B Is for Basho

INVISIBLE CITIES IV -- Cities and Desire: DOROTHEA

Take the last part of Isidora and the Greek for god rather than an Egyptian goddess and you've got Dorothea: "Gift from God."  Interesting, the progression of cities and names so far and how their descriptions reflect not only themselves but each other.  As the last city, Isidora, a near-anagram of its predecessor, Diomira, dealt as much with desire as memory and yet was a "City and Memory," does Dorothea, as a "City of Desire" fit the progression?

1. Compare our introduction to the city of Dorothea--the opening lines--to that of the first two cities.
2. Similarly, is there a negative aftertaste here as previously?
3. Clearly Dorothea is a desirable city.  Is there a thematic issue of memory to go with it, as the Cities of Memory had both memory and desire, though the latter left untitled, and if so, how/where?
4. Invisible Cities appears to deal with some big philosophy: cities, desire, memory, time, deity....  Another shows up here: paths.  These are similar issues, though in even smaller literary contexts, as those treated by Jorge Luis Borges.  What's the draw for the author?  What's the draw for the reader?  
5. So the two ways of describing Dorothea: the one is to describe it physically--its architecture and its citizens and their activity; the second is what?  (Notice, by the way, that this second "way" begins much more like the first two cities.)  Apparently connected to the definition of this "way," what has happened to Dorothea in the years since the camel driver's initial visit in his "first youth"?

There is always room to comment on something that I don't mention in the questions.  Where poetry is concerned, any single mind--or mine at least--will always miss something.

Has it Changed My Life? Quite Possibly.

So, Calvino's Invisible Cities is our next book.  Period.  I just finished reading it, which reading, as I've said before, was slow and savory, and I'm trying to decide: am I the same person, now that I've finished it, I was before?  Just the fact that the book's brought me to this question is saying a great deal.  Of course, to place it upon the pedestal aside the very few other truly life-changing books, I must compare it to them.  This also raises an interesting question: what is it that makes a book life-changing for its reader?  It's not a particularly difficult question, just interesting.  The answer, I think is simple: it must be a combination of [1] the book's quality (though generally to a lesser degree) and [2] the circumstances of time and place of the reader's life.  As it is, Invisible Cities is of a higher quality than some of the books way up there.  For example, as wonderful as Life of Pi is, it has its [few] limitations, one of which is word craft.  Don't get me wrong.  Martel is an excellent craftsman of the sentence, but Calvino is of the master-smithing status of Borges, Chabon, and McCarthy.  Other books include the obvious tomes of The Divine Comedy and East of Eden/Grapes of Wrath, as well as the Alice books, Ender's Game, Wonder Boys, and Blindness.  Each of these books arrived in my life at key moments, did their business, such as it was, and took up permanent residence upon my bookshelves--literal and metaphysical.  Does Invisible Cities, an essentially perfect book (yeah, really--and not perfect like Joyce, but perfect like, well, Joyce if he had a freaking heart or if Steinbeck could write briefly yet as powerfully), warrant place among the others?

Nearly all of the best books I've read, save All the Pretty Horses, which just bloody tortured me, broke me, heart and spirit, and highlighted in thirty-foot capital, fluorescent letters, "YOU CAN'T WRITE!" inspire me.  You see, I want to be a writer.  Rather, I want to be a successful writer.  I want to be a writer whose stuff people want to read!  The best books nearly always inspire me to write.  They tickle the muses who come and circle me and whisper in my ears and give my fingers and cerebral frontal lobe the itch and make me want to CREATE.  Yeah.  Well, Invisible Cities has done that--and in frickin' spades, man.  The last time I felt the bug this strongly (at least via a book) was when I finished Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North (or however you want to translate it) and subsequently began my own hyohakusha and used the genre and text as model for my creative writing students' end-of-year project.  (My hyohakusha ultimately failed (I'm an inadequate poet), though many of my students wrote and created brilliantly, beautifully.)

Basho was a three years ago.  Since reading it, I've returned to it again and again.  I've studied its poetry and form and in four or five translations.  I've traced his path on maps.  I've referred to and used him as model in poetry and a book of my own.  Has it changed my life?  I dare say it has.  Maybe it just takes time for a book to climb the long stair to the top once it's arrived at--been permitted access to--the base.  If this is the case (and you can't tell right away if it's happened), I expect Basho will soon arrive at the top right along with Steinbeck et al and Calvino will have likely just recently begun the ascent.  Time will tell, I suppose.

