I don’t really have anything to say today. I didn’t last
week either, so I skipped a week, and I almost never skip weeks, so… you know…
I’m here tonight. But I still don’t have anything, really.
What do I have?
I have some free time, having completed the draft of a paper
whose deadline I just barely busted. Tuesday night is still “early in the week,”
right?
I have some complicated feelings about Independence Day,
since I’m grateful to live in a country that allows me to say how disappointed
I am in us right now.
Grandma Isla loved dogwood and delicate things.
I have my grandma’s tea cups and her love of quiet,
civilized time.
I have a really splendid family, who chose to celebrate our
freedom by grilling hotdogs and playing a new board game. My partner got to use
his firepit, and the girly made a monster fruit salad.
I have arthritis in my feet. Who knew? So I have some new
foods in my diet and am cutting down on others, to do what I can to slow its advance.
I have some fear, but mostly hope for our future as a
country and as a planet. I have a well-developed sense of wonder at the beauty
of the world and the ingenuity of people who screw it up, but also rally to fix
it.
I have enough stamps that I can pick and choose from a
variety of sets and materials and get more use out of them than they’re marketed
for. And I have a partner who likes to see me happy, so encourages my hobby
rather than complaining that it’s too expensive.
I have “Dirty Little Secret” stuck in my head. It’s my
daughter’s fault. It’s on her playlist.
I have a daughter who
plays music while she tidies the kitchen.
I have lots of memories of fireworks and parks and watermelon
and parades and my parents from my happy childhood. I have some holes in my
heart where people like my parents have taken little bits of me in to the beyond.
I have a stack of academic books to be returned to various
libraries, some classes to plan, a letter of recommendation to write, some
portfolios to assess, and a fall schedule to tidy up… next week.
And I have a cat walking across my desk, telling me to wrap
this up and pet her already.
If you’re still reading, I wish you a wonderful evening, a
heart full of hope, and enough of whatever makes you happy.
When my son was ten, he and my partner played a tabletop
fantasy game called Warhammer 40K. This involved lots of painting of tiny
soldiers and model tanks and buildings, and it sort of peaked when they found out
there was a convention in Chicago. At first, my eight year old daughter and I
thought we’d go too, but we also thought it sounded like watching movies in a foreign
language about subjects that don’t interest you. So we passed and decided to
think of our own thing.
I had always wanted to go to Solvang, a little tourist town
in the Santa Barbara wine country with Danish roots (and therefore bakeries). There
was even a Hans Christian Andersen museum.
As a Girly Getaway, it had loads of potential.
I made a reservation at a Bed and Breakfast with a fairy
tale theme, and we got a room filled with Danish lace and paintings of swans and
princesses. It was perfect. We bought Dala horses and ate abelskivers, the little
spherical pancakes drizzled in raspberry sauce, and we decided this was our
thing.
And that was before we discovered the bookshop.
The bookshop is what kept us going. The Book Loft is a
lovely, independent bookstore with used and new books and the best Fairy Tales
and Folklore collection I’ve ever seen.
We each bought an armload of books, and we headed across the street to the
park to examine our haul. We read under a tree all afternoon.
Since then we have done largely the same thing every summer.
We love the little town, but if we’re honest, we go for the books. It’s a
perfect destination for us, although neither of the boys understand.
We chat all the way there and back, and if it were a trip with
girlfriends, we probably would buy wine and keep chatting. It’s not.
It’s with my favorite bookworm, and we spend a considerable chunk
of our time sitting next to each other companionably and reading. We stop to read
each other funny passages or show a picture or summarize a great story. We are
geeks. When she was eight, I was already buying more picture books than she
was. She was reading children’s fantasy novels, and I was collecting picture
books and new versions of fairy tales.
Now she’s a teenager, and she reads YA fantasy novels. I’m
still collecting fairy tales. This year I got a couple collections with an eye
to adopting one for my folklore syllabus in the fall. But the first thing I did
was read one of her books—a verse novel about Joan of Arc. And she read a
collection of graphic novel-style fairy tales I’d picked out to stay current.
That’s right. We both sat there and read a whole book under that tree before
one of us had to go to the bathroom.
Book Haul 2019
Several things stand out about this to me (or they did, when
our hotel smoke alarm went off and the front desk guy came in to turn it off
and saw our giant stack of books strewn across the bed and looked at us like
that was one thing he’d never seen when he entered someone’s hotel room at night.)
