Scheherazade

The female teller of The Arabian Nights, holding out the promise of another tale – a tale leading to another – has now been recast (in my mind) as Elizabeth Gaskell. Dickens, I am told by a professor of English, addressed her as such, for her short stories always contained suggestions of further. And told in parts – two or three or more, as many were then, they would have defied Poe's criteria defining a shorter work, for none could have been read 'at a sitting'. Readers would have had to ponder the first part until the next was published, continuing or concluding the tale. A slower digestion of words would have allowed tales with layers, such as hers were, to be more closely examined, and for the social problems she may have raised to be considered, set in a world where Time and Place are becoming different, or to characters who have gained Independence appear so: they are part of a wider world; a world that questions their own; a world that for all its progress of simplification is actually more complex. Or the reader is introduced to the woman's world of making do, including that of her reflections: girlhood recalled, then the first flush of womanhood, before Age with its grey locks knocked at the door, and turned all to memory. Here, a woman's mind is preferred to her person.
Mrs Gaskell's observations seem to me still current: Time and Place are always changing, complicating rather than simplifying; and such advancement, whilst it allows us to connect with the wider world, causes us to neglect our local surroundings. Our horizons broadened we lose much (in my opinion) by failing to narrow them. And yet a woman's world is still not as broad as a man's, nor is her mind consistently preferred to her person.

Picture credit: Scheherazade, Sophie Gengembre Anderson (source: WikiArt).

See Cousin Phillis and Other Stories, Elizabeth Gaskell (Oxford World Classics, 2010, introduction and notes by Heather Glen.) From journal, November 2021.

Telescope

From Coleridge's telescopic introspection to a boy's. A boy's Travels With A Telescope, watching ships, and beginning a voyage of discovery: gender divorced from sex. A boy with dreams of femaleness. The world he wished to inhabit so distant through the glass he felt removed from the human cycle: what part did he have in any of it? He existed, yes, but his mind and body were not One, and therefore as a boy he couldn't be at one with the world. A spiritual Conundum, a spiritual quest. From Wales to stately, intellectual, scholarly Oxford; to Army life and foreign travels. A boy, a man, a woman.
But not a woman, in my opinion, in the true sense of the word. The term is more than a feeling. Woman is a biological experience: it's painful, it's messy, and fluctuates from one extreme to another; a bodily tide of mood and emotion. Woman has a different relationship with her anatomy; chemically, hormonally, there is a difference – a huge country of influence. Boys, men can explore or cross into this terrain, but their lived experience is not Woman, it is Other.

*

I can only judge through the lens of my own lived experience. I do not deny that all mortals have feminine and masculine qualities, nor that one, irrespective of biological gender, will dominate, be the principle ruler, but 'Woman' I translate as Fact; determined biologically, chemically, by Nature. The issue for me is Language, not prejudice. I don't much care what people are; I don't much care for confined spaces – cramped boxes with labels – but I do care when one half of the human race is told they can't hold certain views, nor discuss openly their own idea of 'Woman'. I do care when a people are redefined without any rational debate, just flung hatred. I do care when women are informed their identity, their experience, as seen through their individual lens, is obsolete, and that they must now accept a new language, a new order. Woman, an accommodating gender, is too often dictated to.

Picture credit: Still Life with Telescope, 1927, Max Beckmann (source: WikiArt). 

I refer to Jan Morris' Conundrum and to the initial response it raised within me. Adapted from a journal entry, October 2021.

Groups of Lines

Coleridge #1
His rolling eyes, a sea never becalmed, always in motion; his large, fleshy gaping mouth, a fish struggling for breath; and his hair, a black glossy mass.
Coleridge, wild and strange. A Romantic Poet; a visionary Philosopher. Charismatic and hypnotic. Wordsworth, in comparison, a drier character.

Coleridge #2
Coleridge, a wolf, wrapped in a greatcoat: What Imagination! What Language! What Fast Science! What Eyes! What Milk-white Forehead!
Coleridge, from whom nothing escapes.

Coleridge #3
Coleridge, figuratively running wild and blind in the deserts of Arabia, screaming 'Wordsworth!'
Coleridge, an outburst of emotions.

Coleridge #4
Coleridge, a mind that had much to do; that gave its attention to the visible, the invisible, and the evocative; hovered between images, like a Kingfisher in short flight, thereby permitting its observant eye to see and define everything it was surrounded by.

Coleridge #5
Coleridge, the German scholar, a mass of information; holding forth enthusiastically on any topic. Him, the sun of a young and admiring circle.

Coleridge #6
Coleridge, an alleged kleptomaniac. Jumping from foreign rock to foreign rock, smuggling valuables across borders, in disguise. His large prominent eye fixed upon his own image in glittering waters.

Coleridge #7
Coleridge, the fatal Genius; all things to all men, tho' uncertain about his true direction. Dreamed more than planned; planned more than could be executed. Coleridge, in a restless whirl, or ecstatic state, unable to concentrate. Or absorbed, wholly absorbed, in his inner world of thoughts and feeling.

