The seduction of boys iv: the gossamer-fine thread

Dmitry Petrovich had begun to take aim, and for a second everything had disappeared. There was no granite sky, no red lingonberries - nothing but two eyes, turned toward him. The elk was looking at him. He was, after all, the sole witness of the disaster that had that morning befallen her.

And with a sense of strength and happiness, with a hunter's accurate premonition of a fine shot, taking care not to disturb the gosammer-fine thread linking him and his target, he pressed slowly and smoothly on the trigger. 

Then, going up to the elk he had shot, Dmitry Petrovich realised what had happened. Her calf had damaged a front leg - it was caught in the split trunk of a fallen alder tree, and the calf was evidently terrified of being abandoned. Even after the shot, even after the mother had fallen to the ground, the calf had gone on trying to persuade her not to abandon him - and she had not abandoned him.

The writer is the great epistolary witness to the warfare between the Soviet Union and Germany in the 1940s; this story is from an invaluable collection of his fiction, essays, and journalism. An occasion he didn't witness, but whose remnants were scattered ubiquitously before him, was the ballistically meticulous judeocide of his entire home town, Berdichev, in the Ukraine, whence he deduced the disap-pearance of his mother by the shawl left on her chair.

This is not a page to be illustrated by artifacts. There will be no painter's impression of the Goyesquerie of the occasion, or snapshot souvenir inva-sions of the privacy of death. They simply cannot do what Grossman has done, to vitiate the illusion in any premonition that there can ever be, a fine shot. The courage of maternity is his profoundest rebuttal, and it is unanswerable; there is only lewd tran-sitory advantage. But then he follows that thread where it visibly draws itself: to the calf who was corrupted, with a sense of strength and happiness.
















Vasily Grossman
The Road: Stories,
  Journalism and Essays
    The Elk, 1954-55
Robert and Elizabeth Chandler,
  and Olga Mukovnikova, translation
New York Review Books, 2010©

i         Lasse Pedersen

ii        Mathias Lauridsen

iv, v   Thomas Andreasson

Saturday commute xxxvi: Venice to Cyprus on a salade niçoise

   I'm to have lunch today with a fellow who goes around the world, looking at things, from whom we last heard in a garden in Mougins, addressing a steak tartare. Possibly, in the open shade of a garden in the Piedmont, we'll resort to a salade niçoise and Sancerre, but I'd be hopeful for a fine Chablis. I remember this fellow because he went to La Fenice for me to hear the Schubert 8th, whence I gave him dinner in Venice, too, because I wanted to see what to do with a good Amarone. He reminds me that it's useful to have a few palates out there to travel for one, and I recommend this expedient unreservedly, not to banish them, particularly, so much as to keep in touch with one's dog.

The commute from Venice to Cyprus is really nothing, these days, but it was of consequence to the Moor, who must also play his part at lunch. My friend tells me - insisting, it's coincidence - that he is taking up Shakespeare; and of course it's coincidence, the way one might barge into the sea between Point A and Point B. Far be it from anyone, to detain a fellow who goes around the world, looking at things, from looking at things. Hence, Othello, I think, more than Prospero at this embarkation on the marine experience.

I'll hand him two copies of the play, and Mr Welles' interesting movie about it. He can have the pristine and unmarked Pelican, staple of my college days - costing, I note, 65 cents, new; and my heavily marked up copy in the Arden edition, from hanging out with actors. 

If nothing else, one is conscious in Othello of a story that is simply going nowhere in the world or in time, but onward; and every time one looks upon it, one is watching something remorseless and vast, going past. I'm a slowly educated man, but I can think of extremely few products of the mind which embody such inextin-guishable energy, that they never need - like the Parthenon - to be resummoned to contempla-tion as something excellent - but, rather, have a pulse you can see, receding in the distance.

And yes, it seems it's all Iago's fault - but isn't everything, you were about to interject. I'd have to think about that. I'm not sure that would allow the play to be a tragedy. I may not be able to go so far.

She loved me for the dangers I had passed,

And I loved her that she did pity them.

ii Andrew Cooper

William Shakespeare
The Tragedy of Othello,
  The Moor of Venice, I, iii, 167-8
1602
Alice Walker and
  John Dover Wilson, editors
The New Shakespeare
Cambridge University Press, 1957©
  

Suppose it were Friday vii: the waiting room of daylight

  In the waiting room of daylight
  there are alarming reports

  of the imagination.

