*Grande Sertão: Veredas, or, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands

Grande Sertão: Veredas, or, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands -João Guimarães Rosa
I think the novel itself is a form of bravery. Any novel. The poem may be truth, but the novel is good. There is so much badness in this book that I can’t explain exactly how soft it is. The place itself, the sertão, the text, is as dense as a heart. And though a heart is fragile, it is never short-lived.
A beautiful book.
“Don’t you know that one who is wholly brave, in his heart, cannot help being good, too?”
“Is God a trigger?”

*Beloved

Beloved -Toni Morrison
One of the most pure and powerful uses of language I’ve ever encountered. I don’t know in what possible way we, as humankind, are not like the love that terrorizes the characters of this novel. And yet. And yet. Sethe ends up dribbling in a rocking chair and yet she wins. She wins. She wins grace that her world isn’t ready for. Listen to her voice:
“And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew.”
“Now I can. I can sleep like the drowned, have mercy.”

*Our Lady of the Flowers

Our Lady of the Flowers -Jean Genet
In the long-evening half-light of mid-American dusk, the smell of barbecue and panting dogs and summer children, sun tea cooling on the gravel driveway and mosquitoes in helices around the porchlight in the deep green unmown lawns to the slow romance of the crickets, the dandelion is sexing itself. The starfish breaks an arm to fragment a new organism. The coffee tree is autogamous. Most amazing is the aphid, which is usually parthenogenic, generationally telescoping, born with a baby in the belly, sometimes born with a baby and a grand-baby in the belly. But the aphid will still have sex, Genet is idiodioecious, and under his covers he is only a man, hard-on, mind womb wound around a semi-gendered Darling who gains the male pronoun like the blooming phallic raceme of the foxglove but sometimes slips into the deep curtsy of a little girl.
This book inspired me to research the hymen, which is only present in the following animals: llamas, guinea pigs, manatees, moles, toothed whales, chimpanzees, elephants, rats, lemurs, seals, and horses.
Besides the hot sex, it was hard for me to pay attention to this book. I let the words, though, the slick hard style of it, gloss over me. Coat me. And I marveled at a phrase, a situation, but, especially towards the end, completely lost myself to its pages.
“The swan, borne up by its mass of white feathers, cannot go to the bottom of the water to find mud, nor can Jesus sin.”
“It was a smile that was enough to damn his judges, a smile so azure that the guards themselves had an intuition of the existence of God and of the great principles of geometery.”
“He was good-looking—as are all the males in this book, powerful and lithe, and unaware of their grace.”
“like violins being skinned alive.”

*The Duino Elegies

The Duino Elegies -Rainer Maria Rilke
For Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror is to say that Birth is nothing but the beginning of Death. Then, ask me, ask, to what is the beginning of Death? The only medicament is Night. Oh and night: there is night... Because Light and Lovers are only masks—inadequately covering the terror. Masquerades of levity we are. And wasn’t it Goethe who said that if the world wasn’t inherently dark then we wouldn’t need light. And didn’t he also say that architecture is frozen music. What then is poetry, but unfettered dirt. Angels, chronologically, are pre-dirt. Man is post-rock. Poetry is un-rock. Music is etymologically earth-angel. Architecture, then, is to Poetry what an edifice is to marble slab. What then, Rilke, has mustered under his open window with the violin pealing along the breeze, is an unwieldy temple for metaphors (instead of vice-versa). On its altar shines a Mask to end all Masks. In which we disguise our dark souls with darkness and disappear into immortality. No, not even Women in Love can penetrate this totality, not even the Hero or Rome or Gaspara Stampa or Nietzsche or the Army of Children Crusaders can fade into the unremitting tides of eternity like Goethe’s Homunculus martyring himself to the lowest of forms, knowing in complete faith that over the millennia he will fall into the cycle of evolution and attain its highest state: a worthy lover. He died for worth. For boys drink wine, men drink port, but heroes drink brandy. Quaff, then, Ahab! Consecrate and Consanguinate! And then abandon. Complete, inexhaustible idealism. The poet is a Young Man—the only soul with the tension to withstand the bowstring, to fire the quiver into the unknown. For still stillness is worse than death. We must be, as Miller says, still as the hummingbird. For there is no place where we can remain.
You can remain in the beloved.
Restrain him.
Oh gently, gently, wash the atavistic graveyards with your soft steps, flicker away the battling phalluses like a fly on a hot day, landing to rub his feet in the sweet sweat-manna of your arms, a hot day, the glaze down your neck, flood the dried-up riverbeds with your tears of joy, with your birth-giving tears. For even lovemaking is a birth. And drown the rivers. But don’t be his mother. But don’t be his lover. And don’t hide his face.
Let it encounter all the world and be stunned forever.

…And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

*The Ladder of Divine Ascent

The Ladder of Divine Ascent -St. John Climacus (intro by Kallistos Ware)
from Ware: “the progress of eternity,” that is, “The essence of perfection consists paradoxically in the fact that we never become perfect, but advance unceasingly ‘from glory to glory’.”
and from St. John Climacus: “War against us is proof we are making war.”
“So then, keep running, brother athletes, and again I say to you, keep running… Keep running, athlete, and do not be afraid.”
“It is one and the same fire that is called that which consumes and that which illuminates.”
“By dispassion I mean a heaven of the mind within the heart.”

*The Symposium

The Symposium -Plato (translated by Christopher Gill and Desmond Lee)
2 books in a row on Love, whose parents, according to Plato, are Poverty, a drunk beggar woman, and Resource, the wily son of Invention, who conceived a child to put the Gods in order and make poets of men. I wasn’t expecting such a tipsy, homoerotic text. Nor, a sarcastic eulogy of Socrates.
“All human beings are pregnant in body and mind.”
“Yes, sexual intercourse between men and women is a kind of birth.”

*The Song of Songs

The Song of Songs -translated by Chana Bloch and Ariel Bloch

How wonderful you are, O Love,
how much sweeter
than all other pleasures!

But to try to quote from the Song is like hunting for a rabbit’s foot. Or trying to cook only a spoonful of soup. The lovers are stoked with the such desperate passion, that no matter the circumstance, the politic, or the law, they bestow on themselves and, now, thanks to the translation, on us, a profound innocence. In that split moment before tears begin to well. Before pain is translated into reaction. Or desire hits the brain. No wonder the Song flaunts such a pure animal presence. The lovers living between the heartbeats. I can see the Shulamite stealthing around the city at night. Silent, almost rolling, footsteps. The lovers collision always in the softlight of dawn. The air cold.

Hurry, my love! Run away,
my gazelle, my wild stag
on the hills of cinnamon.

