The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Matsuo Basho

It is easy enough to say, for example, that such and such a day was rainy in the morning but fine in the afternoon, that there was a pine tree at such and such a place, or that the name of the river at a certain place was such and such, for these things are what everybody says in their diaries, although in fact they are not even worth mentioning unless there are fresh and arresting elements in them. The readers will find in my diary a random collection of what I have seen on the road, views somehow remaining in my heart--an isolated house in the mountains, or a lonely inn surrounded by the moor, for example. I jotted down these records with the hope that they might provoke pleasant conversation among my readers and that they might be of some use to those who would travel the same way.

I know almost nothing about haiku. I think I taught a five-minute lesson on haiku, maybe, for my interview for the New York City Teaching Fellows many years ago. If so, I'm sure I said the same stuff that every middle schooler learns: a haiku is five syllables, followed by seven syllables, followed by five syllables. I'm sure I didn't think to discuss why the haiku is that way, or what it tries to accomplish, nor did anyone ask, nor would I have had an answer for them. To me, it made perfect sense that a haiku is little more than a formal exercise, a mental challenge.

Over the darkened sea,
Only the voice of a flying duck
Is visible--
In soft white.

But the idea of a poetic form as being purely mental is a Westernizing idea; as this collection of travel sketches by the haiku master Matsuo Basho shows, the haiku form is perfect for the expression of a single moment's experience. Basho traveled extensively throughout Japan in the 17th century, traveling from village to village and scene to scene during a time when travel for pleasure was not really known. In his own explanation, Basho talks of the haiku as a way for the reader to experience his journey, or, in a strangely practical touch, a guide for other travelers. In any case, what is most touching about Basho's haiku is the way they capture in miniature not just the visual of a scene but its emotional resonance: the strange bittersweetness of not seeing Mt. Fuji behind fog, for example, or the wonderous realization that a beauty can come from an overlooked landscape at the right time and in the right weather:

It is spring,
Even nameless hills
Are decorated
With thin films of morning mist.

Much of what is contained in this collection is probably lost on me. I don't understand, for example, the introduction's explanation of the way that haiku are often linked together in chains; the links are so subtle most of the time they elude me. And the prose travelogue mostly drifts by me because I have no point of reference for the geographic or social landscape of Japan. But the haiku themselves are arresting; they divert the attention away from the fluid relentlessness of prose and make them focus on the momentary. What I can't quite get a hold of in the prose, the haiku makes clear.

The chestnut by the eaves
In magnificent bloom
Passes unnoticed
By men of this world.

It seems to me that haiku is a way of being in the world, a meditative practice that demands the practitioner stop and see what is around them. Like the chestnut blooming magnificently, we move through the world too often without seeing it. I love the way the haiku makes me stop and take notice in the same way that Basho himself must have; but I also love their brevity, which seems to speak of a kind of evanescence, a recognition that the moment captured in the haiku lasts for only a short time before it disappears, and the road beckons again.

The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch

It was only now clear to me how very much I had made that image, and yet I could not feel that it was anything like a fiction. It was more like a special sort of truth, almost a touchstone; as if a thought of mine could become a thing, and at the same time be truth. It was the dismissive resentment, the 'let her go then', which was a lie. My odd almost mad faithfulness had become its own reward in the end. I had smoothed Hartley's brow and unclouded her lovely eyes as the years went by, and the ambiguous tormenting image had become gentle and a source of light.

Theater director Charles Arrowby has decided to retire and move to a drafty old house in the north of England, overlooking the sea. He's trying to get away from it all, but his past keeps turning up to find him: in the shape of his former actress-lovers, like the guileless Lizzie and the fiercely jealous Rosina, as well as several friends and one ascetic cousin. These guests turn up to remind Charles of the life he's tried to leave behind, sometimes as friends and sometimes as enemies. But the most remarkable surprise visitor of all is an aging woman who turns out to be Charles' long lost love Hartley, who broke his heart as a teenager by refusing to marry him.

It seems like kismet, and Charles certainly takes it that way. He wages a long campaign to convince Hartley that her unhappy marriage to a blue collar man has been a mistake, and that she should return to him and lead the life that was lost to both of them years ago. He takes it as a given that her love for him is as eternal as his love for her, and this certainty leads him to troubling places. Soon, he's more or less kidnapped Hartley, refusing to let her leave his house and return to her husband, certain that she'll eventually come to her senses. Into this volatile atmosphere arrives Hartley's adopted son Titus, who believes he's Charles' son--it's not true, but as far as Charles can imagine, it certainly might be.