Regardless, this book amazed and amazes me.  I am eager to read it again.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana XIX -- chapter 18: IT'S A TWISTER!

1. "I see now that it was Lila who, when I was sixteen, gave me hope that I might forget that night at the Gorge."
2. Paola is to Sibilla as The Divine Comedy is to the atom bomb.  Ha!
3. "...in order to be able to move forward we behave as if everything we see is real."
4. Who/what are: Lila Saba, the First Folio, Clarabelle's Treasure, Queen Loana, Angelo Bear; and what other pivotal character-symbols might there be (given by collective labels is just fine)?
5. "And at last, great God, I saw. I saw like the apostle, I saw the center of my Aleph from which shone forth not the infinite world, but the jumbled notebook of my memories."
6. John the Revelator's The Book of Revelation?
7. What is the value of the various illustrations, aside from their beauty and/or design?
8. At the end of The Wizard of Oz we get the reunion of Dorothy and the farm hands, but also with the characters of Oz itself, from which she was is just as distanced as she was from her family, and an interesting reunion inasmuch as the family/hands and Ozites are the same people--a kinda body+spirit=soul thing.  Is the end of Mysterious Flame much like Oz?
9. The acceleration to the end leads to what?  What is the blacking of the sun?
10. Compare Cyrano and Christian to Paula and Sibilla (either Sibilla/Lila), wherein I believe the crucial connection lay.
11. What is the arc of the story, and is the conflict(what's the conflict?) resolved?

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana VIII -- chapter 7: THE MEMORIOUS

1. Just the first two paragraphs of this chapter already give the impression of the trope of one's life flashing before his eyes.  Obviously there are inherent problems to the application of this metaphor here; the Benjamin Button/Signor Pipino complex, on the other hand, may be more appropriate.  Thoughts?
2. "Sibilla was now beginning to seem like a distant childhood memory, while everything I was gradually excavating from the fog of my past was becoming my present" (emphasis added).  Explain.
3. In color, Eco's description of the attic resembles that of Joyce's general description of Dublin (a perhaps likely comparison, considering Eco's admiration for Joyce): brown, in all its variations.  However, this attic is nothing like Dublin.  What is the difference--defined in terms of color, or substance--between the two?
4. I don't generally associate Eco with poetry, the way I do with other prose writers, like, and especially so, Borges (who wrote a lot of poetry); however, this sentence, "If a cellar prefigures the underworld, an attic promises a rather threadbare paradise, where the dead bodies appear in a pulverulent glow, a vegetal elixir that, in the absence of green, makes you feel you are in a parched tropical forest, an artificial canebreak where you are immersed in a tepid sauna," is gorgeous and poetic.  More, there's a potentially fascinating indication in it, ascribing a sort of natural metaphor (and recalling and defining vast amounts of literature in the process) to the house, or even to architecture in general.
5. Further to the Dantean "Commedic" (#4) and Button/Pipino themes (#1), justify Eco's use of his brief "womb" analogy, and why, perhaps in Yambo's case, the genetic (is the adjectival form of genesis really genetic?) locus of garret is more appropriate than cellar.
6. Some great "p" words here: pluvial, pulverulent (and here)
7. What is the inherent problem with Yambo's belief that Clarabelle's treasure is "certainly there"; or, rather, what's the inherent issue to what we might call The Paradox of Clarabelle's Treasure?
8. Further information of Clarabelle as a name: Clara (also clara/chiara, Italian, meaning "clear"); belle (also bella, Italian, meaning "beautiful" and related to bene, for good); and Claribel, and Clara.
9. All three tins' illustrations (two of them: the cocoa "Due Vecchi" ("two old people"), the antacid, "Brioschi" (company name)) have a woman serving a man, and note the ages of the women, where given.  Appropriate?  And, of course, the image-within-an-image....
10. This paragraph with the repeating images and infinite return/regression, is pretty bleak, hopeless.  If he is indeed at the bottom of the regression, holding the tin, then it should be finite, else there would be no bottom; but in fact, by the physics of reflection and Mobius strips and whatnot, it is infinite, in which case Yambo will never arrive at himself.
11. "At the instant he knew, he ceased to know."  This recalls, of course, the flashing-before-the-eyes mentioned in #1.
12. Yambo, the author, is the forebear of our protagonist's nickname, yet it's his our hero's hero, Ciuffettino, with whom our Yambo identifies himself.  (Did you get that?)
13. If you haven't yet read "Funes, His Memory," By Borges, (here, "Funus, the Memorious," and not my preference for translation, ignorant though I am generally of Spanish), you should do so now.
14. I'm not going to bother with speculations on the cresch's fountain. 