*Cat Attacks

Cat Attacks -Jo Deurbrouck and Dean Miller
I can see them. Feel the unprecedented silence of the pounce. We are at complete oblivion to their eyes. And before I hear a sound the back of my neck is in the hot mouth of a lion.
The way they run, while stalking, so close to the ground, so graceful, almost rolling, and silent. I’ve never before seen an animal become a complete blur. We lock eyes. Or maybe it locks on my eyes and I paralyze. Or maybe I rip off my sunglasses to compensate for the depth of its stare, which takes in most of the canyon’s light. Don’t look away, I say to myself. Don’t look away. I start backing up and run into a bush. For one split moment I glance down, and then back up and the lion has halved the distance between us and is still as if it never moved. I unbutton my shirt with my left hand. Don’t look down. I pull it away from my body, assuming more girth. I snarl. Scream. Hoist my crosier in the air like some hellish cataclysm and the lion doesn’t even flinch. When my echo dies, the lion, without sound, takes about six lightning steps forward and stops again, now less than fifteen yards from me. Don’t look away. With my left hand I reach across my body and unbuckle the sheath to my knife. The lion takes two more steps. It’s still enough to be dead. My eyes water and the lion blurs into the camouflage of the sand. As if it could sense my slightly obscured vision, it creeps closer. Now I know it’s a male. Too big to be a female. But still, probably weighing less than my one forty-five. I unsheath my knife and again raise my crosier in the air. Without reason, during the scream, I feint forward and I see the lion tense. I feint again. Snarling and brandishing my crosier like some lunatic samurai. The lion doesn’t move. I feint and stamp the ground and slash the air with my knife and feint. The lion doesn’t move. Then it charges.
v

*The Black Book

The Black Book -Orhan Pamuk
The first hundred pages and the last forty were stellar. But the middle few hundred were very static. Lots and lots of “becoming” going on. Lots of very subtle “revelations.” Lots of time spent watching characters read and write. The last line even named writing as “the only consolation,” which is fine. I do look forward to reading one of his later books, after Pamuk himself comes to and gets over coming to writing. And great to glimpse Turkey in the ‘70s and ‘80s. So many nouns in this book. I liked too, the notion of finding Latin letters in the lines of faces.
“and that the universe is he who is seeking the mystery.”
He like Tolstoy’s lips as well: “I loved seeing how you pushed out your upper lip when you were reading, just like a character in a Tolstoy novel.”

*The Ramayana

The Ramayana (retold by Ramesh Menon)
this was a sea of love they plowed through, their chariot a ship of sorrow

“It is you who seem to have lost your reason, and tread a path of madness called Rama.”
list of animals appearing in Ramayana:
nilgai, chital, sambur, bison, leapard, tiger, krauncha bird, langur, filigree keepers, swans, tame deer, peacock, elephant, wolves, black bees, sarasa, chakravaka, geese, migrant teal, scarlet ibis, pelican, wild pig, crane, painted stork, koyal, owls, gigantic eagles, rabbits, vulture, kite, horse, squirrel, vanjaluka bird, honey bees, bear, ghandarva, kinnara, panther, monitor lizard, butterfly, firefly, scarlet-footed pigeons, mynahs, moths, boar, chameleon, duck, crocodile, cur, dolphin, whale-eating giant squid, jackal, deer called srimara and chamara, hyena, whale, sea serpent, shark, timming ala, vidyadhara, kokilas, bhringarajas, hamadryad, kitten, cobras, ants, worms, horse, and cows.
list of trees and plants appearing in Ramayana:
pipal, nyagrodha (pipal sap), kadamba, mango, aswattha, valkala (tree bark clothing), palasa, badri, yamala, bamboo, eucalyptus, early pine, sala, asvarkana, madhuka, apple, peach, pear, darbha grass, scented pala trees, karnikara, asoka, lodra flower, tilaka, sara reeds, kritamala, kumsuka flowers, patala, priyangu, punnaga, arjuna, chandana, mandara, bakula, ketaka, kusa grass, sandalwood, japaa flowers, gajapushpi vine, aguru, desdar, shimshupa, champaka, punnaga, parijata, deodar, asana, nipa, saptaparna, atimuktaka, mandara bakula, jambu, and kovidara.

“And in the heart of the forest, his spirit was opened to him: a secret, mystic bloom, thousand-petaled.”

*The Pilgrim’s Progress

The Pilgrim’s Progress -John Bunyan
I am not very well acquainted with physical violence. Sad and desperate for the arduous tasking of Christianity, of religion. Death is a presence that lives in healthy, beaming children. This life however is more than thorn. Moses scourged the pilgrim, clobbered him over and again on the head until he was pulled to safety (further thorn-tripping) by a Jesus angel. I know that I’m not a “good” writer. I know I owe penance and honor and every ounce of me to my creator, but I know too that dues have been paid, and if I, and Bunyan, and the weak and the strong and the eloquent can swallow this freedom than the terror of thorns is painless, soft-petaled. I don’t want a walk in the park. I couldn’t. Nor would I turn away a man who came into the path of righteousness but “not at the wicket gate,” who “camest hither through that same crooked lane,” and not through the path of travail, through the Slough of Despond or through the trial at Vanity Fair, or after fighting the terrible Apollyon. Is there not a path through pure beauty. If I wasn’t so measly, write it, to write it. My roommate and his girlfriend storm drunken into his room. The wall is thin and she complains, “I’m so cold.” I revile the sound of my typing that I know they can hear. These words. They’re so drunk.

The Rings of Saturn -W.G. Sebald

The Rings of Saturn -W.G. Sebald
A beautiful way of thinking. Robert Silman, in a blurb on the front cover, says, “Stunning and strange… like a dream you want to last forever.”
I fell asleep reading this book two days ago and dreamt of strange Chinese mass suicides and woke up with a leg and an eye twitching.
Sebald transitions, often within a paragraph, from glowing herring to the history of citylights to a forgotten maritime battle to an English hurricane to a biography of Joseph Conrad. And all done seamlessly, in the logic of interest and exploration and awe, which is closer to reality (the logic, the “storyline”) than any book I have ever read.
If I were the surgeon general of the west, I would readily prescribe afternoon constitutionals with W.G. Sebald.
“It is not for nothing that Brazil owes its name to the French word for charcoal.”
“…but would still be concerned about the wellbeing of her goldfish, which she washed under the kitchen tap every day and placed on the window ledge when the weather was fine, for a little fresh air.”
“An idiosyncrasy peculiar to the herring is that, when dead, it begins to glow.”