It would be accurate, though perhaps not quite apt, to say The Sea, the Sea is a 500-page book about an idealistic old man who kidnaps a woman who wants nothing to do him. Our love-fantasies, Murdoch explains, have a great power of their own. All love, she suggests, might really be rooted in our own imagined versions of the other, and who's to say that Charles is any more misbegotten than anyone else? (It certainly doesn't help Charles' case that his soulmate seems to be as provincial and dour as she keeps trying to convince him she is.)

There's something uncanny about The Sea, the Sea. There's a supernatural element that's never quite explained: a sea monster Charles witnesses on the first day of his new residence, a floating image of his lover's head in a high window, as if hanged. But the coincidence of the whole thing is uncanny, too: why is it, exactly, that all these people keep turning up in this little northern town? It only made sense when I reflected on something that James, Charles' mystic cousin, says about the Tibetan concept of the bardo, that afterlife in which you drift around encountering the spirits of those you've known in life. The moors of the north are Charles' bardo, a place where he encounters the spirits of his life whether he wants to or not, not to make things right, or better, as you might in a book that took its cues from Christianity and not Buddhism, but to contemplate the life that's formed around him. You get the impression that his mistake is thinking that he can reach out and touch the spirit of Hartley, or anyone else, to push or pull them in one way or another, but that's not what the bardo is about.

When I pick up an Iris Murdoch novel, I feel like I'm always chasing the furious comic energy of Under the Net, and it never arrives. Henry and Cato got pretty close, and other books of hers have it to some degree, but the kidnapping of a sad old woman didn't really get there for me. Perhaps it makes sense that The Sea, the Sea seems to churn and churn and not really go anywhere, like the dangerous "cauldron" at the bottom of Charles' cliff--but this is probably the least satisfying of the Murdoch novels I've read.

 

Red at the Bone by Jaqueline Woodson

 

They had always been soft-spoken.  Because they had always been afraid.  Brooklyn was a new world they didn’t quite understand – the angry Italian boys slamming into their shopping carts as they made their way to the A&P on Wycoff Avenue.  The elevated M train above their heads as they rushed to the check-cashing place on the corner of Gates and Myrtle.  The thick women watching them from the windowsills, their elbows propped onto dingy pillows, eyes slowly moving up the block then down again.  Nosy as they want to be, his mother said more than once.  He never told her how they asked about his father.  Was there one?  Where was he?  And even once, Dark as you are, you sure you your mama’s baby?

 

Jaqueline Woodson is an esteemed children’s book author, four-time winner of the Newbury Medal for the best children’s book of the year.  Now, she is an esteemed novelist as well.  Her first novel for adults, Another Brooklyn, told the story of August who returns to Brooklyn upon the death of her father and reminisces about her relationship with three childhood friends.  It was nominated for a National Book Award in 2016.

 

Red at the Bone has a good deal in common with Another Brooklyn:  both are short, lyrical narratives that move forward and back in time to tell complex family stories in short, condensed incidents.  That Woodson is able to compellingly tell such a complex story in so few words is impressive.  In Red at the Bone the prose is also crystal clear and the complex plot is never confusing.

 

The novel opens on the day of Melody’s sweet 16 party in the summer of 2001 – which family tradition designs as a kind of coming out party.  Melody will dress in white, perform certain dances and represent the next generation of her prosperous clan.  There is extra pressure on Melody because her mother, Iris, missed this event sixteen years earlier because she was pregnant with Melody.  Melody’s grandmother, Sabe, has been grooming Melody for this moment her whole life, and has saved what would have been Iris’s dress for her granddaughter to wear.  

 

From the day of Melody’s party, we move back and forth through the family history, learning of the great grandparents escape from the Tulsa massacre, their move to Brooklyn and how the family became successful Morehouse and Spellman graduates who own a brownstone in Park Slope and send their granddaughter to Riverdale Country Day School.  Iris is the rebel of this group – sexually promiscuous even before she takes up with Aubrey, son of an impoverished single mom, and gets pregnant, then abandons her daughter to go off to Oberlin.  