Maybe this is weird. Maybe the fact that we essentially make a two-day bookstore
run every year is weird. Maybe that we take a vacation together but don’t talk
half the time is weird. Maybe the fact that we’re happy doing essentially the
same thing, eating at the same restaurants, and that we go to the fudge shop
the first night for us and on the way home for the boys, since we can’t be
trusted not to eat theirs is weird. (That seems least weird to me of this list,
frankly.)
But the fact is some day she’s going to be 21, and even
though people have been recommending wine to her there since she was 13, she
will someday take them up on it, and the dynamic will change.
I tried to shake things up a few years with different
locations or (gasp!) restaurants, but she has always been somewhere between
reluctant and outraged. I have pushed her to all the local museums and the
ostrich farm, with the tacit understanding that we should probably know more of
the area than the park and the bookstore, but really, what makes us happy is the
quiet time leaning against each other under our tree, comparing this year’s books
to last year’s, and chatting with the shop workers and servers who only see us
once a year, but remember us anyway. Some comment on how much she’s grown, like
the server who remembers her back when she wore Crocs with gibbitz in them and
clapped at the Red Viking because they served her milk in a pilsner glass.
The secret to happiness is indulging your inner geek.
Especially with someone who high fives you for it.
I’m still a medievalist, of course, but in the years between
grad school, where I wrote a master’s thesis on Beowulf and the Old Saxon Heliand
and a doctoral dissertation on the scribes of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, I have not done the kind of manuscript study
or textual analysis that I did in these works, much less kept up my reading
facility in Old Saxon.
Actual evidence that I could translate Old English in grad school.
I am a generalist. I teach poetry from Homer to the 18th
century, and I also teach a seminar on a 20th century Italian
novelist. I guess it was bound to happen.
But it’s also a series of choices.
I have, in working toward tenure and promotion, done more research about the act of teaching than about the content I teach. That’s fine. Teaching is vitally important to me, and I do not regret that work. Also, I have never stopped wanting to read more, learn more, and broaden my scope. It’s why I chose Medieval Studies, as opposed to a smaller, more focused field. Some people make a whole career out of a single author. I have never been able to choose just one. (This holds for cookies too–and other things–if one kind is good, isn’t five a whole lot better?)
But I opened up my thesis the other day, and reading through
my translation of the Old Saxon gospel and my argument about how the language was
developing in relation to its other Germanic sibling languages, and the impact
of that on our understanding of that text made me long to wander back to
manuscripts and lay aside my anthologies for a bit.
Old English and Old Saxon texts minus the sweat, tears, and graphite.
There is a different kind of pleasure in encountering an
ancient text in its original language. This was my job throughout most of graduate
school, and if there is one thing I miss about that kind of study, it’s the
language. To read The Heliand at that
time meant calling up all my Old English and Old Norse knowledge and
triangulating to deduce meaning in the Old Saxon. Otherwise it’s Dictionary
City, and you look up every word. But if you’ve met Beowulf in an Anglo-Saxon
bar, and watched Thor bash giants in Old Norse, Jesus’s life is pretty easy to
follow in Old Saxon.
They warned me. My Anglo-Saxon professor said to relish our Beowulf reading, because that seminar
was likely the only time we’d read the whole thing in the original. He was
right. I look at excerpts to critique translations. I show my students a page
or two, but never the whole thing. It’s not appropriate or practical in a sophomore
level survey of British Lit.
But I miss it.
So diving back in a bit has been a joy. Not the deadline for
this paper I’m writing, but the sitting and reading the stories again, and the
language. Hearing the sounds of the long dead languages as I roll them around
in my mouth and realizing I can still read them. Because the pleasure of a
medievalist is to study languages for reading ability without the pressure of
having to produce intelligible Old Saxon on my own. I don’t need conversation
skills, just reading skills. And those skills have not diminished in my absence
from the manuscript rooms.
Beowulf is still fierce and cocky (ӕglӕca); the Danish queen
is still decorously smacking him down, telling him not to push his luck. Peter
is still a badass; Jesus still is a powerful lord (mahtig drohtin), trying to rein
him in. For my money Game of Thrones has nothing on these stories.
Maybe I’ll pursue this kind of work again seriously, but if
I don’t, it’s nice to know I can still enjoy the experience of reading these “olde
bokes,” as Chaucer called them. That’s what I was after all those years ago
anyway.
Happy summer, everyone. May you find time for all the weird
little things that make your heart happy. I’ll keep my nerd flag high, so you’ll
know where to find me.
