So what happened? And for most of the human universe - who was he?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">Greif was born in Paris on January 3<span style="font-size: x-small;">rd</span> 1950, his father a Polish Jew whose previous address was a barrack-bunk in Auschwitz; but complicatedly so, because he left Poland before the Holocaust, emigrating to France to study medicine, becoming senior neurologist at the Marie Curie Institute, then senior doctor in the FTP-MOI network of the Maquis, the French Resistance, before being arrested in January 1944, and deported back, surviving a full year until liberation. The experience would taint his son for life, and the inherited trauma drive his music.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">Greif </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">pè</span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">re had also been a musical child prodigy, but chose medicine while encouraging his son to fulfil his abandoned talent vicariously. So he too became a prodigiously gifted pianist, but also a prolific composer, his first piece, "Nausicaa", performed when he was just nine years old. His talents in both spheres were so highly regarded, he was offered a place at the Paris Conservatory somewhat earlier than was customary.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">Greif was never conventional in his playing, or in his composing either, ignoring the fashionable to pursue the personal, writing his soul between the staves, and then expressing it between the black and white notes. "Nausicaa" is lost, sadly, as are several others from his late childhood; the first to survive from his adolescence, and therefore the official Opus 1, are "Five children's songs", for voice and piano, settings of his own poems, composed at around the time that he might otherwise have been preparing for Bar Mitzvah. Or perhaps he was! Bar Mitzvah is the point at which a child becomes a man.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;"><br />In 1964 he produced two Sonatas for piano, then paused to complete his academic education. In 1967 he wrote his first pieces for a different instrument, the Sonatas for Violin and Piano N° 1 and N° 2, good enough to win the composition prize at the Conservatoire. Just to completely spoil matters for the older students, he also won first prize for chamber music that year, and may have become an object of considerable jealousy, or hopefully respect, when it became known that Nadia Boulanger was treating him as something like her protégé, though she never actually taught him, just recognised his gifts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">In 1968 Greif moved to London, less for the glorious weather or the country's renowned Francophilia than for the need to learn English ahead of his move to New York, where he had been invited to attend the Juilliard. 1969 was an interesting time to be living in the big apple, given the number of big cheeses who were also making culture there, many of them at the Chelsea Hotel. Among Greif's distinguished company at that time, the still only nineteen year old counted Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger and Salvador Dali, the latter becoming something of a friend.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">The Piano Sonatas N°s 5 to 9 date from this period, though accounts of him suggest that he was already doing much more improvisation than fixed composition. One lengthy impro session found itself bootlegged under the title "In Paradisum", probably an allusion to his Piano Sonata N° 9, which is sub-titled "Paradisiac Memories".</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">In 1970 he found himself appointed assistant to that most avand-garde composer Luciano Berio at the Santa F</span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">é Opera, tasked to help his former Juiliiard teacher bring several of his works together for a single performance - the final product including pieces that the two would write in partnership. Then, because chance and coincidence are key to all artistic and scientific endeavour, he went on a holiday to San Francisco, stayed with his distant cousin Gerta Wingerd because it was convenient, and browsing though her bookshelves one afternoon saw a book of poems with a dedication by the poet. Yes, she told him, I knew him as a child in </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">Chernovitsky</span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">. He and my brother were classmates. He is the most important Jewish poet you will ever read. Greif had never heard of him. But read. Her prediction proved correct. The door had finally opened into his past, into Poland, into what happened to his father, into what would drive him, into what he now realised had always been driving him, in music, in life. The name of that poet was <a href="http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/poems-from-death-camps.html" target="_blank">Paul Celan</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">Still composing in </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">more or less </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">the conventional manner, which is to say creating a score before the performance rather than during it, in 1973 he completed his "Wiener Konzert", a cycle of five songs "about", rather more than "based on" poems by Heinrich Heine, for the National Society of Music. In 1977, at Carnegie Hall, and again at the Abbey of Royaumont in 1978, his fifteenth piano sonato, entitled "War" though he originally named it as the somewhat lesser "Battle". The inherited trauma not yet confronted, but the curtain on the window in the door was open. It would take another twenty years to break the lock.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">And in the meanwhile, because confronting these things directly can cause great emotional and psychological and spiritual distress, which also needs an outlet, Greif went where many were going at that time, souls for whom western culture and values had not survived their pounding into nihilism in the first three-quarters of the century. The yogi that he chose was the Sri Lankan, </span><a href="https://www.srichinmoy.org/" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">Sri Chinmoy</a><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">, who made him change his name to Haridas, "Servant of God", though it was probably not the same God that his parents had brought him up to disbelieve in; and for the next twenty years Chinmoy taught Haridas to meditate, while Haridas arranged various Chinmoy texts for choirs of disciples, the first a piece eventually given the title "The Sri Chinmoy Song Waves".</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">As hinted above, what really makes Greif stand out among contemporary composers is his commitment to live composition - that wasn't what he called it, but it seems to me that this is what it was. The Bob Dylans and Pink Floyds of the world do it all the time, writing their song in its original form, setting it in a fixed form by recording it for an album in the studio, then taking it on tour but, where most performers rehearse to perfection and stick to the script, they then give themselves the freedom - easier if it's one man and a guitar than a band or an orchestra - to let the mood of the performance take you where it will, so that the version on the "Live album" may sound nothing like the studio version, or indeed the previous or next "Live version". And in Dylan's case, you may even be half-way through hearing a completely new song, words and music totally unfamiliar, when you suddenly realise it isn't; he's doing something from the early '60s, but it ain't this babe, so to say. Multiple stages of creation - of the same piece, of which the live is the most daring, because you do it on a tightrope, and you may lose balance. Creative cover versions of your own work! Why not? Why not, indeed, in rock and folk and pop music? But in classical? Gabriela Montera will show off her technical skills with rehearsed improvisations that shift from Bach to jazz to Rachmaninoff to Grieg to flamenco - but she is making anagrams out of existing works that happen to share keys. Greif took it to another level. What happened on stage was seeded beforehand, outlined beforehand, </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">partially pre-rehearsed,</span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">but mostly composed in the act of performance. Extraordinary!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">The trial run was the </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">the Heine opera with Nell Froger; now </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">there was "Bomben auf Engelland", </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">again for the National Society of Music, again </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">with Nell Froger as vocalist</span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">, this time with Ryo Noda on saxophone as well. Then there was a small chamber cantata rendition of "The Lord is my Shepherd", for female voice and two pianos, commissioned by Radio Suisse Romande and put together in Lausanne, the collaborators on this occasion Evelyn Brunner and Henri Barda. So there was the Sonata for Violin and Piano N° 3, sub-titled "The Meeting of the Waters", created in Paris first with Gaëtane Prouvost, later (1993) recreated in Warsaw with Gottfried Schneider. So there was the Piano Sonata N° 19, "Three Poems by Li T'ai Po", premiered in Hong Kong by Siao Ping Fan (or Fan Xiaopin, as I understand he is written today). So there were the variations on Peter Philips' "Galiarda Dolorosa" for violin and piano, created with Gaëtane Prouvost and Michel Dalberto for the Mediterranean Festival of Young Performers. So there were three more poems by Sri Chinmoy, for voice and piano, created in 1979 in Paris with Nell Froger, recreated in the same location the following year (but very differently, by such few accounts as I can find) with Meredith Parsons. So there was "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVA4-1SZwJ0" target="_blank">Veni Creator</a>" (a Mahlerian allusion? Mahler was a big influence, though not so much as Britten or Shostakovich), for cello and piano, created in Barcelona with Daniel Raclot, the second time in Annecy with Frédéric Lodeon, while Greif was teaching composition at the Annecy Easter Festival; and then a third time, again with Lodeon, that summer, at the Festival des Arcs.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">There were more conventional performances as well - perhaps because he needed to earn money and avant-garderie does not always pay well - though Greif rarely programmed strictly to the approved canon. Between 1975 and 1980 he gave dozens of concerts as an interpreter of other people's music, including radio and television appearances in France, Switzerland, Spain, America and Japan. One of these, at Royaumont Abbey on May 20<span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span> 1977, would be the last concert attended by his mother, who died within the month. That evening he performed his "Sonata de Guerre", alongside standard pieces by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann (Richard, not Clara). Eighteen months later, again working with Lodeon, he created a "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhurPYL4IYk" target="_blank">Requiem Sonata</a>", for cello and piano, in his mother's honour, describing it as an account of "the journey of the soul after death".</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">So there was "The Pilgrim's Book", for women's voices and seven instruments, based on William Blake's poem "The Tyger", alongside extracts from the Psalms; again for the National Society of Music, again with Nell Froger, and this time Raphaël Oleg and Quintette Nielsen; "The Tyger" re-appears, somewhat altered, as the opening melody of "Songs of the Soul". So, in 1981, there was "Noh", a chamber opera, based on a libretto written in collaboration with Marc Cholodenko, created at the Center Pompidou at the behest of the Paris Opera. And then...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">Exactly what took place that evening is unclear, and what I can discern is simply my attempt to unravel the paucity of information on the Internet. For certain, the critics found the booklet for the event bewildering: the piece is entitled "Noh", which suggests the ancient and traditional Japanese theatre, but what exactly this piece has to do with the Noh is far from obvious, other than four </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">obscure</span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">lines from a Noh play quoted at the end of the booklet. Two of Greif's admirers, the composers Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez, were in the audience, and the expressions on their faces may explain why photography is not encouraged during a performance. What the critics found bewildering even before the performance, they described rather more candidly negatively in their reviews the following morning. To call it "scathing" may be litotes.</span></div><div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">Other than arrangements of Sri Chinmoy's melodies for the disciples' choruses (the "Oi Akashe", for violoncello and piano, the "Premaloker", for mixed double choir, twelve men's voices and instrumental ensemble), and small pieces for piano for his friends, Greif gave up composing that night. When Leduc, his publisher, announced their intention to publish the "Noh" and sent him the drafts for proof-reading, he didn't even bother to look at them, let alone them correct them or return them. The epoch of live creation was over. For the moment.</span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWPAlLOjsrzTS32XkO8KnFbpuHJoV4sfYNi2mWNlE36vzmGtIQV2gFUXwcs3uk7S2eD9oF2b1eF7j0i3c-WcIhdikZ58n2m0nzoItjhlrtmTICgzwuK-54TImdEatcLvV8uimbkgAoJb8/s1600/Olivier+Greif+-+Sri+Chinmoy.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="193" data-original-width="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWPAlLOjsrzTS32XkO8KnFbpuHJoV4sfYNi2mWNlE36vzmGtIQV2gFUXwcs3uk7S2eD9oF2b1eF7j0i3c-WcIhdikZ58n2m0nzoItjhlrtmTICgzwuK-54TImdEatcLvV8uimbkgAoJb8/s1600/Olivier+Greif+-+Sri+Chinmoy.jpg" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">Not that Greif took himself apart from the world. Between 1983 and 1986 he was co-artistic director of the Academy-Festival des Arcs, where he had been teaching for some years, and would continue. He also gave lectures on meditation, and ran a bookstore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, a retail outlet for Sri Chinmoy's drawings and books, meditation cushions, incense and other merchandisable karma jewjaws. And he was still performing conventional piano pieces in live performance.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">But during those next ten years the "spiritual search" replaced the inherited trauma completely - Leonard Cohen would do exactly the same, with his Yogi, Roshi, on Los Angeles' Mount Baldy, at about the same time. Greif's metaphorical mountain was rather more Sinai than Baldy, and rather more Penuel than Sinai, hirsute with noble truths. When he emerged from under the bodhi tree in 1991, it was as if he had awoken cathartically from a long dream on the psychiatric couch. He talked, and composed, about his childhood, about the war, about his father's stay in Auschwitz, about the disappearance of a large part of his family in the camps. He quoted Paul Celan and started setting his words to music.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">That same year the conventional composer also resurfaced (I have chosen this word even more deliberately than my customary care; the reason will become clear in just a moment) with the setting of a number of poems by Hölderlin, fixed score, no instruction on the page to improvise. After which, a final, a definitive and futurely unmodifiable version of the "Requiem Sonata", though this was created live, but also recorded for posterity, at the Kuhmo Festival in Finland. And then a twentieth Piano Sonata - "The Dream of the World", created </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">with Christoph Henkel </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">in Warsaw in 1993, followed by "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RiSnQpuwrc" target="_blank">Letters from Westerbork</a>", for female voices and two violins, based on texts by Etty Hillesum and extracts from the Psalms, commissioned by Radio-France and created with Doris Lamprecht in Paris. Etty Hillesum was a young Dutch Jew whose letters describe the transit camp through which she was passing, the Dutch equivalent of Drancy, which was the transit camp used by the Vichy government for Jews being sent to Poland. Unlike Greif's father, Etty and her family did not survive.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;"><br />But the epoch of live creation did, born again, reincarnated. So, in the latter years, there were "Am Grabe Franz Liszts", for piano, literally created live in the France-Musique radio studio during a program - "Words and Notes" - dedicated to Liszt. And other pieces unconnected with the spiritual or psychological sources, composed because it was pleasing to compose them: two melodies on poems by Paul Bowles in 1994, created at the Roundabout Theater with Jo-Ann Pickens and Howard Haskin and the author; "The Tailor of Gloucester", for English horn, horn, violin, harp, celesta and synthesizer, a commission by that city for the inauguration of a municipal clock; the Piano Sonata N° 21, "Codex Domini".</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT-WR2U2m6tHYkBQWuQdJYLjtOI05M1IZGpnFF9P2X5fLBjrvi-_nETW_OYrNaYyP47N4RuM1LPQc0CNFG_0sSG3ZTgJ7LMJyRfVaxcEamiL27_QKFAZsUVPr0FTEM3APMsZxz7WdkrhU/s1600/Olivier+Greif+-+Agincourt.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="453" data-original-width="500" height="289" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhT-WR2U2m6tHYkBQWuQdJYLjtOI05M1IZGpnFF9P2X5fLBjrvi-_nETW_OYrNaYyP47N4RuM1LPQc0CNFG_0sSG3ZTgJ7LMJyRfVaxcEamiL27_QKFAZsUVPr0FTEM3APMsZxz7WdkrhU/s320/Olivier+Greif+-+Agincourt.jpg" width="320" /></a>
<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">So, in 1995: "Speculative Hymns", for voice, clarinet, horn, cello and piano, on extracts of the Vedas translated into English by Sri Aurobindo. And a Sonata for two cellos, "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljLkmPyj_wQ" target="_blank">The Battle of Agincourt</a>", created at the musical meetings of La Prée with Anne Savouret and Valentin Scharff. So, in 1996: "Songs of the Soul", for voice and piano, based on poems by William Blake, John Donne, George Herbert, Thomas Carew, Henry Vaughn and Henry King, created at the Salle Gaveau with Jennifer Smith, created again, and very differently, by the same performers, during the Rencontres Musicales de La Prée in 1996. So the Quintet "A Tale of the World", premiered at the Kuhmo Festival by Jean-François Heisser and the Sibelius Quartet. So the "Quartet N° 2", with voice, on three sonnets of Shakespeare, created in 1998 at the Musical Springtime of the Priory of Saint-Cosme by Elsa Vacquin and the Danel Quartet. Note "by" and not "with", for several of these pieces. Fixed compositions with permission to extemporise. And Greif not always present - gut-wrenched by some sort of an intestinal obstruction, he had been rushed to the St. Louis Hospital, near his home on rue Saint-Maur in Paris' Marais district, one night in 1994; the same intestinal obstruction that had tried to kill his mother and his grandmother at the same age, and which would render him too a survivor from the jowls of death. Colon cancer. The operation gave him several more years, and his determination to use each one of them with maximum creativity bequested to the world an output even more prolific than till now.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">So "The Sidewalks of Paris", for soprano, tenor and piano, based on a text by Yves Petit de Voize, created at the Conservatory of Dramatic Art by Catherine Dubosc, Jean-Paul Fouchécourt and Greif - Greif, not Haridas, for the first time in more than a decade his own name his original name was back in usgae, his relationship with Sri Chinmoy breaking. And at this time, also, the Chartier Prize from the Académie des Beaux-Arts, alongside France-Musique's dedication of a week to him as part of the program "Musique Pluriel" by David Herschel, and then another acclamation, </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">RCF (Radio Chrétiennes de France) devoting five half-hour programs to him</span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">. Greif had simultaneously returned, and arrived.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">So, in 1997: his first Symphony, for voice and orchestra, and at last the poems of Paul Celan had found their agonised and agonizing voice, premièred at Salle Gaveau on February 1<span style="font-size: x-small;">st</span> 1998 by Jacques Loiseleur des Longchamps and the Orchestre de La Prée under the direction of Jérémie Rhorer (Greif had </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">become artist in residence at the Abbey de La Prée, in Berry).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">So "The book of Irish Saints", for voice and piano, created at the Deauville Easter Festival by Stefan Genz and the author on </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">April 11<span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span> 1998</span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;"><br />So "Office des Naufragés", for soprano, quartet, clarinet and piano, created at the Schauspielhaus in Berlin by the Vogler Quartet, with clarinetist Eduard Brunner, and then its French premiere, at La Prée, on June 3<span style="font-size: x-small;">rd</span>, 2000 by the Danel Quartet, with Françoise Kubler, Armand Angster and Michèle Renoul. The original intention was a piece comprised exclusively of poetry by women, but the voice of Paul Celan was unrelenting, and he could not refuse it.<br /><br />So the "Trio" for piano, violin and cello, created by Jérôme Ducros, Renaud Capuçon and Henri Demarquette in the church of Verquin on the occasion of Rencontres Musicales en Artois, with a second performance at La Prée by Bruno Rigutto, Renaud Capuçon and Dominique de Williencourt.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">So the "Quartet N° 3" with voice, entitled "Todesfuge", created in Strasbourg by Stephan Genz and the Sine Nomine Quartet; one of Celan's masterpieces, and this time it defeated Greif. In the end he kept the title, but used a Dylan Thomas poem in its place, a tribute to his father who was dying at the age of ninety-three.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">So the "Quadruple concerto" known as "The Dance of the Dead", for piano, violin, viola, cello and orchestra, premiered at the Festival de Cordes by the Festival Orchestra, conducted by Jérémie Rhorer, with Jérôme Ducros, Nicolas Dautricourt, Florent Brémond and Christophe Morin.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">So the Sonata for piano N° 22, "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITzJOERWa2o&t=1212s" target="_blank">Les Plaisirs de Chérence</a>", created at the Rencontres de La Prée.