 

The life of the family, and of each character, revolves around this pregnancy.  We learn how shocking it was to the middle-class Christian parents, how they came to love and accept Aubrey, how Aubrey never really recovers from Iris’s abandonment and how Melody and Iris attempt to maintain a relationship that is as much acquaintance as it is parental.  This is related in detailed scenes told from a variety of points of view.  Iris’s early years at Oberlin and her discovery of her own lesbian feelings are especially detailed and we get a clear picture of the arc previous generations have travelled – the context of the family’s move to Brooklyn after escaping Tulsa and their climb to prosperity is well conveyed with a few carefully chosen details.  Iris and Aubrey’s relationship, the pregnancy, and her move to Oberlin are especially vivid.  

 

However, the book skips over several years.  We see Iris move through college and come to understand that even after graduation she will not be moving back home to be with Aubrey and Melody (who both live in the family brownstone).  Then we lose a period of several years – Melody is 7 when Iris graduates college and doesn’t come home, and then she is sixteen and taking her mother’s place in the family tradition.  Then she is herself bound for Oberlin and mother and daughter have reunited after the death of Aubrey and the grandparents.  How their relationship moves through early adolescence and into adulthood is not even glossed over – we are left to intuit what happens from the end result, with only the day of the party to show their lives between when Melody is seven and when she is nineteen. 

 

However, that end result is both vivid and symbolically satisfying as we see Iris and Melody pay tribute to the others in their last moments in the brownstone and are granted material proof of the family’s progress.  The last page of the book really sings.  In fact, virtually everything here sings, which only makes me long for a more complete narrative of these lives.  With these two novels, Woodson is building a wonderful portrait of Black lives in central Brooklyn in a voice that is thoroughly individual.  While much of the time Woodson’s style feels like powerful compression, at other times the I feel shortchanged.

Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

He crossed in the twilight a pitchgreen wood grown murk with ferns, with rank and steaming plants. An owl flew, bow winged and soundless. He came upon the bones of a horse, the polished ribcradle standing among the ferns pale and greenly phosphorescent and the wedgeshaped skull grinning in the grass. In these silent sunless galleries he'd come to feel that another went before him and each glade he entered seemed just quit by a figure who'd been sitting there and risen and gone on. Some doublegoer, some othersuttree eluded him in these woods and he feared that should that figure fail to rise and steal away and were he therefore to come to himself in this obscure wood he'd be neither mended nor made whole but rather set mindless to dodder drooling with his ghosty clone from sun to sun across a hostile hemisphere forever.

Cornelius Suttree lives in a houseboat on the Tennessee River. He makes a hand-to-mouth living fishing in the river and selling the fish to shops in Knoxville. The rest of the time he spends drinking with the down-and-out denizens of the river flats, mostly black but not all, getting drunk in whorehouses and pool halls. He goes by "Bud" or "Sut," and his patrician first name is a sign of a life he's forsaken, which McCarthy scrupulously avoids detailing but of which he offers tantalizing flashes: a visit from an uncle, or a horrifying scene where Suttree learns the young child we didn't even know he had has died. (His former, I guess, mother-in-law expels him from the funeral by nearly biting his finger off.) Relatives who appear to compel Suttree back into a life of good standing are brushed off; Suttree remains on the river.

Some have compared Suttree to Huckleberry Finn, which is true in the sense that both are set in the South and on a river. But in Huck Finn, the river, which moves ceaselessly toward the slave port of New Orleans, is the unstoppable forward motion of narrative; in Suttree the river is a place where the idea of life as progress is forsaken. The novel floats, too, through cycles of feast and famine, summer plenty and winter freeze, but there's no recognizable through line that would enable Suttree to grow or change or achieve anything. Suttree is haunted by a fear of death that suggests the life he's chosen is a recognition of the absurdity of striving in the face of death, or the unfeeling nature of the cosmos. (I'm guessing nobody told McCarthy that the French Broad River, where Suttree travels for a spell, is one of the oldest rivers in the world, because you have to think that would have made it in here, along with words like atavistic and arcane.)