During the last week of a long spring semester my students started
talking about whether or not we’d run out of ideas. Like, as a species. We were
reading the last essay in Calvino’s Six
Memos for the Next Millenium, “Multiplicity,” which is the one where he talks
about encyclopedic novels. Calvino argues that in order for literature to stay
relevant in the 21st century and beyond, it has to keep attempting
new, ambitious things. He talks about books that try to ‘contain multitudes’—books
that are like people: constellations of lots of knowledge and experience and other
books.
It’s an idea worth exploring because it posits where we get
ideas from to be creative. When authors push boundaries, what are they pushing
on? When we try to come up with something new, what does that mean? In a world
where Game of Thrones is derived from
Lord of the Rings is derived from Norse
myth, is anything original?
Of course.
Yes, on the one hand, Disney is remaking their animated classics in live action versions, and every book about magic seems to nod to Harry Potter, and memes are funny because they’re repetitive. On the other hand, that is the whole history of creativity in a nutshell. Nothing comes from nothing. The whole history of creativity and innovation is a process not of creating from nothing, but of making stuff out of other stuff. In the most literal sense, paintings are made out of paint and canvas: materials become something new.
But ideas work that way too.
Calvino calls this process “combinatorial play” in his 1967
essay “Cybernetics and Ghosts.” He talks about it both in the context of the first storytellers, kind
of rubbing a few words together until something sparked with meaning, and then
also of computer software, that can be used to compose text. We’re always and
ever manipulating ideas and words and plots that we already know.
For the Google generations, this means we need to do more
filling of our own heads with material we can manipulate if we want to be
creative. If we offload everything, there’s nothing for our subconscious to
play with. I talk about this in a few blogs on memory.
For the bigger picture, though, Anthony Brandt and David Eagleman’s recent book The Runaway Species makes the best sense of it for my money. All creative activity involves working with something to create something new. Again, nothing comes from nothing (nothing every could…). Brandt and Eagleman capture the processes in the delightfully alliterative trio of “bending, breaking, and blending,” but they corroborate the product in-product out model.
In bending, they argue an artist takes a material and just reshapes it. This is the modeling clay method, but the world is your oyster, not just the Play-Doh bucket. Take what already exists, and smush it until it looks different. Caricatures for instance. Or variations on a theme. (Think of music, but also visual arts, like Monet’s series of haystack paintings or Hokusai’s wood blocks of Mt Fuji. In literary terms, think of Sherlock Holmes—all variations on a theme).
Breaking involves actual rupture of a thing—Picasso’s
people, buildings or bodies or books deconstructed and reassembled. Calvino’s
hypernovel, If On a Winter’s Night a
Traveler breaks the narrative in to a dozen pieces, split up by other
stories. The tower of the art gallery is split and separated in Frank Lloyd Wright’s
Guggenheim Museum.
Blending heads back to Calvino’s combinatorial idea. If we
put two things together, we get something new. Yellow and blue make green, yes,
but also King Arthur legends and comedy sketch shows make Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
All of this is to say that my students don’t need to worry that there won’t be new ideas and new art. If we have a flood of texts and images now, it’s just that much more raw material for the artists and inventors of the next generation—them. And I can’t wait to see what they come up with.
Sources: Anthony Brandt and David Eagleton. The Runaway Species. Catapult, 2017. Italo Calvino. Six Memos for the Next Millenium. Vintage. 1993.
Today my daughter accused me of being a large 5-year old.
She was talking about how excited I get around holidays, so I let it slide. She’s
not wrong. I also love children’s books and poetry written for children. In
honor of National Poetry Month, here are three poems by Edward Lear, the 19th
century British writer and illustrator who often gets credited with inventing
the Limerick. In all his anapestic glory, I give you “The Owl and the Pussycat,”
“The Pobble Who Has No Toes,” and “The Duck and the Kangaroo,” which inspired a
certain tiny boy’s Hallowe’en costume about 15 years ago. Timballo!
I
“The Owl and
the Pussycat”
The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea In a beautiful pea-green boat, They took some honey, and plenty of money, Wrapped up in a five-pound note. The Owl looked up to the stars above, And sang to a small guitar, “O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love, What a beautiful Pussy you are, You are, You are! What a beautiful Pussy you are!”
II
Pussy said to the Owl, “You elegant fowl! How charmingly sweet you sing! O let us be married! too long we have tarried: But what shall we do for a ring?” They sailed away, for a year and a day, To the land where the Bong-Tree grows And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood With a ring at the end of his nose, His nose, His nose, With a ring at the end of his nose.