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">So, in 1999, the Concerto for cello, "Durch Adams Fall", created at Notre-Dame de Paris by Henri Demarquette and the Musicians of La Prée directed by Jérémie Rhorer, with a second performance on November 26<span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span> 2000 Salle Pleyel by Henri Demarquette and the Chamber Philharmonic conducted by Marc Minkowski.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">So "Portraits and Appearances", for piano, created in May, at the Kiron space, by Greif alone, the last concert attended by his father. A second performance, again creating live from the bare bones of a musical idea, took place in March 2000 at La Prée.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">So the "Three apocryphal songs", created with Marie Devellereau at the Rencontres musicales de La Prée, with a further performance by Marie Devellereau and Alexandre Tharaud on June 3<span style="font-size: x-small;">rd</span> at the Auditorium du Louvre, filmed by the Muzzik channel and recorded by France Musique.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">So the preliminary composition of a Requiem for a double choir a cappella, commissioned by the Vocal Plus Association for the International Choral Academy in the Thouet Valley, uncreated until after his death.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">So, in 2000, "Ich ruf zu dir", a sextet for piano, clarinet and string quartet, commissioned by the Festival Présences de Radio-France, created by Alice Ader and his ensemble on February 13<span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span> 2000 at the Maison de Radio-France, and including anagrams of two of his father's favourite pieces, the eighth prelude of the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, and the largo of the seventh sonata of Beethoven. His father had died in November 1999.<br /><br />So the Quartet N° 4 "Ulysses", premiered on April 23rd 2000 at Le Prée by the Syntonia Quartet.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;"><br />So the three settings, for voice and piano, of a poem by Alfred de Musset, partially created at the Bibliothèque Nationale on May 9<span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span> 2000 by Françoise Destembert (vocals) and Jean-Louis Haguenauer, fully created on May 31<span style="font-size: x-small;">st</span> at La Prée by Françoise Destembert and Isabelle Aubert. The partial creation because Greif was unwell. The full as a tribute concert, after his "disappearance".<br /><br />Yes, disappearance, the website got it dead right. Jews heading for Auschwitz disappear, and in Greif's world, where there is no afterlife beyond the work you leave behind, any human catching the metaphorical cattle-truck to the eternal graveyard will likewise disappear, from visibility in the short term, from memory too </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">in most cases</span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">, within three generations. Because disappearance is the opposite of ubiquity, just as oblivion is the opposite of immortality.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-MaoOrwSGov5fga4cz2LZpZhIW-N8rNr4oE61UR8lid9U4g03yEDjTeoKfVt44lnaLPnJbXnL3jk_4Kg7jxBCUjM4XalOYVJX3AkWm8rCmsEYYBAx8OnQ_H4IGpH8GNhmCe4ur8uGh3c/s1600/Olivier+Greif+-+hommage.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="867" data-original-width="1000" height="277" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-MaoOrwSGov5fga4cz2LZpZhIW-N8rNr4oE61UR8lid9U4g03yEDjTeoKfVt44lnaLPnJbXnL3jk_4Kg7jxBCUjM4XalOYVJX3AkWm8rCmsEYYBAx8OnQ_H4IGpH8GNhmCe4ur8uGh3c/s320/Olivier+Greif+-+hommage.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">On the home page of the website dedicated to him personally (http://www.oliviergreif.com/): there is a quotation:</span><br />
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<span style="color: #990000; font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>"Un jour viendra - je ne serai plus de ce monde - ou ma musique vous submergera de son evidence."</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">The word "ou" is written there without an accent, as tends to be the case with French titles, so it could mean "or", and it could mean "where"; the difference nuances very subtly. I am assuming there should be an accent, and translating literally, even though it doesn't really work in English:</span><br />
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #990000; font-family: "helvetica neue", arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>"A day will come - I will no longer be of this world - where my music will submerge you with its evidence."</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">Tracks in the sand. Tracks, not footprints. Every human being leaves a few footprints in the sand, but most of them get blown away in the first sandstorm. If you want to do something significant, you have to leave tracks, deep tracks, with the power to endure even the hurricanes. You have to "submerger". </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">And if I have gone into so much detail about each composition, each act of creation, each source, it is because, with every new piece of information that I discover about him, it seems to me that I am reading my own life-story, translated into French and composed rather than written in prose and poetry, but still my life, the Polish origins, the Holocaust centrality, Mahler, Heine, Celan, Tai Po, the obsessive outpouring from a tap that refuses to be turned off... and even that phrase about submergence, which I have explained in terms borrowed from my long-ago started memoir, "Tracks In The Sand", named as it is after visiting my paternal grandfather's grave for the first time, and finding the sad cliché "footprints in the sand" engraved upon his stone.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">Greif died very quickly, though by no means suddenly given the pace at which colon cancers grow, on May 13<span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span> 2000, and is buried in the cemetery at Montparnasse.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">The risk that he will also disappear from memory as </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">an extraordinary creative artist </span><span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">remains alive beyond his physical disappearance, though there are CDs, and access through the Internet. I hope this personal Requiem will help.</span><br />
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David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-27117003703880787482018-01-28T07:42:00.000-05:002018-01-28T07:42:32.509-05:00The Hay-Wain<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3rA6ExG45xSN8VbCCcCe5lqCDEb325nRkG-DGEoZlQ1k6iX0nkzcApvuBLcjSDQTeBNJzJn5pIWMvZDlw2Zcr-cFwdJ5u-ELE9-6nVHi5oaJRiPYg0WNO5V3U-MQGOsiiuR4c3dl2xtM/s1600/Constable+Hay+Wain+sketch+at+the+V+%2526+A.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="390" data-original-width="556" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3rA6ExG45xSN8VbCCcCe5lqCDEb325nRkG-DGEoZlQ1k6iX0nkzcApvuBLcjSDQTeBNJzJn5pIWMvZDlw2Zcr-cFwdJ5u-ELE9-6nVHi5oaJRiPYg0WNO5V3U-MQGOsiiuR4c3dl2xtM/s400/Constable+Hay+Wain+sketch+at+the+V+%2526+A.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The Victoria & Albert Museum in London's South Kensington has the rough draft of Constable's "Hay Wain" - the
National Gallery in Trafalgar Square has the finished version - and I have to
say I much prefer it. The Turneresque sky. The very fact that it is not "finished",
which is to say: turned into photographic art, and rendered static in the
process, fixed for all time in neat-and-tidiness, perfect for jigsaw puzzles
and chocolate boxes, where it has tended to live most of its posthumous
existence. That draft, or sketch, though it is surely far too elaborately
detailed to be called "a mere sketch", contains the authentic ephemerality of the "captured" scene (can one really "capture" a scene, and take it home
on a canvas, or in a camera, and mount it on the wall like the trophy of a
Serengeti lion? I suppose one can), and surely that ephemerality is as necessary for an authentic depiction of the scene as are its material objects?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Intellectually intriguing as it is to have two artist's versions of the same painting, the intrigue becomes deepened when there are also two rather different photographs of the same painting - the one at the top of the page is from the V&A's own website, and it is markedly different in tone, even while it is precisely identical in every other feature, from the alternative version below (I was very naughty; when the docent wasn't looking I took a photo on my digital camera, and frankly, if this was it, I would have passed it by: too dark, too dull, too lacking in clarity - if only the artist had put some sunlight into the sky behind those clouds... what? he did... show me... where? in the one on the V&A website, you're absolutely right - does art appreciation then depend as much on aperture and shutter speed as it does on... well, any other aesthetic considerations?)</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4jmK8NpSa-wIvslFjT2lGYpzpSyMe-YRzgu7x_56aRPVfSNG5Aks5Z7iJUCaJD2gxmJELy63U85YV7VqoLMvvELGzQZD_EshuKNUUmnHsKXTqw3og3lANQCKUaTpP90zbs_0edCuTjVA/s1600/Constable+-+Hay-Wain+2nd+version.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="390" data-original-width="560" height="277" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4jmK8NpSa-wIvslFjT2lGYpzpSyMe-YRzgu7x_56aRPVfSNG5Aks5Z7iJUCaJD2gxmJELy63U85YV7VqoLMvvELGzQZD_EshuKNUUmnHsKXTqw3og3lANQCKUaTpP90zbs_0edCuTjVA/s400/Constable+-+Hay-Wain+2nd+version.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And how fascinating, given its date - the "Hay-Wain" belongs to the 1820s, fifty years too early - that you could place this "draft" anonymously in an exhibition of Impressionist paintings, and no one would spot
the outsider.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And indeed, exploring the
commentaries on the Internet, it appears that the Impressionists also had this
thought, and were deeply influenced both by the finished Turners and by unfinished
sketches such as this one...<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I also like the unfinished nature
of the work from a second perspective. During my few years as an actor, I
always preferred the rehearsals to the performance, because rehearsals were
never just an endless run-through of the play, repeating the choreography
decided by the director and reciting the lines fixed by the dramatist, but were always an act of personal exploration and discovery, no
different really from Magellan sailing off to find the North-West Passage, or
Scott snow-walking to the Pole, or the spaceship Voyager boldly going where not
even science fiction spaceships had ever gone before. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Finding the character" is really
just the same, and then still more so in the struggle to relate
the character you are slowly uncovering to the ones your fellow actors are simultaneously discovering (the conflict in terminologies will become clearer in the closing paragraph of this essay). I have this same sense with the V & A "Hay-Wain",
can imagine Constable down there in East Bergholt in Suffolk, sniffling in
the damp air of an autumn morning (the original title was "Landscape:
Noon", but we have to assume he started somewhat earlier in the day), in the marshy
grounds of Flatford Mill, with Willy Lott's cottage on his left, and his
thoughts not just full of the technical problems of getting that hay-wagon as
it crossed the shallow stream, but the emotions behind this choice of venue,
memories of his father, who once owned that cottage, memories of childhood
spent looking at it every time he gazed out of the window or walked the
neighbourhood. You don't get any of that in the final painting, but the
chimerical light and the impressionistic haziness certainly hint at that
nostalgia, that sentimentality. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgEQFHF9YiymfIOt28_xm42Kct9SzFuX41BNnAy5bECrhzOURSexOszalpcVMSv_BnnUbG2nl9LZYfxHnaVemrbZldWJqGythuFhmZGh-8GvsrWt6ihyphenhyphen9wEmXanXN2x-BGW67eGCXyDZI/s1600/Willy+Lott%2527s+cottage+-+for+Constable.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="583" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgEQFHF9YiymfIOt28_xm42Kct9SzFuX41BNnAy5bECrhzOURSexOszalpcVMSv_BnnUbG2nl9LZYfxHnaVemrbZldWJqGythuFhmZGh-8GvsrWt6ihyphenhyphen9wEmXanXN2x-BGW67eGCXyDZI/s320/Willy+Lott%2527s+cottage+-+for+Constable.jpg" width="242" /></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There are other sketches too, many of them made during his childhood there -
the V & A has a very small small oil sketch of Willy Lott's cottage
from about 1811 (the illustration </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">on the</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> left), and blow me if that isn't exactly the same dog as the one
in the final "Hay-Wain" of 1821! And were those trees against the
front wall not painted by Seurat, the ones behind by Manet, that sky by Turner?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
I found myself wondering if my response was just me, so I went to the V &
A's website and looked up the painting. "The finished picture in the
National Gallery," it told me, "differs hardly at all in composition - only the figure on
horseback in the foreground has disappeared - but it does show a more detailed
treatment of the landscape, with firmer contours and more naturalistic
colouring. It is by far the better known of the two, yet in some ways it is the
sketch, with its rapid brush strokes, its flecks of white and green skimming
the surface, and its generally broader treatment that accords more
with modern taste." <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Yes, "with modern taste". That,
too, is a significant statement about the painting - that we "like" and "dislike" certain works of Art, not for whatever "their intrinsic qualities" might have
been at the time that they were painted, but for what we now regard as "their intrinsic
qualities", because that is what suits the "correctness" of our epoch. So we
reject works from the past when they do not conform to our present dogma (which
of course is not dogma at all, but right thinking, and must be so, because it
is ours), just as often as the past rejected perfectly good works at the time (see any number of pages on this blog for examples!), and always for the same
reason.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></o:p></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></o:p></div>
<span style="color: blue; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /><br />The National Gallery provides teacher's notes for primary schools on "The Hay-Wain" (click <a href="https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/media/13668/notes_constable-hay-wain.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>): <br /><br /><br />For those of you who absolutely, definitely, no question about it, much prefer the final version, click <a href="http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/his/CoreArt/art/rom_con_hayw.html" target="_blank">here</a> to be hugely disappointed by a larger-than-thumbprint version whose shutter-speed and aperture-settings are simply dismal and thereby ruin the piece, but also an unabashed extolling of its virtues.<br /><br /></span><div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
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David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-83857715969148369512017-02-06T04:21:00.000-05:002017-12-06T13:15:08.740-05:00The Quidditas of Esthetics<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In James Joyce's "Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man", the eponymous protagonist Stephen Dedalus gives his explanation of the basics of esthetics (spelled without an initial 'a') to Lynch, while they are out walking. The dissertation is interrupted by trivial remarks, relevant to the tale, but not to the thesis; I have therefore slightly edited the text, presenting here only the thesis. Every would-be reader writer, critic and artist should make a point of reading it:</span><br /><br /> <br /><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">— To finish what I was saying about beauty... the most satisfying relations of the sensible must therefore correspond to the necessary phases of artistic apprehension. Find these and you find the qualities of universal beauty. Aquinas says: <i>Ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur integritas, consonantia, claritas</i>. I translate it so: Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance. Do these correspond to the phases of apprehension?..<br /><br /> Stephen pointed to a basket which a butcher's boy had slung inverted on his head. <br /><br /> — Look at that basket — he said. <br /><br /> — I see it — said Lynch. <br /><br /> — In order to see that basket — said Stephen — your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time. What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space. But temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehended it as one thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness. That is <i>integritas</i>, — <br /><br /> — Bull's eye ! — said Lynch, laughing — Go on. — <br /><br /> — Then — said Stephen — you pass from point to point, led by its formal lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words, the synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension. Having first felt that it is one thing you feel now that it is a thing. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious. That is <i>consonantia</i>. — <br /><br /> — Bull's eye again! — said Lynch wittily. — Tell me now what is <i>claritas</i> and you win the cigar. — <br /><br /> — The connotation of the word — Stephen said — is rather vague. Aquinas uses a term which seems to be inexact. It baffled me for a long time. It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter was but the shadow, the reality of which it was but the symbol. I thought he might mean that <i>claritas</i> was the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or a force of generalization which would make the esthetic image a universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is literary talk. I understand it so. When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks in the scholastic <i>quidditas</i>, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart. — <br /><br /> Stephen paused and, though his companion did not speak, felt that his words had called up around them a thought enchanted silence. <br /><br /> — What I have said — he began again — refers to beauty in the wider sense of the word, in the sense which the word has in the literary tradition. In the market place it has another sense. When we speak of beauty in the second sense of the term our judgment is influenced in the first place by the art itself and by the form of that art. The image, it is clear, must be set between the mind or senses of the artist himself and the mind or senses of others. If you bear this in memory you will see that art necessarily divides itself into three forms progressing from one to the next. These forms are: the lyrical form, the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself; the epical form, the form wherein he presents his image in mediate relation to himself and to others; the dramatic form, the form wherein he presents his image in immediate relation to others. — <br /><br /> — That you told me a few nights ago —said Lynch — and we began the famous discussion. — <br /><br /> — I have a book at home — said Stephen — in which I have written down questions which are more amusing than yours were. In finding the answers to them I found the theory of the esthetic which I am trying to explain. Here are some questions I set myself: Is a chair finely made tragic or comic? Is the portrait of Mona Lisa good if I desire to see it? Is the lust of Sir Philip Crampton lyrical, epical or dramatic? If not, why not? — <br /><br /> — Why not, indeed ? — said Lynch, laughing. <br /><br /> — If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood — Stephen continued — make there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art? If not, why not? — <br /><br /> — That's a lovely one — said Lynch, laughing again. — That has the true scholastic stink. — <br /><br /> — Lessing — said Stephen — should not have taken a group of statues to write of. The art, being inferior, does not present the forms I spoke of distinguished clearly one from another. Even in literature, the highest and most spiritual art, the forms are often confused. The lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion, a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who pulled at the oar or dragged stones up a slope. He who utters it is more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion. The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea. This progress you will see easily in that old English ballad Turpin Hero, which begins in the first person and ends in the third person. The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. — <br /><br /> — Trying to refine them also out of existence — said Lynch. <br /><br /> A fine rain began to fall from the high veiled sky and they turned into the duke’s lawn, to reach the national library before the shower came. <br /><br /> — What do you mean — Lynch asked surlily — by prating about beauty and the imagination in this miserable God forsaken island ? No wonder the artist retired within or behind his handiwork after having perpetrated this country. —<br /><br /> <br /><br /> </span></span><br />
