The thread that runs through Summer

An American boy is all an Amer-ican boy is ever going to be. Not that this can get us off the hook of reading James and Eliot on the futility of expatriation (in case they didn't know what they were saying), because, after all, they give us such delight with our language. Just not with the way we talk.

For this I keep coming back to Maxwell and Agee. They authen-ticate the distinguishing fea-ture of the American boy, diverted as it multifariously is, almost always, by a culture of something else distinguishing his life, just not his being: striving. His contribution to existence is that figure of his speech. Hunger, without hunger.

Most of us become clever enough with words to regulate exposure of this structure, and this can seem to be polite or hypocritical, but is unambiguously a striving. 

This feature has nothing to do with the appetites, so called, or anxiety in the ordinary sense. It has to do with an awareness of a prev-alence of choice - of a kind, much less a degree, resembled nowhere else. Neither noble nor savage, and not knowingly anarchic, the American of this gender is an expatriate of history, a radical, like it or not, who would connect.

Kind of.

Sunday morning with Stevens

      It is agreeable to think
      of the poet as a whole
      biological mechanism and
      not as a subordinate mech-
      anism within that larger
      one.

     

  In any case, [analogies] are     the pictorializations of men,     for whom the world exists as a   world and for whom life exists   as life .. thus poetry becomes 

  
  and is a transcendent analogue   composed of the particulars of   reality, created by the poet's   sense of the world, that is to   say, his attitude, as he         intervenes and interposes the     appearance of that sense.

      A man's sense of the world
      may be only his own or it
      may be the sense of many
      people. Whatever it is it
      involves his fate..


      The measure of the poet is
      the measure of his sense 
      of the world and of the 
      extent to which it invol-
      ves the sense of other 
      people. We have to stop 
      and think now and then of 
      what he writes as implicit
      with that significance.

We question analogy's legitimacy far too unsympathetically, even while resorting to it far too uncritically, exactly as Stevens says, seldom for its implication of a fate which may not be one's own. It is proper to measure us as poets, and probably mistaken to presume we are not. A Sabbath for some, strikes one as the ideal day for reflecting on the condition of analogy in our discourse, where almost every reference point of any eschatological consequence is steeped in a more and more clotted, almost ethnic righteousness, of telling territoriality.

Inevitably a violence implicit in that character of biological mechanism involves no sense of other people, infamously rich as its sense of its own truly is. I find nothing exotic in the Netanyahu government's exuberant repression of Palestinians under the divine right of self-defense. It's the way my neigh-bors think, what they enjoy, what they queue for in Netflix.

This week, The Post published another shabbily shallow abuse of analogy against the Pres-
ident, as having no under-standing of war, for failing to favor it. This former toady to George Bush cited Sherman's tactics, as the sophisticated approach to a man's fate. That's not analogy. That's deception.


We see a page, full of analogies,
and if we find in them the death
of the soul, why on earth, might
that be? Is it possible, that we
are admonished so long, even in
scripture, to deny its domicile,
that a furious, clarion anguish
moves us to the sentimental fic-
tion of ever discovering it, in
unhallowable ground?

Wallace Stevens
The Necessary Angel
  Essays on Reality and
  the Imagination
    v The Effects of Analogy
Frank Kermode and
  Joan Richardson, editors
Collected Poetry and Prose
  In Memory of James Merrill
Library of America, 1997©

Eliot A. Cohen
Obama Does Not Accept War
  for What it Is
31 July 2014
The Washington Post©

iv  Salim Kechiouche
vi  Yosemite
     Copyright asserted

In case you need to

     wake me,
     when you
     come in?

Who knew, our spooks were smokers?

  The ruin that constantly threat-
  ens them is all the blacker be-
  cause they only doubtfully 'be-
  long'. A duke who has served a 
  prison sentence is still a duke, 
  whereas a mere man about town,
  if once disgraced, ceases to be 
  'about town' for evermore.. 

  He can still commit successful bur-
  glaries, but there is no way back 
  into Paradise.

George Orwell
Decline of the
  English Murder and
  Other Essays
    Raffles and Miss Blandish
Penguin, 1965©

Mountains as they rise ii

"Immobility," the petrol-rationed
scholar wrote, "has its advantages,"
and they are not denied to any so-
cial isolation. "I have now read
The Paston Letters," he was able to
report to Berenson, between members
of a wealthy Norfolk family in the
English Renaissance.

No wonder the civilised Italian envoys from 'bourgeois-capitalist' cities like Venice found the English barbarians!
I was reminded of Morocco - the 
great caïds of the Atlas who built 
up, by ways very like those of our 
15th Century dukes, similar ephem-eral empires of patronage, vio-lence, and corruption .. Really it is to Morocco that our medievalists should go to study feudal life. But alas, they insist on reading only monkish words and build up a ridiculous never-never-land of Christian Unity: kings with folded hands and nuns demurely knitting, in shady cloister pent.