*The Botany of Desire -Michael Pollan

The Botany of Desire -Michael Pollan
I was introduced to this text as a letdown. I scanned briefly the section on the tulip, which seemed immediately paltry and dry compared to Anna Pavor’s The Tulip. I went to a Pollan reading at Black Oak’s with the Berkeley crowd wearing sandals, hemming, healthy, and terrifically pleased with themselves to confront their two favorite topics in one setting: advocacy and organics. So I was doubtful of the seriousness of the writing, and expecting mere fasciculation of the old, pro-, hippyish themes. The book is divided into four sections, or, as Pollan puts them, Desires. He explores the idea that plants have adapted themselves to meet our desires for reasons of self-propagation, or, another way of looking at it, is that certain plants have taken advantage of our desires, have, in the same way we use plants to gratify ourselves, used us to “gratify” their own unyielding desire for life. So Johnny Appleseed wasn’t delivering healthy teeth and Red Delicious to the Midwest, it was instead eccentric evangelism and applejack that came from his makeshift canoe of seeds. Basically, bringing liquor to the thirsty. Similarly, Pollan combines anecdote and the unmystification of botany and history concerning the Tulip, Marijuana, and the Potato. He shines most clearly, or, perhaps the potato does, in the last section, explaining away the human desire for control.
“Banality depends on memory…”
“Memory is the enemy of wonder.”

*Faust

Faust, I & II -Goethe
Strange.
Part I, which I’d read before, was legible, full of action, tragic, and, indeed, dramatic. Part II was hifalutin, abstruse, very sexual, discombobulating, and wonderful. My favorite storyline (there were many) was that of Homunculus, the sarcastic incorporeal man-spirit, who accompanied Faust and Mephisto on their journey to Ancient Greece (in search of Helen of Troy), to find himself a form to inhabit. Quickly, (as went most of Part II, either quick or at an enormously poetic standstill), and with hardly any background or buildup, the little mansprit spots his ideal form in the passing sea goddess Galatea (a non-sequitur cameo), falls in love, and in a semi-onanistic climax, sacrifices himself before her to be deposited as the lowest form in the sea, where he will eventually, over millennia, evolve up the ontogenic ladder to become, or reincarnate, Galatea herself (which all takes place in about three pages). But Homunculus is only one of many sidebars. In fact, the entire “drama” of part II seems constructed exclusively of sidebars. Even Faust himself doesn’t seem to find much page space, and when he does, he usually poeticizes obscure references to ancient forms of magic or deities. But, somehow, despite, and also because of, a few hundred pages of nearly pure orgasm (greeting, courting, foreplay, even bodies barely exist in part II), it is a wonderful read. Not to mention the two philosophers, a Vulcanist and a Neptunist, arguing about the origin of a recently appeared mountain.
Concerning Part I: the story of Gretchen is one of the most gruesome and ruthless I’ve ever encountered. Yet Goethe still tells it playfully. And a misconception (my own) that has been righted: Faust initially “sold his soul” to Mephisto, not for knowledge, but for the experience of all human experience. Which, omniempiricus, is much more interesting than omniscience or omnipotence. Faust longs for the whole gambit of human experience, all the way to even the sadness of loss, and the ultimate loss: “Heap all their joys and troubles on my breast, / And thus my self to their selves’ limits to extend, / And like them perish foundering at the end.”
Faust retranslates the first line of John’s Gospel:“In the beginning was the Deed!”
Faust’s first words when he wakes up after time-traveling to ancient Greece (concerning Helen): “Where is she?”
Learned something about Goethe in the footnotes, that he supposedly hated bells.
“Freedom and life belong to that man solely / Who must reconquer them each day.”
And the last words of the play, “The Eternal-Feminine / Draws us onward.”

*Antony and Cleopatra

Antony and Cleopatra -William Shakespeare
The seminal difference between Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth lies not in their action, nor in their intention, but in their conclusions. The last we see of Lady Macbeth is when she is frantically trying to rue away her bloodstained hands,“Out, damned spot,” she begs. But, she realizes, “What’s done cannot be undone.”
Whereas Cleopatra is left, indeed, with the ultimate cleansing, self-martyrdom. Having done no irreparable wrong, she kills herself to both avoid becking to Caesar and to join her deceased lover. Both Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth are, in terms, in the end, “unsexed.” Lady Macbeth bats away her sex so that she can find the fortitude to murder. Cleopatra, on the other hand, achieves the consummation of her sex through the love and anger shared between her and Antony. The diabolical difference between LadyBeth and Cleopatra, is that Cleopatra ends life unsexed and Lady Macbeth is, in the end, resexed. When Cleopatra dies, she uses as weapon an asp. Obviously symbolic of what it took women to become women, or to become at least ashamed of being so, instead of beggaring to the temptation of the snake, this time, she (woman/Cleopatra) delivers her own coup de (grace)innocence, and seals herself forever with the mark of conscience, the, in fact, ultimate mark of purpose, suicide.
“My resolution’s placed, and I have nothing
Of woman in me. Now from head to foot
I am marble-constant; now the fleeting moon
No planet is of mine.”
and,
“I am fire and air; my other elements
I give to baser life.”
She walks away from life Cained. She leaves tattooed by the beast (purpose/potential/possibility), but, she walks upright.

Lady Macbeth, however, attempting to trump her womanity, succumbs to the beast (p/p/p, or, conscience), and is left imprisoned. Both her man, and the man in her, fail her: Macbeth cowers to a ghost and is then killed by Macduff, while she herself concedes her masculinity to tears.

Two more from Antony and Cleopatra:
“There’s beggary in love that can be reckoned.”
“The breaking of so great a thing should make a greater crack.”

*The Road

The Road -Cormac McCarthy
The Road is not a transcendent novel. It is not philosophy, fact, nor harbinger. It is not a moral or a prophesy. It is an artifact.
Could you say that a recovered amphora is transcendent?
But what relic has function?
If an amphora could tell a story then why would men tell stories?
Then what does the amphora do?
It promises.
And so does this book.
It promises of civilization. Of life. And of God.
“Look around you, he said. There is no prophet in the earth’s long chronicle who’s not honored here today. [to his son] Whatever form you spoke of you were right.”

Again, read an entire McCarthy novel in less than 24 hours. Again, sick. Again, what is the opposite of devastation?
The book started with the typical Cormac off-colored descriptions…“like some… [simile of something godly, ghastly or obscure].” And the dialogue was spitting off the skillet.
But a few times Cormac was off target with sentences like, “A blackness to hurt your ears,” which is, itself, painful, beautiful, but McCarthy stresses the prose a little too much, and adds, “with listening,” [A blackness to hurt your ears with listening] which is obvious, redundant, and, in the author’s own standards, long-winded.
“Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground.”
The truncated, perhaps often truncheoned, diction of The Road was less abrasive and simpler, almost sweet, inquisitive, than what is found in even the most recent of his novels.
“On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?”

And as the reviewer in The Economist pointed out, we are not short of the Cormacian stylism, “The snow fell nor did it cease to fall.” But sometimes he broke out of his fashion and was dead on good, “The nights were blinding cold and casket black…” and, this cold, miniature, Melvillian chapter, addressing the reader, pointblank, “Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.”
This sentiment is perhaps the completion of an oeuvre. But despite the blood splattered, the insanity, and the fear of ten novels, a play and a screenplay, in both of his septuagenarian works we are left with a modicum of hope. Of promise. The finish of No Country was the story of a man who built a stone water trough that would last ten thousand years. Did it last the cataclysm that forced father and son to take to The Road? Probably. Just like the promise of the amphora will last.