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David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-4983035548815163522017-01-17T06:01:00.001-05:002017-12-06T11:02:52.432-05:00Footnotes to the Book of the Setback<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtyzYsAZMGPr6gM51Gbo0aGe-Dt1TYCIcHlkTfaybvvAgFh9TO_eIYoDUUSvP9lWJNuvXJN56kRCKGt8q_QzWnR5Uqeh_PuDNcWNAkeu2SnOgWwouwfGP6DKq_uoLnMUi1sFlSThJj1j0/s1600/Palestine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="219" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtyzYsAZMGPr6gM51Gbo0aGe-Dt1TYCIcHlkTfaybvvAgFh9TO_eIYoDUUSvP9lWJNuvXJN56kRCKGt8q_QzWnR5Uqeh_PuDNcWNAkeu2SnOgWwouwfGP6DKq_uoLnMUi1sFlSThJj1j0/s320/Palestine.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;">The dream of a totally liberated Falastina</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Nizar Qabbani</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.0pt;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The setback in question (</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span class="st">al-naksa</span> in the Arabic) was the aspiration of the Arab world to remove that wart known as Israel from its otherwise cosmetically perfect face. It took place between June 6<span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span> and June 11<span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span> 1967, and is called the Six Day War in the West, the Huzairan or June war in the Arab world, or more generally </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span class="st">al-nakba, the Catastrophe</span>.<br /><br />Until that time Nizar Qabbani had been an interestingly dull, very minor and very traditional poet, the author of erotic serenades to multiple women, and of elegant minor odes in the conventional themes of poetry. The disaster of 1967 changed everything, and the lyricist turned into a pamphleteer of Iltizām - commitment - overnight, blaming and criticising every Arab Sheikh and government and imam, from Kabul to Casablanca. The "Footnotes" were published in the August 1967 edition of Al-Adab, the most important poetry magazine in Beirut, which was then still the cultural centre of the modern Arab world. <br /><br />So powerful was the impact of the poem, in a world which continues to prize public poetry much as we in the West prize ballroom dancing by celebrities or the results of television baking competitions, that the leaders of every Arab state immediately banned it, which of course is an act of stupidity that governments with access to history books should surely have learned by now. To ban a poem is to give it heightened status, so that everyone now must have a copy, learned by heart if necessary, when actual texts are too dangerous to pass around. To ban a poem is to invite the creation of a poetical movement, because now others are awakened to the rallying-cry, others wish to show support, and even Iltizām; others feel emboldened to add their voices to the protest against the corrupt and incompetent leaders, especially of the Palestinians, the worst-served people in the modern world as far as leadership is concerned.<br /><br />So the Al-Adab Al-Huzairany was born, "The June Literature", a remarkably lilac-coloured blossoming of angry political writing, in the manner of Brecht and Neruda and Dylan. Ironically, several of the best of that group of poets, which includes the Druze <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/samih-al-qasim">Samih al-Qasim</a>, the expelled Palestinian <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/mahmoud-darwish">Mahmoud Darwish</a>, and the "locked out" Palestinian Rashid Hussein, do not live in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, nor in the Palestinian Diaspora which is now as global as the Jewish one which caused it, but in Israel itself, where their anger is conjoined with that of many equally embittered Israeli poets, and both sides simply want to create one shared homeland between both people. <br /><br />For many years, before the Internet came along, finding a copy of the "Footnotes" was not easy, so that I knew about the existence of the poem, had even heard it recited in Arabic, which I do not speak, but had not managed to find anyone who could render it in English. Then, for many years, I simply forgot about it, until I chanced upon "Modern Poetry of the Arab World", translated and edited by Abdullah al-Udhari (Penguin Books, 1986) at Harrow's Gayton Library; but unfortunately, when I opened the book, pages 87-114 had been hacked out with a pair of scissors, and the "Footnotes" were among them. This sent me back to the Internet, where I was able to find al-Udhari’s translation, which is the version reprinted below. I would like to include a copy of the original in Arabic, but sadly I have been unable to locate one, either in print or on the Internet; I promise to update this blog as soon as someone who can find it sends me the text, or even just a link to a text.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Qabbani, for the information, was born in Damascus in 1923, and died in London in 1998. Like Neruda, when not being a poet, he earned his living as a diplomat.</span><span style="color: lime;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br /> </span></span><br />
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<b><span style="color: lime;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Footnotes to the Book of the Setback<br /><br /> 1<br /> </span></span></b><br />
<span style="color: lime;"><b><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Friends,<br /> The old word is dead.<br /> The old books are dead.<br /> Our speech with holes like worn-out shoes is dead.<br /> Dead is the mind that led to defeat.<br /><br />2<br /><br />Our poetry has gone sour.<br /> Women’s hair, nights, curtains and sofas<br /> Have gone sour. Everything has gone sour.<br /><br />3<br /><br />My grieved country, In a flash<br /> You changed me from a poet who wrote love poems<br /> To a poet who writes with a knife.<br /><br />4<br /><br />What we feel is beyond words:<br /> We should be ashamed of our poems.<br /><br />5<br /><br />Stirred by Oriental bombast,<br /> By boastful swaggering that never killed a fly,<br /> By the fiddle and the drum,<br /> We went to war<br /> And lost.<br /><br />6<br /><br />Our shouting is louder than our actions,<br /> Our swords are taller than us,<br /> This is our tragedy.<br /><br />7<br /><br />In short<br /> We wear the cape of civilisation<br /> But our souls live in the stone age.<br /><br />8<br /><br />You don’t win a war<br /> With a reed and a flute.<br /><br />9<br /><br />Our impatience<br /> Cost us fifty thousand new tents.<br /><br />10<br /><br />Don’t curse heaven<br /> If it abandons you,<br /> Don’t curse circumstances.<br /> God gives victory to whom He wishes.<br /> God is not a blacksmith to beat swords.<br /><br />11<br /><br />It’s painful to listen to the news in the morning.<br /> It’s painful to listen to the barking of dogs.<br /><br />12<br /><br />Our enemies did not cross the border<br /> They crept through our weakness like ants.<br /><br />13<br /><br />Five thousand years<br /> Growing beards<br /> In our caves.<br /> Our currency is unknown,<br /> Our eyes are a haven for flies.<br /> Friends,<br /> Smash the doors,<br /> Wash your brains,<br /> Wash your clothes.<br /> Friends,<br /> Read a book,<br /> Write a book,<br /> Grow words, pomegranates and grapes,<br /> Sail to the country of fog and snow.<br /> Nobody knows you exist in caves.<br /> People take you for a breed of mongrels.<br /><br />14<br /><br />We are thick-skinned people<br /> With empty souls.<br /> We spend our days practising witchcraft,<br /> Playing chess and sleeping.<br /> And we the ‘Nation by which God blessed mankind’?<br /><br />15<br /><br />Our desert oil could have become<br /> Daggers of flame and fire.<br /> We’re a disgrace to our noble ancestors:<br /> We let our oil flow through the toes of whores.<br /><br />16<br /><br />We run wildly through streets<br /> Dragging people with ropes,<br /> Smashing windows and locks.<br /> We praise like frogs,<br /> Swear like frogs,<br /> Turn midgets into heroes,<br /> And heroes into scum:<br /> We never stop and think.<br /> In mosques<br /> We crouch idly,<br /> Write poems,<br /> Proverbs<br /> And beg God for victory<br /> Over our enemy.<br /><br />17<br /><br />If I knew I’d come to no harm,<br /> And could see the Sultan,<br /> I’d tell him:<br /> ‘Sultan,<br /> Your wild dogs have torn my clothes<br /> Your spies hound me<br /> Their eyes hound me<br /> Their noses hound me<br /> Their feet hound me<br /> They hound me like Fate<br /> Interrogate my wife<br /> And take down the names of my friends,<br /> Sultan,<br /> When I came close to your walls<br /> And talked about my pains,<br /> Your soldiers beat me with their boots,<br /> Forced me to eat my shoes.<br /> Sultan,<br /> You lost two wars.<br /> Sultan,<br /> Half of our people are without tongues,<br /> What’s the use of people without tongues?<br /> Half of our people<br /> Are trapped like ants and rats<br /> Between walls’.<br /> If I knew I’d come to no harm<br /> I’d tell him:<br /> ‘You lost two wars<br /> You lost touch with children’<br /><br />18<br /><br />If we hadn’t buried our unity<br /> If we hadn’t ripped its young body with bayonets<br /> If it had stayed in our eyes<br /> The dogs wouldn’t have savaged our flesh.<br /><br />19<br /><br />We want an angry generation<br /> To plough the sky<br /> To blow up history<br /> To blow up our thoughts.<br /> We want a new generation<br /> That does not forgive mistakes<br /> That does not bend.<br /> We want a generation of giants.<br /><br />20<br /><br />Arab children,<br /> Corn ears of the future,<br /> You will break our chains.<br /> Kill the opium in our heads,<br /> Kill the illusions.<br /> Arab children,<br /> Don’t read about our windowless generation,<br /> We are a hopeless case.<br /> We are as worthless as watermelon rind.<br /> Don’t read about us,<br /> Don’t ape us,<br /> Don’t accept us,<br /> Don’t accept our ideas,<br /> We are a nation of crooks and jugglers.<br /> Arab children,<br /> Spring rain,<br /> Corn ears of the future,<br /> You are a generation<br /> That will overcome defeat.</span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 13.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I could very easily write a critical appraisal of this poem, its techniques, its lexicon, its tone, the ironies of the address to the Sultan by a poet who is also an appointed diplomat. But I don't think that literary criticism is what this poem is crying out for.</span><br />
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<br />David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-18165807093233143302016-10-14T08:41:00.000-04:002017-12-06T13:17:14.410-05:00After My Death<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_fE2zRh6uR5IWY5EkfT8jrYIG7BFtg1t8dpsD9eEH1-yQzhBEt8yd21QIrK9dEtJrKSDXfxcXkt5MA6KylauoEICn47hgQG0jNk4O4j-5vgtcbpPjswto2qsFvdzXJ4oSn7lUpABNzIs/s1600/Bialik.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_fE2zRh6uR5IWY5EkfT8jrYIG7BFtg1t8dpsD9eEH1-yQzhBEt8yd21QIrK9dEtJrKSDXfxcXkt5MA6KylauoEICn47hgQG0jNk4O4j-5vgtcbpPjswto2qsFvdzXJ4oSn7lUpABNzIs/s200/Bialik.png" width="183" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Chaim Nachmann Bialik</span><span style="font-family: "nyala"; font-size: 16.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Say this when you mourn for me:<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">There was a man – and look he is no more<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">He died before his time<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">The music of his life suddenly stopped<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">A pity! There was another song in him<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Now it is lost<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">forever<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">A great pity! He had a violin<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">a living speaking soul<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">to which he uttered<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">the secrets of his heart<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">making all its strings vibrate<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">save one he kept inviolate<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Back and forth his supple fingers danced<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">one string alone remained entranced<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">still unheard<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">A pity!<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">All its life that string quivered<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">silently shook<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">yearned for its song – its mate<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">- as a heart saddens before its fate<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Despite delay it waited daily<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">mutely beseeching its saviour lover<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">who lingered loitered tarried ever<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">and did not come<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Great is the pain!<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">There was a man – and look he is no more<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">The music of his life suddenly stopped<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">There was another song in him<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Now it is lost<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">forever<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">What I love about this poem is - even despite the poor quality of its translation into English - the ability of Bialik to transcend morbidity; whatever it may seem, this is not really a poem about death at all, but about the joyous and vigorous fulfilling of our transitory lives. It is the song of a man in his full bloom, a man who knows, so to speak, that death will one day punctuate the stanza of his life, but for whom that knowledge is a spur, a stimulus, and not a block; and in the meanwhile there is always an opportunity for parole.<br /><br />There are regrets, but they are hypothetical regrets; they are a man serving upon himself the warning of what he might one day regret if he does not live now; and serving this warning precisely in order to prevent regret. Even the pity is speculative; after all, there is still plenty more time in which to bow the string, whether of the heart or of the violin, and go on playing.<br /><br />Bialik's poem is the antithesis of Proust's, in length, in tone, in content. And somehow the one serves as a warning of the other. Where Proust abandoned present and future life in order to review it in the solitary monastic cell of his cork-lined room (I have often thought it might be amusing to create a shirt in goat's wool as a souvenir for visitors to Proust's apartment on the Boulevard Haussman: My guru went to worship at the Maestro's feet, and all he brought me back was this extremely lousy hair-shirt), pouring out the waste in page upon turgid, interminable page of convoluted, ultimately misanthropic angst, entombed alive in sarcophagal regret, Bialik cries out exultantly, sweetly, simply but intensely "Act now". Once again, the d'vei Falstaff versus the d'vei Hamlet. I know which side I am on.<br /><br />And yet. How very – how completely – different this poem would be, if it were not given that one-line preface: a mere obituary, where this becomes a song of birth! I wonder if the original came with, or without, that preface.</span><br />
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David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-68129935972500409672016-10-14T08:29:00.000-04:002017-12-06T13:14:17.428-05:00Climbing Wyndcliff<div class="CSP-ChapterBodyText-FirstParagraph">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-t49VvDRaTXISbrfdnJ6-XoqWDmHH2melQXD_R26K1Qv-iLI8DxRjrRn0q_kMgPoYH1IrjXdLa_2Y0lA_YsQmvAZ1uibpfa_HHPLkdpaCA1czhrjgLmHgCnp7wfGwRa4WYIe0isuyWwo/s1600/Wyndcliff.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-t49VvDRaTXISbrfdnJ6-XoqWDmHH2melQXD_R26K1Qv-iLI8DxRjrRn0q_kMgPoYH1IrjXdLa_2Y0lA_YsQmvAZ1uibpfa_HHPLkdpaCA1czhrjgLmHgCnp7wfGwRa4WYIe0isuyWwo/s400/Wyndcliff.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">William Wordsworth</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /><br />Alain de Botton, in "<a href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwj3yuGUltrPAhVlLMAKHahODFkQFggjMAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Falaindebotton.com%2Ftravel%2F&usg=AFQjCNEejBGWjpLgdcOUGQfEGLJ4GQxifw&sig2=prKRrl9p5XDPRR6SjpRI3w">The Art of Travel"</a>, reminds me that Wordsworth's famous "Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey" originally bore the sub-title "On revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13 1798". No one knows precisely where Wordsworth sat, or stood, or leaned against a tree, to look down at the Wye valley and the splendours of Monmouthshire and be inspired to write this poem on that particular day, though the general location is reckoned to be Wyndcliff, which actually overlooks Chepstow, rather than Tintern; but that is what poets get their licenses for.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Back in my husband-and-family days in north Somerset, we visited the area regularly, making the journey across the Severn to visit the ruins of the great Cistercian Abbey and compare it with the ruins of the great Benedictine monastery of Gleistonbury, and it is highly likely that the first time was on some July 13 of the 1990s, because my somewhat anal personality tends to like those sorts of symmetries; and equally likely that one or other of my daughters was harnessed in a baby-sling across my chest, and students from my school, who needed something to do on a boarding school Sunday, in tow.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Climbing Wyndcliff is tiring, but it needs neither rope nor sherpa, the path having been made-to-measure by the National Trust. There is strenuous exercise too, and quite stupendous views, which neither technology nor civilisation have succeeded in diminishing, by intruding upon them, since Wordsworth's pre-Luddite day. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And finally there is poetry: a carefully carved niche complete with wooden bench purports to host the very sycamore which shaded W's penmanship that day. This I would regard as pure romanticism, and not in W's understanding of that term at all, but in our modern denigration and misuse of the term: a synonym for sentimentality, which is the trivialisation of emotions at their glossy surface. What W was seeking was not chocolate box lids painted by Constable, nor Easter cards with pretty bunny rabbits, nor indeed a rural idyll far from the smelly city; rather an alternative to Robespierre's reign of terror, a breach in the darkness of human civilisation such as might let some intellectual light through, and an opening to inwardness that might lead on towards catharsis; something not yet D.H. Lawrence, though without Wordsworth, D.H. Lawrence could not have been, and those moderns who regale both of them could never have attained that eagle's nest of intellectual superiority from which to do so.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The bench, the sycamore, the actual eagle's nest, even the trail, are really just conjecture - but W was of that era, breaking free of the structures of Christian catechism, that favoured, indeed encouraged conjecture, so he probably would not have cared. And truthfully it doesn't matter; the point isn't the exterior landscape anyway, but the metaphor that it provides for the interior landscape. Nevertheless, while there are poems that one reads exclusively as poetry, these lines of Wordsworth's definitely merit the journey further, into the actual hills of Wales:-</span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /> …for she can so inform</span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span></span>The mind that is within us, so impress</span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span></span>With quietness and beauty, and so feed</span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span></span>With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues</span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span></span>Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,</span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span></span>Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all</span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span></span>The dreary intercourse of daily life,</span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span></span>Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb</span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span></span>Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold</span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span></span>Is full of blessings.</span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Nature as an intellectual paradigm, a dialectic of sophistry; and communing with Nature equivalent to communion with whatever God might be. The religion of Man (of Humankind, I would prefer, but in W's day Man still predominated), Standing Alone, in his elements and essences, devoid of superstition, as stately as a tree, seeing inside himself the entire vista and panorama of the human possibility. Yes! Yes! Yes!</span><br />
