C Is for Carroll

INVISIBLE CITIES VI -- Cities and Desire: ANASTASIA

blue chalcedony

The new city's name is Anastasia, the feminine derivative of Anastasius, which is, of course, Greek for "resurrection," which initially, and only initially, turns on its head my first impression--one of extreme negativity--of Anastasia, the city, and is causing me now to look up everything.  Check out the episode's imagery:

• concentric circles, or layers of existence and sustenance;
• kites flying, or risen above the earth; 
• agate, a metamorphic, or volcanic, and therefor changed and risen to a more beautiful and perhaps perfect state, rock;
• onyx, a type of chalcedony, of which "family" agate is also a member; 
• the pheasant baffles me a little, as it, as a word, is not at all related, duh, to "phoenix," and I'm not getting any appropriate lead on metaphor for the marjoram or cherry wood either, though maybe the fire...;
• the bathing women and their water, like the rebirth of baptism (if a bit of a bastard usage);
• the awakening or resurgence of desire;
• and so on, yet despite all this, the city is described as treacherous, and so it must be, as its desires are never your desires and you must "do nothing but inhabit this desire and be content."  Is there, therefor, no choice?  Can't you just leave Anastasia, or is this some sort of metacity where everyone who is alive inhabits?  Is Anastasia herself life?

From the opening paragraph above, does this extraordinarily persistent application of allusions to resurrection bely the negativity or accrete it?

1. Whose resurrection is this?  Or is Anastasia's treachery the fact that, despite the promise of her name, there is no resurrection or, if we're speaking Christianically, redemption or salvation, but just a desire for it, though, of course, that desire is not, could never be, hers as she offers its illusion as bate to steal you away?
2. Worse, if you partake too fully of Anastasia's treasures, you believe you are enjoying yourself and even fulfilling your desires, yet you are only fulfilling her desires, and you will not rise again, like you're stuck eternally in this circle--canal?  Are those concentric canals not interconnected?  Wouldn't that make them a spiral, from which there would be escape, or is this pushing it?  (Sheesh, sounds almost Satanic, this place--at best, entirely hedonist.)

Aside: Most like this has nothing to do with it, but the volcanic source of the episode's mineral treasures recalls the eruption in Coleridge's "Kubla Kahn."

"Kubla Khan," "Invisible Cities," and "An Approach to Literature"

"KK" in C's own hand

(For the record, it appears that Coleridge has the spelling deficiency, not Calvino or his translator, William Weaver (whom, by the way, Eco also happens to endorse), regarding the spelling of the 5th Great Kahn of the Mongol Empire.)

I stated in a comment earlier today that I believe Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" was an integral part in the creation of Calvino's Invisible Cities.  In the most recent three editions of Sunday Poetry, I've been digging through An Approach to Literature, assembled by Cleanth Brooks, John Thibaut Purser, and Robert Penn Warren (yes, that Robert Penn Warren), which, by the way, I happen to think is excellent and happens also to have a solid and succinct application of the interpretation of "Kubla Khan" to the general interpretation of poetry in general, and, as it happens, very specifically to Invisible Cities.  This, "Kubla Khan," is a poem that every literature student (at least those with an correlating BA) on the planet has read and torn apart.  I'm a big fan of the monster and have even taught it to my high school students.  Here it is (and, if your interested, I've looked over the Italian translation, and it appears to be right on--not that I'm an expert):

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Next, here is most (like 99.9%) of An Approach to Literature's word-for-word ... uhm ... approach:

“Kula Khan” raises in a most acute form the whole question of meaning in a poem and the poet’s intention.  …  We have Coleridge’s account account of how the poem was composed:

        In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effect of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in 'Purchas's Pilgrimage:' 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto: and thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.' The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two or three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to the room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast, but alas! without the after restoration of the latter.