And in The Road the author’s voice never felt as obvious as in moments when the writing itself was choked:
“When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different.”
and
“He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”

*The History of Love

The History of Love -Nicole Krauss
As long as the lightness keeps itself light… But how does it do that? What is the pretence is to shining? Why would a dark soul even try to write a book?
By the end of the novel I was impressed. The plot complicated delightfully and resolved like the crack of a blossoming sweet pea.
What was so perplexing was the ever-present question: Can I take this book seriously?
Very far from meta-fiction, removed from slapstick, off-track of drama, oft-too-puerile for a love story, full of tricks and quips, The History of Love, unbelievably, came to itself, and what I finally gleaned from Krauss was the simple joy of writing.
It won’t keep you up nights, but, quick and charming in a great way.
“her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”
“When a Jew prays, he is asking God a question that has no end.”

*Monkey

Monkey –Wu Ch’Eng-En – translated by Arthur Waley
A blurb from The Nation describes the book as a “combination of picaresque novel, fairly tale, fabliau, Mickey Mouse, Davy Crocket, and Pilgrim’s Progress.” I would add to that list The Divine Comedy, The Odyssey, Huckleberry Finn, 1001 Arabian Nights and modern political satire. But despite the seemingly esoteric description, it is a light, breezy novel. The reader doesn’t need to know who Lao Tzu is to laugh when he pinches Monkey and tells him “Be off with you, be off with you, and don’t let me find you hanging round here [heaven] anymore.” The reader doesn’t need to have a few University years of Chinese fiction or philosophy under the belt before laughing at Monkey stuffing himself with the Jade Emperor’s peaches. Nor, even, does the reader need to be steeped in morality, for, though having early attained immortality and, we all know, on fast track for Buddhahood, Monkey still likes to crack a dragon joke before clobbering one over the head with his cudgel in “a real garlic-pounding blow that will finish him off for good and all.”
Waley’s translation flows lightly, using a vernacular that is simple, easy and inviting, and, at the same time, reminiscent of the sagacity of the veteran Boddhisatvas, many of whom make guest appearances. It is a beautiful, wild, fun story centered around a stone-born ape, aka Monkey, aka “Aware of Vacuity,” who tromps the world over in search of mischief, power, peaches, sacred texts and enlightenment. Strikingly similar to 1001 Arabian Nights in both form, wisdom, and content.
“I wonder whether a knowledge of the True Scriptures would not cause some improvement in them? Do you yourself possess those scriptures?’” asked the Bodhisattvas! ‘Yes, three baskets of them,’ said Buddha,” and the journey began…
“Tripitaka said nothing, but only pointed again and again at his own heart.”
“He who does not believe that straight is straight must guard against the wickedness of good.”
“’I will rise on my cloud-trapeze,’ said Monkey, ‘and force my way into the southern gate of Heaven. I shall not go to the Palace of the Pole and Ox, nor to the Hall of Holy Mists, but go straight up to the thirty-third heaven, and in the Trayasimstra Courtyard of the heavenly palace of Quit Grief I shall visit Lao Tzu and ask for a grain of his Nine Times Sublimated Life Restoring Elixir, and with it I shall bring the king back to life.’”
“A team of horses cannot overtake a word that has left the mouth.”

*The Satanic Verses

The Satanic Verses -Salman Rushdie
The short opening chapter was so elegantly written, so coherently conscious, and fresh, that I was verily disappointed that the novel extended into cutesy, half-forged post-modernism. I see how he is Pynchonesque. I see how he adopts a cultural headline, a modern trend or a big name and transplants it in a seemingly timeless style of writing. I see how people like to read “serious” fiction that mentions Goldie Hawn. What I don’t see is how Ayatollah Khomeini denounced and threatened to execute a man for such an ephemeral book. Topically, it may be profound. But even children play with big words and we don’t condemn them for their constructions, or mistakes. I can see how easily this pertinent novel could be so swept into the realm of important literature… it’s because we want it to be good, we want it to matter, we want to understand the human condition, and so when any skate comes mountebanking, we’re quick to throw down our cash. No, I didn’t finish it. Pertinence and quality are very different animals.
“How does newness come into the world? How is it born?”

*New Arabian Nights

New Arabian Nights -Robert Louis Stevenson
Wholly without the charm, wisdom, ancestry, longevity, vibrancy or wit of the “old” Arabian Nights. The pleasure mostly came from imagining Borges so enjoying them as a boy. I suppose there may be a place for these tales, resting in historical literary scholarship, obscure theses, or middle childhood.

*Arabian Nights

The Arabian Nights: Tales from A Thousand and One Nights -translated by Sir Richard F. Burton
Though the collection is incomplete (this edition contains only the “most famous and representative” tales from the entirety), the compendium outshines any expectation or foreknowledge of the stories and is choc with the marvelous wit of ancient Arabian storytelling. The stories have an underbidding theme all alike, good is good and evil is evil, Allah is all and always and man and manhood will be sundered, for without fail comes with the tail of every tale “the Destroyer of delights and Severer of societies, the Plunderer of palaces, and the Garnerer of graves.” Reminding sundry-reader that, despite diamond caches and throes of love, all is vanity of vanity, and only the story will exist for aught. The structure of each of these stories is thematically similar: a poor man happens on a souterrain of riches, he is espied by someone of evil, foul play ensues, a moon of moons of a beauty entrances one and all, a jinn sneaks out of a signet ring, the enemy is bewitched, and the hero is consummated with love and gold. Or, the reverse. Or, the inverse. But what is unique to each of these stories is the complete freedom of happenstance. A man fishing in a pond nets a monkey. A marooned sailor flies with a giant bird to freedom. A man blind in one eye runs into another blind in one eye and they run into another blind in one eye. Ali-Babba overhears an eponymous password to a storehouse of plunder. Everything and anything goes. As well with the language, in “fairest favour and formous form,” Sir Burton spares no joyance of neologism coined, alliteration aligned or rhyme rhymed. The text is bedight with proper consciousness of Shaharazad, “for interest fails in twice told tales,” and “Words cannot undo the done,” as we are gently and thematically reminded of the bookends: the murderous king and the maiden, Shaharazad’s “fictitious” fight for survival. The stories that have so obviously leaked into our culture, Aladdin, Ali-Babba and the Forty Thieves, are so much richer, more profound, and less coddling than our cartooned interpretations (as is also the case with the Grimm and Andersen tales). In the end, it is obvious that nor King nor author nor Queen is the hero. None save the stories themselves and the love of the telling will live on.

