A year, untuning just one string

Pandarus. You have no judgment, niece. Helen herself
          swore th'other day that Troilus, for a brown
          favour - for so 'tis, I must confess - not brown
          neither -

Cressida. No, but brown.

Pandarus. Faith, to say truth, brown and not brown.

Cressida. To say truth, true and not true.

A year of desperate misdirection in resistance to rampant, ruthless treachery in American high office found commentator after commentator promising that the next infraction would clarify one's purpose, not to say the plain obligations of words. What began as a universal revulsion with leering denunciation of a female for being female, reaches now a peak in dithering conjecture on what to say about a multi-front war on fact, its institutions, and their survival in the shakiest society this continent has ever known. What is more galling than a privileged voice that will not speak, for fear of what is plain, if not the falseness of objection, gaudily ornamented? Shame now wrings its perfect emulation, as our schoolboy mourns the half-eclipse of his curriculum, just not its tireless prince. He comes.

         The specialty of rule hath been neglected.

         And look how many Grecian tents do stand

         Hollow upon this plain, so many hollow factions.

         When that the general is not like the hive

         To whom the foragers all repair,

         What honey is expected? Degree being vizarded,

         The unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask.

         The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre

         Observe degree, priority, and place,

         Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,

         Office, and custom, in all line of order.

         And therefore is the glorious planet Sol

         In noble eminence enthron'd and spher'd

         Amidst the other; whose med'cinable eye

         Corrects the influence of evil planets,

         And posts like the commandment of a king,

         Sans check, to good and bad. 

                                    But when the planets

         In evil mixture to disorder wander,

         What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,

         What raging of the sea, shaking of earth,

         Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors,

         Divert and crack, rend and deracinate

         The unity and married calm of states

         Quite from their fixture! 

                                 O, when degree is shak'd

         Which is the ladder of all high designs,

         The enterprise is sick. How could communities,

         Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,

         Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,

         The primogenity and due of birth,

         Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,

         But by degree stand in authentic place?

         Take but degree away, untune that string,

         And hark what discord follows. Each thing melts

         In mere oppugnancy; the bounded waters

         Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,

         And make a sop of all this solid globe;

         Strength should be lord of imbecility,

         And the rude son should strike his father dead;

         Force should be right - or rather, right and wrong,

         Between whose endless jar justice resides,

         Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

         Then everything includes itself in power,

         Power into will, will into appetite,

         And appetite, an universal wolf,

         So doubly seconded with will and power,

         Must make perforce an universal prey,

         And last eat up himself.

William Shakespeare

Troilus and Cressida

  I, iii, 78 - 123

ca 1608

Kenneth Palmer

  editor

The Arden Shakespeare

Methuen, 1982©

René Girard

A Theatre of Envy

  William Shakespeare

Oxford University Press, 1991©

i   Michael Verheyden

     bowl

ii  Christopher Thompson

    Oil on canvas

    2017©

iv  Constantine Manos

     Photograph, untitled

     Northern Peloponnese

     1964

                  

Saturday commute cxlix: Pursuit and the genial element

 2017 has given cause to reconsider

 the vulnerabilities of the elements,

 as much as their inherent integrity,

 fickle as well as constant, which can

 deflect as well as temper one's way

 in them. They seem to constitute such

 a system, of their own, as to tempt

 understanding to treat them as predict-

 able. Affections, for example - of ex-

 perience as ancient as a bath, if not

 of sustenance, itself - are even less

 the unvolatile flux of our way in them 

 than their system is inviolate. They

 are subject to other systems, as much

 as reflections of them, in their way.

i, ii  Salvatore Scaglione

        2016

Suppose it were Friday cxlv: With you all the way

                

                                 
                                      British Legation
                                      Belgrade
                                      15 February [1951]

               Dear Anne,

               A brief line to let you know that Eve

               is coming to London for a fortnight in

               order to scout around and see what she

               thinks about having the baby there; I've

               told her to drop you a line and perhaps

               when she comes to Oxford you'd be good

               enough to give her tea and tell her 

               roughly what the form is ..