Coleridge #8
Coleridge, a pure scribbler; a political, poetical reporter, displaying his extensive knowledge and well-grounded foresight, defending Liberty and the Rights of Nature.
Coleridge, a translator, in a five-penny floral dressing-gown decorated with hieroglyphics, alone in his study, losing himself in his work.

Coleridge #9
Coleridge, a drifter and dreamer, always looking to, and searching for, a sublime and beautiful visual existence.

Picture credit: The Dreamer, Caspar David Friedrich (source: WikiArt).

Source material: Coleridge: Early Visions by Richard Holmes.

Written October 2021.

Twilight State: A Definition

The Twilight State, the state between day and night, between child and adult, the state in which there is no clear distinction between the two: it is both. A square of light in a darkening day, a childish mind in an adult frame.

Picture credit: At the Summer House in Twilight, c.1895, Isaac Levitan (source: WikiArt).

Written October 2021.

Essay on Browning

My first official introduction (by Penguin Classics) to Browning, Robert Browning was conducted through a strangling, which I hadn't expected having just read, only seconds before, of his passionate attachment to home – he left his parental home aged thirty-four; and yet here he was the lover of Porphyria strangling her with her yellow hair. Hm Browning, I thought, you have dark depths; what next on this selected poetry tour?
One surprise after another followed: dramatic romances, dramatic lyrics, and the Pied Piper that rid Hamelin of its rats, then spirited its children away. Three riders galloping, galloping; two, their horse spent; so, alas! only one makes it into Ghent. My eyes fly from word to word, my heart pounds.
Then, a pause... a different note. A wistful, contemplative note, as the poet surveys what was once an ancient city; or recalls a day in the city-square, oh to have a house there! if there was 'money enough and to spare', where a trumpet might announce the arrival of a puppet show 'Bang-whang-whang goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the fife'. Noise and bustle, or the calm of a villa where nature more forcibly strikes you, its darkness pierced by song and lute. Music has crept in, its language and its notes, as have the longer storytelling poems, which I have to, I admit, often read twice through, because sometimes only then does the full story take, my full understanding awaken. My mind, it is true, occasionally drifts on these selected journeyings, somehow loses the ability to at first grasp the words and sees only imagery, but as if through a fog as compared to a clear mist. I reach the end and begin again, Ah! Light, here she comes, line by line, until a sun has edged the clouds away. As the madman saith to the Arab physician: 'It is strange'; strange how the hour of the day influences. But perhaps the hour too made its mark on Browning? I know from my own experience it can be difficult to return to a work unfinished in a different hour: the same thread might not be found, so that which is complete is abandoned or revised, or continued from but disjointedly. The writer loses objectivity, for the work to them reads like two separate pieces: the joins can be perceived. Have they in their tinkering, continuation, or re-write made it worse or better? Perhaps, though, Browning had none of those problems...
This certainly seems to be the case with Childe Roland, which Browning claimed some thirty-odd years later came to him, with no conscious intention, 'as a kind of dream. I had to write it then and there, and I finished it the same day, I believe.'
Is Browning to be believed? Yes! Some ideas just come, entire, with no clue whence they came from, or how, in the aftermath, the artist (the writer, the poet etc.) executed them, for the style, the language might not seem their own: their normal habitable mode. It was all there, existing already in the mind, the imagination, and had to be written, with no reflection until later of what it meant or might suggest; and indeed that might never become clear. Being in that creative flow, however, feeling borne along by it or almost united with it, is a wonderful feeling, whether as an active participant or passive spectator. It is present in all art forms (and nature), and is the closest we have, in an increasingly secular world, to achieving what was once described as religious ecstasy: a soaring of spirit.
Did Browning's spirit soar with Childe Roland? I think so; and though it may not have been as apparent to me as to him, we have to take his word.
Art, the written, the visual is collaborative. Words paint landscapes and portraits; two sources might combine, for example, to paint a man in poetry or prose: the historical giving way to fiction or verse. One artist's work becomes a handbook for the other. It is to this he refers, as Browning does with Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, to create, in different words, in different form, his own. Art, in other words, inspires art. Or comment. Just as Browning found cause to write how a poet might strike a contemporary; just as I have found cause to write on Browning. 

Picture credit: Robert Browning by George Frederick Watts (source: WikiArt)

See Selected Poems by Robert Browning (Penguin Classics, 2004).

Written October 2021.

Nerval's Madness

What if he saw symbols we didn't see;

what if Nature did indeed communicate with him.

What if he had crossed a plane that most mortals can't;

what if by that definition he wasn't mad at all?

What if he instead spoke the language of the Universe.

Picture credit: Gérard de Nerval by Félix Nadar

Written October 2021.