*Iphigenia among the Taurians

Iphigenia among the Taurians -Euripides
Good to be reminded of the genre. The Deus-ex-Macchina. A tale much reminiscent of Arabian Nights. Short, sweet, full of trickery, chicanery, the fear of God, brotherly love and a happy ending.

*The Orchard Keeper

The Orchard Keeper -Cormac McCarthy
Finished with his public works and ready for the upcoming novel, “The Road,” this fall. The Orchard Keeper was published in 1965 when McCarthy was only 32. Wonderful to see the lessons that he learned, not only about writing, but about life. Mostly it was unfocused, characters more ideas than characters. Wit precedenting depth. The writing was similarly esoteric, sesquipedalian, but without the punch of his later work. It is like a sword-swallower hesitating mid-throat. Which smarts, but is the only way to establish scar that will afford a lifetime in the trade. He took, in this novel, entire paragraphs to glean the beauty of the sunset when in his later works he does so in a few words and moves back to the character. Nonetheless, striking.

*East of Eden, Steinbeck

East of Eden, John Steinbeck

It may be even because he’s working within the boundaries of accepted/traditional truths, he seems to have a lot of space to work with. Some of it literal (it’s a long-ish book), some more literary (as in, room for meaning), most of which is flat out sentimental/religious (God—a lot of space to work with).
Then, I guess, there’s the philosophical, too, which is to say… the hope/assertion, and exploration of a distinct reality (specifically, one full of (even, composed of) possibility—which is, itself, incredibly spacious).
How else to say that.
Sometimes it’s like he’s set up his own lake of fish—the story, that is—and I say lake, because it’s big and calm, facilitates movement, but thicker than air/reality, and the fish are clearly seen from above the water. And he’s got them all swimming around, and it’s lovely to watch, for hours even, on end. That is, watch the story interact with itself, watch it emerge, sometimes, it’s a great story, but then once in a while he can’t help himself, he’s got to reach in and grab one. And it’s not always a graceful gesture, sometimes it takes him a flopping, splashing mess of a go at it (sometimes, they slip), but when he gets them, he’s got a philosophy on his hands—something to work with, some scholarly fodder to cook up and eat for dinner. Or he’ll just let it go. Just for the catch. That’s the eagerness in it.
But then, there is a reluctance, too. Like he knows what he’s looking for, but this time it’s a river—more active, less established. So he sets out the right bait (that is, in this case, the story), and waits. His prey, then (ideas/perceptions, gorgeous new ways of perceiving and refreshing ancient, insistent ideas), sniffs and flirts with the bait and finally, hungry for some requital, willingly approaches. Feeding both itself and the man.
It’s that kind of masculine—as in, ideas as prey. Writing as hunting.
And the fish are already put down, I think. As in, he’s not creating fish. They are the ancient and the accepted—
“Lee said softly, ‘Couldn’t a world be built around accepted truth?’ ”
(Maybe that’s the thing. This kind of venue (by which I mean, at least, the novel—maybe all writing, maybe all art, or more likely, just creative, outward gestures) kind of put down that lake, so the fish can be clearly seen like that. Or at least devise a method to lure them in.
(Aren’t we—as a history, I guess—fishing for food/life?)) That’s that for the fish metaphor. More appropriately—

East of Eden

Reminds me that there is freedom in these acts/deeds of creativity, to explore different versions of truth (freedom in this life, to explore the different versions of judgement)—perhaps to prove/validate those desired/hoped for, to confront those that are dreaded or resisted, and to explore the reasons that they might be so precisely, adamantly embraced, rejected, feared, etc. And for so long. And while he takes a dip into the lakes and rivers of inevitability and salvation, the real redemption is offered within the very space (by the very God) that limits(condemns). Possibility—

Timshel, “Thou mayest”



“Once a woman told me that colored flowers would seem more bright if you added a few white flowers to give the colors definition. Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lupins is more blue that you can imagine. And mixed with these were splashes of California poppies. These too are of a burning color—not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of the poppies.”


“ ‘Suffering—I wonder that it has been properly looked at.’ “


“Some people think it’s an insult to the glory to their sickness to get well.”

“Give me a little wine, my throat’s dried out with wine.”


“When you’re a child, you’re at the center of everything. Everything happens for you… But when you grow up you take your place and you’re your own size and shape. Things go out of you to others and come in from other people. It’s worse, but it’s much better too.”


“Cal sat down in the straight chair beside the bed. He said, ‘I’m sorry, Father.’
The eyes blinked slowly the way a frog blinks…
“He put his head down the side of the bed to escape the terrible eyes, and he could still see them. He knew they would be with him, a part of him, all of his life.”

*On the Ground

Fanny Howe’s, On the Ground


"Far/Near", familiar vs foreign, actual war, nonsense in articulation, fear in reason in fear, vulnerability in power structures—and so, encounters the celestial, the mysterious here, "On the ground". Doing so with the grace of ages, while acknowledging the present with specificity and precision.

So, the body—
“mentally washed his body” “bodies were an offering” “sheets were like skins”
Body as mental landscape, body as holy, body as material. And that’s not to mention,

“God is calling for God/inside bodies and caves.”


Of the distribution of authority between power and origin,
“But who is the mother here anyway?/The rock, the moan, Mary, or the air?”


It is here that articulation, the scientific method, the “dragon of history”, and the diagnosis (the “physicians prison”), are the process of truth. It’s this world where “the word alone could distinguish,” (and so, alone, could (and does) navigate and determine) it's own reality. This is the same world “where logic can carry you to hell,”
(and does),
while the “dreamy stuff” (of mystery, intuition, wonder) is “analyzed toward a theory of uselessness.”
Where “physical history/is the repository of memory,” while “a curve of generations/and their achievements… disperse like particles of something never whole.”


“I’ll defy emptiness/instead of dying”

Perhaps, if only, in order, equipped, so to “turn all words back into the prayers they once were.”

*Memory Room

Memory Room, by Mary Rakow

This is the book I’d aimed to glean from all the poetry of every book I had yet to read. The lesson I’d prepared myself to spend a lifetime learning. She’s making a greater demand of the spirit than I’d expected to encounter face to face like this. It’s a gracious challenge, to be met with exuberance.



“A balustrade explodes, plaster and stone fly into the courtyard below. Celan feels the earth tremble…
“He says to himself, I will not describe the bombing of the blustrade.
I will be the balustrade, bombed.”

“‘I never heard of her,’ my mother said when I asked about Veronica. ‘Probably some saint the Catholics made up.’
Every night I blew off the page to remove anyone else’s touch.
I followed the logic of her story as if it were my own.
The other figures in the triptych were all sorrowing.
Mary Magdalen, the Virgin, Christ Crucified, the two donors, four lamenting cherubim, St. John.
Veronica was the only one with a souvenir.
Not a miracle, I thought, to put oneself into an object.
Jesus thrusting himself into her cloth.
A simple and necessary act when things move too quickly
toward destruction.”