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<span style="color: #444444; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The full poem is below:-</span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />Five years have past; five summers, with the length<br />Of five long winters! and again I hear<br />These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs<br />With a soft inland murmur.—Once again<br />Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,<br />That on a wild secluded scene impress<br />Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect<br />The landscape with the quiet of the sky.<br />The day is come when I again repose<br />Here, under this dark sycamore, and view<br />These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,<br />Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,<br />Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves<br />'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see<br />These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines<br />Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,<br />Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke<br />Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!<br />With some uncertain notice, as might seem<br />Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,<br />Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire<br />The Hermit sits alone.<br /><br /> These beauteous forms,<br />Through a long absence, have not been to me<br />As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:<br />But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din<br />Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,<br />In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,<br />Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;<br />And passing even into my purer mind<br />With tranquil restoration:—feelings too<br />Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,<br />As have no slight or trivial influence<br />On that best portion of a good man's life,<br />His little, nameless, unremembered, acts<br />Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,<br />To them I may have owed another gift,<br />Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,<br />In which the burthen of the mystery,<br />In which the heavy and the weary weight<br />Of all this unintelligible world,<br />Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,<br />In which the affections gently lead us on,—<br />Until, the breath of this corporeal frame<br />And even the motion of our human blood<br />Almost suspended, we are laid asleep<br />In body, and become a living soul:<br />While with an eye made quiet by the power<br />Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,<br />We see into the life of things.<br /><br /> If this<br />Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft—<br />In darkness and amid the many shapes<br />Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir<br />Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,<br />Have hung upon the beatings of my heart—<br />How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,<br />O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,<br /> How often has my spirit turned to thee!<br /><br /> And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,<br />With many recognitions dim and faint,<br />And somewhat of a sad perplexity,<br />The picture of the mind revives again:<br />While here I stand, not only with the sense<br />Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts<br />That in this moment there is life and food<br />For future years. And so I dare to hope,<br />Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first<br />I came among these hills; when like a roe<br />I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides<br />Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,<br />Wherever nature led: more like a man<br />Flying from something that he dreads, than one<br />Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then<br />(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days<br />And their glad animal movements all gone by)<br />To me was all in all.—I cannot paint<br />What then I was. The sounding cataract<br />Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,<br />The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,<br />Their colours and their forms, were then to me<br />An appetite; a feeling and a love,<br />That had no need of a remoter charm,<br />By thought supplied, not any interest<br />Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past,<br />And all its aching joys are now no more,<br />And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this<br />Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts<br />Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,<br />Abundant recompense. For I have learned<br />To look on nature, not as in the hour<br />Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes<br />The still sad music of humanity,<br />Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power<br />To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt<br />A presence that disturbs me with the joy<br />Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime<br />Of something far more deeply interfused,<br />Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,<br />And the round ocean and the living air,<br />And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:<br />A motion and a spirit, that impels<br />All thinking things, all objects of all thought,<br />And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still<br />A lover of the meadows and the woods<br />And mountains; and of all that we behold<br />From this green earth; of all the mighty world<br />Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,<br />And what perceive; well pleased to recognise<br />In nature and the language of the sense<br />The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,<br />The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul<br />Of all my moral being.<br /> </span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Nor perchance,<br />If I were not thus taught, should I the more<br />Suffer my genial spirits to decay:<br />For thou art with me here upon the banks<br />Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,<br />My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch<br />The language of my former heart, and read<br />My former pleasures in the shooting lights<br />Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while<br />May I behold in thee what I was once,<br />My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,<br />Knowing that Nature never did betray<br />The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,<br />Through all the years of this our life, to lead<br />From joy to joy: for she can so inform<br />The mind that is within us, so impress<br />With quietness and beauty, and so feed<br />With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,<br />Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,<br />Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all<br />The dreary intercourse of daily life,<br />Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb<br />Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold<br />Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon<br />Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;<br />And let the misty mountain-winds be free<br />To blow against thee: and, in after years,<br />When these wild ecstasies shall be matured<br />Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind<br />Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,<br />Thy memory be as a dwelling-place<br />For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,<br />If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,<br />Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts<br />Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,<br />And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance—<br />If I should be where I no more can hear<br />Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams<br />Of past existence—wilt thou then forget<br />That on the banks of this delightful stream<br />We stood together; and that I, so long<br />A worshipper of Nature, hither came<br />Unwearied in that service: rather say<br />With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal<br />Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,<br />That after many wanderings, many years<br />Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,<br />And this green pastoral landscape, were to me<br />More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!<br /></span></span><br />
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David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-49563402680114806382016-10-14T07:05:00.000-04:002017-12-07T05:49:19.979-05:00A Song for Alfred Nobel<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: #444444; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The posting date of this entry, as you may have noticed, is October 14<span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span> 2016, the day after it was announced that a new name had been posted on the honour board in the Hall of Literary Fame, a place where club-members generally do not have first-names, but only initials: T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, E.E. Cummings, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster (J.K Rowling); and now, to the total perplexity and consternation of those human beings who have a desperate need to put things in boxes, with labels on the boxes, but then don't know what to do with that which fits neither box nor label... one R.A Zimmerman, Poet Laureate, though in most of his several former lifetimes he was known by his pseudonymous Welsh name (Welsh, from the Anglo-Saxon, Wal-es, meaning "outcast", "foreigner", "unwelcome") as Bob Dylan.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHiRDM3xNIuY0pV4sibMNxlFR-qV1l1Ru-tQFH75SqnE5MQUD7WaMYYzZQz09NDQNzm7F4ggDl-1SH7WLcQDi1O_hEJI8I4j7EdmIbdSD5viTi4P7CrJsVuNgY3lK_tkXnZjYDy7kM3AQ/s1600/Lyre.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHiRDM3xNIuY0pV4sibMNxlFR-qV1l1Ru-tQFH75SqnE5MQUD7WaMYYzZQz09NDQNzm7F4ggDl-1SH7WLcQDi1O_hEJI8I4j7EdmIbdSD5viTi4P7CrJsVuNgY3lK_tkXnZjYDy7kM3AQ/s200/Lyre.jpg" width="152" /></a><span style="color: #444444; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Back in the days of Apollo and Orpheus and King David, they played the lyre rather than the guitar, though, let's be honest, a lyre is simply a guitar with four extra strings and its fretboard cut short. Ode, verse, poem, psalm, epic, saga - all of them, back then, written to be recited, performed, yes, sung, to the accompaniment of a sitar or an ud, a lute or a harp, quite likely with a tambourine providing percussion, a ram's horn standing in for the saxophone, a full choir of female backing vocalists - and what we call "lyrics" are simply the words written to be accompanied by the lyre. So what, pray, is the difference between King David's royal orchestra doing Psalms to the Great Moon-Goddess (<a href="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YYiMJ2bC65A/hqdefault.jpg?custom=true&w=196&h=110&stc=true&jpg444=true&jpgq=90&sp=68&sigh=RtCd_rLJCfrSajyi4yJSYUIPv0w" target="_blank">Hallelu-Yah</a> - the link here is to K.D. Lang at Leonard Cohen's induction to the Canadian Songwriters' Hall of Fame), or Bob Dylan and the Band performing the marriage rites of "Isis on the fifth day of May", or between King David (Psalm 34:19) telling us that "YHVH Adonai is close to the brokenhearted, and helps those crushed in spirit" or Dylan, "Trying To Get To Heaven Before They Close The Door" while insisting that it's "Not Dark Yet"?</span></div>
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<span style="color: #444444; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br />To he or she who writes, there is no difference between a song and a poem; the same range of techniques are available to both, and neither form is prose. One may use rhyme, or free verse; one may choose to include metaphors and similes and alliterations etc, or one may decide not to; one may use metre, or blank verse; one may write exalted language, or one may write banality; cadences, assonances and dissonances, the methodologies of rhythm, are inevitable, where written prose tends to be flat. One may leave the finished work to be read on the page, or recite it, or perform it with musical accompaniment of any kind from madrigal to bluegrass, from jazz to folk-rock, from Surah to Cante Jondo, from Hymn to Hip-Hop; there is still no difference between poem and song, between verse and lyric, not in the act of writing anyway. And in Hebrew the word Shir can mean a poem or a song; many other languages likewise use the same word for both. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #444444; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And as to its being of Nobel standard - that surely is a matter of quality, and impact, and not of form. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #444444; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The 20<span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span> century produced only two artists of truly universal stature, whose work transformed the way we think of art and culture, who have influenced, because they are unavoidable, every artist in their field who has followed, and will continue to do so in the future. One of those was Pablo Picasso. The other was Bob Dylan.<br /><br />Which "poem" should I choose for this blog? Too many great pieces to make selecting easy, but if you want to get inside the mind of a truly deep-thinking artist (one of the criteria, surely, for his Laureateship), and at the same time witness his formidable skills with rhyme and lexicon and rhythm and metre and all the other techniques that poets have available, and I would recommend you follow the words in print while listening to them in performance, "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding", with or without the ironic "ho ho ho" of the 1965 Free Trade Hall concert, in Manchester, which is the version I have linked <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHGrWTmXK6w">here</a>. You can find the printed lyric <a href="http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/bobdylan/itsalrightmaimonlybleeding.html">here</a>.</span></div>
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David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-14178389478879527512016-10-13T11:28:00.000-04:002017-12-07T06:22:59.124-05:00On Dover Beach<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Matthew Arnold<br /><br /><br />The sea is calm to-night.<br />The tide is full, the moon lies fair<br />Upon the straits; on the French coast the light<br />Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;<br />Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.<br />Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!<br /><br />Only, from the long line of spray<br />Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,<br />Listen! you hear the grating roar<br />Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,<br />At their return, up the high strand,<br />Begin, and cease, and then again begin,<br />With tremulous cadence slow, and bring<br />The eternal note of sadness in.<br /><br />Sophocles long ago<br />Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought<br />Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow<br />Of human misery; we<br />Find also in the sound a thought,<br />Hearing it by this distant northern sea.<br /><br />The Sea of Faith<br />Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore<br />Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.<br />But now I only hear<br />Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,<br />Retreating, to the breath<br />Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear<br />And naked shingles of the world.<br /><br />Ah, love, let us be true<br />To one another! for the world, which seems<br />To lie before us like a land of dreams,<br />So various, so beautiful, so new,<br />Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,<br />Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;<br />And we are here as on a darkling plain<br />Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,<br />Where ignorant armies clash by night.</span></span><span style="color: #444444; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /><br />The title of a poem is a form of semiotics, like the label underneath a painting in an art gallery. Read the title, and you can deduce the theme. If "On Dover Beach" were a painting, you would expect white cliffs, a shingle beach, a Canute sea, some Vera Lynn bluebirds; elements of nature with most likely a nostalgic edge - something like the illustration I have chosen at the top of the page.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And indeed, the first two and a half lines confirm the prediction. The next two and a half provide the satellite position, the place where the easel is set up: the window of a house close enough to the beach to see its detail, far enough away to catch the distant glow of lights across the English Channel. Expected nostalgia – a scene wistfully remembered – turns out to be present sentiment, not terribly different, as the poet calls his lover to peruse the view, or more likely to stand in the conventional posture of lovers, with the view as a good pretext for a Cialis moment. We are in the realm of love poetry, nature poetry, the pathetic fallacy.<br /><br />Only... we are not, not really; the entire opening has been a trick, one of those tacky TV adverts that appeal to our most superficial receptors. Draw the potential customer in with shots of Baywatch men and women, and then sell them what you really came to sell. Only. That's the key word – a remarkably ordinary, banal, trite word for a transition in poetry, but "only" is enough. And once the transition is made, the pathetic fallacy proves to be precisely that, a fallacy, and disappears, and with it sentiment also disappears, and if we "Listen!" fastidiously enough, we can hear a philosophical theme slithering like Leviathan out of the sea, the ebb and flow of thought replacing that of the waves.<br /><br />Words in poetry may be semiotics too, whether standing for themselves in the literal, or functioning as metaphors. One of the great achievements of this human invention, language, is its ability to evoke. Simply to pronounce the name Sophocles is to conjure up a philosophical system, a moral code, a civilisation, a vanished world, and also its continuum into the present. Arnold names Sophocles, and we are no longer on Dover Beach, but on some Aegean sands, wondering perhaps how the Persian or the Trojan war is faring, if Theseus has killed the Minotaur, if hemlock is a useful plant, and whether or not the gods still live on Mount Olympus. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The image of the sea, literal in the first verse, becomes metaphorical now; neither the Aegean nor the English Channel but the "Sea of Faith", the philosophical system, the moral code, the source of civilisation that replaced the Greek when Hellenic Greece eventually failed. Only... Christian civilisation appears to be failing too, the Christian God threatened by the new evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin (Mankind, emerging from his origins, right there, in the sea), and the beginnings of genetics that are being revealed, right there where the light gleams on the French coast, by Lamarck. The "eternal note of sadness" is no longer that of Sophocles, but of this poet; and hemlock is only a useful plant if you are contemplating suicide.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">To me the great strength, but also the great weakness of this poem, is its final verse. Sophocles took the hemlock, and joined his dead gods in the oblivion of permanent remembrance; Arnold has already called his lover – his wife, in fact, Frances Wightman – to the window, to share his sadness, but also to nourish his sentimentality. "Ah, love, let us be true to one another" belongs to the soap opera, not the grand opera; even the phrasing is prosaic, breaking the metre and undermining the cadences that till now have sustained this seemingly blank verse. Yet simultaneously the verse breaks into a rhyme scheme that is almost a sonnet, more clearly structured than anything beforehand. The message of love in times of darkness is the poem's, and the poet's, strength; but it is also doomed love, because "the world, which seems/To lie before us like a land of dreams,/So various, so beautiful, so new,/Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain". If I were Frances, I might be thinking that the Cialis was as useless as the hemlock, on this dark night, and my husband lost in melancholia.<br /><br /></span><br />
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David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-41382045643598921072016-10-13T11:03:00.000-04:002018-08-10T05:41:40.204-04:00On His Blindness<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWGG3uUFxPsOOk07QTyOV_TnXkthjwooAzyV4-2RQOsMdPTNWVH2kDsUrRGBPn-aMSguTLS-cBQzpADOOr1rUzwl-7WGgr2OVJKknr6N_4pOhBY0ClsyM_YNCUIHY7xVhGlsawbw4XOY0/s1600/Milton+and+his+Daughters.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="246" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWGG3uUFxPsOOk07QTyOV_TnXkthjwooAzyV4-2RQOsMdPTNWVH2kDsUrRGBPn-aMSguTLS-cBQzpADOOr1rUzwl-7WGgr2OVJKknr6N_4pOhBY0ClsyM_YNCUIHY7xVhGlsawbw4XOY0/s320/Milton+and+his+Daughters.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">John Milton</span><span style="font-family: "nyala"; font-size: 16.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><span style="font-family: "nyala"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span><br />
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When I consider how my light is spent</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And that one talent which is death to hide</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Lodg’d with me useless, though my soul more bent</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">To serve therewith my Maker, and present</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">My true account, lest he returning chide,</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That murmur, soon replies: “God doth not need</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Either man’s work or his own gifts: who best</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And post o’er land and ocean without rest:</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">They also serve who only stand and wait.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Why is so much poetry so convoluted, so awkward, so uncomfortable? Where grammatical and syntactical expectation require prose to flow fluidly and balk at misconstructions, the little box of rhyme into which so much verse is force leads to these curlicues and hyphenations. Paraphrased into prose this might have been written: <br /><br /> When I consider how my light is spent, before half my days in this dark, wide </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">world </span>have passed; when I consider that my one talent, which it would be akin to death to hide, is lodged with me uselessly – though my soul could not be more bent to serve my Maker with it, and desirous to present my true account, lest he, returning, chide: "doth God exact day-labour, light denied?" When I consider this, I also fondly ask... <br /><br /> But even attempting the paraphrase makes it clear that Milton is trying to compress too many thoughts, too many ideas, into a single sentence. The opening conceit leads to a parenthesis; the reiteration of the opening conceit leads to a second parenthesis, and that in turn to a digression which generates a second conceit, itself leading to a further parenthesis, and that parenthesis to what is almost a footnote to a piece of marginalia. Until we realise that the poet has lost his way (as blind men do, of course, but that would be far too subtle an explanation of this poem), and the phrase "I fondly ask" stands out alone, unrelated to any of the previous. Yet apparently central. Or is it simply that he needed four more syllables, and these occurred to him as satisfactory?<br /><br />And is it, then, simply, a very bad poem? One which has endured because of the poet's name, his reputation, and in spite of his failure on this occasion? When we consider the canon of European art and literature and music, it is the case that vast amounts of second-rate work continue to be performed, published, exhibited, anthologised, simply because they belong to the oeuvre of an artist whom we regard as great, and we too humble, or too lazy, or too lacking in fastidiousness, to separate the good wheat from the chaff. In truth, half the European canon should be dumped, and the space filled up with truly great works that have been forgotten, and this simply because the artist who had that one moment of genius also produced nothing else of any merit in his life. In the case of this poem, it isn't even Milton's reputation that has caused it to endure, but a simple cliché that has entered the vernacular, a lame and insipid cliché at that, one that should also have been forgotten: "they also serve who only stand and wait". In most of our experience, the cliché isn't even true, especially in restaurants</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But still this poem has endured, and if I had nothing but these negatives to say about it, why would I include it in a blog-anthology of my "favourite poetry and prose"? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In the beginning, St John of Patmos tells us at the start of his account of the life of Jesus, in the beginning was the Word. He isn't actually correct. For there to be a word there first have to be the letters that make the word, and also the idea that requires a word in order to express it, hopefully articulately, though most often the words are ambivalent, if not ambiguous, and the ideas, usually borrowed anagrammtrically from someone else, are not quite as fully developed or elaborated as in the moment of our aspiration (that's inspiration with a more correct first-letter a). So Samuel Beckett infers, in almost any line of his you choose to choose, that in the beginning was the stammer, and the stutter, and the incoherence, and quite probably the crossed-out-and-replaced, the thrown-in-the-garbage, the abandoned-and-resumed, and the sheer fluke that this time it came out perfect. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So we - what is the word I'm looking for? - so we, fumble, stumble, grope, no, not grope, I think fumble is as near as I can get, so we fumble (do I need the "about"? it's unwieldy) - so we fumble in the darkness like a, like a man gone blind, desperately trying not to surrender to the despair induced by blindness "Ere half my days in this dark world and wide"... and wait, isn't that a kind of anagram of Dante's opening to "The Inferno", "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita... at the mid-point of our life", and doesn't Eliot cento that same line in the "East Coker" fragment of "Four Quartets", and is it just coincidence that when he centos the Dante, he also takes up the very theme that Milton is alluding to...</span><br />