        Can a poem dreamed up, as “Kubla Khan” was, be said to have a meaning?  Can it be said to express some ideas held by the poet?  But supposed it is not a poem dreamed up, but a discovery in mathematics or a chemical formula?  Does the mathematical discovery or the formula have any less validity because it was dreamed up or came in a flash?  We should have to say, no, its validity does not depend on how it came, it depends on its own nature.  We can, in fact, find many accounts of important scientific discoveries made quite literally in a dream or in some flash of intuition.  For instance, the great German chemist Kekule’ dreamed up two of his most important discoveries just as Coleridge dreamed up “Kubla Khan.”  But there is one important fact to be remembered: only poets dream up poems and only scientists dream up scientific discoveries.  In other words, the dream, the flash of intuition, or the moment of inspiration really sums up a long period of hard conscious word.

        Wordsworth, in the Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, has a very important remark on how meaning gets into poetry.  Having just said that he hopes his poems to be distinguished by a “worthy purpose,” he continues:

        Not that I always began to write with a distinct purpose formally conceived: but habits of meditation have, I trust, so prompted and regulated my feelings, that my descriptions of such objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry along with them a purpose. If this opinion be erroneous, I can have little right to the name of a Poet.  For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic se sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.

The important point is that Wordsworth takes a poem that happens to come in a flash as embodying the ideas carefully developed over a long period of time.

        Sometimes, of course, a poet does start with a pretty clear notion of what he wants his poem to be and works systematically.  Sometimes he starts with on the vaguest feeling and with no defined theme.  Sometimes he may simply have a line or a phrase as a kind of germ.  But no matter how he starts, he is working toward a conception of the poem that will hold all the parts in significant relation to each other.  Therefore, as his general conception becomes clearer, he may find more and more need for going back and changing parts already composed.  The poem isn’t a way of saying something that could be said equally well another way.  Its “saying” is the whole poem, the quality of the imagery, the feel of the rhythm, the dramatic force, the ideas, and the meaning does not exist until the words are all in their order (emphasis added).

        It does not matter, then, whether the composition is slow and painful or easy and fast.  We do not have two kinds of poetry, one spontaneous and one calculated.  Without reference to the origin, we consider the quality of the poem, for the poem must deliver its own meaning.  Some of those meanings may have entered in a flash, out of the poet’s unconscious, but once they are absorbed into the poem they are part of the poem; they are ours and not the poet’s (emphasis added).

        Let us come back to “Kubla Khan.”  We know that it came to Coleridge in an opium dream.  But we also know the origin of almost every image and of many phrases in the poem, for John Livingston Lowes has tracked them down in Coleridge’s reading (The Road to Xanadu.  Houghton Mifflin Co. (1930), pp. 356-413).  But the materials from Coleridge’s reading do not give us the meaning of the poem any more than the fact of the composition under the influence of opium necessarily renders it meaningless.  We have to look at the poem itself.  The poem falls into two main sections.  The first describes the dome of pleasure, the garden, the chasm, the great fountain and the ancestral voices prophesying war.  The second, beginning with the line, “A damsel with a dulcimer,” says that music might rebuild the world of Xanadu—or rather, that the special music of the Abyssinian maid might rebuild the world—and if the poet could recapture that music all who saw him would recognize his strange power, both beautiful and terrible.  In other words, without treating the poem as an allegory and trying to make each detail equate with some notion, we can still take it to be a poem about creative imagination: “song,” the imaginative power, the poetic power, could “build a new dome in the air” and recreate the enchanted and ominous world of Xanadu.

        Does the fact that Coleridge considered the poem unfinished argue against this interpretation?  Probably not, because though from the point where the poem now ends many different lines of development might have been followed, we have a thing that is in itself now coherent and that comes to a significant climax.  This thing might have been a section in a larger work, but in default of that larger work it can stand alone.

        How do we know that Coleridge “intended” the poem to mean what we have just said it means?  Now we are back to our starting point.  We do not know that he “intended” anything.  He simply had a dream.  But we do know that this poem is very similar in tone and method to his great poem “The Ancient Mariner” and the great unfinished work “Christabel,” which were composed bit by bit and not dreamed up.  Slow or fast, opium or no opium, Coleridge wrote the same way, and it all came out of Coleridge, and there carries his characteristic themes and ideas.  …

Note to two sections I bolded and how they fit precisely with our discussion of Invisible Cities' introductory account between Polo and Khan.  Thoughts?