Lives

Lives fascinate me; but biography is for me to read not to write. The obsession with the chosen subject over a prolonged period would be too much; that is the way I think one might descend into madness. For, it must grow difficult to separate the lived from the living, the two must, to some extent, converge. To understand the lived, the living must try to inhabit, or at least try to visualise or imagine, some of their world as it once existed. The old and the new travelled between, or the modern, for a time, suspended. The subject, the life must be breathed for the biographer to animate the words they will in turn write. The places their subject dwelt in or frequented must be visited; their footsteps followed. Any trace they may have left of themselves must be read or investigated. It must an exhausting, all-consuming search, and accompanied therefore by euphoric or depressive moods, which may chime with the subject's own. I cannot imagine, from my limited reading of lives, how it could be otherwise. It requires more mental, emotional stability, I think, than the average human, or perhaps the resilience to bounce back, to shake off the lived, after the experience.
Perhaps however I'm wrong and the lived subject can be divorced from throughout the whole process. I cannot believe though that this approach would not affect how the life was written and read. I cannot conceive of not, as a biographer (and indeed a reader), liking and identifying with the lived. Why then choose to write of lives lived? (Why then read biography?) There must, there has to be, some affinity, some attraction, a wanting to know.
The best biographers, the best written biographies, will always be for me those that live and breathe their subject.

Picture credit: Englishman in the Campagna, 1845, Carl Spitzweg (source: WikiArt).

Journal entry, October 2021.

We Look Far

We follow, in many ways, our ancestors' paths instead of forging our own. We look back to their achievements, their times of peace and conflict, and their colonial past. We look far, beyond our grandparents, and even our great-grandparents, great uncles and aunts. We look far, to understand, to critique, to atone. We look far, to praise or blame these long ago events for our present state. We look far, too far. Our eyes less eager to examine more recent history, for roots of problems, for solutions, for it's too fresh in public memory and forms part of our own lived history. We look far because we do not wish to acknowledge our own mistakes, our own participation, as a nation, in certain events: the Gulf, Iraq, Afghanistan. We look far, and blame our present division on Victorian values or Empire, and not our own failure to integrate, only to divide further. All-white, all-black, all-male, all-female groups; safe spaces, yes, but charitable, commercial, dramatic enterprises? All one race, all one gender does not, it is obvious, promote equality or tolerance, but then nor do quotas. We look far, to assess power, the power given to or taken by authority figures, the leaders of governments or states, the voted-in officials, and say in response to rapes, murders and mass shootings: 'Never Again', when history, near and far, testifies otherwise. Never, in the historical context, does not exist. Some things cannot be prevented. Humankind is not designed to be all good. We look far, to study the Greats, the great men, the great women, and uncover, too, their flaws. We look far, and in present time rewrite their past, their character, as man, as woman, as playwright, as novelist, as artist. We look near, and study not, in biography, their works, but their personality. We look near, too near, and learn nothing about art.

Picture credit: Ink Valley, 2012, Jacek Yerka (source: WikiArt).

Inspired, in part, by Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life by Lyndall Gordon. Written October 2021.

Crisis

A week after reading of William James and whilst reading Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, I had a crisis, not a physical or spiritual crisis but a writerly one. I suddenly questioned what I call my 'work', and whether I actually wanted anyone (other than myself) to read it.
It had not, I felt, been a good year for writing. The year before had produced better material, in spite of, or perhaps because of Covid restrictions, not that in reality they impacted my life that much, except that suddenly my part-time job was gone, but then the nature of it (in the service industry) had begun to make me feel vulnerable anyway. In a sense, my first lockdown had started a week before the government called it, and perhaps in that 'protected' time that went on and on and on I'd said all I wanted to say or used up all my creative ability, and now, in mid-September 2021, I was growing dissatisfied. The urge to write still very much there, longhand or freehand (in the creative flow) on the keys, and yet something that's impossible to define was not the same.
The changes in seasons affect me, so perhaps - I hoped - it was only that; it would settle, it usually did, once the clocks went back; although until then I might continue to feel uncomfortable at the thought of my work being read. Work that was unpolished, unedited, and flouted, at times, grammatical rules. Work with poorly constructed sentences, because it's all about sound, how it sounds to me personally, and the grammatically correct I often don't like; and with too many commas and semi-colons sprinkled everywhere, and new sentences beginning with And. Work that was neither prose or poetry. Work that chose not to explain anything, that expected a reader to know or if interested to do their own research. Work that said less is better: I have no energy to fill this blank space, and anyway, people's attention spans are shorter; therefore, my pieces will reflect that.
Reflect that they had, and still do. They said only what they needed to say and then stopped, instead of, as I would have done in the past, drawn them out, until the white space crawled with black words. I had, I felt, explained too much; and now I could afford to be more condensed, more abstracted. I shifted, it is true, with some difficulty to this new perspective, and entered – I think on reflection - a new exploratory writing phase; all had been well until this new uneasiness stirred. Stirred at a time, too, when I was in a feverish process of writing twelve pieces (for publication 2023!), all of which had to be a maximum of 250 words. The last, though it was intended to be published eighth, I rewrote three times, which for me is unusual, and I was still, though through editing it met the criteria, unhappy with what was to be the final version.
Through it all the uneasiness tugged, like a form of self-doubt or self-consciousness. As I type this, freehand, it's even now tugging away, causing me every now and again to pause, hands clasped almost in prayer before the keyboard, lips pressed to the thumbs. I don't want not to write, but do I want some of what I write to be read? It's no good, no good at all. I'm not a writer. Yet writing a journal on its own I know won't be (though it used to be) enough. If there's no purpose, other than my own selfish need, I might stop, which I don't think would be wise for a mind whose thoughts circle ceaselessly and build, layer upon layer, unless released and set down on physical or digital paper.
This writerly crisis must, it has to, pass.