III
“Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling Your ring?” Said the Piggy, “I will.” So they took it away, and were married next day By the Turkey who lives on the hill. They dined on mince, and slices of quince, Which they ate with a runcible spoon; And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, They danced by the light of the moon, The moon, The moon, They danced by the light of the moon.
“The Pobble Who
Has No Toes”
The Pobble who has no toes
Had once as many as we;
When they said “Some day you may lose them all;”
He replied “Fish, fiddle-de-dee!”
And his Aunt Jobiska made him drink
Lavender water tinged with pink,
For she said “The World in general knows
There’s nothing so good for a Pobble’s toes!”
The Pobble who has no toes
Swam across the Bristol Channel;
But before he set out he wrapped his nose
In a piece of scarlet flannel.
For his Aunt Jobiska said “No harm
Can come to his toes if his nose is warm;
And it’s perfectly known that a Pobble’s toes
Are safe, — provided he minds his nose!”
The Pobble swam fast and well,
And when boats or ships came near him,
He tinkledy-blinkledy-winkled a bell,
So that all the world could hear him.
And all the Sailors and Admirals cried,
When they saw him nearing the further side –
“He has gone to fish for his Aunt Jobiska’s
Runcible Cat with crimson whiskers!”
But before he touched the shore,
The shore of the Bristol Channel,
A sea-green porpoise carried away
His wrapper of scarlet flannel.
And when he came to observe his feet,
Formerly garnished with toes so neat,
His face at once became forlorn,
On perceiving that all his toes were gone!
And nobody ever knew,
From that dark day to the present,
Whoso had taken the Pobble’s toes,
In a manner so far from pleasant.
Whether the shrimps, or crawfish grey,
Or crafty Mermaids stole them away –
Nobody knew: and nobody knows
How the Pobble was robbed of his twice five toes!
The Pobble who has no toes
Was placed in a friendly Bark,
And they rowed him back, and carried him up
To his Aunt Jobiska’s Park.
And she made him a feast at his earnest wish
Of eggs and buttercups fried with fish, –
And she said “It’s a fact the whole world knows,
That Pobbles are happier without their toes!”
Please note the tiny duck riding at the end of the kangaroo’s tale. This child is a walking poem.
“The Duck
and the Kangaroo”
I
Said the Duck to the Kangaroo, ‘Good gracious! how you hop! Over the fields and the water too, As if you never would stop! My life is a bore in this nasty pond, And I long to go out in the world beyond! I wish I could hop like you!’ Said the Duck to the Kangaroo.
II
‘Please give me a ride on your back!’ Said the Duck to the Kangaroo. ‘I would sit quite still, and say nothing but “Quack,” The whole of the long day through! And we’d go to the Dee, and the Jelly Bo Lee, Over the land, and over the sea;— Please take me a ride! O do!’ Said the Duck to the Kangaroo.
III
Said the Kangaroo to the Duck, ‘This requires some little reflection; Perhaps on the whole it might bring me luck, And there seems but one objection, Which is, if you’ll let me speak so bold, Your feet are unpleasantly wet and cold, And would probably give me the roo- Matiz!’ said the Kangaroo.
IV
Said the Duck, ‘As I sate on the rocks, I have thought over that completely, And I bought four pairs of worsted socks Which fit my web-feet neatly. And to keep out the cold I’ve bought a cloak, And every day a cigar I’ll smoke, All to follow my own dear true Love of a Kangaroo!’
V
Said the Kangaroo, ‘I’m ready! All in the moonlight pale; But to balance me well, dear Duck, sit steady! And quite at the end of my tail!’ So away they went with a hop and a bound, And they hopped the whole world three times round; And who so happy,—O who, As the Duck and the Kangaroo?
National Poetry Month rolls around once every year, and some years it slips by without my notice amid the bustle of an academic spring. I try to remember Poem in My Pocket Day (April 18 this year!) because I adore the idea of carrying words of power with me in my pocket, like a spell that no one suspects I bear. I usually enlist my daughter in this happy conspiracy, and we have had wonderful, serendipitous moments like her having the poem in her pocket that a teacher referred to and she shouted out, “Hey! That’s in my pocket!” to the amazement of her teacher and the annoyance of her gobsmacked peers.
This year I’m celebrating by posting a poem every day of April on my choice of social media. (It’s Facebook. I’m old). But I’m excited because it feels like taking part in the same magic mojo of Advent or a gratitude journal–a small, lovely thing that builds toward something substantial and rewarding.