This is the first of McCarthy's novels set in the South that I've read. He's so associated with the Southwest these days people forget his Southern Gothic phase, but I have to say, Suttree really struck a chord with me in its depiction of the South. There's a very specific sensation I associate with the North Carolina summer made of up heat, wild greenery, and droning insects, but also boiling concrete and gravel, that McCarthy's overcooked language can really capture. Suttree's Knoxville is a grotesque wasteland where condoms and dead animals and, huh, "jissom" can be found floating down the river. Its physicality is almost body-like, but in a way I can't quite explain, it felt accurate to me. I've always said that you have to take McCarthy's language as partly tongue-in-cheek, and the ironic detachment necessary to appreciate it seemed part and parcel with the way Suttree and his friends live lightly on the earth.

Suttree is also the funniest of all the McCarthy novels I've read. (Although All the Pretty Horses has its moments.) Novels like Blood Meridian and The Road are so grim and self-serious you wouldn't think McCarthy even has a sense of humor, but he does. In Suttree it's represented by a character named Harrogate, a pipsqueak kid who ends up in the workhouse with Suttree after getting caught copulating with a farmer's watermelons. (A real line from the book is, "Somebody has been fuckin my watermelons.") Harrogate is a schemer--trying to dynamite his way into a bank vault from the caves beneath Knoxville, or plugging up every payphone in the city and lifting the quarters--and a kind of picaresque version of Suttree himself, who never had a normal life to haunt him in his days of floating on the river.

I loved Suttree. For a book that's often disgusting and violent and terrifying, I kind of wanted to curl up and live in it. When McCarthy's really on, his words take on a kind of dadaist character, more about feeling than sense, and like the river itself, it's a pleasure to let them float past.

 

Outline by Rachel Cusk

 

It was interesting to consider, said the long-haired boy – Georgeou, as my diagram now told me – that a story might merely be a series of events we believe ourselves to be involved in, but on which we have absolutely no influence at all.  He himself had noticed nothing on his journey here:  he habitually did not notice things which did not concern him, for that very reason, that he saw the tendency to fictionalize our own experiences as positively dangerous, because it convinced us that human life had some kind of design and that we were more significant than we actually were.

 

 

It is possible that every novel contains, or manifests, a theory of the novel – even if most of them accept the prevailing theory of their time.  Dickens was all about convincing us that human life had some kind of design and that were more significant than we might appear to ourselves at any given moment.  Hemingway liked the first part of that but disagreed with that last part, while Toni Morrison accepted both halves of the premise, though she saw multiple designs competing to influence our views of our selves and our lives.  

 

Rachel Cusk seems to view these patterns as most powerful when they go unnoticed.  Outline can be described as an experimental novel in that it powerfully and beautifully offers many of the elements of the novel – characters are fully rendered and deeply human, the language is lovely and very literary, and themes emerge effortlessly from the various encounters and conversations that make up the text.  Those encounters and conversations are all that she offers in the way of plot, however.  It is reminiscent of the work of Ben Lerner, and may also be faithfully autobiographical, though it takes on a much smaller slice of life and renders it with more quotidian detail.

 

Faye, the narrator, is a writer who is travelling from her home in London to Athens to teach a one week writing class.  She meets a man on the plane and they strike up a minor friendship centered on his taking her out on his small boat to go swimming.  She has friends, colleagues and previous acquaintances in Athens and meets some of them for coffee, drinks, and lunch.  She has ten students in her class and they tell stories about themselves and reflect on the purpose of writing in response to her prompts.  The week goes by.  The man she met on the plane (who remains unnamed and referred to as her “neighbor” throughout) makes a pass at her and their budding friendship is stunted.  One of her students drops her class after condemning her work as a teacher.  She gets a phone call from her son who is walking to school alone for the first time and gets lost.  She gets another phone call from a banker informing her she has been turned down for a loan.  The next writer arrives to live in her borrowed apartment and she leaves for the airport.  Nothing more dramatic happens.  The arc here is more like a gentle undulation.

 

However, in each of the ten chapters, there is a conversation recounted, and here certain themes become apparent.  Many of the people she spends time with have some level of marital problems.  Looking back on their lives they see that their relationships changed in subtle ways that in retrospect are important.  Her neighbor from the plane has been married three times and confesses that he was happiest with his first wife but in his youth thought the story of his life demanded more passion and adventure.  Looking back, he wishes he had accepted the stability and recognized its importance to his happiness.  Another man admits that he and his wife flirt with other people, that they are no longer each other’s main erotic interest.  One woman recalls a lost relationship with the line “Looking back, those were some of best times of her life, though at the time they had had the feeling of a prelude, a period of waiting, as though for the real drama of living to begin.”