Picture credit: Robinson Crusoe illustration, 1920, N. C. Wyeth (source: WikiArt).

Written September 2021.

The Lived Experience

Do I believe in determinism? Do I believe in science? Do I believe in accidents or cause and effect? Do I believe that leisure is the mother of philosophy? The latter definitely, the rest less so. I do and I don't. I struggle with determinism; I struggle with the fact that science always requests evidence or tries to trace any event to a cause, a logical explanation, for it seems to me science and scientific opinion refutes a person's lived experience, because they cannot believe in anything science hasn't demonstrated to be true, even though they have a will of their own which they regularly exercise.
I don't believe we are thrown into the world; I believe we have agreed to enter, or return to, it. And determined, too, some of the circumstances we are born into. We may not like, nor understand, the choices we've made, but I don't believe our race, our sex, our family are largely accidental. At some stage, prior to commencing the journey, they were within our control.
I don't believe in positive discrimination; I believe in no discrimination at all. Quotas only tip the scales of discrimination the opposite way.
I believe most of us, at some point, experience the inability to feel pleasure; with some of us it's a lifelong complaint.
I believe some of us remain disengaged by choice, and then flirt all the time with thoughts that cannot be, even if the chance or the opportunity arises, overcome; in moments where they are their disappearance does not last long. Faking it doesn't make it. Faking it is torture.

Picture credit: Here I and Sorrow Sit, (red crayon on paper), by William James (source: MS Am 109.2 (55) _Houghton Library, Harvard University).

Journal entry, September 2021. See Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life by John Kaag.

But ...

The honest man keeps his own counsel and refuses to share.

A letter is a living soul, a faithful echo of the spoken voice.

Paraphrased Balzac wisdom that on first reading strikes you enough you return to cast your eye over again, and then again to take note of, only to a moment later, as the mind still churns them over, want to add 'but'.

But...the honest man is doubted.

But...an echo can only be heard if the spoken voice is known.

But...the honest man might be using his honesty to work towards immoral rewards.

But...the echo, if heard, though it might be faithful to the spoken voice might be speaking lies.

But...

The buts continue to interrupt, refuse to accept the face value of the words; for, didn't Balzac set out to prove with his Human Comedy cycle, and indeed prove it, that each mortal has its own ways, of living, of loving, of being both moral and immoral; that no human is entirely one or the other, and that every human can be, many without realising it, duplicitous and contradictory.

Picture credit: Portrait of Balzac in his Famous Dressing Gown, Louis Boulanger (source: Wikipedia).

Journal entry, September 2021. See Old Man Goriot by Honoré de Balzac (Penguin Classics 2011)

Story of the Love Affair that Never was

The story starts with a lodger in a boarding house saying to his landlady, 'Mrs X., I'll not take porridge today, please; I'll take some eggs.'

And I assume that's what he did, with brown bread – eggs taste so much better on brown, but perhaps to him bread was bread, or the landlady was strict in this regard, it was white or nothing, with marge.
Anyhow, that is how, I'm told, the story started, though frankly it was a little irritating that the teller left out these more trifling details; but I can only relate it as I heard it.
So, well lined with eggs, off he strode with giant steps to his job in a public building, on what I can only imagine was a bigger, more important day than usual, though eggs, I fear, would not have set him up.
Now, in this public building were shelves and shelves of books, where people wandered in, off the streets, day in, day out, to look at and, if a member, i.e., had within their wallet or their purse a card, borrow for three weeks or longer. I don't know what our lodger's exact job was, but obviously it involved books and therefore the users of the building, be they very young or very old or somewhere in-between.
Of course, as such stories go (and they rarely go anywhere else), there was a woman, who puzzled and intrigued him; for her movements, when within, it must be said, were a little odd. She hovered around the shelves, a moth forever drawn to the written word, and studying often a scrap of paper in her hand yet appeared unsure of whether it was this book she wanted or another, or indeed any at all. Some of the assistants thought she was waiting for the books to speak to her and when none did, she was dumbfounded. Other times however the knowledge, out of sight of this great public building, had been given to her, and her choices had been made, and transported, before she arrived.
This was one of those days – She had come to collect.
The lodger having seen her library number among the reserved books the day before had also divined this, and had determined that somehow he would engage her in conversation.
She, however, on arrival, did not as he had imagined immediately approach the reservation collection point and scurried off to a darker recess, a bit of paper as always clutched in her hand.
He looked at his watch – his break was soon, and regulations stipulated that he took it at the exact minute to its exact ending second. He had now lost sight of her and lost his head. She wasn't in the children's section – why would she be? She wasn't in Art or Biography. Ah, there she was! A dark-coated figure in Travel, standing prone, turning over the yellowed leaves of a paperback. He looked again at his watch... damn! And strode past with a sideways glance.
By the time he returned, her ordered book had gone!
And that was the beginning and the end, for never did they in the surroundings of books encounter each other.