I know it’s small. But it’s really also lovely. I promise.
It means I have to think of thirty poems. The first couple I pull right out of my head. They’re short. I own them. I have swallowed them like Zeus swallowed Metis—whole, so they can still advise me. I carry them everywhere.
Some poems I associate so strongly with people, that I can’t think of or read the poem without an accompanying memory of the person. E.A. Robinson’s “Miniver Cheevy” is the first poem I remember my dad reading to me. He was extolling the virtues of a set of books he’d owned as a child and was passing on to me, and he proved their worth by plucking “Miniver Cheevy” out of the pages like a flower, reading it aloud, holding it up to the light for me to look at.
How much happened in that moment for me is hard to gauge. It may have been the first time a poem was presented to me like a gem. Was it the first time I thought about someone being so enchanted by the past? The image of Miniver dreaming while drinking certainly stuck with me. It is a tragic poem, but an incredibly evocative image.
Some poems are locked in my memory as emblematic of a certain time in my life. I know it’s cheesy, but Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay” is probably the first grown up poem I memorized, and it’s absolutely due to my watching of the movie The Outsiders in about 1984 on HBO. I can see 12 or 13-year old me on the couch in the family room thinking to myself, “something big just happened there.” So I memorized it and kept it with me. I vowed to stay golden, like Ponyboy, but not by dying young. I started looking at flowers as something with an expiration. I let it change me.
35 years later, many, many more poems have changed me.
Because some poems are like people. Once you encounter them, they offer you a new perspective you never considered. They open up a window on the world that you hadn’t had access to before. Some friends have introduced me to Buddhism and homemade tamales. Some poems have introduced me to reincarnation and sugarplums.
So in anticipation of when I run out of poems in my head, the commitment to produce a beloved poem a day is an occasion to sift through books of poetry looking for treasure. I know the internet exists, but I prefer to start with books. So I’ve just set myself a reading assignment. Part of me thinks I may go beyond the month. Probably I’ll let myself slip back into the mundane world where my daily responsibilities outweigh my self-indulgent word-love, but one can always, always hope.
So I’m a closet linguist. I’m interested in language—how it
changes, how it works, how it feels in my mouth, and how it paints pictures
without your standard art supplies. I’ve probably spent more time on how it
changes from a historical perspective, but I’m no less intrigued by how it
changes in contemporary slang or in my own usage. Today I’m thinking about the
language my partner and I use to communicate.
The catalyst for today’s ruminations is Calvino’s Mr. Palomar. In the chapter entitled “The
Blackbird’s Whistle,” Mr. Palomar is sitting on his terrace, working , while his
wife waters plants, and they both remark on the presence of the blackbird
couple who visits. The chapter opens:
“Mr. Palomar is lucky in one respect: he spends the summer in a place where many birds sing. As he sits in a deck chair and “works” (in fact, he is lucky also in another respect: he can say that he is working in places and attitudes that would suggest complete repose; or rather, he suffers this handicap: he feels obliged never to stop working, even when lying under the trees on an August morning)…” (22)
…and we’re done. I’m in. I prepare for class on my patio,
listening to bird songs and trying not to get distracted by the wind in the
peach tree and the light on the mountains. And to a teacher, every book you
read, every movie you watch, every place you go might someday be worked in to a
class, so you’re always sort of working.
But that’s just why I love and identify with Mr. Palomar.
This is a blog about language.
As he sits on the patio, Mr. Palomar listens to the birds.
They seem to him to be communicating, and as Mrs. Palomar bustles about
commenting on them, the human couple’s communication mimics the blackbirds.’ She
comments absently that the flower bed is dry again, and:
“…from these remarks Mr. Palomar derives a general picture of tranquility, and he is grateful to his wife for it, because if she confirms the fact that for the moment there is nothing more serious for him to bother about, then he can remain absorbed in his work (or pseudowork or hyperwork). He allows a minute to pass; then he also tries to send a reassuring message, to inform his wife that his work (or infrawork or ultrawork) is proceeding as usual: to this end he emits a series of sighs and grumbles—’…crooked… for all that… repeat… yes, my foot…’—utterances that, taken all together, transmit the message ‘I am very busy,’ in the event that his wife’s last remark contained a veiled reproach on the order of ‘You could also assume some responsibility for watering the garden.'” (26)
When I teach this book, this is the point where some sweet,
sensitive student worries about him. Why is he not communicating well with his
wife? He must be so lonely, isolated even from those who love him. He’s not
communicating. She’s talking, and he’s not listening.