 

Through these conversations and her reactions to the stories people tell her, we deduce that the narrator is recently divorced, that she has travelled with her husband before but that this trip alone is a relatively new experience for her.  While she sometimes holds out hope for love and happiness in her dialogue, she is also adjusting to the loss of her marriage and the self that inhabited that phase of her life.  At one point she praises the “virtues of passivity,” suggesting that trying too hard to do something might lead to success in that venture, but would involve “forcing events in a direction they did not naturally want to go.”  All this is involved in her realization that there is a difference “between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have.”  

 

The final conversation is with the playwright who will teach the next week’s seminar and stay in the same apartment.  This woman is in the midst of a psychic and professional crisis.  Shortly after breaking up with her husband, she is mugged.  While her ex is sympathetic, he does not step up to help her and she is forced to recognize that change in her life.  This has provoked a crisis in her ability to write.  Her plays now seem to be unnecessary structures of words.  She says “drama became something real to me,” and that “the truth had to be represented:  it couldn’t be left to represent itself.”  At this point the airplane neighbor, his sexual advance freshly rebuffed, attempts to reset their friendship with a boat ride, but it is too late, the narrator must head for her plane home.  In his response, he confuses the words “solicitude” and “solitude” and the two words suddenly seem to be antonyms – that relationships involve being solicitous of each other’s needs.  The rest is loneliness.  It seems that the writer and the neighbor have learned to accept the difference between what she wants and what she can have.

 

While all this is not happening, the various characters are beautifully rendered, the conversations flow briskly and the city – its heat and lethargy, the beauty of the water and minute sensations this produces in the author – becomes real and three dimensional.  I found myself reading with the page turning excitement I might bring to a much more plot-oriented book.  It is a page-turner even after you realize that the next page is pretty much like this page. 

The Long Prospect by Elizabeth Harrower

Hastily, one night she turned from the memory that induced the heart-felt pang of pain and delight. Tossing round in bed the sensation faded. She held the dammed-up knowledge back a moment longer, and then began to feed again to her slow-thumping heart, the memories of the day, realized anew. She was valued! She was valued! The thumping and the tenseness dissolved in slow, self-conscious, thrilling tears. They fell briefly.

Emily lives with her grandmother Lilian in a suburb of Ballowra, a fictionalized version of the Australian city of Newcastle. Her mother lives in Sydney and her father in the Outback, the result of a hasty marriage between two people who didn't know any better, and whose interest and capability in raising Emily are both zero. Lilian, for her part, can be both remarkably protective and remarkably cruel toward her granddaughter, who casts a shadow over what she considers to be a still-thriving social life. As a result, Emily lives a life that feels isolated and diminished; her parents are strangers ("it was immensely embarrassing to have a stranger as an intimate relation," Emily notes) and her grandmother is as likely to forget she exists as to cut her down.

Into this scenario walks Max, who takes a room in Lilian's house. Max, a university lecturer, takes an instant liking to Emily and soon they're spending most of the day together, talking about astronomy and ancient Greece and things like that. This is a state we are told about but not quite shown; Harrower is one of those writers who believes that real conflict and narrative exist within, and mostly we're treated to long passages of Emily thinking through her feelings for Max and the startling realization that for once there is someone in her life who values her. The long prospect of the novel's title is Emily's awakening to the stultifying nature of her suburban upbringing and the small-mindedness of her grandmother's set, and the need to understand the arc of her future life as taking her away from it: "Where were her people? Where were the others like her, to keep her company? And where was she to look for help or information? She might, she felt, have been told something before being dropped off in Ballowra."

Max encourages her to ask Lilian to plan a college career; but Emily doesn't see Max as an entry into another world with another kind of people, but a world within himself that she is unable to do without. (In one scene, she tosses away a gold bracelet given to her by another of Lilian's borders, to whom she had once been attached.) But Max's attentions to Emily don't go unnoticed by Lilian or her hangers-on, who gin up vague accusations of impropriety in order to push Max out of the house and out of Emily's life forever. Lilian and the others are the kind of people who see only social form, and not reality; because they believe more strongly in the social idea of the proper relation between children and adults--even as they forsake their own responsibilities with regards to Emily's upbringing--they're unable to see the way their actions threaten to murder Emily's soul. They don't even understand that Emily has a soul to begin with.