               There is no news to give you much that

               you don't see in the papers; ah yes! I

               have struck a great blow for poetry. 

               While in Trieste I found, hiding in a

               garage, too big to be used, a perfectly

               gigantic car - a Horch: the German Rolls-

               Royce. Eight cylinder, forty horse power.

               It used to belong to Goering and then to

               the general commanding the area. I bought

               it for a song and brought it back. It is

               lovely, silver-grey, sleek and with a fun-

               ny old-fashioned look. It makes you feel

               like a film star of the twenties. We call

               it Hermann and are planning one mad summer

               of plutocracy in it before the war breaks

               out [rumored, with the USSR]. As a matter

               of fact you have often seen Hermann in the

               newsreels - do you remember the entry into

               Prague etc with one of the big shots stand-

               ing up in the front and giving the boys the

               salute. That's how I go to the office now.

               Everyone is speechless with rage, and few

               will speak to me these days. But the Bel-

               grade police force is deeply respectful.

               There are two horns on the car, bass and

               tenor. I say that I've struck a blow for

               poetry because it is an ideal poet's car:

               too large for any purpose except triumphal

               entries, and so expensive to run that only

               a lunatic would buy such a thing. I shall

               sell it to Tito when I leave. He already

               has one but not as nice as mine. Wish you

               could come out and admire it.

               

                               Love 

                                    

                                    Larry

                                    

Lawrence Durrell

Spirit of Place

  Letters and Essays

  on Travel

Alan G. Thomas, editor

Leete's Island Books, 1969©

New Haven, Connecticut

Alabama goes voting ii

Our morning news brings sad evidence
of an apostasy in Alabama's defrocked
Judge Roy Moore, appealing an adverse
turn in his fate to a secular venue,
a State circuit court in Montgomery.
Why he didn't go straight to his burn-
ing bush for relief from democracy,
is not for one to speculate; but the
humiliation this must bring to his
flock surely must incur our sympathy.
Had they hidden so, only to be seen?

Chistmas Eve rising

           Ye Mists and Exhalations, that now rise,

           From hill or steaming lake, dusky or grey,

           Till the sun paint your fleecy skirts with gold

           ..

If one were to imagine all

the capabilities of language

in advance, it's doubtful if

we'd reach Milton. On Christ-

mas Eve I tend to keep a com-

forting practice, of sitting

up with a snifter of Scotch

to read from Dryden's Aeneid,

but poetry comes up earlier

to me this year, as pressing

its case with morning coffee.

I spent the previous evening,

tossing and turning over where

I had read of the impressions

conveyed to me by this anony-

mous photograph at an elegant

website; but as is often the

case with me, this is why my

dog and I go out upon a dawn,

to rebuild as with the day.

The rather wonderful British

scholar, Alexandra Harris, re-

minds us that John Milton's

Morning Hymn in Book V of his

Paradise Lost was the first po-

etical work ever cited by Tur-

ner in a canvas he presented

to the Royal Academy (1798),

which may or may not have en-

tered Wordworth's mind as he

read from it to Dorothy, over-

looking the valley of Brathay,

"[when] it seemed we had nev-

er before felt deeply the pow-

er of the Poet" (1810).

If there had seemed to be dis-

couragements in power's resort

to language in this year, I'd

not pretend that Milton were

necessary, for allaying them.

Anyone with our slenderer ac-

quaintance of its protections,

has been obliged to heed them.

But this was a poet who plain-

ly believed it of poetry, that

dawn is its manifesting moment.

Something like strength, more

than power, distinguishes this

perception and its fulfillment.

What one feels, is its nerve.

John Milton, a new winter mor-

ning, walking with one's dog.