You can't hear them, but they're infamous and they are true. Everyone's his own armourer, buckling a cuirass he would see dismantled;

  
  Discovering, unfurling something 
  else.

ii, v  Bolshoi youth
         Benjamin A. Huseby, photography
         

My favourite clothespin iv

        

  
  One clothespin of a 

  quality of lighting
  we enjoy in language, 
  to apply a sense of 
  touch to a fact which 

  can lift it off the 
  line. 

A friend a friend will know

I would like guys in their youth to adopt William Shakespeare as a matter of ordinary weekly refreshment. There will come a time when less and less will make sense, or even be observed unless there is that frame of reference; but that's only for judgment's sake. For engagement's sake there could be few truer conduits between the minds of friends than in his plays. Plato is superb for conjecture; Virgil is much more like his sonnets. His plays portray lives in layers, beyond the circumstantial, of life as it is certain to be lived again. And when they turn to each other I want them to have seen those wafers in the kaleidoscope which turn with every thought they will exchange.

It's possible to lose a friend and it's possible to recall a friend by other means; but I have never lost a friend, in the sense of being unable to say I knew him any longer, who has sat with me to speak of William Shakespeare. 

I did not invent this expedient, hedging my bets at the time; but now I can look through decades and bright lights, and bring right here to the ground beside me, the essence of these friends in conversations he convened between us.

Yet with everyone, Shakespeare invigorates engagements, in all their permutations, which we deserve to understand in feeling at the time, and never lose.

Meter and syntax are his bones, words and words and words for senses, endings and beginnings shifting every gesture of thought; lines of supple texture every time we touch them, shape and substance certain in his grasp, yet fluid and prolific, always saying there'll be more. And there will be, whenever one goes back. Our language gave us a fortune.

I don't know if the President of the United States is reading Richard II now. At the close of Act III, a Gardener takes the stage and gives instructions to assistants, which have lain on that page for more than 400 years, for every student of a State to know by heart, placed there as plain as day for the young. Such interventions by spontaneous innocents in Shakespeare are like choral odes, laid out for no dramatic gain but for moral assessment. Richard has been inadequate in his part, and several things this President is not, but one thing that he is. Complaisant; pathetically so, toward his usurpers.

Go, bind thou up young dangling apricocks,
which like unruly children make their sire
Stoop with oppression of their prodigal weight,
Give some supportance to the bending twigs.
Go thou, and like an executioner
Cut off the heads of too fast growing sprays,
That look too lofty in our commonwealth:
All must be even in our government.
You thus employed, I will go root away
The noisome weeds which without profit suck
The soil's fertility from wholesome flowers.

Why should we, in the compass of a pale,
Keep law and form and due proportion,
Showing, as in a model, our firm estate,
When our sea-walled garden, the whole land,
Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers chok'd up,
Her fruit-trees all unprun'd, her hedges ruin'd,
Her knots disordered, and her wholesome herbs
Swarming with caterpillars?

Hold thy peace 

.. O what pity is it,

That he had not so trimm'd and dress'd his land

As we this garden! We at time of year

Do wound the bark, the skin of our fruit trees,

Lest, being over-proud in sap and blood,

With too much riches it confound itself; 

Had he done so to great and growing men,

They might have liv'd to bear, and he to taste 

Their fruits of duty ..Had he done so, himself had borne the crown,

Which waste of idle hours 

hath quite thrown down.

A sordid sight is not a happy one to blog, a sorry view is not our favourite way of bringing something that exists into being, so that it may be seen. Very few of the blogs I admire permit themselves to do this; and their resolution to present some beauty and to eschew advice is exemplary. I offer no excuse, and in fact a mild apology. As is obvious, this is a page of occasional advocacy, and it has a constituency. We know the beautiful and we know the good, but they are also something else: an inheritance to be looked after from time to time, even for us to affirm to each other.

  Just sayin'.






















William Shakespeare
King Richard II
  Act III, iv
1597
Peter Ure, editor
The Arden Edition of the Works
  of William Shakespeare
Richard Proudfoot, general editor
Methuen, 1955©

The little river through Horace's estate was called, Digentia

I, once handsome in delicate clothes and sleek hair .. addicted once to rich wine as early as noon, I now love brief dinners and naps in the grass by the stream. I'm not ashamed of my fun ..