INVISIBLE CITIES I -- Introduction, and Chapter 1, ..... 1

Superficially, Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, is not a complex book.  If you look at the table of contents, you can see that it's categorized very simply into cities and types (memory, desire, signs, etcetera), as well as the periodic ".....," which indicates italicized encounters between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan (and considering Calvino, we might even want to ask, "So why the 5-point ellipsis?").  From the outset, these descriptions of cities and how they (the descriptions and the cities, which, as we discover, are two distinct things) relate back to their stated type are fascinating all on their own, one by one like individual poems in a collection.  However, as we dig into the meat of the book--the relationship between Polo and the Khan and the situation (a deliberately vague word) of the empire and the overlapping of cities--we should see how these descriptions and adventures interrelate and build one upon another.  Calvino, as far as I'm concerned, is a magician with a million tricks.  The conceptual undercurrent of this book is, first, ingenious, and, second, all the more so because he makes it work, faithful to the concept to the end.  Be open-minded.  This book, if you let it, will stretch you.

On a technical note, regarding the blogging of the book, each reading day I'll put up one to five posts, one post per city and "......"  This is mostly for organizational purposes, particularly as I'm very interested in going back at the end and examining together, for example, all the "Cities of Memory" or "Hidden Cities."

*

….. 1

1.       Calvino’s language and word choice is always important.  I think we need to assume that he’s taking on the whole Beethoven every-note-must-be-perfect thing.  Notice the use of we.  Who is “we”?  We see it first in the second sentence: “…of the territories we have conquered….”  If we assume that we can’t take anything for granted, then what’s he going for there?  (The italicized encounters are narrated in third person omniscient.)  I guess I should ask whether you believe Calvino is speaking “we” from his own first person perspective over the survey of the book’s contents or if he’s channeling the Khan and speaking the emperor’s “we.”

2.       Considering what I said in the little introduction above, is Calvino, in the remainder of this fatty second sentence, acknowledging that we—he and us—will never fully understand….  What?  Cities?  Cultures?  People?  The book (or Book)?

3.       There’s an adroit composition to this little essay.  Compare the first sentence to the last.  Why does the Khan pay more attention and interest to Polo than his other explorers?  What obstacles, or potential conflict, can we anticipate?

4.       A question to consider over the course of the book: Why did Calvino choose Marco Polo and Kublai Khan?  There are some near-obvious possibilities, but others….

5.       Have you read Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”?

Sunday Poetry XII (and Jane Eyre XXVIII) -- JANE EYRE IS A BIRD

For brevity's sake, I am not including the full poems I reference here.  Also, and as I've done before (even just last week), I'm going to leave the majority of dot-connecting to you.

The topic comes from our most recent Jane Eyre installment, chapter 27, which in its reference to birds as "emblems of love" throws back in a contrary manner (opposite really, but birds still the same) to chapter 1, where Jane is reading from Bewick's History of British Birds.  Before we get into the direct application to the book, however, I want to look at some more birds.


Birds, symbolically, are a lot like that of trees, at least on the positive end of things, where they can represent nature and God (often, and particularly in the case of Jane Eyre, the same thing) and love, and, in their movement between earth and Heaven, they can represent prayer and angels or spirits.  However, they have a freedom impressionistically lacking in trees, and their folkloric connection to deity is stronger than that of trees.  (Look at Quetzalcoatl and, on the less dramatic side, Mr. Stork -- video below.)

There is also a darker element to birds, which seems more appropriate, at least by first impression, to Jane Eyre.  Birds are often carrion eaters--consumers of the dead.  Blend this with their naturally spiritual element, and you have a symbol well worthy of Jane Eyre, and particularly chapter 1.  Crows, owls, vultures, etcetera are not birds associated with that which is pleasant and beatific and uplifting.  I posted this picture yesterday:

Here a man--one unlucky soul from the Book of Samuel--after being stoned gets taken apart by the birds.  It reminds me of that moment in Pirates of the Caribbean shortly before Jack SPARROW escapes (see? "sparrow": freedom -- though also, perhaps, idiocy -- in that name) where we see crows poking at the eye of some woebegone sailor in a cage.