Picture credit: Blossoming Almond in a Glass with a Book, 1888, Vincent van Gogh (source: WikiArt).

Written September 2021, with a little assistance from Robert Louis Stevenson (see The Amateur Emigrant – from The Stowaways.)

Letter to G.

Dear G.,

Wednesday, a crafting day with PVA glue. (What does PVA stand for?) A sticky mess – hands, table – and it's only the morning; but nevertheless on a warm, muggy beginning, when the air is but a breath, a restful activity. DIY books are made, a legacy – for what, for whom? I don't know. I will store them in a box to be found, and hope they survive the years, the moths, the paper-chewing bugs, any natural god-made disasters that befall the contents of this flat. There are digital equivalents, but who knows whether in years to come they'll be able to be read, to be unlocked. And again by whom, by what? It's a riddle, though I'm not sure I care that I don't have, don't know the answer. It's for after, after the fact, when dust has come to these bones. A dust that is being slowly grinded now I think. The state they must be in! Walking yesterday, just to the shops and back, was hard work, not painful, just effortful. The pavement the problem, not my feet; unless it is my feet that have grown picky upon what ground they walk over.
A pause, a break, to wash the hair, to exercise inside, to watch Neighbours, to lunch (peanut butter – yum!) with Robert Louis Stevenson and Modestine (the donkey) in the Cévennes.
Then a further break to attempt again to restore, to rewrite a lost work (human error!), and failing, some online research.
Wednesday, a crafting day, with none of yesterday's near total silence. No; a busy day of sirens.
Wednesday, a day I cannot write a normal letter and stuff full of trivia and goings-on; though the trivia matters just as much as the big; because it all, big and small, passes. One day becomes another, one year goes into another dot, dot, dot.
Yes; Wednesday, when my mind does not wish to think, nor indeed to comment, upon worldly affairs, nor speak of the personal. We are all still here – Mum, Dad, D., Aunt, Uncle, I. Ups and downs. Highs and lows. But here.
An unusual letter, if it can be said to be a letter at all. Perhaps a more usual one next time? (if not penned on a Wednesday.)

H.

Picture credit: Path under the Trees, Summer 1877, Camille Pissarro (source: WikiArt).

Written September 2021.

Passage to America

The beautiful sea-cry, 'All's Well!'
heard through a veil,
two syllables in a darkness of a night at sea.
A lantern swung to and fro with the motion of the ship;
through the open slide-door, a glimpse of a grey night sea,
phosphorescent foam flying,
swift as birds, into the wake,
and the horizon rising and falling
as the vessel rolled to the wind.
Below, on the first landing,
lads and lasses danced,
in jigs and reels and hornpipes;
a god made of the fiddler.
In a different quarter, a more forlorn party,
the motion, here, in the ship's nose, violent;
the uproar of the sea overpoweringly loud.
The yellow flicker of the lantern
spun round and round.
The human noises of the sick (sea-sick, dog-sick),
joined into a kind of farmyard chorus.
A man, run wild with terror,
cried with a thrill of agony,
'The ship's going down!'
Repeated, in a whisper,
his voice rising towards a sob.
The emotion of his voice catching.

Picture credit: Woman on ship deck looking out to sea, (also known as girl at ship's rail), 1835, Maurice Prendergast (source: WikiArt).

Inspired by The Amateur Emigrant by Robert Louis Stevenson (from Steerage Scenes).

Written September 2021.