For me, The Long Prospect unfolds under the shadow of The Man Who Loved Children, another Australian novel about bad parenting. Max is a kind of image of the man Sam Pollitt believes himself to be, a genius who can meet kids on a level of intellect others have not recognized. I preferred the satire and bombast of the latter to the sensitive, languid manner of The Long Prospect but it's easy to see why Christina Stead herself loved the novel, and why she was a long-time friend of Patrick White, and why modern reviewers called for a renewal of interest in Harrower's books when she died earlier this year.

Blow-Up and Other Stories by Julio Cortazar

Hopelessly, I wanted to prove to myself that my own sensibility was projecting a nonexistent consciousness upon the axolotls. They and I knew. So there was nothing strange in what happened. My face was pressed against the glass of the aquarium, my eyes were attempting once more to penetrate the mystery of those eyes of gold without iris, without pupil. I saw from very close up the face of an axolotl immobile next to the glass. No transition and no surprise, I saw my face against the glass, I saw my face against the glass, I saw it on the outside of the tank, I saw it on the other side of the glass. Then my face drew back and I understood.

"There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls," begins Julio Cortazar's collection Blow-Up, "...Now I am an axolotl." The narrator of the story describes how he had become obsessed with the axolotls--eerie salamander-like creatures from Mexico--at a Paris aquarium. He visits them every day, certain that they have a human consciousness like his own hidden behind their coin-like eyes and impenetrable expression, and that this human consciousness is beset by suffering. He's sure about this even though he dismisses the idea that the axolotls are able to communicate or connect with him, or vice versa; the consciousness of the axolotls, like the consciousness of the man, touches only the limits of itself.

And when sure enough, he suddenly finds himself looking through they eyes of the axolotl in the tank, condemned to the "liquid hell" he suspected the axolotl endures, his suspicions are confirmed. The funny and frightening thing about "Axolotl" is the way it asserts that solitude is an essential part of consciousness, and yet there is no solace in recognizing this fact; it doesn't bring humans closer to each other or allow them to enter into each others' interiority any more than it does humans and axolotls. When the transformation happens, it happens with "no transition and no surprise," the horror of one consciousness swapped for another without passing each other on the way.

Something similar happens in the story "The Distances," in which a young Argentine woman believes that she has another self who lives as a beggar in Budapest. She begs her fiance to take her to Budapest for their honeymoon, and sure enough, she meets her other self on a Hungarian bridge, and when they embrace she finds herself in the body of the beggar watching the wealthy Argentine walk away. The point of human connection, the embrace, is only a shuffling of loneliness, just as it is for the man and the axolotl.

Cortazar's stories are all about the inadequacy of the mind to meet anything beyond itself, whether that's another person, or reality itself. Many, but not all, of these stories explore this anxiety in the magical realist mode, more Borges than Garcia Marquez, as in "Axolotl" and the terrific "Bestiary," about a young girl invited to summer at an estate where a tiger is always loose. But as the collection progresses--I think the stories, separated into three previously published sections, are more or less chronological--Cortazar moves away from this mode toward a purer realism that acknowledges that the "real world" is already uncanny enough.

The best piece here is probably the novella "The Pursuer," narrated by a jazz critic worried about his friend and subject, a heroin-addicted saxophonist named Johnny. "The Pursuer," like Young Man with a Horn, which it resembles, is about genius, but both Johnny and Cortazar insist that there's nothing otherworldly about Johnny's talent. Music is easy, Johnny says; living is hard: "To look, for instance, or to understand a dog or a cat. Those are the big things, the big difficulties." Jazz, in fact, because it is non-representational--it doesn't have anything to do with dogs or cats, or words, or anything other than itself--seems the perfect flight from the difficulty of being in the world. But that doesn't prevent Johnny, the titular pursuer, from driving himself to death looking for something that, precisely because it doesn't have anything to do with dogs or cats, can't be described or understood.