John Milton

Paradise Lost

  V, 185-187

1667

Alexandra Harris

Weatherland

  Writers and Artists

  under English Skies

Thames & Hudson, 2015©

ii  Leonardo da Vinci

    A copse of trees

    Chalk on paper

    1502

    Collection HM Queen Elizabeth II

Rescue of the houseguest: Our book of the year

One couldn't characterize the con-

sternation in the guest room as a

groundswell of dissidence over the

lack of a book of the year, but it

has projected a clear enough sus-

picion of rudeness in that depriva-

tion, as to moot the effect of the

bonsai, bibelots, bouquets and bon-

bons scattered about that sanctuary.

It's enough, it seems, to put the

cabin's insulation against the in-

ternet in an almost monastic light.

And, no, this was not one's intent.

                                    I know I will go back

             down & that it will not be the same though

             I shall be sure it is so. And I shall be even

             deeper by rhyme and cadence, more held

             to what isn't mine. Music is truly

             the sound of our time, since it is how we most

             deeply recognize the home we may not

             have: the loss is trust and you could

             reverse that without change.

If this is so, then the prose essay is how we most deeply recognize the home which we might not keep, by acts of revocation, reform, perverse Reconstruction or degenerate negligence. Such prospects, setting the tone of 2017 in the United States, our book of the year arrives by discerning compilation of an epistolary trust of great range and penetration, whose virtues - fearlessness, acuity, vitality and consistency - place these essays under comparison with very few writings conducted over a comparable span of time. And there isn't a redundant tone or concession to fashionable flippancy in a one of them. 

             . . But is this a long or a short time?

             I have, however, worked on this place, as

             one speaks of working on some new language.

             I have studied it a bit, driven about alone,

             inland, looking, wondering. Is the quiet a

             true tranquility and peacefulness? I some-

             times think it is and then again - perhaps

             it is something else. There is about the re-

             gion a curious and fascinating softness that

             seems to spread like a blanket over the hard-

             ness of rock and woods and icy turf. This is

             a perturbation, this ambiguous softness in

             the drifting fogs, the thick greens of the

             trees, the dampness, the swampy meadows. It 

             is in the people, too, in the men as well as

             in the women. Not a tropical softness, . .

             but the odd snowy lassitude of isolation.

American readers in the English language

are indebted to the vigorous and discern-

ing critic, Darryl Pinckney, for an edi-

tion of The Collected Essays of Elizabeth

Hardwick, which effusively explode with or-

iginal penetration, music, panache, and

incisive grace. The temptation to quote at

length from them is as intensely seductive

as the qualities of Maine, she discovered,

above. But this aspect of her extraordinary

perceptions has warned critics off, to go

read the whole thing, instead, since that

pathbreaking essay from 1959, The Decline

of Book Reviewing, with which she prefig-

ured her creation, with her husband and

their stupendously competent neighbors, 

of a periodical which has set the standard,

ever since. In a year which saw the loss

of its longtime master-editor, this astute

selection works a double rescue, of guests

who know where their language is welcome.

Mr Pinckney, a former student of hers at

Columbia (from which she had dropped out,

to go write), presents fine contributions

of his own now, to her New York Review of

Books, and a solidly persuasive defense

of his processes of exclusion and selec-

tion. There is an appendix for tracing

the breadth of her publishing, which un-

fortunately omits dates. This compromises

the anthology's primary structural advan-

tage - a chronological sequence of ent-

ries to furnish some supportive context

to every one. But her consistency, with-

out redundant tone or lazy resort to a

familiar stylistic accent, is proof of

more than a self-controlled and trusted

mind; it is the work of determined, con-

stant application, across a broad spec-

trum of human life. Pinckney relates, how

she would frequently decline subjects if

they held no interest to her, but to this

attractive model of behavior, there was

unfailingly a corollary, of illuminating

the house where we might stay.

i   J.H. Prynne

       The White Stones

        Thoughts on the 

          Esterházy Court Uniform

    1968

    New York Review Books, 2016©

ii  Elizabeth Hardwick

     1916 - 2007

     The Collected Essays

     Darryl Pinckney, editor

       In Maine

    New York Review Books, 2017©

Phillip Helmke

  Jennifer Adler, photography