A Passage, A Letter, A Story

A letter placed by the side of another, then perhaps another, and another, nudging each other, to form a word, a single word, leading on to perhaps a whole string of them like charms on a bracelet. A passage, a letter, a story. Mere tangles of words, the string played with over and over; the knots grow tighter, the string plays with another similar, different coloured, ball. Inarticulate, ridiculous, unprintable. Better never to have been written at all. But ah! freedom; the freedom of letters placed side by side. A mere outcry; a wild outburst. A flight; a shout, that echoes, echoes, echoes... nonsense; and again trails off, dot, dot, dot. Silence. How still the self, the voice has become. How still the world...but no! There is noise. A bird discoursing to itself or another; the sound of a train running over the tracks Sutton-here-I-come, Sutton-I-come; the constant hum of an air conditioner, one long exhale. People, animals, objects going about their lives.
The self, paused, once more pipes up. 'But', just as the narrator of An Unwritten Novel also asks, 'when the self speaks to self, who is speaking? - the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world – a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.'
Up and down, up, down...
Yes, the self muses, a coward; and no beauty, except perhaps in lantern-light. A rare light to be sure. Worshipping things, soft living things and hard solid things with its softening light. All sharp angles gone. All marks covered.
The mind, under this dimmed light, no less quick in thought but absent-minded in action. A book placed where an empty cup should have been left, an empty cup where the book should be. A set of pyjamas moved back to where they've just been moved from, then moved again to where they should be; and joining in the doing, therefore, all pleasant and disagreeable thought, that no crack in the paintwork or mark on the wall, even if seen and looked at, could put a full stop to.

Picture credit: Lantern and Flashlight, Dan Witz (source: WikiArt).

Quote from An Unwritten Novel by Virginia Woolf. See Selected Short Stories, Penguin Classics.

Journal entry, September 2021.

Maturity

Maturity, more abstracted, more surreal. As the poet matures, perhaps in years, perhaps experience, perhaps expression, so does the poetry. I think this is true of many a writer – poet or novelist, unless their debut is dazzling. I think this is true of many a person, unless what they see and learn of the world stalls them; keeps them locked in place or makes them retreat.
Where it's written, I prefer the more anguished early years; later it's more hidden, cloaked in metaphors. Youth have that freedom; adults must resist it, not speak of it, and not write openly of it. For, angst should have disappeared, as years were gained, as the adult face emerged, beneath the youthful one.

Picture credit: The Poet, 1911, Pablo Picasso (source: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Wikipedia).

From journal, September 2021.

Minor

A minor role. A minor song. Minor, not in age but in experience and feeling. A minor woman. A minor human.
A woman, withering, with melancholy eyes. The bloom not quite gone, but beginning to decay. Silver strands; unfading lines. Time, marks her. And marks, too, the mind.
What has life given her? Memory; and childhood imagery. Of sea, as Lorca describes, with 'teeth of foam, lips of sky'. Dreams, with spiders of oblivion, spinning thread. And song, their ancient words still recalled; their melodies hummed.
Life gave, then took. And ceased to give; whilst others continued to live; and grow in ways expected.
The adult, half-crossed out, has no story; only a minor role, a minor song.

Picture credit: Testimony of a Minor, Honore Daumier (source: WikiArt)

See From Book of Poems in Selected Poems by Federico García Lorca (Oxford World's Classics, translation by Martin Sorrell).

Written August 2021.

Framework

The framework on which a novel rests or is supported, its structure perhaps strong in some places and weak in others. The sequencing of events is good, keeps the inquisitive novel-reader hooked, but less so the intelligent, for being devoid of plot there is no plot to thicken. Or the why? is there, but the sequencing is a shambles, leaving both the inquisitive and the intelligent novel-reader confused as to what is happening generally or even who characters are and which of them the story or plot ultimately depends upon or revolves around. Who is flat and who is round? if we wish to critique in E. M. Forster's terms. And yet it could be that the characters themselves, minor or major, are the weakest part of the structure, and fail to act as directed by the writer or in some instances to act at all. The writer has lost control of his cast!
Examples! demand the audience, to which the speaker responds: I speak in general, not of particulars, for how dreary it would be to spend the evening comparing one author with another. Each of you – if you are really readers, or scholars – will know of novel people or passages to which you can refer (and refer others) to as flawed, though you will have to admit there must be some allowance for taste. By which I mean some flaws, if there, can be overlooked, certainly if the writing is good or if the rest of the structure is, for the most part, sound. Novel-readers, inquisitive or intelligent, never agree, you know...
The speaker breaks off to clear his throat and sips from a glass of water. And here too we will leave him, for his lecture, like the novel as it nears its end, shows signs of decay; it will either be too neat and formulaic, culminating in marriage or death, or so messy that one might ask: 'What was that about?' And the writer, in this most trying of circumstances, for her creation is no E. M. Forster, does not wish to observe her creation flounder, as is bound to happen, his left hand is already in his jacket pocket feeling for the crumpled handkerchief to wipe his brow, for it's hot in the hall, under the spotlights, and the audience are not, as he anticipated, sitting in appreciative silence; they are disconcertingly muttering amongst themselves.
And then? No; we shall leave.
Why? Because like some dramas put on the stage or small screen, what should have been strong is weak.

Picture credit:  Who, What, 2006, Alexsandr Borodin (source: WikiArt).

See Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster

Journal entry, August 2021.