The companion piece to "The Pursuer" is "Blow-Up," the title story and the inspiration for the Michelangelo Antonioni thriller. "Blow-Up" is about a photographer who captures a tense moment in a public square--a beautiful woman chats up an uncomfortable young man while another man watches from a car. The blown-up photograph haunts the photographer, not because it offers a solution to the perplexity of the moment--in Antonioni's film, the photographer believes he's captured a murder--but because it offers no real insight into the world whatsoever. The photograph, even though it claims to be a representative, creates its own universe, which becomes slowly but aggressively more real than the photographer's own, and threatens to shut him out. "Every looking oozes with mendacity," Cortazar writes, "because it's that which expels us furthest outside ourselves." Like a quantum physicist, the photographer knows that looking at something changes it, and that when we look at the world we are really only looking at ourselves.

One thing I enjoyed about Cortazar's story is how close they seem to a 19th century sort of realism, even as they're horrified by their own ability to capture the real, unlike someone like Borges, who sort of throws his hands up at the problem and takes it as permission to write about the fantastic. Cortazar's stories are like the mansion haunted by the tiger that everyone would rather pretend isn't there, but which they forget about at their own peril.

 The Sounds of Poetry A Brief Guide by Robert Pinsky

 

While I may read an occasional biography or an article about an individual poet, I do not read a great deal about poetry as an art form.  Many years ago, I read Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter and Poetic Form and it has been the spine of much of my understanding of the aesthetics of poetry ever since.  It is a wonderfully rich and rigorous little volume, but I must admit I never really mastered scansion to the level Fussell advocated.  He made it all seem very precise and technical and I have trouble remembering the difference between a troche and a dactyl.

 

I picked up this very brief book at The Strand a couple of years ago.  I wish I had read it right away – it has many of the virtues of Fussell’s more complex guide, with more of an eye towards the pleasures of poetry than the Art of Poetry.  As he says in the introduction, “The idea in the following pages is to help the reader hear more of what is going on in poems, and by hearing more to gain in enjoyment and understanding.”  Later, he says that essentially, the more you can notice about the sound of a poem, the more you can enjoy the poem.  If there is a fault here, it might be that Pinsky is sometimes bending over backwards to avoid sounding complex or academic.

 

He begins with the simple notion that poetry is essentially a vocal art.  While this may not be as universally true as Pinsky lets on (I think about concrete poetry, for example), it is a god starting point for his purposes.  He also immediately introduces the idea that there are no rules, but there are common practices or “principles” as he calls them.  He encourages the reader to experience these principles in poems themselves, suggesting that the best book about traditional metrics might be The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats, whereas a reader who would like to study free verse might try William Carlos Williams; an interest in short lines would be satisfied by Emily Dickinson.  In other words, his guide is clearly meant to supplement the habit of reading poems, not introduce it or replace it.

 

His guide is then divided into different aspects of sound in poetry:

 

In Accent and Duration, he sensibly observes that when we talk about stressed and unstressed syllables in a poem, we are talking about relative levels of stress:  “the stress on a syllable in English is not inherent in the sound, but relative.”  In a nutshell, not all iambs are created equal – the unstressed syllable in one iambic foot might be hit a little harder than the stressed syllable in the next iamb.  This variable is made even more nuanced when we recognize that syllables are of different vocal lengths.  He uses the word “popcorn” to demonstrate this nuance – the first syllable is stressed, but the second syllable is longer (depending, perhaps, on who is speaking, it could be much longer).  Simple as it is, this was something of a revelation for me.   I knew of both duration and accent as elements of sound, but I had not thought of them interacting in quite this way.  It also helped me understand why so many professors have insisted on scans of lines of poetry that were different from mine.  Not that everyone has their own meter, but that the rhythm of iambic pentameter is never as steady as we (teachers and professors) would like it to be.

 

Pinsky then tackles the line as a unit of poetry, in this case combining the examination with one of syntax.  His point here is that both the line and the word order contribute to the impact of a poem’s phrasing and that they can work together or be at odds with one another.  If the syntax of a phrase works to reinforce the shape of the line – in an end-stop line, for example – the phrasing gets one kind of power.  If the syntax and line structure are not reinforcing each other, but perhaps competing with each other (in enjambment) than the phrasing gets a different kind of power.  