The gift for comparison, we admire as a legacy of learning, is as strained in our fact-denying cultures as the gift of comparison, we value as culture. 

Somehow the beauty of the one is upheld by the vitality of the other.
Then we have Venice.

Hugh Trevor-Roper
Fellow of Christ Church
Regius Professor of
  Modern History
Letters from Oxford
  to Bernard Berenson
  7 January 1957
Richard Davenport-Hines
  editor
op. cit.

Mountains as they rise

  Friends said, No, skip the Carven show.
  It's all about the street. What use is
  that to you?

  I remembered then, seeking Petrarca as
  a youngster, chasing rumors of torment
  to be ready for with words, and leaping
  headlong into his lap, exhausted, OK,
  slow down. He never does. I find I owe
  him, certain peaks:


  Perhaps I could become a stone somehow ..

  adamant, perhaps, or marble - white
  with fear - or else rock crystal that men
    admire
  At any rate, the weight I can barely stand

  to carry of my burden of desire
  would lift: I envy Atlas with his light
  load of the sky in Morocco's burning sand.

Petrarch
Sonnets and Shorter Poems
  rima sparse, 51
  fragment
  ca 1350
David R. Slavitt
  translation
Harvard University Press, 2012©

Bram Valbracht
  Carven, 2014
  Paris

Lifeguard not on duty

     Possibly we've all seen the Russian
     people endure privation under author-
     itarians enough, not to join our pa-
     per of record in applauding another
     financial attack from the West, on
     another Russian government. But the
     exercise lays bare the futilities in
     retribution's gestures of this kind,
     in which satisfaction is based on
     harming the weakest, to destabilize
     the strongest. 

     This fantasy will not mature in fact,
     and we know it. With this in mind, it
     strikes one as especially disreput-
     able, of the Times to link - can you
     stand it - "the honor of France" to
     its breach of our favorite kind of
     contract, arms sales (and sales of
     naval hardware, at that). If anything
     is as predictable in Western diplom-
     acy as an ostentatious tease with the
     markets, it is this vulgar sort of
     reference to France, which has absorb-
     ed more blood of Western blunders in
     its soil than any land on earth, save
     Russia. That landscape can never re-
     claim its endowments of Nature.

     Another generation of spineless West-
     ern politicians, intimidated into fol-
     ly by the impulsive passions of a pub-
     lic 'roused by unctuous media, bears
     such little resemblance to our addic-
     tion to novelty that, I suppose, all
     that explains it is our forgetfulness.

Julien Benda
1867 - 1956
La Trahison des Clercs
1927


The Editorial Board
Stronger Sanctions
  on Russia, at Last
July 29, 2014
The New York Times©

The weight of the absolute world, of course, impinged

   Have you been stranded on Paros

   in the middle of an engraver's

   strike, when you had to get the

   place cards in time for a lunch

   on Lycabettus? Very likely, given

   how your rmbl shades give you a-

   way as the 4-year trouper that

   you are. But it's worse (let us

   console ourselves) for Gérard, 

   who can't remember whom he asked.

  

   Later this afternoon, there will

   have been 4 years of this page,

   which ought to have been fair e-

   nough warning of diurnal unrest, 

   with ample time to join in.

   What has held you back? Pace one's

   own polemic of yesterday, the same

   compunction imperils the progress

   of one's own spirit, toward that

   commemoration in Durrell no media

   mariner can refuse. When he jests,

   even Jimmy Merrill listens:

    At the post office I ran into the

    two French ladies. They had had a

    great shock, and they gobbled like

    turkeys as they told me about it.

    As usual they had been sending off

    clutches of post-cards to their

    friends and relations in France -

    they seemed to have no other occupa-

    tion or thought in mind. But peering

    through the grille after posting a

    batch they distinctly saw the clerk

    sweep the contents of the box into

    the lap of his overall and walk into

    the yard in order to throw all the

    mail on to a bonfire which was burn-

    ing merrily on the concrete, apparent-

    ly fed by all the correspondence of

    Taormina. They were aghast and shout-

    ed out to him - as a matter of fact

    they could hardly believe their eyes

    at first. They thought they had to do

    with a madman - but no, it was only a

    striker. He was burning mail as fast

    as it was posted. When they protested

    he said, "Niente Niente .. questo e

    tourismo .."

    What further travel can we wish on friends

    To coax their absence with our memory ..

   

Lawrence Durrell
Sicilian Carousel
  Taormina
  [two fragments]
Viking, 1977©