Pseudo-scholars

The pseudo-scholar. A class of, that apparently 'includes professors who have written large books on the novel as well as all the people who read superficially', to whom E. M. Forster addressed his Clark lectures, somewhat sarcastically, with irony. For they were not true readers; they did not as a true reader would enter into a struggle with the writer. Though the struggle begun will, of course, be one-sided, the writer having done and closed the subject. The reader discourses with a creation independent of its author and can expect no authorial responses, except those from reviewers and critics and teachers and professors should it have become a required text. And even if the latter should be the case and the text is read under some duress, the struggle is still the reader's own, so that he or she will have to make their own judgements and reach their own conclusions, and determine, for instance, why they may be troubled or exercised.
A struggle is also, it's worth pointing out, not determined by length. A slim volume, of say seventy to one hundred pages, can be as equally thought-provoking or maddening as one of such size and weight it makes a good doorstop. The slimmest are not, as is frequently assumed, the simplest, nor the fattest, the more complex. It's very often, in my experience, the reverse, perhaps due to language or style or the psychology of the protagonist, or the historical circumstances covered. The slim can pack a punch, whilst the fat's punches are evenly spaced in-between more slow-paced action, usually ending on a damp note, as too many words by this time had been spent; the reader's struggle having ended some pages ago, past caring, though on they read to the bitter end.
Size, then, (the number of pages or words), can determine the novel's energy, and how too the reader's struggle will be charged. A quick read and the ground on which the reader-writer relationship is built may prove less firm, less secure than the cosy one formed with a confiding narrative made of many words. One may exhaust with its nervous tension, the other may only have moments of it, interspersed with moments of stillness, peace. One's protagonist-narrator may make the reader uncomfortable with his actions, the other less uneasy and more complicit. The writer either indifferent to the reader, or the reader, and their perception, made to feel involved in the story.
Pseudo-scholars know only a little or nothing of these struggles, for they read not to challenge themselves, but because they are told, led, as it were by bestselling lists and the choices of their contemporaries, and so cannot engage with a novel in quite the same way as a true reader or a real scholar.
'The word [genius]', to quote Forster, 'exempts him [the pseudo-scholar] from discovering its meaning.' A genius writes literature; all novelists therefore are geniuses, a class apart from the rest of us, even if the novel, born of the genius' hand and itself declared genius, has not been digested or even partially consumed. The pseudo-scholar, as said before, would rather go around proclaiming their uninformed opinions than sit down alone and read. For, I imagine, if we take the same French critic's definition of the novel as Forster does in his introductory lecture anything above 50,000 words would be too much. A pseudo-scholar would prefer in that instance to place their hands upon it as one might do a Bible and hope some, if not all, of what it contains is transferred to their brain. Perhaps some have tried this?

Picture credit: Scholars at a Lecture, William Hogarth (source: WikiArt).

See Aspects of the Novel by E.M Forster.

Adapted from journal entries, August 2021.

Dead Man's Slave

Having assumed more strange shy ways, as I turned my back on youth, including the possession of its spirit, I have grown more prone than ever, if that's possible for an already contemplative nature, to moods of thought. And although they have mostly led to bewilderment and few gains in wisdom, I would rather entertain them than not. The more I look at the world and all its oddities, the more it exceedingly puzzles me. Men and women, and children especially, as, to echo young Holgrave of Hawthorne's novel, one can never be certain that she really knows them; nor guess what they have been, from what she sees them to be, now.
Humanity is a complex riddle, which to a mere observer, like myself, means becoming more and more a slave to by-gone times – to Death if you prefer – and taking refuge in them, so as, I'm persuaded, to understand the present.
But maybe the Dead Man is not the best way to solve this riddle, for perhaps he is but a dead weight to land ourselves with, and prevents all of us, not just those invested in history, from making our own errors. An idea (close to that of Ralph Waldo Emerson's own) that Holgrave proceeds to explain, in an earnest tone, to Phoebe Pyncheon:

“a Dead Man if he happen to have a will disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much longer dead than he. A Dead Man sits on all our judgement-seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in Dead Men's books! We laugh at Dead Men's jokes, and cry at Dead Men's pathos! We are sick of Dead Men's diseases, physical and moral, and die of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We worship the living Deity, according to Dead Men's forms and creeds! Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a Dead Man's icy hand obstructs us! Turn our eyes to what point we may, a Dead Man's white, immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart! And we must be dead ourselves, before we can begin to have our proper influence on our own world, which will no longer be our world, but the world of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of a right to interfere.”

And yet interfere, in my own affairs, I let them.

Picture credit: Fan Bearing Slave Girl, Legendary Kings by Erte (source: WikiArt)

See The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Written as a journal entry July 2021.