I have to explain that this is just a conversation between two
people who have been married a long time. They don’t need very many words, just
like the blackbirds don’t need many sounds. They are enjoying a summer morning
together, companionably parallel-playing, my husband and I would say. He’s doing
his thing; she’s doing hers. They’re not interrupting each other, but they’re
keeping one another on their radar. He’s alert to potential guilt about never watering
the flowers; she’s aware that he’s working and trying to preserve his time
while still being present. It’s a delicate dance. But it’s not loneliness.
As we approach our 28th anniversary, Rob and I
have begun making jokes about what kind of eccentric old people we’re going to
be. I’m certain no one will have any idea what we’re talking about. We talk in
movie quotes (“Inconceivable!”) and expressions our children coined when they
were little (“Put it in the fridge and save it forever,” which my son said
about a train-shaped Jell-O jiggler when he was three and gets hauled out whenever
anyone wants to hold on to something long past its prime). We use more Monty
Python lines than any ten people should, and we refer to new people with old
names, grafting names with personalities—some of people we knew, but others of characters
from books or movies we’ve seen together. We have developed our own language.
Our kids understand most references, since we’ve spent years
repeating the same stories. (They’re teenagers, so they’re quick to point out
when we repeat ourselves. I hope as we age, their patience increases with our propensity
to repeat ourselves.)
But to a stranger, I’ll bet we already don’t make much
sense.
I’m ok with that. We communicate just fine. We understand
each other. Our words carry more meaning because of our shared history. This kind
of thing happens whenever two or more people share experiences, inside jokes, and
adequate time together. We use language to communicate, but also to reassure,
to comfort, to cheer, to share, to love. The birds may do all of that with
their series of chirps and trills and silences too, but they’ll never
understand the importance of knowing that “Strange women lying in ponds distributing
swords is no basis for a system of government.”
A group of blackbirds isn’t a murder, right? Maybe a manslaughter? A misdemeanor?
At my house whenever something unexpected happens, you’re liable to hear someone say, pensively, “Harold wasn’t always allergic to bees.” It’s a line from the 1993 rom-com Sleepless in Seattle, from the crazy dinner conversation full of crossing narratives and non-sequiturs, and it struck us as so random that it stuck, and we’ve been variously applying it and misapplying it ever since.
Today, as I write another installment in the Life Hacks from Ancient Myth, I have a lesson that seems less broadly applicable, but is still surprisingly relevant from time to time, so we feel like it’s a truth that no one sees coming: If someone takes a spear to the chest, don’t just pull it out right there. Resist the temptation to relieve your comrade of the stabby thing that seems to be paining them. Be calm.
This is, believe it or not, a recurring lesson throughout literature. I know it from two pretty dissimilar texts—one Roman, and one Anglo-Saxon. It comes up more often than that, really, but these two are very vivid for me.
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, completed in the year 8 CE, he parodies the Trojan War material with a raucous wedding scene where a centaur tries to steal the bride. (That hilarious parody and Ovid’s neat reduction of the Trojan War to a couple embarrassing moments for Achilles is the subject for another blog.) Today I’m interested in the tragic love story he drops in the middle of the ‘red wedding’-style brawl.
As humans slaughter centaurs in defense of the bride, and centaurs rise (or not) to glory in self-defense, the narration pauses to hold a light on perfect love: Cyllarus and his beloved Hylonome have come to the wedding as a happy couple to celebrate another happy couple. They are described as almost nauseatingly sweet—“she honeys him” at 12.411, and just as we’re imagining this loving centaur couple (for me, thanks to the Disney animators of Fantasia, I have a very clear image), Cyllarus takes a spear to the chest.
We’re told that it did not pierce his heart, but it’s close,
so for a moment the possibility of his survival fills our hearts. Then
Hylonome, crazed with fear and grief, rips out the offending projectile.
Oh, Hylonome.
Did she not take War Time Triage 101? When she pulls out the spear, hoping to help, she instead rips his chest open, and his lifeblood pours out. She tries kissing him to stop his soul escaping with his breath, but she’s already lost him. She runs herself through with the same spear, and the tragedy is complete.
So what have we learned? Centaurs are terrible wedding guests;
they arrive drunk and only get worse.
But also, beware of chest wounds. They need special care.