There is so much to love about one's entry into quiet water, that it may seem strange to be especially taken by the awareness that it is always deliberate. Plainly Horace loved the experience of this deliberate act as much as what he was comparing it to, in this Epistle - the racier play of life in Rome. I would guess, we all have the highest sense of fellow feeling for those who are so conscious of a choice to change their experience - Rossellini, again: change a rhythm, you get an emotion - as we are, in our own preferred pursuits. We clasp one spine from among many on our shelf, and consent to immersion in that one book; we slip the lead into our dog's collar for an evening walk; we pull the chain of the lamp by our bed to enter into sleep, and these enactments feel proportionate to the transformation we accept. I have no memory of any lover which is not framed by this consciousness of a deliberate movement, as in stepping into quiet water.

Gilbert Highet

Poets in a Landscape

op. cit.

Horace

Satires and Epistles

  Epistle I, 14

John Davie, translation

op. cit.

Waiting for the bigotry bus

The best thing about Republican bigotry is the ecstatic release it promises in hard times. Its technique is first to lacerate with horror, next to wallow in indignation, and last to raise its fist in triumph. That its specialty is lawful abuse, under colour of religious, patriotic scruple, gives deniability to the suicide it inflicts, the spousal abuse it shields, the substance abuse it propagates, and the infinite suppression it achieves of social progress. It's designed to keep the sharecropper class where it belongs, and it works. They exploit terror to promise dominance, and they get away with it in plain sight of their exploitation of their own constituents. Here they come again.

I think we should go out and meet it. The Party has been on a joyride of immunised hysteria since the campaign of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew in 1968. It worked, because times were hard. They lied; and led with praise of righteousness, to drive a 40-year stake through the heart of progress, called fear. Now they have destroyed the nation, and they want people to be frightened of making love? We shall see. 

I've been spending some time this summer in the bloodlands

The historian Tim Snyder has finally published in book form, findings previously exhibited in The New York Review, on the conduct of the Soviet Union's and Germany's war in the 1940s. Together with Max Hastings' broader history of the last year of the war, Peter Longerich's meticulous tracing of decisions leading to the judeocide, and Vasily Grossman's writings from within the belly of the Stalinist beast, I find a prejudice being strongly reinforced, which germinated for me at a tender age. 

I refer, as a lifelong historian, to my regret that the discipline exists. If it did not, the facts of the Second World War, which destroyed progressivism in the United States, led directly to a state of chronic war for 50 years, and which recast the very identity of the American republic as a perpetual parody of its worst original elements, would have had to have been assimilated by everyone and as early as possible in life, rather than optionally and by the few, whenever they felt like fitting it in between Austen and Ayn Rand. Instead of denouncing the ignorance of these generations, I denounce its cause, in the retirement of data to a priesthood.

You can come to the same despondency by happier means, of course - my original means, in fact. I refer to an enthusiasm for its method and its enormous lev-erage of related discoveries, which stipulates that history is a fit subject for well-bred conversation. As a naïf, I'm always the last to believe we desire ignorance. I'm trying, therefore, to see if shirt-lessness can help, because I still believe in the pertinence of facts, and they still seem urgent to me to know, when yet another campaign for the Presidency of the United States bids fair to turn on terror and phobia, misrepresentation and op-pressive, cynical expenditure.

The campaign boarding a bus this day, to scare the people of Iowa into catatonic obliviousness to the sucker punch of fascism once again, is really not one's cup of history. But this should be an easy call; and that for who-knows-how-many millions, it isn't, is more than perplexing. It spoils the chapter in Twain on the King and the Duke; and that really isn't nice to do, in a state lying on the Mississippi.

One never knows. The Summer can be a gainful season of growth; and for that matter, who does not recall with special fondness, the histories one learned to trust and to treasure, in that most blissfully autodidactic of intervals. If so few as 1,000 copies of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have been read in Iowa this Summer - a not unreasonable assumption, in a State of 3 million - that's bad news for demagogues, bad news for bigotry, bad news for hypoc-risy, and bad news for folks who think they can mess with a boy's heart. It may just be that Iowans might love the family and the friends they really have.

Tim Snyder

Bloodlands: Europe 

  between Hitler and Stalin

Basic Books, 2010©