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years —</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Because one has only learnt to get the better of words</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">One is no longer disposed to say it.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">With shabby equipment always deteriorating</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">By strength and submission, has already been discovered</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">To emulate — but there is no competition —</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">There is only the fight to recover what has been lost</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">That seem unpropitious... </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"By men whom one cannot hope to emulate" indeed! Dante, Eliot, Milton. And if there is blind Milton to allude to, is there not also blind Borges, engaged in the same struggle, which ultimately is not the struggle of blindness anyway, but the struggle of lucidity in any form?<br /><br /> Which leaves one final question. If Milton is resigned, as that closing clich</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">é</span> seems to indicate, to a life in which the writing of poetry is no longer available to him because of his blindness, if there is nothing left for him to do but "stand and wait", whether for the invention of the digital voice-recorder or the development of ocular surgery, if this is the case, how is it that he managed to overcome these obstacles, and write this poem?</span><span style="color: #444444; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />The illustration at the top of the page shows "Milton" by the Hungarian Mihály Munkácsy (1844-1900), in the New York Public Library.</span></span><span style="color: #444444; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
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<span style="color: #444444; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-19104347654604091212016-10-13T10:23:00.000-04:002017-12-07T12:57:49.693-05:00 Limerick for the English Pastoral <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Author Uncertain</span><div>
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<b><span style="color: #38761d;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">The Dean’s
son, Nathaniel Clover<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: #38761d;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Once bowled
seven no-balls in an over<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: #38761d;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Which had
never been done<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: #38761d;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">By a
clergyman’s son<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="color: #38761d;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">On a Tuesday
in August at Dover</span></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The form is Edward Lear, the tone A.A. Milne, the title my invention, the author reputedly Clement Freud, though this is probably either apocryphal or wishful-thinking on his part – it ought to have been written by Bill Frindle or Henry Blofeld, but I don't suppose it was. Could there, however, be a more succinct and complete description of that certain-type-of-Englishman, Larkin with his bicycle clips, Betjeman with his train-spotting manual – the quirky obsessiveness, the clerkish idealism, the self-mockery that isn't really self-mockery at all, the victory at Waterloo inspired by House Sport at Eton, the memorialisation of failure as though, like Dunkerque, it had actually been some kind of triumph. <br /><br />The poem has never appeared in print, so far as I am aware. It may be read, however, on the website of the England cricket team, which one day will hopefully be www… , a rather better scorecard than Nathaniel Clover's - I leave it to those of you who do understand these things to explain the subtlety of the above to those who don't.<br /><br />The illustrations are, top, The Close at Clifton College in Bristol, made famous by Henry Newbolt in a poem you will find on another page of this book - click <a href="http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/foul-play-at-vitai-lampida.html" target="_blank">here</a> - though in fact it wasn't really Newbolt who made The Close famous, but rather W.G. Grace, cricketer extraordinaire, whose portrait is in the illustation on the right.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As to the presence of these poems in a serious anthology, let me just say that I take everything in life extremely seriously, not least the need for mockery, including self-mockery, and a good deal of irreverence, satire and iconoclasm. This page is my contribution to that genre.</span></div>
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David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-85821351276706130532016-10-13T10:06:00.000-04:002017-12-08T07:13:32.958-05:00Bloomsday Sermon, June 16th 2004<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: #444444;">It was, I have to confess, somewhat surprising, to be invited as the Head of Synagogue to deliver a sermon in the school's Christian chapel, but then Clifton always was a radical institution, and a sermon by someone on the centenary of Bloomsday did make perfect educational sense. I would have preferred to keep it entirely secular, but Joyce’s own texts dis-enable that, and… but you can judge the final paragraph for yourself. This is what I read, and said (and then, if you want the source of the aesthetic theory, go to <a href="http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/the-quidditas-of-esthetics.html" target="_blank">The Quidditas of Esthetics</a>, elsewhere on this blog):</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #444444;"><b><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">
STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of
lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown,
ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. <o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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He held the bowl aloft and intoned:<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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“Introibo ad altare Dei.”
Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #444444;"><b><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">
“Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful Jesuit!”<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about
and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding country and the
awaking mountains. Then, catching sight
of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air,
gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and
sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking
gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light
untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak. Buck Mulligan peeped an
instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly.<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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“Back to barracks”, he said sternly.<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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He added in a preacher’s tone:<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #444444;"><b><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">
“For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine christine: body and soul and
blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little
trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.” He peered sideways up and
gave a long slow whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his
even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. “Chrysostomos.”<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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Two strong shrill whistles answered through the calm.<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #444444;"><b><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">
“Thanks, old chap”, he cried briskly. “That will do nicely. Switch off
the current, will you?”<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #444444;"><b><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">
He skipped off the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering
about his legs the loose folds of his gown. The plump shadowed face and sullen
oval jowl recalled a prelate, patron of arts in the middle ages. A pleasant
smile broke quietly over his lips.<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #444444;"><b><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">
“The mockery of it!” he said gaily. “Your absurd name, an ancient
Greek!”<o:p></o:p></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /> The opening fragment of James Joyce's novel "Ulysses", set in Dublin on a single day, June 16<span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span> 1904 – one hundred years ago today precisely. It tells the story of Stephen Dedalus, based somewhat on Joyce himself, a modern-day Telemachus searching for his father Ulysses, and finding him in Leopold Bloom, who is himself returning to his Penelope in Ithaca at the end of his personal quest. But the story of the novel is its least significant dimension…<br /><br /> Joyce used an immensely complex schema for the novel. First, he wished to parallel Homer's original, and so divided the novel into fragments that echoed the Homeric tales of Telemachus, Nestor, Proteus, Calypso and the rest. Each scene is fixed at a precise moment of the day, allowing Joyce to follow his characters on an epic journey that lasts precisely a single day, the day still known as Bloomsday, June 16<span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span>, 1904. Each scene carried an anatomical leitmotif: the kidney, the heart, the liver. Each scene also reflected an area of mental activity: theology, botany, art, mechanics. Each scene had an associated colour, and an associated symbol such as the horse for Nestor or the tide for Proteus. All of this established both the incidents in the scene, and the poetic language, often highly experimental, through which Joyce could explore the psychology of his characters, something that no one had ever done in literature before, though it had been explored in musical composition, by Bach in a number of his fugues for example, and by Robert Schumann in his <a href="https://davidprashkersbookofdays.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/october-27.html" target="_blank">F.A.E. Sonata</a>, where the names of musical notes were also made to stand for letters of the alphabet. This complex schema makes the language of Ulysses so rich and multi-textured that at times it is hard to say that it is still prose and has not in fact become transmuted into poetry.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But far more significant than any of this was the variation scene by scene of the literary techniques employed. Like </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Cézanne's great paintings of Mont St Victoire, where the same scene is painted again and again on the same canvas, but a few hours or a few metres apart, in order to demonstrate the impact of minute changes of light or perspective, so Joyce approached his novel from a multitude of different points of view. What he understood, and he was probably the first serious writer to understand this, is that we use language very differently in very different contexts, and thereby shift our meanings. A third-person narrative recounts a story from the outside and can attempt to be objective; a first-person monologue recounts a story from the inside and must of necessity be subjective. A dialogue without narrative gives only the words spoken, devoid of authorial interjection. A comic scene epiphanises different aspects of the human character than does a dramatic one, though it may be the same scene that is epiphanised. So each episode is recounted in a different mode, or different voice, sometimes seen from Dedalus' perspective, sometimes from Poldy Bloom's, and in the famous final chapter through a stream of consciousness form that allows the private erotic thoughts of Bloom's wife Molly to achieve an extraordinarily lucid articulation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">There are those who would call Joyce's "Ulysses" the greatest novel in the English language. Others detest it, and with equal fervour. What I would say is that it is, without doubt, the second most challenging novel in the English language – Joyce's next work, "Finnegan’s Wake", taking first place on that list. As someone who loves books, and reads voraciously, I am deeply disappointed, again and again, to find so many of our writers turning out the same old anagrams of the same old plot and characters and themes, using the same old, boring, conventional narrative techniques. It seems to me that, if you want to be a great painter, you have to take on board what Picasso and Matisse have done to change that art, just as a great composer cannot ignore Mahler or Schoenberg or Stravinsky. Yet other than a very small band of disciples, Nabokov and Samuel Beckett in particular, to a lesser degree William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, all our contemporary writers wilfully ignore Joyce, preferring to act as though he simply never happened. Joyce is a huge challenge to any reader, and an even greater challenge to a writer. But culture becomes static and sterile if it does not grow, or if a growing stem is left un-nurtured. I would suggest that Joyce is the greatest flowering stem of modern English literature, and that it is our duty to nurture him. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath deliberately chose Bloomsday to get married. Fans of Joyce have celebrated Bloomsday for a hundred years, and in Dublin, the city which is really the central character of the novel Ulysses, this centenary year has been marked with a Joyce festival lasting no less than five whole months. Even if this is all we do at Clifton, there is no reason for any of you to miss out on Joyce and "Ulysses" in future, and you can tell your grand-children that you participated in the centenary celebrations of one of the world's great works of literature.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In the final chapter of a previous novel, "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", Joyce involved Stephen Dedalus in a long debate about aesthetics. His tutor puts to him Aquinas' proposition that "pulchra sunt quae visa placent - beauty is in the eye of the beholder" - and says to him: "You are an artist, are you not, Mr Dedalus? The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is, is another question." Dedalus, or rather Joyce, replies that: "Plato, I believe, said that beauty is the splendour of truth. I don't think that it has a meaning, but the true and the beautiful are akin. Truth is beheld by the intellect which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible; beauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible. The first step in the direction of truth is to understand the frame and scope of the intellect itself, to comprehend the act itself of intellection. The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of aesthetic apprehension."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It seems to me that this not only sums up the achievement of Joyc's "Ulysses", but also the whole purpose of education and of culture. It presents a challenge to every one of you gathered here today, and I wish you every success if you dare to take on that challenge.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Let us pray: If beauty is indeed the splendour of truth, may each of us receive a portion of that beauty, and that splendour, and that truth. May our imaginations and our intellects be nurtured until they are fully ripe, and may each of us understand the frame and scope of the intellect and the imagination, so that we may climb the ladder of the human soul, and reach its summit. Amen. </span><br />
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David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-24227300047904983402016-10-13T08:32:00.000-04:002017-12-08T09:17:10.416-05:00The Stars<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: -16.65pt; margin-top: 0cm;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkr7XgunM53kmBBOVCCwwdMfcFrzEgD2Lw0mY8Gxb-I6QBWqH01y45Z0DGmND4eBw-LFv8Puaa7NEm3Dy69NCJejGnup6hj6301x3pFPtgYjLyneUkimU5unSCJGLtW6LpbMDoYaldUbE/s1600/Passamaquoddy+Indians+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkr7XgunM53kmBBOVCCwwdMfcFrzEgD2Lw0mY8Gxb-I6QBWqH01y45Z0DGmND4eBw-LFv8Puaa7NEm3Dy69NCJejGnup6hj6301x3pFPtgYjLyneUkimU5unSCJGLtW6LpbMDoYaldUbE/s320/Passamaquoddy+Indians+1.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">From the </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Songs of the </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://exequy.wordpress.com/2011/09/14/passamaquoddy/">Passamaquoddy Indians</a><br /></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For we are the stars. For we sing.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For we sing with our light.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For we are birds made of fire.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For we spread our wings over the sky.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Our light is a voice.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We cut a road for the soul</span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">for its journey through death.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For three of our number are hunters.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For these three hunt a bear.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For there never yet was a time</span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">when these three did not hunt.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For we face the hills with disdain.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This is a song of the stars.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggmKudb9R4qhGw8ywHmRdrdDQ-_sfIFiv1Pr563_LvHo7xq0O7iHLcGbT_azjs5rHXukGFoAizL_KqDIv5Ty9PVRHbNBy3ifH6DQ7iH6aaT4MKTNG2OgU9x0PazOprQysII6Jt_d6-L8I/s1600/Passamaquoddy+Indians+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="317" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggmKudb9R4qhGw8ywHmRdrdDQ-_sfIFiv1Pr563_LvHo7xq0O7iHLcGbT_azjs5rHXukGFoAizL_KqDIv5Ty9PVRHbNBy3ifH6DQ7iH6aaT4MKTNG2OgU9x0PazOprQysII6Jt_d6-L8I/s320/Passamaquoddy+Indians+2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> I do not know why I like this poem.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"> I do not know what
to say <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"> about this poem. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> Is it conceivable
that, had it been written by Davie,</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"> or Macniece, <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"> by Patten, <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"> or Ginsburg <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"> by a minor modern,
that is – <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"> rather than by an
anonymous ancient </span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"> of the Passamaquoddy Indians of Canada, <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"> that then I would have
passed it over </span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"> for inclusion in this blog? <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; text-align: justify;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; text-align: justify;"> Then are
aesthetics, too, </span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; text-align: justify;"> subject to snobberies, </span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; text-align: justify;"> even to inverted snobberies?</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "baskerville old face" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
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David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-59347134681114786732016-10-13T06:49:00.000-04:002017-12-09T07:08:09.417-05:00Welsh Landscape - R.S. Thomas<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH-MxaCkmMxklJ0pon7qd3w_w5p37mVzBsg2va11FKvFOsTQvN1EgC13HALC83-7PAt-dbIeWTPdapyfFW_b8irvLBkrsdy6Ah3F86KSAgJv9QQySCLEiG63-Qt2DdOroJPLJBMit-scw/s1600/Welsh+Landscape.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="259" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH-MxaCkmMxklJ0pon7qd3w_w5p37mVzBsg2va11FKvFOsTQvN1EgC13HALC83-7PAt-dbIeWTPdapyfFW_b8irvLBkrsdy6Ah3F86KSAgJv9QQySCLEiG63-Qt2DdOroJPLJBMit-scw/s320/Welsh+Landscape.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "nyala"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: purple;"><br /></span></span></div>