A later example of this type scene comes from the Old English poem ”The Battle of Maldon,” wherein the defending earl of an English tribe is hit with a spear from an invading Viking ruffian. Byrthnoth, the lord, has exhibited tremendous arrogance in allowing this battle to take place at all (he gave up a position of advantage out of pride). And to prove his manhood, just seconds before the fatal chest wound, he had wrenched a spear out of his own shoulder and sent it back at the Sea Dog who threw it.
So perhaps we forgive poor Wulfmar, who at fifteen years old
is fighting his first and last battle. He sees his lord go down and rushes to
help. But our narrator reminds us it’s his inexperience that is to blame. You
can almost hear a chorus of seasoned warriors scream “NO!—Don’t do it!” as he
slides the spear head out and Byrtnoth slumps to the ground.
Why wasn’t this covered in basic training? In both tales
someone pulls the blade who didn’t know any better—a woman, a new soldier—because
everyone else knows not to do that until you can treat it carefully.
But now we know. If you or someone you love is ever pierced by
a spear, don’t try to remove it on the battlefield. Or in the classroom.
Because Harold wasn’t always allergic to bees.
In a Texas elementary school in October of 2000, six-year old Destiny Lopez was trotting back to her desk when she fell on her newly sharpened pencil, and it pierced her heart. A pencil is just a small spear, after all—wooden shaft, sharp point.
Her heroic and self-possessed teacher did not act rashly.
She lay down on the floor with Destiny as the pencil pulsed with the beat of
her heart. She did NOT remove the weapon from the wounded warrior’s chest.
And that little girl lived.
So let that be a lesson to us. And go get some first aid
training, or at least read some good battle poetry.
Here are two articles about Destiny and her teacher:
If I am a lover
of form in verse, I am no less enamored of poetic prose. I don’t know why more
people don’t write prose poems. Some poems, in fact, I think would lose none of
their charm if we just let them be prose instead of forcing line breaks that can
seem arbitrary.
So tonight, on
what social media has just informed me is World Book Day, I offer some baby
books for the harried, along with a brief introduction.
Prose poems are
compact, usually a paragraph to a page or two. Shorter than most fiction, they
tend not so much to tell a story as to convey an evocative image. The density
of their language and their use of figurative language often used in poetry
make them seem like a verbal inoculation against sloppy writing—they remind us
that language can be precise and powerful without meter or rhyme, and they
leave us with an image or idea that we can carry in to the world.
They are perfect for evenings when you just have a little time and want to indulge in something like candy for your brain. My choices tonight hearken back to where I first encountered the prose poem—a French literature class in college—so one is from the 19th century Baudelaire (who is often compared to Edgar Allan Poe, even by himself) and the 20th century Francis Ponge, who became something of an icon in prose poetry, known for minute description and crystalline imagery.
Enjoy.
“Be Drunken” by Charles Baudelaire
BE DRUNKEN, ALWAYS.
That is the point. Nothing else matters. If you would not feel the horrible burden
of Time weigh you down and crush you to the earth, be drunken continually.
Drunken with
what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please. But be drunken.
And if
sometimes, on the steps of a palace, or on the green grass in a ditch, or in the
dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and find the drunkenness
half or entirely gone, ask of the wind, of the wave, of the star, of the bird,
of the clock, of all that flies, of all that sighs, of all that moves, of all
that sings, of all that speaks, ask what hour it is; and wind, wave, star,
bird, or clock will answer you: “It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if
you would not be the martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With
wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please.”
“Rain” by Francis
Ponge
The rain, in the backyard
where I watch it fall, comes down at different rates. In the center a fine discontinuous
curtain — or network — falls implacably and yet gently in drops that
are probably quite light; a strengthless sempiternal precipitation, an intense
fraction of the atmosphere at its purest. A little distance from the walls to
the right and left plunk heavier drops, one by one. Here they seem about the size
of grains of wheat, the size of a pea, while elsewhere they are big as marbles.
Along gutters and window frames the rain runs horizontally, while depending
from the same obstacles it hangs like individually wrapped candies. Along the
entire surface of a little zinc roof under my eyes it trickles in a very thin
sheet, a moiré pattern formed by the varying currents created by the
imperceptible bumps and undulations of the surface. From the gutter it flows
with the restraint of a shallow creek until it tumbles out into a perfectly
vertical net, rather imperfectly braided, all the way to the ground where it
breaks and sparkles into brilliant needles.
Each of its forms has its particular allure and corresponds to a particular
patter. Together they share the intensity of a complex mechanism as
precise as it is dangerous, like a steam-powered clock whose spring is wound by
the force of the precipitation.