 

Pinsky subsumes his discussion of rhyme in a more flexible category of like and unlike sounds – so that partial rhymes, consonance and another discussion of duration.  Again, his emphasis is on sounds in relation to one another:  “Rhyme, however one defines that term, is a matter of degree, and not necessarily an either/or toggle.”  Like and unlike sounds work together to build the experience of the poem, often calling attention to each other.

 

All three of these chapters feel like preludes to his final chapter on Blank Verse and Free Verse.  Pinsky immediately rejects the notion that these forms are any less formal than metered, rhymed poetry, telling us, “the form in some cases is based on a measure, in others it is not.” And later, “Free verse might be described as the most successful alternative to penatameters.”  

 

Throughout, Pinsky offers clear and helpful readings of various lines and verses of poetry (rarely examining an entire poem) to illustrate his points.  The lines are varied – from many poets and many time periods.  In what strikes me as a particular tour de force, he scans a section of Abbot and Costellos “Who’s on First” routine and illustrates that much of it is in iambic pentameter: “What’s the name of the guy on second base?” I have not yet turned back to that classic to see how this Guide has enriched my pleasure, but I have benefitted from its guidance in reading and rereading other great poets.

The Origin of Satan by Elaine Pagels

At first glance these stories of Satan may seem to have little in common. Yet they all agree on one thing: that this greatest and most dangerous enemy did not originate, as one might expect, as an outside, an alien, or a stranger. Satan is not the distant enemy but the intimate enemy--one's trusted colleague, close associate, brother. He is the kind of person on whose loyalty and good will the well-being of family and society depend--but one who turns unexpectedly jealous and hostile. Whichever version of his origin one chooses, then, and there are many, all depict Satan as an intimate enemy--the attribute that qualifies him so well to express conflict among Jewish groups. Those who asked, "How could God's own angel become his enemy?" were thus asking, in effect, "How could one of us become one of them?"

Elaine Pagels' thoughtful and comprehensive The Origin of Satan is a great companion to another book I read this year, Miguel de la Torre and Albert Hernandez's The Quest for the Historical Satan: De la Torre and Hernandez trace the conception of Satan from the early church up to the present, but here Pagels (with some overlap) lays out the roots of the idea of Satan, first in the Hebrew Bible and then in the Gospels. Like De la Torre and Hernandez, she makes clear something I think would surprise a lot of Christians: the idea of Satan as a literal character with his own agency and designs on the Earth is not a fundamental part of the Hebrew Bible, and comes from the later Christian tradition, and even the Gospels are not unanimous in promoting the idea.

So where does the idea of Satan come from? Both Pagels and the authors of The Quest for the Historical Satan start with what I imagine is intuitive for anyone who doesn't believe in a literalized Satan: Satan is the image of the other, used to characterize Christians' political, cultural, and religious enemies. Pagels' most significant contribution to this intuition, I think, is her observation that in both testaments the figure of Satan is most often associated not with foreign enemies like Babylon or Rome, but what she calls the intimate enemy: a competing faction within one's own in-group.

For the writers of the Old Testament, that means accommodationist Jews who favor cooperation with Rome over the Seleucids; for the writers of the New Testament, it's the Pharisees who oppose the Jesus movement within Judaism. (I'm oversimplifying; Pagels does an expert job of outlining the different viewpoints of each Gospel author and showing how each of them associates his own particular factional enemy with the Satan figure, and it's not always the Pharisees.) It's no wonder, then, that the idea of a literalized Satan comes into full bloom among the early fathers who are interested in formalizing church doctrine and defining orthodoxy against heresy. (Here Pagels' expertise in the Gnostic gospels of Nag Hammadi is invaluable.)

I've been reading these books because I'm writing a novel set during the Satanic Panic of the late 80's and early 90's. What was most useful about The Origin of Satan, for me, is that it answers a question I've had: if Satan is an image of the Other, why is it that the Satanic Panic focused primarily on white scapegoats? Why didn't it manifest more often as a fear of, say, immigrant religious practices? But like the authors of both the Old and New Testament, the purveyors of the Satanic Panic reserved their greatest fear for the enemy within: the mother, the daycare worker, the teenage son. The Panic spread the fear of the Satanist down the street, the person who looks normal but engages in ritual sacrifice behind closed doors. Suddenly this aspect of the Panic makes more sense in light of Pagels' observation that Satan is the intimate enemy, the fallen angel.