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /> To live in Wales is to be conscious</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>At dusk of the spilled blood</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>That went to the making of the wild sky,</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>Dyeing the immaculate rivers</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>In all their courses.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>It is to be aware,</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>Above the noisy tractor</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>And hum of the machine</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>Of strife in the strung woods,</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>Vibrant with sped arrows.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>You cannot live in the present,</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>At least not in Wales.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>There is the language for instance,</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>The soft consonants</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>Strange to the ear.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>There are cries in the dark at night</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>As owls answer the moon,</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>And thick ambush of shadows,</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>Hushed at the fields’ corners.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>There is no present in Wales,</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>And no future;</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>There is only the past,</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>Brittle with relics,</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>Wind-bitten towers and castles</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>With sham ghosts;</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>Mouldering quarries and mines;</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>And an impotent people,</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>Sick with inbreeding,</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span>Worrying the carcase of an old song.</span></span><span style="color: #444444; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />This, certainly, is my Wales, the one that loomed steep and dark and lyrical through the mists along the Severn estuary, the humbled Celtic land viewed from my own Celtic Somerset where I spent a dozen years: outsider looking upon outsider. And this the poem, more than any other, that induced me to write my own "<a href="http://davidprashkerssongsandpoems.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/a-song-in-welsh.html">A Song In Welsh</a>".<br /><br />As I wrote there, to the ancient Saxons, Wales (pronounced Wa-lès) literally meant "outsider", or "foreigner", as Habiru – Hebrew - did in ancient Egypt; a term of derogation, of ostracism; a sending away to the margins of what is no longer your own country. Thomas nonetheless is wrong (and in truth he knows it): there is a present in Wales, but it is an English present, or Anglo-Saxon anyway, of industrialised farmers and unemployed miners, of dark satanic mills imposed on green and pleasant land, of the tolling and tolling of the sad bells of Rhymney, their peals arranged in London, not Caer Dyff. <br /><br />But even this is not the real tragedy of Cymru (though it is also the same tragedy as the one in Catalunia, the Basque regions of France and Spain, Brittany, Palestine, Crimea, Kurdestan, and rather more non-countries in the world than you might even be aware of, but all of whom are listed <a href="http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/catalonia.html" target="_blank">here</a>); rather it is that a man like Thomas, steeped in the Welsh language, steeped in history, culture, tradition, that a patriot like Thomas, whose voice, whose landscape, whose lexicon, whose characters and melodies, whose very punctuation describes a Welsh lilt, that such a man should be reduced to the pathetic bitterness of writing those last three lines in English.<br /><br /><br /></span>You can find David Prashker at:<br />
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David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-41951820120751857882016-10-13T06:32:00.001-04:002018-01-01T09:36:31.461-05:00The Madman<br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Friedrich Nietzsche<br /><br /><span style="color: #444444;">(From: "The Gay Science")</span></span><i><span style="font-family: "nyala"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="color: #444444;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></i><br />
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market-place, and cried incessantly: “I am looking for God! I am looking for God!” – As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there he excited considerable laughter. “Have you lost him then?” said one. “Did he lose his way like a child?” said another. “Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Or emigrated?” – thus they shouted and laughed. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances. “Where has God gone?” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him – you and I. We are all his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is more and more night not coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? – gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives – who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed – and whoever shall be born after us, for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto…</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In Auschwitz, where they recognised that the smell of burned and decomposing flesh was actually the corpse of God, there were many who answered Nietzsche's question precisely by kneeling on the dirt and asking God for guidance nonetheless. Absurd? And yet he gave them answers (see <a href="http://davidprashkersbookofdays.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/october-28.html">October 28</a> in "The Book of Days"). In Auschwitz, where they recognised that the smell of burned and decomposing flesh was truly just the corpse of Man (can one use the phrase "truly just" in a sentence such as this one? nothing in the whole of human history was ever more "truly unjust"), there were many who answered Nietzsche's question by putting God on trial, and finding him guilty of both indifference and suicide, and sentencing him as a punishment for this most heinous crime – to eternal life. (Ah, paradoxes! Don't we humans just love our paradoxes!)</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Beyond argument (nothing is beyond argument – and yet the phrase is apt), this passage of Nietzsche's is the most cataclysmic in all modern prose: the annunciation of the tearing of the Veil, the blowing of the ram's horn to declare the alarum for the apocalypse, and circumambulate his Black Rock backwards, in order to disintegrate him like a <a href="http://davidprashkersbookofdays.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/september-17.html">Golem</a>. Yet nowhere is it stated, nowhere is it affirmed, that God is truly dead (indeed, He is self-evidently alive and well and living in these sentences - both the ones I am writing here, and the judicial one, passed by the heirs of Nietzsche). <br /><br /> So many paradoxes (so many necessary parentheses)! And questions – vast, rhetorical questions. Were there ever more rhetorical questions asked in a single breath? Was there ever written a greater, a more extraordinary example, of rhetoric, and hyperbole, than this? But for all my irony, the questions, like the paradoxes, are truly momentous and monumental. How do we live our daily lives, how do we distinguish good from evil, how do we construct a civilisation, if the bulb and the battery have been taken from the torch, and yet we still expect, nay demand, eternal light? Nietzsche was the midwife at the birth of modern Man, an induced delivery by forceps and without benefit of epidural; and what came out of the womb was monstrous – another Golem, this one an anti-Christ; Lucifer's talons, fangs and wings were all in evidence, as well as the impudence and arrogance, the unyielding mind, the rabid rage for destruction, the sarcasm and cynicism, the impious laugh.</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI9CI2BJPfmB4sWRecy6R6uwppmQl4PVGnO5rTVorpc6Q-0yLgr0oSCugXX9AWswShNKtplncIC0cOqFIz9AQYZpd4XFCgaJudxOlTbRvlX8oFVuvHgafjviMSSNa814AOed4sN6q8Po0/s1600/Kazantzakis.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="149" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI9CI2BJPfmB4sWRecy6R6uwppmQl4PVGnO5rTVorpc6Q-0yLgr0oSCugXX9AWswShNKtplncIC0cOqFIz9AQYZpd4XFCgaJudxOlTbRvlX8oFVuvHgafjviMSSNa814AOed4sN6q8Po0/s320/Kazantzakis.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">These latter words are not mine (though I added the Golem); they belong to Nikos Kazantzakis, the greatest of modern Greek writers, both in <a href="http://www.helleniccomserve.com/demotic.html">Katharevousa</a> – high Greek – and in demotic, the colloquial. Kazantzakis speaks in his "<a href="http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Report-to-Greco/Nikos-Kazantzakis/9781476706863">Report To Greco</a>" of his first encounter with the Übermensch: </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">"His impetuosity and pride swept me off my feet, the danger intoxicated me, and I plunged into his work with fright and longing, as though entering a bustling jungle full of famished beasts and dizzying orchids. Each day I could not wait for my classes at the Sorbonne to end and night to fall. I longed to go home and have the landlady come and light the fire so that I could open his books – they were all piled high on my desk – and begin to share his struggle. I had grown accustomed little by little to his voice, his halting breath, his cries of pain. I had not known – only now was I discovering this – that the anti-Christ struggles and suffers just as Christ does and that sometimes, in their moments of distress, their faces look the same...</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">"His pronouncements struck me as impious blasphemies, his Übermensch as the assassin of God. This rebel had a mysterious fascination, however. His words were a seductive spell which dizzied and intoxicated; they made your heart dance. Truly, his thought was a Dionysiacal dance; an erected paean raised triumphantly at the most hopeless moment of the human and superhuman tragedy. In spite of myself, I admired his affliction, mettle, and purity, as well as the drops of blood which bespattered his brow as though he too, the anti-Christ, were wearing a crown of thorns."</span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /><br />The story of Kazantzakis' Orphean journey through the thought of Nietzsche is as powerful as any physical epic of the heroes, worthy of adding to this collection both as personal voyage of discovery and as the best brief explication of the Übermensch philosophy that you will read. At its end, before rejecting the philosophy as "just another paradise, another mirage to deceive poor unfortunate Man and enable him to endure life and death", he raises "three cheers for Nietzsche, the murderer of God" and poses one final, rhetorical question of his own, a challenge gauntleted to each of us: "Would I, I wondered, ever be able to confront the abyss with this tranquil, untrembling glance?"<br /><br />Would any of us?</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: blue;">Friedrich Nietzsche's "The Gay Science" is published by Penguin Classics; "Report To Greco" by Nikos Kazantsakis is published, in English translation, by Simon and Schuster. </span><br />
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David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-24864318268656031792016-10-13T05:58:00.000-04:002017-12-11T09:47:45.408-05:00Psalm 121<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Attributed to King David</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I lift up mine eyes unto the hills,<br />from whence cometh my help.<br /><br />My help cometh from the Lord,<br />which made heaven and earth.<br /><br />He will not suffer thy foot to be moved:<br />he that keepeth thee will not slumber.<br /><br />Behold, he that keepeth Israel<br />shall neither slumber nor sleep.<br /><br />The Lord is thy keeper:<br />the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.<br /><br />The sun shall not smite thee by day,<br />nor the moon by night.<br /><br />The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil:<br />he shall preserve thy soul.<br /><br />The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in<br />from this time forth, and evermore</span></span></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Modern versions of the Psalms-in-English have a tendency to transform into unrhythmic and unscanned prose what, in the original, was intended to be sung, with musical accompaniment. Not so the King James, which manages to achieve the literary impossible – not simply to translate successfully a great work of literature, but to create a new work which is itself a literary masterpiece. Modern versions may be closer to the authentic meaning, may obtain greater accuracy, but to those brought up on the King James they read nonetheless like modern "translations" of Chaucer or Shakespeare. Somehow the archaisms, the obsolescences, the anachronisms, are fitting; after all, these are ancient scriptures, quilled on cow-hide or scratched with a stylus onto wax tablet, something in the range of three thousand years ago.</span><br />
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">שִׁיר לַמַּעֲלוֹת</span></div>
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">אֶשָּׂא עֵינַי אֶל-הֶהָרִים מֵאַיִן יָבֹא עֶזְרִי</span></div>
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עֶזְרִי מֵעִם יְהוָה עֹשֵׂה שָׁמַיִם וָאָרֶץ</div>
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אַל-יִתֵּן לַמּוֹט רַגְלֶךָ אַל-יָנוּם שֹׁמְרֶךָ</div>
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הִנֵּה לֹא-יָנוּם וְלֹא יִישָׁן שׁוֹמֵר יִשְׂרָאֵל</div>
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יְהוָה שֹׁמְרֶךָ יְהוָה צִלְּךָ עַל-יַד יְמִינֶךָ</div>
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יוֹמָם הַשֶּׁמֶשׁ לֹא-יַכֶּכָּה וְיָרֵחַ בַּלָּיְלָה</div>
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יְהוָה יִשְׁמָרְךָ מִכָּל-רָע יִשְׁמֹר אֶת-נַפְשֶׁךָ</div>
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יְהוָה יִשְׁמָר-צֵאתְךָ וּבוֹאֶךָ מֵעַתָּה וְעַד-עוֹלָם</div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What King James does not manage, however, and I have yet to find any modern version which manages it either, is to retain the formal structure of the original. In translating an Italian Sonnet, would it not be automatic to retain the fourteen lines, the rhyming scheme, the use of the iambic pentameter? Where, then, are the echo-lines, the couplets, the parallelisms? In the version printed here, I have loosely restored them, while still keeping the text of the King James. Do I sense another task for my old age coming on?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Running my own synagogue for many years, I have found many an appropriate occasion to recite this particular Psalm. On the day that I am writing these lines – April 22<span style="font-size: x-small;">nd</span> 1994 – the first free elections are taking place in South Africa, a country, and a cause, close to my heart since I first travelled there sixteen years ago. At the end of shacharit this morning, after a brief sermon from the amud on the background to the elections, I recited this Psalm again, and discovered once again how, given a modern context, these ancient hymns can still reduce a man, a congregation, to tears.<br /><br />It comes, this Psalm, from a collection (numbers 120-134) believed to have been sung by pilgrims en route to the Temple in Jerusalem for the "regalim", the three harvest festivals of Pesach (Passover), Shavu'ot (Pentecost) and Succot (Tabernacles). Its attribution to King David is certainly apocryphal. The title of the collection is Shirey Ma'alot, Songs of Ascent – the going-up to Jerusalem echoed grammatically in the word Aliyah, which is both emigration to the State of Israel and also the going up to the altar in the Temple, or the amud, the reading-desk, in any synagogue, anywhere in the world.<br /></span></div>
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David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-91673146249928867662015-12-18T18:19:00.000-05:002017-12-11T11:40:54.980-05:00Don Quijote In America<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Christmas 2015, and the Mindbenders Book Club in San Francisco is wrapping up its year of only reading the very best literature from around the world; a book a month, and then one major piece for which the entire year is granted as time to complete it. Calvino and Kafka, Marquez and Nabokov, Joyce and Melville for the monthly reads, but tonight it's time to wrap up Cervantes' "Don Quijote", or "Quixote" in the Anglo-American spelling. <br /><br />We are struggling with the multitudes of translations, and it is not primarily those into the English of the Victorian age or 1990s America, but the ones into the remarkably different languages of the several Spanish speakers in the room, two of whom are not native Spaniards but learned the language in the mother country, one of whom is of indigenous El Salvadorian blood and prefers Creole to the Classical lingo of the conqueror and occupier, a fourth is a Venezuelan who regards all other forms of Spanish as anachronistic and incorrect, the fifth an Argentine who has to use the dictionary to learn the meanings of many of Cervantes' neologisms - so no surprise when our conversation turns to Borges, and we begin to understand why he wrote "<a href="http://hispanlit.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2011/06/Borges-Pierre-Menard.pdf" target="_blank">Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote</a>", a fictional tale which brilliantly sums up the entirety of post-modernist and structuralist academic theorising and criticism in just eight pages. Every book is different for every reader in every language and at every point of history; but perhaps few are quite so universally different as this one.<br /><br />So we return to the English translations, all of which likwise transform the novel into something very different again that may not always be what Cervantes intended (not that we know any longer what it was that Cervantes did intend). The Victorian translation presents a rather seriously-minded tale about a delusionary Romantic who learns the hard way. The 1990s version clearly spent too many hours absorbed by Monty Python, and sees Quixote as a Spanish equivalent of "Life of Brian" - a satire on absolutely everything, but especially on the ideals and values that those who occupy the moral high ground like to proclaim, while never actually attempting to live them by example; Quixote sets out to be that example, and his tale is the inexorable consequence: Candide on horseback. The recent American version simply doesn't get the Quijote at all, because it doesn't understand that Spanish culture in Cervantes' time was a very recent emergence from seven hundred years of Islam, but with the Spanish Inquisition in brutal charge of the process of emergence; even more significantly, Americans really don't get satire. I had anticipated this, and had prepared a "treatment" for a late 20<span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span> century American retort to Cervantes, which I entitled "Don Quijote in America".</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> I imagine Don Quixote Jnr III, grandson of illegal Mexican immigrants who wet-backed into Texas with their extended family when no one was paying attention during World War Two, and made his way to New York where, despite being deaf in one ear, Miguel's father, Rodrigo, earned his living as a barber-surgeon, setting bones, performing bloodlettings, and attending "lesser medical needs", when not simply cutting hair. Don, or Donald as he always insisted, was born on September 29th 1947<sup>[1]</sup>, and grew up in the 1950s, a total believer in that wonderful chivalric romanticism The Great American Dream.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /> In the late 1960s, accompanied by his dad’s former houseboy Sancho Panza, Donald headed across America on a retired Greyhound Bus operated by the Rocinante Bus Company, aiming for the West Coast but travelling via the Deep South, in search of fame and fortune and freedom in the land of opportunity. After spending several months serving Walburgers in the bad end of West Baltimore, he was forced out of his zero-hours contract by a gang-leader who didn’t know that Black Lives Matter and thought that Mexicans and Blacks were just the same; then spent three months in jail trying to prove he wasn’t an Islamic Radical sympathiser just because he was wearing a PLO head-scarf and read poetry by Hafiz. Three months as toilet attendant in a tourist restaurant on a former cotton plantation outside Charleston ended when he was caught reading Mark Twain during the lunch break that his contract didn’t actually permit, and he was then chased out of town by the Ku Klux Klan for daring to assert his rights as an “honorary black man”. His last job was in a wind-farm in the Yosemete mountains that unfortunately burned to the ground in the annual fires.<br /><br /> While Sancho busked Bob Dylan protest songs, and was beaten to death by a group of Christian evangelists when he tried to take his pregnant girlfriend to an abortion clinic, Donald attempted to gain an education by reading Thoreau, Emerson and Walt Whitman, but was still turned down from every university to which he applied on the grounds that they needed quarterbacks and golfers, not poets and scholars. He spent the last of the '60s and early '70s as a draft-dodger in Canada, worked as a bouncer in a brothel in Nevada for several years, before landing the plum job of PR consultant to an art-house production company in the San Fernando valley, whose high quality “love-interest and intimate human relationships” movies, as he re-branded them, profited to the tune of $60 billion dollars within three years, enabling the company to use the techniques of the leveraged buy-out to acquire the entire means of distribution for all the products in the world, and to furlough Don as a way of avoiding paying him the six months’ severage to which he was entitled.<br /><br /> Still believing in The American Dream, and planning to vote for Donald Trump, Don Quixote Jnr III was last heard of, homeless and penniless, sleeping in an Afghan rug on a bench outside the Shattuck Cinema in Berkeley, where a festival of Disney movies, accompanied by a biopic of the Founding Fathers and an anime version of the Bill of Rights, is in the planning. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: blue;"><sup>[1]</sup> the 500th anniversary of Cervantes’ birth</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It is by no means obvious to me how to translate my version either into Classical Spanish or El Salvadorean Creole, and in the current political climate I wouldn't even dare to try the Venezuelan dialect.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">You will find a very different take on Don Quijote, or Quixote if you prefer, by clicking <a href="http://davidprashkersbookofdays.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/june-27.html">here</a></span><br />