“When I arrive, the Great Egret is on the far side of the pond. His body is dazzling white against the ivy bank, even from here, his yellow beak, his long thin black legs.
I set up on the bridge. He begins to climb, moving smoothly and with confidence, absolutely certain when his feet go forward, his body will follow, all of one piece. He does not look back, clearly knowing what is Egret and what is ivy.”


“Moving my body is not the same as death.”

*At the Mountains of Madness

At the Mountains of Madness -H.P. Lovecraft
Never in the entire novella did H.P. Lovecraft frighten me. The build-up was incredible, almost viral, and in the end, it was all. The monsters’ origins, their habitat, their sculpture, their history, their diet, economic glitches, decline and wars and they turn out not to even be the monsters, or at least can’t be blamed for acting monstrous, and in the remaining ten pages we are given a glimpse of the long-built-up “unspeakable terror” and it’s a giant blob resembling a subway car… Well… the imagination was pointed. The language was steeped.
“What we heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of elder earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous response.”
Lovecraft obviously knows all the synonyms for scary.
But what I love most of him is his name. And second most, his writing. But his allegory never struck.
“Even the pictures illustrate only one or two phases of its endless variety, preternatural massiveness, and utterly alien exoticism. There were geometrical forms for which an Euclid would scarcely find a name—cones of all degrees of irregularity and truncation, terraces of every sort of provocative disproportion, shafts with odd bulbous enlargements, broken columns in curious groups, and five-pointed or five-ridged arrangements of mad grotesqueness.”

*Europeana

Europeana -Patrik Ourednik
At the end of Europeana Ourednik observes that, “memory is renewed wheras history removes the legitimacy of the living past by fixing it in time.” I say observes because hardly in this unique work could I say that Ourednik writes, yet, at the same time, his observations have such ringing aesthetic dignity to them that this is undoubtedly a work of art rather than a textbook or any other expository chuck at history. Ourednik has created a memorial rather than a museum, living in the flux of memory rather than the stronghold of history. His observations are so quick and poignant that they are more caustic than nauseating (MTV) and more unsettling than tedious (CNN). I compare him to television not because he resembles it, but because he comes close to what in television is possible yet rarely attained.
Ourednik attends detailed horrors and tongue-in-cheek sidebars with the same cool, glib composure, for example, “Above the entrance to the Buchenwald concentration camp was the sign EVERYONE GETS WHAT HE DESERVES.” A note that is read so quickly and so deeply ensconced in a two-page paragraph that it is almost glossed over. But it’s not. Rather than glossing over these thousand and one facts, it is the unpartisan details that gloss over the reader, showering us in horror and humor alike. The potency of the Buchenwald sign is given no precedence over, “And no one wanted to be poor anymore and everyone wanted to have a refrigerator and a cordless telephone and a dog and a cat and a tortoise and a vibrator and take part in sports and attend psychoanalysis.”
or,
“And young people looked toward the future and the wind ruffled the ears of corn and the sun rose on the horizon.”
And the book reads in about two maniacal hours.

*Gilead

Gilead -Marilynne Robinson
Gilead is like a circus tent that never opens its flaps. To enjoy the show you have to join the troupe. Robinson has eased her way into a language that doesn’t succeed in any translation or abridgement. You must join her circus, you must know how to juggle, or swallow fire, or funambulate to enter into this novel. You must move to the town of Gilead to understand what she is saying. You must listen to her like a mother.
Her best passages are not quotable.
To quote from this novel is to conjure.
She has built a house without a foundation and the result is more solid and skyscraping than any series of I-beams or cement crews could muster.
The tendentious motives of many great writers is to work within a book so that they may succeed in erupting out of the book, into the “real” world. The great writers want to achieve pertinence outside of their books. They want to matter, to tell us something about us. Robinson does not do that. This novel is self-contained. It matters only to itself, yet still resonates of the most pointed parable. Only in the middle, when Robinson shifts to blatant (though sensitive) theology, are we reminded that she falters, and then, and sadly, are there a few moments of redundancy, but so simple, and dry, they remind me more of annoyingly hot summer days than bad fiction.
There is a spark in Iowa.

*Fear and Trembling

Fear and Trembling -Soren Kerkegaard
It is important for Abraham to have never given up the finitude of wanting his son alive. This is the dialectical nature of faith, to not only believe in God, but to fear him, not only to believe in life after death, but to live in this life before death. It is absurd for God to have asked Abraham to sacrifice his only son, but Abraham traveled three days journey to complete the act. It is absurd for God to then allow Abraham to sacrifice a ram instead of his son, but Abraham rejoiced. If he had not faith, the Joy at gaining a son, instead of having to kill him, would have been incomplete.
Problema One: Abraham’s action, that of meaning to kill his son, was not ethical, it was beyond ethics. The ethics were “teleologically suspended.” Kierkegaard carefully makes the distinction between the pagan (faithless) tragic hero, who suspends his own will for the upholding of a greater ethic and Abraham (the knight (father) of faith), who acts by a purely personal virtue. “He does it for God’s sake… and for his own sake in order to be able to produce the proof” of his faith, because that is what God demands of him. The tragic hero upholds a virtue outside of himself, and so for him we can weep, and laud. But the knight of faith goes beyond virtue, and, his action is absurd. For God is beyond our rationale. “When a person sets out on the tragic hero’s admittedly hard path there are many who could lend him advice; but he who walks the narrow path of faith no one can advise, no one understand.”
Probelma Two: Is there an absolute duty to God? The answer is in the koan-like aphorism: “the knight of faith is kept in constant tension.” Tension? What tension is there in perfect faith? Is not faith the opposite of tension, unsurety, of quavering? Is not faith the pillar holding man to God? What then is there of tension? The common quip to “build on rock” could be extrapolated to build on the deepest, hardest rock, deeper, still, all the way digging to the center of the earth, where the rock has become so adamant that it has turned to fire, which is the essence of rock. Flame. With faith the same. The essence of faith lies in its tension. Its question.
Problema Three: The story of Abraham extends far beyond a genre. Into the absurd. Kierkegaard asks if it was ethical for Abraham not to tell his wife, his servant, or his son what he was going to Moriah to do. It was neither ethical, nor unethical, because even if Abraham tried to explain or expiate himself, he could not. He spoke a language not of men, but of Faith. He spoke in tongues. “Aesthetics can well understand that I sacrifice myself, but not that I should sacrifice another for my own sake,” which is exactly what Abraham did. Yet, to put it lightly, it perturbed him. When Isaac asked where the lamb was, Abraham broke his silence and answered, “My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering.” He said this because he truly believed it. He had faith that either, as happened, a ram would replace his son, or, if he went through and killed his son God would restore him. This is not a self-sacrifice, or, in Kierkegaard’s words, “infinite resignation,” rather, it is faithfully and resolutely holding onto the self-employ, or self-will, that he doesn’t want to kill his son. The tragic hero would resign himself, sacrifice his will and murder his son for the “greater” good. Abraham, the knight of faith, does greater than “greater”, he maintains his will unto God. Proof of this is his clarity of acceptance of, first, the ram, and second and most importantly, his son. This is what hits me the most. In pure faith, he is filled with Joy not to have to sacrifice Isaac. This rejoicing is not a test of faith, it is not a result, but it is an indelible mark. If he had not perfect faith, there would be guilt, or doubt, or even, simply, hesitation. I don’t mean hesitation to lift the knife, which there obviously wasn’t… but the hesitation that there wasn’t to take back his son.
Kierkegaard maintains that “faith is the highest passion.” It is what each generation is born without and only a few of each generation achieve. Yet faith is only and the only stepping stone for something far greater. Love. Call it ascension. Christ ascended not in faith, not even because of faith, (though without it he would never even have been killed) but in love. He ascended not in passion, but only after passing all passion. Faith, simply, is not a shovel. It is not a tool at all. It is not the anvil or the hammer. It may be the blacksmith. (A blacksmith because a blacksmith is not useful, it is of no use to the gardener. You can’t dig with a blacksmith, but, nor can you dig without a blacksmith) And love, then, are the tools that the blacksmith makes. It is also every tool that he doesn’t make. And even every tool that he couldn’t make. (Imagine three-spaded shovels, hoes that do the hoing, scissors with ball and socket hinges) Love is the anvil and it is the bread that powers the blacksmith’s arm and the wine that he drinks with his wife. It is the fire and it is the bellows. It is the steel and it is the ingot and it is the mold. It is the coup de grace of the blacksmith’s sword. It is the death groan and the weeping widow and the orphaned child and the revolution and the lily in the field and this one mis-cropped wishing great things into metallurgy. Oh, Soul!