The ringing on the ground of the vertical trickles, the glug-glug of the
gutters, the miniscule strikes of the gong multiply and resonate all at once in
a concert without monotony, and not without a certain delicacy.
Once the spring unwinds itself certain wheels go on turning for a while, more
and more slowly, until the whole mechanism comes to a stop. It all vanishes
with the sun: when it finally reappears, the brilliant apparatus evaporates. It
has rained.
*The Baudelaire poem was printed in Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine: Selected Verse and Prose Poems and translated
by Joseph M. Bernstein. Citadel Press 1990.
Sometimes in the middle of unpacking a myth’s metaphoric meanings, the story can seem pretty wild and ridiculous, and if I’m still looking like I think it’s cool, my students start to look at me like I’m slightly cracked. That’s when I try to make it relevant. Today’s handy lesson was “When you’re grappling a shapeshifter, just hang on until they run out of forms.”
We read the myth of Erysichthon, the sacrilegious cretin who chops down a giant oak sacred to Ceres (goddess of grain and fertility and motherhood). Inside the tree is a nymph, so it bleeds when he chops it down. Ovid’s treatment is wonderful: in response to this crime, Ceres seeks out her opposite, Famine, and sicks her on Erysichthon. Famine breathes want in to his bones, and he gets hungrier as he eats.
Just as the sea receives the rivers of the earth, but then can drink still other streams that flow from distant parts; and just as a devouring fire will not reject more fuel, but feeds on countless logs, becoming ever more voracious with each gift: so for the sinner Erysichthon’s lips, each banquet only adds to what he’s missed. For him food calls for food, glut calls for glut; his being full amounts to emptiness. (Metamorphoses 8; Allen Mandelbaum, translator)
And here we have a doodle of the tree Erysichthon mutilates. It was big enough for fifteen nymphs to dance around, hand in hand, and decorated with ribbons and votive tablets.
When it gets very bad (which doesn’t take long), Erysichthon
tries to sell his daughter for food. However, in an offscreen back story, she
had been previously raped by Neptune, and in compensation he had granted her
the ability to shape-shift. So every time Erysichthon sells her, she transforms
in to a different animal and escapes her new master. Eventually he eats away at
his own flesh.
That message seems clear. Don’t willfully challenge the gods,
or they will respond in kind. Erysichthon’s greed is magnified until it
consumes him. It’s not even reciprocal justice; it’s just turning up the volume.
But we were talking about shapeshifters. Erysichthon’s
daughter sparks comparison with other shapeshifters: Proteus, who is name-dropped
in this same book of the Metamorphoses
and Thetis, mother of Achilles, who will come up later.
Both these shapeshifters are gods, so the boon to the mortal
girl had been to make her godlike. Proteus and Thetis are both compelled to do
something against their will, and their shapeshifting turns out to be a
detriment. When Menelaus, the king of Sparta, is trying to get home from the
Trojan War, he learns he needs to get directions from Proteus to do so. He must
sneak up on Proteus as he’s sunbathing and hold on to him no matter what he
turns in to. If he can keep his grip until Proteus grows tired and runs out of
ideas and returns to his original form, Menelaus will have power over him.
The same thing happens to Thetis, the sea goddess whom Peleus overcomes. In her case she’s trying to avoid rape, so she turns into a literal hellcat (ok—tiger) and some other scary things in order to get away. She does get away the first time, but the second time, Peleus gets some coaching and learns he just needs to hold on. It’s still a rape narrative. If you don’t like that, and I don’t, it helps to think of Thetis bearing the child Achilles who will be the greatest warrior the Greeks ever produce. He is so great because he’s a goddess’s son, but no goddess would submit to being dominated by a mortal willingly (except Venus), so she needs to be “won.” Still not awesome by 21st century standards, but if we read it mythically and remember that she is the sea, we see Peleus wrangling the ever-changing sea and that power is channeled in to Achilles.
This is what happens for Menelaus too; he conquers Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, so metaphorically the sea itself. What he gains from that conquest is power over the sea—the ability to navigate it safely and get his crew home. And it reveals our life hack for the day: hang on.
No matter what crazy things happen, no matter how fast things change and how overwhelming or even terrifying they seem, don’t let go. Don’t give up. Every fight teaches you something, so if you fight ten things in quick succession, you learn ten times as fast. Grappling a shapeshifter is like taking a two-week winter session course instead of the whole semester–not for the faint of heart.
A House of Stories 