Sunday Poetry XI -- TIGERS: GRR

SIRENS, TIGERS, and DREAMS, OH MY! and monsters too.

thank you: Chelsea Art Museum

Yeah, yeah.  I know.  Corny.  Hackneyed.  Irresistible.  But if you disregard the first of the trio, then it's likely smackingly obvious where this post is going, and, well, since the sirens really don't have that much to do with it, probably it is.

Francisco de Goya said, or painted really, "THE DREAM OF REASON BEGETS MONSTERS," in his etching to the right, and certainly in his head it did, and he painted them for the world to see.  Monsters is not a new topic here at The Wall, and I am not (thank me later) going to bore you by getting into it again.  The point isn't the monster, but the dream that produces it.  Perhaps all of us, rational or not, yet beget monsters--more or less monstrous--through our dreams.

Consider the first four stanzas of Margaret Atwood's "Siren Song" (taking the poetry's intent likely far from its originally intended context):

This is the one song everyone

would like to learn: the song

that is irresistible:

the song that forces men

to leap overboard in squadrons

even though they see the beached skulls

the song nobody knows

because anyone who has heard it

is dead, and the others can't remember.

Shall I tell you the secret

and if I do, will you get me

out of this bird suit?

(I wonder if the deliberate removal from context and subsequent application of a quotation is anything like the deliberate and maligned censoring of an author's published words.  If so, I am guilty, guilty, guilty.)

Goya

Good poetry is like a dot-to-dot in one of those coloring/activity books I buy my kids to keep them quiet in church.  The dots, obviously as there but the connecting of them is left to the reader.  While I'm in no way claiming any of this (my words) as poetry, much less good poetry, I am leaving the majority of dot-connecting to you--one poem, quotation, and painting to the next--partially because I think the connections are more profound that way, but mostly because my kids just went to bed (which really means things are supposed to be quiet but they aren't--at all) and I'm having a really hard time focusing long enough to articulate the shortest and most menial of my thoughts.

One of my favorite poems to use in my English classroom, and quite a classic, is "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" (below), by Adrienne Rich.  It's a great poem, and it's a perfect one to teach because of its abundant use of classic (and by "classic," here, I mean all the required stuff that shows up all over state boards of education English curricula) poetic devices.  All that aside, sure the poem is beautiful, but pay attention to the tigers, the dreaminess, and how, really, they're indeed monsters from the dreams of a rational or reasonable mind:

Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,

Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer's finger fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid. 

Now put that together with “Dreamtigers,” by another of my all-time favorites, the great Jorge Luis Borges (seriously, if you like any of the stuff we talk about here at The Wall and you haven’t read this guy yet, get with the program!):

In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger—not the jaguar, that spotted “tiger” that inhabits the floating islands of water hyacinths along the Parana’ and the tangled wilderness of the Amazon, but the true tiger, the striped Asian breed that can be faced only by men of war, in a castle atop an elephant.  I would stand for hours on end before one of the cages at the zoo; I would rank vast encyclopedias and natural history books by the splendor of their tigers.  (I still remember those pictures, I who cannot recall without error a woman’s brow or smile.)  My childhood outgrown, the tigers and my passion for them faded, but ther are still in my dreams.  In that underground sea or chaos, they still endure.  As I sleep I am drawn into some dream or other, and suddenly I realize that it’s a dream.  At those moments, I often think: This is a dream, a pure diversion of my will, and since I have unlimited power, I am going to bring forth a tiger.

            Oh, incompetence!  My dreams never seen to engender the creature I so hunger for.  The tiger does appear, but it is all dried up, or it’s flimsy-looking, or it has impure vagaries of shape or an unacceptable size, or it altogether too ephemeral, or it looks more like a dog or bird than like a tiger.

***

There is another piece of lit that I think qualifies, potentially, as part of this dot-to-dot, but it's bigger than I've got space her to include, a children's story, frequently banned, entitled, Little Black Sambo. Here’s the link (HERE – scroll down to the story), and then here, too, is the old movie.