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David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-31109766484017353602014-09-11T12:31:00.006-04:002017-12-12T06:55:06.349-05:00Lament of the Farm-Wife of Wu<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPyluw6Pw0ktUdwwUxqMRMD_uJZOQMNIKIfL9inOFoxsp91bcnlom-qbaXjGcU7uJpqdv6SyfyWJ0JuLNUMp41pacTjj7beD_JqgXzxM9smBDmba92EU8cQ2RYhcviDmTabwWRNB2FNqM/s1600/Su+Tung+Po.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPyluw6Pw0ktUdwwUxqMRMD_uJZOQMNIKIfL9inOFoxsp91bcnlom-qbaXjGcU7uJpqdv6SyfyWJ0JuLNUMp41pacTjj7beD_JqgXzxM9smBDmba92EU8cQ2RYhcviDmTabwWRNB2FNqM/s1600/Su+Tung+Po.png" width="136" /></a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Su Tung P'o</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Which in today's Chinese would be pronounced Soo Doong Bo, in the same way that Pekin has become Bei-jing and feudal totalitarianism has become... feudal totalitarianism, but under a different name. "The Lament of the Farm-Wife of Wu" could be written in any province of contemporary China, though unlike in Su Tung P'o's time it is unlikely that the Communist authorities would allow it to be published (see the final paragraph of this blog and my page on China in <a href="http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/china.html" target="_blank">TheWorldHourglass</a>) and probably today's Farm-Wife would end up as a despised migrant worker in the shanty-suburbs of Mei-shan rather than as a suicide in the local stream, though these two fates are not that easy to distinguish either.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">We are all raised in the canons of our native literature, not much encouraged in schools to look beyond the geographical boundaries, and even less encouraged by publishers, unless they can see a greater profit in old-and-foreign literature than in the novelties of today in our own tongue. What a vast gap that leaves in our knowledge of the world. And who would think of travelling in literature while also travelling to beaches, churches, art galleries, museums? Read Marquez next time you are resting on the beach at Cartagena, after a day's snorkelling among the coral of Las Islas de Rosarios; or Thomas Mann in Venice; Kafka on a long-weekend in Prague; Jane Austen in a Bath café; or Chinese poetry, which is some of the finest in the world, while waiting for your take-away on Spadina Avenue.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Su Tung P'o, who was also called Su Shih (no connection with Japanese raw fish), was born in Sichuan province in 1036, designed the parks that surround Lake Si in Hangzhou, practiced Buddhism in poetry as well as life, witnessed the reigns of five emperors, and rose to the rank of President of the Board of Rites, giving him authority over all imperial ceremonies and acts of worship; roughly the equivalent of Biblical Joseph in Egypt, though there is no record of Joseph writing poetry. The portrait of him was painted two hundred years after his death, by Zhao Mengfu, the man whose name was later given to a volcanic crater on the planet Mercury, though why is not something I am able to explain. <br /><br /> The translations below are by Burton Watson in "</span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Poems-Su-Tung-Po/dp/1556590644"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">S</span></a><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Poems-Su-Tung-Po/dp/1556590644"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">elected Poems of Su Tung-P'o</span></a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">".</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">I Travel Day and Night</span><span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /><br />Past the places<br />where the Ying river<br />enters the Huai<br />and for the first time<br />saw the mountains along the Huai.<br />Today we reached Shou-chou.<br /><br />I travel day and night towards the Yangtze and the sea.<br />Maple leaves, red flowers - Fall has endless sights.<br />On the broad Huai I cannot tell if the sky is near or far;<br />green hills keep rising and falling with the boat.<br />Shou-chou - already I see the white stone pagoda,<br />though short oars have not brought us around Yellow Grass Hill.<br />Waves calm, wind mild - I look for the landing.<br />My friends have stood a long time in the twilight mist.<br /></span><span style="color: #38761d; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Spring Night</span><span style="color: #38761d; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /><br />Spring night - one hour worth a thousand gold coins;<br />clear scent of flowers, shadowy moon.<br />Songs and flutes upstairs - threads of sound;<br />in the garden, a swing, where night is deep and still.</span><span style="color: blue; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br />Lament of the Farm-Wife of Wu</span><span style="color: blue; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /><br />Rice this year ripens so late!<br />We watch, but when will frost winds come?<br />They come - with rain in bucketfuls;<br />the harrow sprouts mud, the sickle rusts.<br />My tears area ll cried out, but rain never ends;<br />it hurts to see the yellow stalks flattened in mud.<br />We camped in a grass shelter a month by the fields;<br />then it cleared and we reaped the grain, followed the wagon home,<br />sweaty, shoulders sore, casting it to town -<br />the price it fetched, you would think we came with chaff.<br />We sold the ox to pay taxes, broke up the roof for kindling;<br />we'll get by for the time, but what of next year's hunger?<br />Officials demand cash now - they won't take grain;<br />the long northwest border tempts invaders.<br />Wise men fill the court - why do things get worse?<br />I would be better off a bride to the River Lord.</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br />Sadly I can't find a copy in Chinese of the Lament; instead, because one has to see this poetry in its Chinese characters, "</span><a href="http://www.nigensha.co.jp/kokyu/en/c12.html"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">On Cold Meal at Huang-chou</span></a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">", a poem written after his banishment for taking the wrong side in a political dispute.</span><br />
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David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-1461801415298169942014-09-09T17:20:00.000-04:002017-12-12T13:08:21.700-05:00Epigrams<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Ralph Waldo Emerson </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">There are writers who one knows one ought to read, and tries, eventually, but somehow they remain unreadable. Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of these: transcendental poet (the term itself is sufficient to put one off), essayist (who reads essays anyway, unless teachers who are forced to mark them?), poet of Nature ("In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes, I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods" - O spare me, please, the constant harvesting of nature images, the drowning-flood of reiterations of the pathetic fallacy), and virtual inventor of the self-help manual... </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br />But wait, was it not Emerson who described, in precisely that self-help manual, "Self-Reliance", "the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his or her own instincts and ideas" (so Wikipedia tells me, and Wikipedia is never wrong)?<br /><br /> Then maybe, maybe there is another kind of writer, heir and disciple of Pascal ("Pensées"), <a href="http://davidprashkersbookofdays.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/january-18.html">Montesquieu</a>, <a href="http://davidprashkersbookofdays.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=La+Rochefoucauld">La Rochefoucauld</a>, writers like Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, whose works one does not need to read, because their genius does not lie in the totality of their writings, but only in their epigrams. Have I just invented, or discovered, a new genre?<br /><br />In the opening paragraph I wrote that Emerson "was" one of those writers I had realised I would never read. But then, in 2012, I found myself teaching AP American Literature in a Baltimore high school, helping some 11<span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span> graders get the 2-year course done in a single year because the school was closing. Emerson was on the list of examined writers - poems (<a href="https://www.shmoop.com/ralph-waldo-emerson/">here</a> and <a href="https://www.enotes.com/topics/ralph-waldo-emerson/critical-essays/analysis-1">here</a>), the Nature essays (<a href="https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/t/thoreau-emerson-and-transcendentalism/emersons-nature/summary-and-analysis">here</a>), and of course the Concord Hymn (<a href="http://education.seattlepi.com/poem-concord-hymn-talking-about-5022.html">here</a>), the one he wrote for the ribbon-cutting ceremony in his home-town on July 4<span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span> 1837, for the Concord Monument, the obselisk commemorating the battle there, regarded as the "second shot" in the War of Independence, and therefore studied alongside Longfellow's account of the "first shot", in "<a href="http://davidprashkersbookofdays.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/april-18.html">Paul Revere's Ride</a>". <br /><br /> Most of his "stuff" (student slang for "literary oeuvre") was way too "boring" (a high school euphemism for "challenging") for these students, who were trained to study examiners' rubrics in detail, in order to know where to look in Shmoop or Cliff's Notes for the minutiae for their essays, and rarely read the actual books at all, which is unnecessary in the epoch of the Internet. So I made the wall-poster that is reprinted at the top of this page*. So I found some recordings of actors reading his translations from the Persian Hafiz, and put them on as background music while the students constructed their A-grade essays without ever so much as opening a book.</span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">* limited space obliged me to leave two of my favourites off that wall-poster, but plenty of room to restore them here:-</span><br /></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="macro"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="toa heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="10" QFormat="true" Name="Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Closing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Signature"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Default Paragraph Font"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Message Header"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="11" QFormat="true" Name="Subtitle"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Salutation"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Date"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text First Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text First Indent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Block Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Hyperlink"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="FollowedHyperlink"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="22" QFormat="true" Name="Strong"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="20" QFormat="true" Name="Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Document Map"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Plain Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="E-mail Signature"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Top of Form"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Bottom of Form"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal (Web)"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Acronym"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Address"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Cite"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Code"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Definition"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Keyboard"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Preformatted"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Sample"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Typewriter"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Variable"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal Table"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="annotation subject"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="No List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Contemporary"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Elegant"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Professional"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Subtle 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Subtle 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Balloon Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="Table Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Theme"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Placeholder Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" QFormat="true" Name="No Spacing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Revision"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="34" QFormat="true"
Name="List Paragraph"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="29" QFormat="true" Name="Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="30" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="19" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="21" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="31" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="32" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="33" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="37" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Bibliography"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="TOC Heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="41" Name="Plain Table 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="42" Name="Plain Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="43" Name="Plain Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="44" Name="Plain Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="45" Name="Plain Table 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="40" Name="Grid Table Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="Grid Table 1 Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="List Table 1 Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4"/>
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<span style="color: purple;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="color: blue;"> Every word was once a poem. </span></span></span><br />
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</span>David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-78626338185387091722014-09-09T16:25:00.000-04:002017-12-13T13:12:16.406-05:00The Departing<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Heinrich Heine</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDBptpIPWNUUrcZsrhULRKAya2W_h8yu7WecNi5wkyrqv1evL5ve_-o6N3kGzwQK0-5_2M_py_B5n2RyExBLFrBVgx6t6ER4JL7r9DnYPMwZpG063IR9fn-rah8gFmvFZMaw_dxseimKY/s1600/Heine.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDBptpIPWNUUrcZsrhULRKAya2W_h8yu7WecNi5wkyrqv1evL5ve_-o6N3kGzwQK0-5_2M_py_B5n2RyExBLFrBVgx6t6ER4JL7r9DnYPMwZpG063IR9fn-rah8gFmvFZMaw_dxseimKY/s1600/Heine.png" width="228" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Dusseldorf, Germany, 1797. The town is under the hegemony of the great, the glorious, the liberator Napoleon Buonaparte, whose Edicts of Tolerance and regime of emancipation have thrown down the ghetto walls and welcomed Jewry into Europe. Eighteen hundred years of pent-up intellectual and creative energy, devolved into Bible study and the painting of New Year's cards until now, are busting to get out.<br /><br /> Like every Jewish child, Samson and Betty Heine's little Chayim was a born genius, a ga'on, an il'ui. The boy would revive the family's fortunes - sadly his father did not have the acumen of others of his tribe - as a merchant, or a banker. No yeshiva bucher nor Holy Land pilgrim like his mother's uncle Simon van Geldern, Harry, as they called him in German, would go into his uncle Solomon Heine's business, after a proper Catholic education please. But sadly Harry's genius did not lie that way. Sadly Harry left his uncle bankrupt.<br /><br /> Still, there are many ways for genius to manifest itself, and if a boy cannot be a child prodigy, perhaps he can still become an adult one. But in philosophy? Who is this goyische Hegel anyway that he takes Jewish disciples? Can you earn a decent living from such a life? And poetry noch? Have you made any money from these Gedichte? At least he mixes with Jews, Peira (Sammy always insisted on using his wife's given name, not her German one). Cultured Jews at that - Edouard Gans, Moses Moser, Leopold Zunz. So who wants him mixing with Jews already? We're out of the ghetto now; let him mix with cultured goyim. Let him be baptised a Lutheran - I told you that Catholic education would come to nothing; and think of how much money we wasted on it. And then let him be ashamed. Ashamed? He's always ashamed. Of being a Jew. Of being a convert. And what did converting gain him anyway? He only did it to get his doctorate at Goettingen, and they still refused him. A Jew is still a Jew, even if he has converted. To the goyim, and in his own confused heart and soul.<br /><br /> Genius he was though - whatever that means. Read "Die Nordsee". Read "Buch der Lieder". Read his responses to the anti-Semitic polemics of Menzel and von Platen. Read the list of charges brought against him when they put him in gaol - a genius is always without honour in his own country. What do you mean it wasn't his own country? He was born there, wasn't he? Several generations native, nu? But a Jew, and a Jew is always a man without a country - as Gustav Mahler would put it, a hundred years later: "I am a threefold expatriate—a Czech among Austrians, an Austrian among Germans, and a Jew in the whole world." Perhaps you're right, Sammy. After Goettingen they turned him down at Munich too. The police were after him for his satires. The German Diet prohibited publication of his work. Yet he still thought of all those years in France as exile.<br /><br /> The French hailed him immediately as a genius, gave him space in Allgemeine Zeitung and Revue Des Deux Mondes, made him the leader of Jungdeutschland - still not what one looks for in a nice Jewish boy, though it was good to see his picture in the newspapers. And such friends, such cultured goyische friends - Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, Ferdinand Lassalle, George Sand, Karl Marx. He's getting married, Sammy. I don't want to hear. Eugénie Mirat - he calls her his Mathilde; isn't that sweet? I don't want to hear about a shiksah. She's a lovely girl. She's an illiterate shop-assistant. And Heinrich the greatest writer in Europe. Heinrich? Since when he is called Heinrich? It killed your father, Chaymele. He made me swear, on his death-bed, never to give you a pfennig if you say a single bad thing about the family. That's a good boy, I knew I could depend on you. Now come back to Germany. I can't mutti. Not because of Germany. My spine. Attacks of paralysis. I am condemned to a mattress grave. At least I can go on writing. Bury me in a Jewish grave, mutti. O, and mutti - we were wrong about Napoleon; we thought he liberated us from anti-Semitism and set us free in Christian Europe. We were wrong. They still spit on us. When we spit back, they burn our books. Take my word for it, where they start by burning books, they will sooner or later end by burning people.</span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="color: blue;"> </span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN_Q-YjY6Xccf0N0123QT6b5f7AXVmjGgL7QrVgW2OtMOrvVAAlBc3IOplzz2bPtqcjLKH6GQ3NPcCJH39UPR09gUFjYUBa5bYANenqgn9E8N_beKMBSJ1oKu9jITIdOeRjqyyykMJdcM/s1600/Heine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="483" data-original-width="860" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN_Q-YjY6Xccf0N0123QT6b5f7AXVmjGgL7QrVgW2OtMOrvVAAlBc3IOplzz2bPtqcjLKH6GQ3NPcCJH39UPR09gUFjYUBa5bYANenqgn9E8N_beKMBSJ1oKu9jITIdOeRjqyyykMJdcM/s320/Heine.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="color: blue;">Der Scheidende (The Departing)<br /><br />It has died in me, as it must,<br />Every idle, earthly lust,<br />My hatred too of wickedness,<br />Utterly now, even the sense,<br />Of my own, of other men’s distress –<br />All that’s living in me is Death!<br />The curtain falls, the play is done,<br />And my dear German public’s gone,<br />Wandering home, and yawning so,<br />Those good folk are not stupid though:<br />They’ll dine happily enough tonight,<br />Drink, and sing, and laugh – He’s right,<br />The noble hero in Homer’s book,<br />Who said once that the meanest schmuck,<br />The lowest little Philistine there,<br />In Stuttgart (am Neckar), is happier<br />Than I, son of Peleus, the hero, furled,<br />The shadow prince in the Underworld. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Not Heine's best poem, but irresistible in the context of this piece. The translation is by A.S. Kline, and you can find many more at <a href="http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/Heine.htm#_Toc277059670">Poetry In Translation</a>.</span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
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</span>David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-33293641670185229902014-09-09T12:14:00.001-04:002017-12-14T06:47:22.591-05:00A Pilgrimage to Beethoven<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Rainer Maria Rilke</span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA4xg_FbwMWPU-RV0RLSvASelAdM-slgT1eHCt9dzl08-d4kXffqZCGZByeDuzr48hFMZstQjENfwWyYE9StzOxI-JoaeCOgM-JLPW_nmwoXRf8-wv7v8GfVSCbMcwYDEqfjHfrXJdxWw/s1600/Beetgoven's+death+mask.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA4xg_FbwMWPU-RV0RLSvASelAdM-slgT1eHCt9dzl08-d4kXffqZCGZByeDuzr48hFMZstQjENfwWyYE9StzOxI-JoaeCOgM-JLPW_nmwoXRf8-wv7v8GfVSCbMcwYDEqfjHfrXJdxWw/s1600/Beetgoven's%2Bdeath%2Bmask.png" width="240" /></a></span></div>
<br /><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The <a href="http://www.raptusassociation.org/wagpilger_e.html" target="_blank">title</a> belongs to Wagner, but the essay below to Rainer Maria Rilke, whose "Der Panther" is already on these shelves (<a href="http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-panther.html">here</a>), and who will be making a third appearance shortly, in a piece comparing his advice to the young writer with Ruskin's to the young artist.<br /><br />Beethoven died in 1827; Rilke was born in 1875, so his witnessing of the great man was not his live face but his death mask - a poor copy actually, on the outside wall of a Parisian shop (he had come to Paris to serve as personal amanuensis to the sculptor Auguste Rodin), next to that of a young woman who had drowned in the Seine; years later, Rilke commissioned an improved version for his own Private Collection. The original was cast by Josef Dannhauser, two days after the composer's death.<br /><br /><br />"His face, which knows," Rilke wrote. "That hard knot of senses drawn tightly together. That inexorable self-condensing of a music continually trying to evaporate. The countenance of a man whose hearing a god had closed up, so that there might be no sounds but his own; so that he might not be led astray by what is turbid and ephemeral in noises - he who knew in himself their clarity and permanence. So that only the soundless senses might carry the world in to him, silently, a world in suspense, waiting, unfinished, before the creation of sound.<br /><br />"World-consummator: as that which comes down as rain over the earth and upon the waters, falling carelessly, at random - inevitably rises again, invisible and joyous, out of all things, and ascends and floats and form the heavens: so our precipitations rose out of you, and vaulted the world with music.<br /><br />"Your music: it could have encircled the universe; not merely us. A grand-piano could have been built for you in the Theban desert, and an angel would have led you to that solitary instrument, through mountain-ranges in the wilderness, where kings are buried and courtesans and anchorites. And he would have flung himself up and away, for fear that you would begin.<br /><br />"And then you would have streamed forth, unheard, giving back to the universe what only the universe can endure. Bedouins in the distance would have galloped by, superstitiously; but merchants would have flung themselves to the ground at the edges of your music, as if you were a storm. Only a few solitary lions would have prowled around you at night, in wide circles, afraid of themselves, menaced by their own excited blood.<br /><br />"For who will now withhold you from lascivious ears? Who will drive them from the concert halls, these corrupted ears whose sterile hearing fornicates and never conceives, as the semen spurts out onto them and they lie beneath it like whores, playing with it; or it falls onto the ground like Onan's, while they writhe in their abortive pleasures.<br /><br />"But master, if some pure spirit with a virgin ear were to lie down beside your music: he would die of bliss; or he would become pregnant with infinity, and his fertilised brain would explode with so much birth."<br /><br /><br /><br /> This passionate exercise in acolyte idolatry can be found in "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" (<a href="https://archive.org/details/TheNotebooksOfMalteLauridsBrigge">here</a>).</span><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> My own "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pilgrimage-Bayreuth-Life-Richard-Wagner/dp/061596141X/ref=la_B00J8R9BY2_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1410456441&sr=1-3">A Pilgrimage To Bayreuth</a>", alongside a narrative version of Wagner's Ring Cycle, "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Book-Ring-novelistic-Music-Drama-Nibelungen/dp/061595488X/ref=la_B00J8R9BY2_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1410456441&sr=1-2">The Book of the Ring</a>", are published by TheArgamanPress.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
