Saturday commute ci: Where is James traveling?

The little watering-place of

Ilfracombe is seated at the

lower verge of one of these

seaward-lunging valleys, be-

tween a couple of magnificent

headlands which hold it in a

hollow slope and offer it se-

curely to the caress of the

Bristol Channel..

                 My chief conclusion, perhaps,

                 from all these things was that

                 the English are masters of the

                 art of not losing sight of ease

                 and convenience in the pastoral

                 life - unlike our own people,

                 who, when seeking rural beguile-

                 ment, are apt but to find a new

                 rudeness added to nature.

   

  I'm honestly not one of

  those admirers of James

  who insist that he real-

  ly meant to be gross,

  and crude and awful, but

  was constrained and ruin-

  ed in life and in art by

  conditioning. I just cop-

  ied, above the previous

  illustration, a classic
  example of his gift for
  appreciation, because it
  renewed my apprehension
  that our "sympathy" only
  substantiates his impres-
  sion of the second excerpt.
  I urge a truce with James,
  even at the beach.

                                and then, in dreaming,

The clouds methought would open, and show

              riches

              Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak'd,

              I cried to dream again.

Henry James

English Hours

op. cit.

William Shakespeare
The Tempest
  III, ii, 138-41
op. cit.

Amherst echoes, plain and clear

                 It makes no difference abroad -

                 The Seasons - fit - the same -

                 The mornings blossom into Noons -

                 And split their Pods of Flame -

I tried this at home,
reluctant to go to
Guantánamo; and rang
up Yoo and Addington,
Tenet and Dick Cheney, 
for technical advice;
alas, to no avail.

One can just imagine
these guys' dismay,
not to be continuing:

                     Auto da Fe - and Judgment -
                     Are nothing to the Bee -
                     His separation from his Rose -
                     To Him - sums Misery -

The papers are all full of the frolic the President enjoyed the other night in Congress, at his hosts' expense. But you know, the papers. I didn't see him being called out on his immaculately empty boast of ending torture, in his announcement that he wouldn't stoop to it. Others have, others may, with his permission; and he knows there's ink to spill on his unconscionable, if not complicit reduction of those crimes to a poster of his propriety.

Until this man secures passage of effective legislation to criminal-ize torture, not blinking past it, he's up to his tanline in it. Na-ture's creatures call his conduct to account. A Presidency is not a podcast, it's a primordial trust.

                Wild flowers - kindle in the Woods -

                The Brooks slam - all the Day -

                No Black bird bates His Banjo -

                For passing Calvary -

Emily Dickinson

Number 686
  i    verse 1 of  3
  ii   verse 3
  iii  verse 2

Helen Vendler

Dickinson

  Selected Poems 

  and Commentaries

Harvard University Press, 2010©

Fixity

   ..

   How can it? O how can Love's eye be true,

   That is so vexed with watching and with tears?

   No marvel then though I mistake my view:

   The sun itself sees not till heaven clears.

   ..

  

   The eye undergoes such sustained

   trial in the Sonnets that it was

   only polite of Shakespeare to ad-

   dress what gets in its way. That

   said, I'm practical enough to un-

   derstand, in the English renais-

   sance, that one could get into a

   very great deal of hot water, by

   being too certain of what heaven

   is. To cite it as crossing paths

   with sight is no less daring now

   than it was, then; yet if coming

   far, were to eclipse the Sonnets,

   security would seize their place.

   We know its gaze. It hasn't love;

   and of all the euphemisms author-

   itarianism has to answer for, it

   is the most basic, the most base.

    

William Shakespeare

Sonnet 148

  fragment

 1609

op. cit.

Aaron Lynch

Capetown

2014

Wear a fun sweater for the fog

       Already cooling

       the slopes, al-

       ready soothing

       our cassoulet.

Weigh enough!

    A bit of rowspeak,

    when the long haul

    is up or when mis-

    adventure catches

    ignominious resis-

    tance in the water.

    The President sug-

    gested fairness in

    an oar dipping in-

    to implacable cur-

    rents, off-camera.

    Improvidently, he

    neglected to call

    for sectarian side-

    shows to cloak his

    policies. This was

    observed as immodest.

    Military frivolity,

    too, was minimalist.

                         There was a stir-

                         ring competition,

                         for a frothing at

                         the mouth. Global

                         debauch emerged,

                         as a Bold Idea. It 

                         was an early night.

Ingmar Bergman

Through a Glass, Darkly

1961

Listening at the Monteleone viii: iron lace

The extraordinary American artist

Walker Evans placed himself in a

window of his apartment in Paris

in 1923 for this self-portrait.

Find me. Answer me, are implica-

tions of these projects in men,

so far as I know, having created

such a thing - published above -

using one's shadow on a sunstruck

terrace on Telegraph Hill. 

We notice the same thing in what

we collect, so far as I know; but

what of the collections assembled

for us by the generations before?

The other day, I encountered an

etching in a box in my basement,

of iron lace -- balconies framed

in wrought iron, prefiguring Wil-

lis Polk's famous curtain wall in

San Francisco -- by the merchant

artist Morris Henry Hobbs, whose

works in New Orleans in the first

half of the last century lent him

a certain renown for sentiment.

On seeing it, I supposed it had

been collected by my grandmother,

whose memory launched this series

from the Monteleone. My research

ruled out this possibility, as

she predeceased this creation by

several years. It would have been

purchased by her mother, or by

mine, either of them reinforcing

in their way, the friendship with

a family in New Orleans, of whom

a visit she paid them would hold

great relevance, by descent, to 

both of her survivors.

I have my own friends in New Or-

leans now, a young couple of ca-

pacity for enjoying the world of

their time, to whom I thought to

send this along. You see the mis-

take before I did; you see the

power of inherited custom, more

than of inheritance, per se, be-

fore I did. One, two, possibly

three ladies from whom I'm des-

cended acquired this etching to

delight themselves in friendship.

Plopped here, upon a spontaneous

nail in the wall, the etching e-

licits a smile of remembrance of

the present, even of the perme-

ability of the past. It may be,

in a way, a strand of their lace.

Find me.

Answer me.

 

Members of the wedding

   swept by here

                                lighter
                                further
                                faster,
                                synched

  The Associated Press and
  San Francisco Chronicle
  have submitted a map of
  a starkly political dis-
  location of a fundamental
  human right in the United
  States. I don't mind con-
  ceding Exxon Mobil's right
  to marry, now that corpor-
  ations are people. It will
  be fun to see what Roberts
  thinks of shareholders.

San Francisco Chronicle
January 17, 2015©