*

Two Great Things (more, and of surely many more still) from Borges

Again from "The Aleph" --just two simple sentences:

"I come now to the ineffable center of my tale; it is here that a writer's hopelessness begins.  Every language is an alphabet of symbols the employment of which assumes a past shared by its interlocutors."

If you notice that these two sentences, out of context as they are, don't seem to coalesce, read them IN context.  Something about this blog is bringing me to see over and over again the subtleties wrought by context.  FASCINATING!  Take either of these sentences alone, and you could write a thesis; or, pen the right narrative and they can sit right next to each in perfect harmony.  It's kind of mind blowing.  Look at them!  They shouldn't be able to go together!

(http://josephcenter.blogspot.com/2010/09/trouble-with-context.html)

***

Notes from the translator, Andrew Hurley, on the collection, "The Maker," which has particular bearing upon the blog's brief tangent on ascribing meaning to words, especially across languages:

The Spanish title of this "heterogeneous" volume of prose and poetry ... is El hacedor, and hacedor is a troublesome word for a translator in English.  JLB seems to be thinking of the Greek word poeta, which means "maker," since a "true and literal" translation of poeta into Spanish would indeed be hacedor.  Yet hacedor is in this translator's view, and in the view of all those native speakers he has consulted, a most uncommon word.  It is not used in Spanish for "poet" but instead makes on think of someone who makes things with his hands, a kind of artisan, perhaps, or perhaps even a tinkerer.  The English word maker is perhaps strange too, yet it exists; however, it is used in English (in such phrases as "he went to meet his Maker" and the brand name Maker's Mark) in a way that dissuades one from seizing upon it immediately as the "perfect" translation for hacedor.  (The Spanish word hacedor would never be used for "God," for instance.)  Eliot Weinberger has suggested to me, quite rightly, perhaps, that JLB had in mind the Scots word makir, which means "poet."  But there are other cases: Eliot's dedication of The Waste Land to Ezra Pound, taken from Dante--il miglior fabbro, where fabbro has exactly the same range as hacedor.  Several considerations seem to militate in favor of the translation "artificer": first, the sense of someone's making something with his hands, or perhaps "sculptor," for one of JLB's favorite metaphors for poetry was at one time sculpture; second, the fact that the second "volume" in the volume Fictions is clearly titled Artifices; third, the overlap between art and craft or artisanry that is implied in the word, as in the first story in this volume.  But a translation decision of this kind is never easy and perhaps never "done"; one wishes one could call the volume Il fabbro, or Poeta, or leave it El hacedor.  The previous English translation of this volume in fact opted for Dreamtigers.  Yet sometimes a translator is spared this anguish (if he or she finds the key to the puzzle in time to forestall it); in this case there is an easy solution.  I quote from Emir Rodriguez Monegal's Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography, p. 438: 'Borges was sixty when the ninth volume of his complete works came out.... For the new book he had thought up the title in English: The Maker, and had translated it into Spanish as El hacedor; but when the book came out in the United States the American translator preferred to avoid the theological implications and used instead the title of one of the pieces: Dreamtigers.'  And so a translation problem becomes a problem created in the first place by a translation!  (Thanks to Eliot Weinberger for coming across this reference in time  and bringing it to my attention.)"

Writing Excercise, via Jorge Luis Borges' "THE ALEPH"

"He said he had to have the house so he could finish his poem--because in one corner of the cellar there was an Aleph.  He explained that an Aleph is one of the points in space that contain all points. ...  'I must forewarn you: dorsal decubitus is essential, as are darkness, immobility, anda certain ocular accommodation.  You'll lie on the tile floor and fix your eyes on the nineteenth step of the pertinent stairway.  I'll reascend the stairs, let down the trap door, and you'll be alone.  Some rodent will frighten you--easy enough to do!  Within a few minutes, you will see the Aleph.  The microcosm of the alchemists and Kabbalists, our proverbial friend in the multum in parvo, made flesh!'" (from "The Aleph," by Jorge Luis Borges).

Gaze within its form and see every
angle of the universe.

Write an absolutely terrible piece of poetry.  Once it's completed, compose a review of your dreadful piece, defending it point by point and with false modesty, as the greatest example of poetic literature ever contributed to humanity.