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</span>David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-88476841706641272692014-09-08T23:52:00.001-04:002017-12-14T10:02:33.781-05:00Gateaux and ale<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Sir Walter Scott</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Speaking of great food in literature (see the previous blog entry: <a href="http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com/2014/09/speed-reading.html">Speed-Reading</a>), I have already shared Colin Thubron's gastronomic waverings over Chinese python (<a href="http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com/2014/09/number-63-with-rice.html">Number 63 With Rice</a>)… but no one does it better than Sir Walter Scott, and Scott was also the first to point out that we use Anglo-Saxon names for animals on the farm and still alive, but French names once they reach the table: calf becomes veal, pig becomes pork, bull becomes beef, sheep becomes mutton, deer becomes venison, snail becomes escargot, beer becomes wine, melted chocolate becomes mousse, and uncouth face-stuffing turns surprisingly quickly into bourgeois grande bouffe. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /> Among the Waverley tales are literally scores of menus, described in minute detail, of which my favourite is his account of a proper Highland breakfast:</span><div>
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;"> “Waverley found Miss Bradwardine presiding over the tea and coffee, the table loaded with warm bread, both of flour, oatmeal, and barley-meal, in the shape of loaves, cakes, biscuits, and other varieties, together with eggs, reindeer ham, mutton and beef ditto, smoked salmon, marmalade, and all the other delicacies which induced even Johnson himself to extol the luxury of a Scotch breakfast above all other countries. A mess of oatmeal porridge, flanked by a silver jug, which held an equal mixture of cream and buttermilk, was placed for the Baron’s share of this repast.”</span><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Lots more examples can be found at <span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.electricscotland.com/familytree/frank/scott.htm">http://www.electricscotland.com/familytree/frank/scott.htm</a> </span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Virginia Woolf was probably anorexic, though they didn’t have the term in her days. This did not stop her "salivating copiously", to use Samuel Beckett's mouth-watering phrase, in "To the Lighthouse":</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;"> </span><span style="color: blue; font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">“…an exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice rose from the great brown dish as Marthe, with a little flourish, took the cover off. The cook had spent three days over that dish. And she must take great care, Mrs. Ramsay thought, diving into the soft mass, to choose a specially tender piece for William Bankes. And she peered into the dish, with its shiny walls and its confusion of savoury brown and yellow meats and its bay leaves and its wine . . . ‘It is a triumph,’ said Mr. Banks, laying his knife down for a moment. He had eaten attentively. It was rich; it was tender. It was perfectly cooked.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And then there is the decidedly non-kosher Bloomsday breakfast in Joyce's "Ulysses":</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;"> </span><span style="color: blue; font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">“Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">All of which you can cook and prepare yourself, following the very recipe that Joyce would have known and loved, by visiting TheOldFoodie at <span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.theoldfoodie.com/2006/06/bloomsday-breakfast.html">http://www.theoldfoodie.com/2006/06/bloomsday-breakfast.html</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">He also provides details and recipes of other of Bloom's favourite repasts at <span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.theoldfoodie.com/2007/06/bloomsday-recipes.html">http://www.theoldfoodie.com/2007/06/bloomsday-recipes.html</a>.</span><br /><br /><br />The plum-pudding on the Christmas table offered as a redemptive gift by Ebenezer Scrooge to Bob Cratchit is the one best remembered from that great literary cartoonist, perhaps because his other exemplar of food with a bad conscience belongs to Miss Havisham in "Great Expectations", the cake that was still on the table all those years later when Pip was dragged into the Ariadne web of the gruesome Estella; leading one to wish to rename that novel Great Expectorations:</span></div>
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;"> “As I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckled-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it . . . ‘I can’t guess what it is, ma’am.’ ‘It’s a great cake. A bride-cake. Mine!'”</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw-Vz61xHkFSRl_pdhbmBxRQOznR4obzTQZv5Gy19zGjIIQZxnokl6q_PLFGpCVxlb-A1g_HqkxwkOM2O8Yb_DanUCwYKjzoBzjX-vjg1nqi3MiUVLpx4SbHwZz5PEMU6n2b33T9Oi7HY/s1600/Gateaux+and+Ale+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="645" data-original-width="485" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw-Vz61xHkFSRl_pdhbmBxRQOznR4obzTQZv5Gy19zGjIIQZxnokl6q_PLFGpCVxlb-A1g_HqkxwkOM2O8Yb_DanUCwYKjzoBzjX-vjg1nqi3MiUVLpx4SbHwZz5PEMU6n2b33T9Oi7HY/s320/Gateaux+and+Ale+2.jpg" width="240" /></a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I could, and would happily go on, for there are thousands of these lyrical accounts of menus carnivorous and vegetarian, of appetisers as well as desserts, of fish as well as fowl, but my lunchtime snack is ready (</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">crèpes in blé noir, one </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">with melted Brie and Parma ham, the other with some of those fruits de mer illustrated above, lightly fried in a Bechamel sauce)... so instead I am pleased to recommend you to read Dinah Fried's delectable "</span><a href="http://dinahfried.com/Fictitious-Dishes" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Fictitious Dishes</a><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">", which catalogues innumerable of them; a work that no self-respecting kitchen library should be without. Heidi's burnt toast and the Mad Hatter's Tea-Party are too good to be missed; the plate of cheese and pickle with toast in "Catcher in the Rye" is simply "phony", but as I can't offer you any of my lunch, why don't you try an avocado stuffed with cottage cheese, tomato and chives, in the style of Sylvia Plath's "The Bell-Jar". </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">B'tei avon, as we say in Hebrew. Bon appetit in French. Apparently the Anglo-Saxons don't have an equivalent expression.</span><br />
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David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-32903125430747083812014-09-08T20:59:00.002-04:002017-12-18T07:28:19.925-05:00I and Thou<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Martin Buber</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="color: purple; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /><br /> "To Man the world is twofold, in accordance with his twofold attitude. He perceives what exists round about him - simply things, and beings as things; and what happens round about him - simply events, and actions as events; things consisting of qualities, events of moments; things entered in the graph of place, events in that of time; things and events bounded by others things and events, measured by them, comparable with them: he perceives an ordered and detached world. It is to some extent a reliable world, having density and duration. Its organisation can be surveyed and brought out again and again; gone over with closed eyes, and verified with open eyes. It is always there, next to your skin, if you look on it that way, cowering in your soul, if you prefer it so. It is your object, remains it as long as you wish, and remains a total stranger, within you and without. You perceive it, take it to yourself as the 'truth', and it lets itself be taken; but it does not give itself to you. Only concerning it may you make yourself 'understood' with others; it is ready, though attached to everyone in a different way, to be an object common to you all. But you cannot meet others in it. You cannot hold on to life without it, its reliability sustains you; but should you die in it, your grave would be in nothingness.<br /><br /> "Or, on the other hand, Man meets what exists and becomes as what is over against him, always simply a single being and each thing simply as being. What exists is opened to him in happenings, and what happens affects him as what is. Nothing is present for him except this one being, but it implicates the whole world. Measure and comparison have disappeared; it lies with yourself how much of the immeasurable becomes reality for you. These meetings are not organised to make the world, but each is a sign of the world-order. They are not linked up with one another, but each assures you of your solidarity with the world. The world which appears to you in this way is unreliable, for it takes on a continually new appearance; you cannot hold it to its word. It has no density, for everything in it penetrates everything else; no duration, for it comes even when it is not summoned, and vanishes even when it is tightly held. It cannot be surveyed, and if you wish to make it capable of survey you lose it. It comes, and comes to bring you out; if it does not reach you, meet you, then it vanishes; but it comes back in another form. It is not outside you, it stirs in the depth of you; if you say 'Soul of my soul' you have not said too much. But guard against anything wishing to remove it into your soul - for then you annihilate it. It is your present; only while you have it do you have the present. You can make it into an object for yourself, to experience and to use; you must continually do this - and as you do it you have no more present. Between you and it there is mutual giving: you say Thou to it and give yourself to it, it says Thou to you and gives itself to you. You cannot make yourself understood with others concerning it, you are alone with it. But it teaches you to meet others, and to hold your ground when you meet them. Through the graciousness of its comings and the solemn sadness of its goings it leads you away to the Thou in which the parallel lines of relations meet. It does not help to sustain you in life, it only helps you to glimpse eternity."</span><div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I could, easily enough, have gone to the Internet to find the text, and cut-and-pasted it into this blog; but I have typed out every word myself, because it seems to me that this is what Buber is telling us, that the act of direct and immediate personal engagement is what life, and the understanding of life, is all about: </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">* the difference between standing on the football terrace to support a team, and being out there on the field playing for the team, or even skipping the "big match" in order to gather your own team in some park somewhere, and why was the "big match" so important anyway, when you just played your own. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">* the difference between the vicarious and the lived. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">* the business of intensity, which Jewish Buber would probably have preferred to call "kavanah", a word that contains two meanings, both inward concentration and sincerity. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The act of typing out required me to focus on his every word, to recognise that every word had been selected where another word might have been and therefore meant precisely what it meant and nothing else (in the original anyway; sadly I am not completely convinced that this is so in the translation; to which Buber would say: then go back to my original, and make your own translation; the lived not the vicarious, the direct not the indirect...)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The act of typing engaged me personally, obliging me to unravel meanings for myself, to pay heed to the internal arguments with their slow but eventual resolutions of internal contradictions, with their minor clarifications that were not always immediately apparent within the total act of clarification; obliged me to notice every element of punctuation too, and to observe the several occasions when, it seemed to me, the punctuation was faulty. To write by hand, or to type by fingers, focuses the mind more deeply than the act of reading, and the act of reading more deeply than the act of looking, at a TV or a movie screen, let alone reality. It is a matter of igniting the cognitive machinery. The same, in Buber's view, applies to love, to family, to friendship, to neighbourliness, to politics, to life. Intensity - kavanah - always intensity. To write at the level that one wants to write, one must first learn to live at the level that one wants to write. And vice versa.<br /><br />Buber published "I and Thou" in Vienna in 1923 - and note that the original German title is "Ich und Du" and not "Ich und Sie", a subtlety that simply does not have an equivalent amid the universal informalities of English, not even by rendering it as "Thou" instead of "You". Where other philosophers require volumes to explain their conception of life in all its forms, Buber contrived the minor miracle of saying everything he had to say in a slim volume of less than a hundred pages. The consequence, of course, of applying his own theories to himself.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> <br />But books don't just happen. If we too apply Buber's theories back to himself, we might assume that, given the intensity of his engagement with life, the book must have emerged out of the process of deep reflection and concentration. And yes it did, but only at a secondary stage. Because the first stage was the very opposite. The book emerged precisely because Buber had failed to engage, had failed to reflect, had failed to pay attention, even superficially. Later he would tell the tale of this himself, but in two versions, identical until the endings; and while there is a significant element of guilt in both versions, it is somewhat </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">expiated</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">in the first version, considerably extenuated in the second; and as this differential also elucidates the "twofold" concept of I-and-Thou extremely lucidly, we may choose to assume that he deliberately established the conundrum as an analogy, by creating the two versions.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Born in Vienna in 1878, he had spent most of his twenties and thirties in Germany, studying and teaching both philosophy and religion, writing books about both religious and mystical experience. And then, "nel mezzo del cammin di sua vita", as Dante might have put it, at the mid-point of his life both intellectually and chronologically, there came a morning when he was working in his upstairs room at home, meditating, praying, writing, and he was interrupted by a knock at his front door. A former student was standing there, one with whom he had been extremely close, a tutor as much as a teacher. Buber greeted him warmly, spoke to him for a few moments, was glad when he went away again before too long, because work was awaiting him upstairs, and he had hoped not to be interrupted.<br /><br />So far the two versions are identical. But now they change. <br /><br />In the first version ("It was in the late autumn of 1914", according to a letter from Buber to Maurice Friedman, written in August 1954)</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">, Buber tells that he never saw the young man again, that shortly afterwards the student was called into the army, and died in battle. Regrets that he didn't engage him deeper; sadness that one so young, so full of potential, should have been taken for so pointless a reason. Sentimental regrets, no more than that.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />In the second version, Buber tells what he later learned from a mutual friend, that the young man had come to him that day in need of help, at a moment of personal identity crisis, in the hope that, if anyone could provide the basic affirmation of life that he was needing, then surely his beloved former tutor could. But his former tutor was preoccupied, uninterested, anxious to get back to his work, didn't even invite the young man indoors, for tea, a biscuit, a question about his current work, and life. Oh, he was polite, cordial, friendly, but only on the doorstep, not really interested. The young man seeking affirmation had received negation. That night he took an overdose of drugs and brought negation to fulfilment.</span><div style="margin-bottom: 13.5pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm;">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"Ever since then," Buber wrote in "Between Man and Man" in 1947, "I have given up the sacred. Or rather it has given me up. I know now no fullness but each mortal hour's fullness." The Mystery, he says, was no longer "out there" for him, but was instead to be found in the present moment with the present person, in the present world. Direct, personal engagement. I-and-Thou.</span></div>
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David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6850423992514368457.post-22784027518250258462014-09-08T18:11:00.001-04:002017-12-15T06:07:19.811-05:00Tonight We Improvise<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhM2AiCeMkcXmHjVw-0MtKWwQpZaRYAz-7gbCy1rahFy2o6fO9i2IjrLeas73Qf532YRms4ONSopJAu6P1T-80dhVJRdrxoGHp5xk5RE3P-8TzhBMBpuEXaeFkMLKBus9Kcr4jz2k9pS1w/s1600/Pirandello.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="348" data-original-width="268" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhM2AiCeMkcXmHjVw-0MtKWwQpZaRYAz-7gbCy1rahFy2o6fO9i2IjrLeas73Qf532YRms4ONSopJAu6P1T-80dhVJRdrxoGHp5xk5RE3P-8TzhBMBpuEXaeFkMLKBus9Kcr4jz2k9pS1w/s320/Pirandello.jpg" width="246" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Luigi Pirandello</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Unlike Lampedusa, who wrote a kind of sophisticatedly modern historical novel; unlike Primo Levi, who reinvented journalism as a literary genre; unlike Calvino, who did what all the world would like to do but only the truly great can get away with, which is to write whatever and however words came into his head and have them turn out brilliant; unlike D'Annunzio, who wanted to be Wagner but settled for being Wilhelm Meister; unlike Croce, who mistook literature for philosophy; unlike any of these other geniuses of modern Italian writing, Pirandello saw literature as a branch of psychology, and used the theatre much as Freud used the psychiatric couch: as a locus for confession, revelation, psychic exploration and the unravelling of the madness of this world. Being completely insane himself was clearly a factor and an aide, but who has ever met a serious professional in the field of the human psyche who wasn't clinically certifiable? Each scene of each act of each play affords another layer of, another perspective on reality – the sliding-doors that Durrell tried to impose upon the time-continuum in Alexandria; only here it is mental, not temporal.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In "Tonight We Improvise" he created what was really an essay on the theatre, or at least on the gap between being and seeing - Brecht called it "the fourth wall" - which may not after all be the same thing. "Six Characters In Search Of An Author", which had its première in 1921, went even further, dissociating reality from reality as well as unreality from unreality by staging a play within a play; and a play about the putting-on of the outer play by the inner one at that. The absolute antonym to anything by Brecht, Beckett was clearly influenced, right down to the staging, but especially dialogue such as: </span><br />
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">FATHER: We’re looking for an author <br /><br />PRODUCER (angry and astonished): An author? Which author? <br /><br />FATHER: Any author will do, sir. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The metaphor as metaphor! And later, in Act Two, a monologue that could as easily be Malone's, or Molloy's:</span><br />
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">MOTHER: No! It’s happening now, as well: it’s happening all the time. I’m not acting my suffering! Can’t you understand that? I’m alive and here now, but I can never forget that terrible moment of agony, that repeats itself endless and vividly in my mind. And these two little children here, you’ve never heard them speak have you? That’s because they don’t speak any more, not now. They just cling to me all the time; they help to keep my grief alive, but they don’t really exist for themselves any more, not for themselves…</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">"Six characters" begins on an empty stage, with no set and no wings, in almost total darkness and the stage manager building what will be the set for a play entitled "The Game As He Played It", encouraging the audience to worry that they have come to the wrong event, unsettling them psychologically. Pirandello could not have done this without Brecht, but neither could Brecht have written "Six Characters". An actor, playing the part of an actor, who is representing someone who denies that they are acting: once the metaphor goes that far the fourth wall simply implodes and there is no longer a space between the real and the unreal – which is to say the imaginary, the fictitious, the fantastical – the metaphorical itself. </span><br />
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David Prashkerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00573157290838220298noreply@blogger.com0