A Moment to Marvel

I feel I should, as others have before now, take a moment to marvel at Conrad. The Conrad I was ultimately led to by Virginia Woolf. It was her essayist praise that caught my interest, whereas nothing and nobody else had before compelled or managed to persuade me to read Heart of Darkness, which is where I was informed you should ideally start. I'd find a library copy of the said story, glance through and think no, nothing about this appeals to me. But then, it might have been the edition, for I have these hard-to-please preferences when it comes to the size and style of font, and the look and physical feel of a paperback, and that's even if the story has in itself grabbed my attention; but if Mrs Woolf said 'give him a go', give him a go I would.
However, I didn't start with the Heart, but Lord Jim, and then progressed to what has been declared Conrad's finest novel, Nostromo. And though it's really too soon for me to make or offer such a judgement, being still little schooled in Conradian themes, morals and principles, I think it a masterpiece! And can quite believe it is, as the critics and scholars have assessed it, the finest of his novels. In fact, I'm sure that the next of his I choose to read will seem poor by comparison, or that I will expect so much more from it that it is sure to fail to meet those reader expectations, even though I know, purely from a reader's point of view, Nostromo could not be bettered and therefore it would be foolhardy of a writer to attempt it. But then I don't think writers make that attempt; of achieving the same success, yes, but not necessarily in the same epic style, for writing like that can take it out of you. And often what the writer's pleased with, contemporary readers aren't; appreciation of their endeavours sometimes comes in a different period altogether.
It is rare that a novel, or any piece of a writing, is proclaimed 'fine', and then, amidst new writers and new styles of writing, is continued to be thought as such, to be held up as an example.
So, what is there to marvel at? The construction of it is the chief answer. It's so well organised. I don't know how Conrad did it, and I don't think I could conceive of it if I did, but everything felt tightly controlled: the plot, the detail, the characters, as if he always knew (and he may not have done) in which direction everything and everyone was to go. His master stroke, or perhaps I should say just one of them so as not to upset true scholars, was, for me, Captain Mitchell, in part three, as tourist guide, relating the history of what happened. Using his character in this way was unexpected, and provoked a certain warmth towards him, just as one feels for Lord Jim's Marlow. The 'lesser' characters, if you like, for I don't know how else to term them, all had their moment or moments in which to shine and evoke some response in the reader. And that maybe is a sign of a great writer, or the measure of a great novel.

Picture credit: A Northern Silver Mine, 1930, Franklin Carmichael (Source: WikiArt)

See Nostromo by Joseph Conrad.

A journal entry, July 2021.

The Gates of Hell

A work of Auguste Rodin has set up an image in my head of the Gates of Hell being hammered on; of people, singly, or two or three, or perhaps a mob, begging with their mouths and their clenched fists or hardened palms for the gates to open. But they would not; they cannot creakingly or silently swing slowly inwards. They were not operational, or even manned by sentry devils or a three-headed hound, and perhaps had never been.
They were not, as had always been thought, Hell's entry point. Although countless petitioners over the centuries had turned up outside them, and still came. The more recent, perhaps, sent by Rodin, the artist that has embellished them according to his own and Dante's whims. Any mob that gathers, growing in number one by one, mostly chanting the same three words: “Let us in! Let us in!” in the vain hope this might have some magical effect, that they will be the chosen ones to not only see but return from the bowels of Hell. A risk, it seems, they are willing to run, as others, too, have attempted it and been successful, in classic literature that is, though nowhere in their hellish myths were mentioned gates quite like this.
At six metres high and four metres wide, on which had been cast one hundred and eighty figures, they stood ready to receive all who might approach, not to admit them, as forementioned, but rather to admonish them. To fill those who walked up to them with awe; warn them that here, all hope must be abandoned. That ignorant sinners should think earnestly of everlasting punishment. That all those who had hovered on the threshold of genius but hadn't made it were also welcome; welcomed in particular by Despair. That, beyond these gates, should they open, was hunger, pain, degradation, and cruel torture. And to look, to closely inspect some of the figures this vision of Hell was adorned with: Paolo and Francesca fleeing one another; Ugolino and his children; the Old Courtesan, with her aged, naked female form; The Thinker, stuck permanently in his thinking pose; and The Three Shades, transgressing their sins.
Chains! All in chains, of some form or another, clanking them together or dragging them around, and on occasion making low, dismal groans, to comfort or torment themselves further as much as to be heard. Their soul trapped; their last spark of life not yet left.
And it is through this vision newcomers wish to be escorted, to be met at the gates, by a guide – a Rodin, a Dante or a Virgil – and once inside, taken on a whistle-stop tour, shown all the damned souls as depicted and more.
So desperate are some to experience this attraction, they have walked varied paths and up different flights of stairs to gain entrance: Zurich, Paris, the United States of America, Mexico City, Tokyo, and yet at each destination, in spite of their faithful demonstration as outlined above, the Gates of Hell would not open.
Their aspiration unrealisable, regardless of how hard they wished it otherwise, for Hell was in their mind; Hell was Earth.

Picture credit: The Gates of Hell, 1917, Auguste Rodin (Source: WikiArt).

Written July 2021.