“I can swim in life, but for this mysterious floating I am too heavy.”
“and yet it is only the knight of faith who is happy, only he is heir apparent to the finite.”

*The Last Temptation of Christ

The Last Temptation of Christ -Nikos Kazantzakis
This book recalls to me a word that I once loved and have since semantically abandoned. Deed. The difference between deed, endeavor, and aesthetics. The endeavor of Kazantzakis is, exemplified by his bio and this opus, large. Though I’ve never seen a picture of the author, I imagine him looking very much like his artistic Judas, gargantuan, resolute, red-bearded (at least in essence), unwavering, fat-fingered, muscle-faithed, but still with a sensitivity-- a big man who can cry. The deed, then, of this man is the novel. Deed, however, not as a stamp, but as a vector. This vectordeed then is beautiful and human. The aesthetic, though I am addressing a translation, is where the opus stumbles. In theory The Last Temptation is beautiful. Christ and the Gospels supercede theory.
The Last Temptation begins before Jesus came out of the closet. He was a young carpenter/crossmaker, still living with his parent, plagued by dreams of angels and allusions of the greatest grandeur. He had memories of childhood love for Magdalene and reluctantly, very reluctantly, heeded his own coming of age. Gathering up the sons of Zebedee and tethering ardent-hearted Judas to a life of love was the adventure. For a few-hundred pages meandering through the Gospels. Ugly, half-shunned ex-publican Matthew was the most interesting character, staying up nights to scribble his prosody, all the other disciples scorning the writer. Not until we find nailed to the cross and hailing God, “Eloi, Eloi…” are we swooped into the aesthetic of Kazantzakis. The alternative end of Jesus, if he were to submit to his powers and descend from the cross, robust and vital, to couple with Magdalene and then live a life as a father, husband, a consummate man. Hunchbacked old Paul is the new thorn in his side, proclaiming, “I don’t need you anymore, Jesus,” the idea of crucifixion and rising again and ascension is enough for Paul to construct a church and a religion. But then staple-hearted Judas maunders by Jesus’ door and reminds him of the “sacrifice of the betrayal” and, soon enough, we are transported back to the moment of the cross, “… Lama Sabachtani!” the scream is complete, “It is finished.”
Three quotes from Magdalene:
“If you’re not hanging on to your mother’s apron strings, you’re hanging onto mine, or God’s.”
and my favorite: “It’s coming down in buckets, Jesus.”
“If you are a holy saint and a woman requests a kiss of you, descend from your sanctity in order to give it to her. Otherwise you cannot be saved.”
And then another gem:
“First came the wings and then the angel.”

*Wild Child

Wild Child -novella by T.C. Boyle included in McSweeney’s 19, along with “Color Plates” by Adam Golaski and “Prince of the World” by Christopher Howard
Encased in a cigarbox with mock AandH bomb tactical response pamphlets and old travel guides to Iraq, is a wonderful volume of literature. What’s unfortunate about modern popular literature is that our contemporary writers, apologies, have behaviorally evolved to, even while writing the most profound or plangent stories, can’t take their tongues out of their cheeks. And it’s so for both T.C. Boyle and Christopher Howard. Their topics are commendable, their diction honed, their metaphors whetted, but there is an inextricable element of postmodern smirk to them. Or is it ennui. For even the slightest glimmer of ennui is worse than determined depravity. The stories, along with the theme of the cigar box, are savage, frightening, and very pertinent to our post-nuclear, operation freedom world. I feel echoes of McCarthy. Echoes of Revelation. And I believe in God.
A man on the street asked me today, But have you surrendered to surrender? He was drunk, intelligent, Berkeley, talking to us about his thesis in calculus, what is the difference between an idea and a belief and he looked at me and said, John, are you racist? His name was Nick Armstong. And his mother and all of his sisters are very becoming women.
“The city awoke and arose. Fires were lit. Raw dough fell into hot oil, eggs cracked, pike lost their heads, civilization progressed.” from T.C. Boyle

*The Tempest

The Tempest -William Shakespeare, with introduction by Harold Bloom
Perplexing. Little direction. Seemingly misinspired. At no point did I ever doubt Prospero’s complete control, and, as there was no suspense, the “jokes” seemed to linger after said, or, even more eerily, present themselves before their just deliverance. My favorite parts were the original bickerings of the boatswain and Gonzalo and, later, the bickerings of Sebastian, Antonio and Gonzalo. As Bloom pointed out, Shakespeare created an unique creature with Caliban, which I agree with, but it felt such a shame that he had so little stage time, or was treated with such snub-nosing, even by Shakespeare himself. He, in fact, as much as claims airiness in this tale:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and out little life
Is rounded with a sleep…
… A turn or two I’ll walk,
To still my beating mind.”

This stout abjectedness hardly holds force to Miranda’s reaction to Prospero’s life story: “Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.”
So, enjoying the glimpse of Shakespeare, but, he never struck me in the heart. The “Anti-Faust”, though, is a idea worth contemplating.

*Two Years Before the Mast

Two Years Before the Mast -Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
A Harvard Classic from a Harvard graduate. Blown about by the torrential Southeaster. Lackadaisy, dropsical academia discarded for two years to become the regular “salt.” Much, as pointed out in the introduction, as Roosevelt left Yale for a few seasons to rough it as a cowhand in Wyoming. Dana’s prose is proper, yet still inspired, full of sailoreese, and an obvious precursor to Melville. I enjoyed it, a good little adventure, but didn’t finish it as it seemed not to course out of its regular, stormy direction.
The Philadelphia Catechism:
“Six days shalt thou labor and do all thou art able,
And on the seventh, holystone the decks and scrape the cable.”

*The Iliad

The Iliad -Homer (Robert Fagles Translation)
I really enjoyed this great and bloody tale by Homer. The translation was seething and alive. I hope I never forget the scintillating use of epithets in The Iliad. Bernard Knox explained in the very thorough and enlightening introduction that repetition and epithet and other literary devices were tools that Homer used to help “memorize” such a long story. Something like, Variations on a Theme. Which is an inspiring and freeing concept to an artist. This book, water-crinkled and ragged, accompanied me through an afternoon of storms at ten thousand feet on the snowy climes of Mt. Shasta. It accompanied me also closer to sea-level on stormy, desolate plateau of sadness and sickness. The diversions and details have survived many thousands of years to still horrify and delight. My favorite moment was perhaps when Achilles’ mother, Thetis, wanting to properly arm him for battle, coaxes the god of fire, Hephaestus, to forge an unheralded panoply for her son and Homer expounds the details of the brilliant shield for one hundred and forty some lines, describing castle scenes, wedding feasts, wars, young men in love, exceeding in form to the point that on the golden shield, where the harvesters plowed the field, “the earth churned black behind them, like earth churning / solid gold as it was.”
My first question is, why did Achilles initially give up Briseis? There is some understanding that he is under deep, honorable obligation to obey Agamemnon at any cost, even if it means hating him through the obeisance. But, as we see that Achilles rage is unquenchable even after his revenge is completely carried out (dragging Hector’s body behind his chariot for nine whole days), there is a sentiment that Achilles longed for more battle than was posed to him by fighting the Trojans. He needed more drama, and more war. And so he submitted to giving up Briseis and spent the entire war plotting to get her back and to pay back Agamemnon and then to revenge Patroclus and still, never, will his rage be sated. I wonder, then, where such “anxiety” comes from? Why will Agamemnon not accept as amends Helen from Paris and call of the war? The characters all lacking a God of peace. Lacking a ultimate reason, even on Earth, and battling, thus, to no foreseen end.
“Beware the toils of war… / the mesh of the huge dragnet sweeping up the world.”
“fighters killing, fighters killed, and the ground streamed blood.”
“the earth that feeds us all.”
“his face dark / as the sudden rushing night but he blazed on in bronze / and terrible fire broke from the gear that wrapped his body, / two spears in his fists. No one could fight him, stop him, / none but the gods as Hector hurled through the gates / and his eyes flashed fire. And whirling round he cried to his Trojans, shouting through the ruck, / ‘The wall, storm the wall!’”

“no one can ever slake / their thirst for blood, for the great leveler, war! / One can achieve his fill of all good things, / even of sleep, even of making love… / rapturous song and the beat and sway of dancing. / A man will yearn for his fill of all these joys / before his fill of war. But not these Trojans-- / no one can glut their lust for battle.”
“both claw-mad for battle.”

And one love scene:
“With that the son of Cronus caught his wife in his arms / and under them now the holy earth burst with fresh green grass, / crocus and hyacinth, clover soaked with dew, so thick and soft / it lifted their bodies off the hard, packed ground…”

“A man’s tongue is a glib and twisty thing.”

*Dandelion Wine

on Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury

To be read while traveling, homeward, from a scalding midwestern heatwave through sweaty corn and soy fields, sleepy cows and crazed mosquitoes, all that quiet, big, hot, august, country full of small things and subtlety. Much like driving west through an east-bound storm—it’s the moral in it, lurking. The short and sweet. There’s always something fishy about a moral, but like those storms—it’s the same clean on the other end. (Albeit an eerie clean… The storms are quick and the days are long, but still… still "something wicked this way comes"(it’s the night))

A clean, generous, inquisitive piece of folklore. Ultimately? Dark. Utterly, hopeful.



“His invention must let a man drowse easy in the falling leaves like the boys in autumn who, comfortable strewn in the dry stacks, are content to be a part of the death of the world….”


“He realized that all men were like this; that each person was to himself one alone. One oneness, a unit in society, but always afraid. …
“Mother was alone, too… she could not look anywhere, in this very instant, save into her heart, and there she would find nothing but uncontrollable repugnance and a will to fear.”


“As the dark retreated like a wave on the shore, three children piled out of it, laughing.”



“
‘Magic, you say?’ asked Douglas.
‘Magic six ways from Sunday.’
‘You believe it?’
‘Yes I do and no I don’t.’ ”



“Long before you hit the grass you will have forgotten there ever was a tree, or other apples, or a summer, or green grass below. You will fall in darkness…”


“Did the wine remember? It did not! Or seemed not, anyway…"

*Housekeeping

Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson

Subtle, peculiar, and incredibly courageous. The wisdom, here, is more in the approach than in the execution of the story, creeps up to moments of clarity with ease and restraint. An authorship of reverence.

Guided into a thick, dark, blank, but lake, and full of possibility. Erosion. As though wisdom/revelation were a process of suggestion, attraction, and magnetism.
But there is also some levity and a decisiveness here, that warrants engagement, trust, and invites inquiry—approaching the sentence with a flirtatious challenge, allowing the valiant, the ordinary, and the strange alike, so long as it turns keys, oils hinges, and opens doors with the same sense of sad, eloquent, relentless, patience required in the face of the all-possible/ever unknown—mystery, miracle, prophecy, faith.



“The absolute black of the sky dulled and dimmed and blanched slowly away, and finally half a dozen daubs of cloud, dull powder pink, sailed high in a pale-green sky, rust-red at the horizon. Venus shone a heatless planetary white among these parrot colors, and earth lay unregenerate so long that it seemed to me for once all these blandishments might fail.”

“I think sorrow is a predatory thing”

“Evening was her special time of day. She gave the world three syllables, and indeed I think she liked it so well for its tendency to smooth, to soften. She seemed to dislike the disequilibrium of counterpoising a roomful of light against a worldful of darkness. Sylvie in a house was more or less like a mermaid in a ship’s cabin. She preferred it sunk in the very element it was meant to exude.”