Gustave Dore'

Pirates and birds, not to mention the illustrator of the above engraving, Gustave Dore (one of my very favorite illustrators, by the way, and thank goodness he was so spectacularly prolific!), brings us to Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (short version HERE; complete poem HERE (and, really, read the whole thing; it's worth it and will only put you out about ten or fifteen minutes).  Here we see the curse that follows the destruction of nature, and in this case, an albatross, symbol of good fortune as well as symbol of Jesus Christ (consider its shape against the sky, sun up and behind it, viewed from the deck of a ship far below).

What interests me here is the combination of hopefulness (the albatross as Christ) with the migratory nature, almost aimlessness, of the sea bird.  This and other sea birds are the subject of the chapter of Bewick's, which young Jane Eyre is reading.  But what about the most recent chapter we've read, where the birds are all about the Love?

Certainly that--love--fits birds just fine.  Read the smackingly sappy (sorry) Ode to a Nightingale, by Keats: HERE.

Note the mention of the dryad in the first stanza: bolster, as if it were needed, to the connection mentioned above between birds and trees (beside the fact that so many birds frickin' LIVE in trees!).

Joseph Severn

While I think these two poems do a good job reflecting at least a little of what Bronte was intending in their respective chapters, it does little to make connection between the two, because birds are such facile and even capricious symbols; they can be practically anything.  But perhaps if we forget about the individual symbolics of specific species or varieties, then we might make a general definition for birds (easy -- they fly, right? and flying is freedom, unfettered and irresponsible), and apply it to Jane.

Look at her circumstances in each chapter as they apply to freedom.  In chapter 1, she craves it, but freedom appears to be impossible, unreachable; hence the birds are dark, migratory, and carnivorous--drawn haunts of the derelict and dead.  In chapter 27, she is faced with the necessity of taking up her a new and undesired freedom, but she doesn't want to go!  She sees love--tweedly little birds, cute and white (I'm making that up)--but it, the love, is as unreachable--keen to fly just beyond her grasp--as was freedom back at the beginning.

Maybe this is stretching, but it works.  Birds are such instinctive symbols that, I think, even if Bronte didn't intend their application here, it works nonetheless.  What might not work, though I'm putting it out there anyway, is Jane's name:

JANE EYRE.  (And this is how totally I am going from the mark.  Read Ancestry.com's derivation of the last name Eyre, from Ayer: "English: from Middle English eir, eyer ‘heir’ (Old French (h)eir, from Latin heres ‘heir’). Forms such as Richard le Heyer were frequent in Middle English, denoting a man who was well known to be the heir to the main property in a particular locality, either one who had already inherited or one with great expectations.")  But say the last name aloud.  Eyre.  Say it.  Eyre; Air.  Birds!  Jane Eyre is a bird, folks!  Take her first name (which means gracious and merciful, by the way) and we've really got a pretty good description of Jane's character: a forgiving and benevolent bird.  Does she not travel here and there spreading the good of her soul?

I welcome you thoughts.

Jane Eyre XXIII -- chapter 23: LIGHTNING AND FIRE

1. Bronte misquotes Thomas Campbell's poem, "The Turkish Lady."  Check line 5: HERE.
2. The first page or two of chapter 23 can be described easily as Romantic--and not "romantic," as in the 'til-now stymied romance between Jane and Mr.R, but Romantic, as in the written gushing effulgence of emotion and unquenched idealism.
3. So, first Romanticism and now Mr.R is pointing out this amazing moth, alien denizen of the night!, and I'm reminded of the albatross from Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."  (If you're going to bother with this question, don't read Coleridge's second master piece passively; this is a BIG and IMPORTANT work.)  I haven't read ahead and don't know if this moth turns out indeed to be a portent one way or another, but the at-least-partially-aligned imagery and tone are both here.  Notice also the mention of the sea foam and imminent voyage to Ireland.  
4. When Jane complains about her necessary--and necessary by statement from Rochester--departure from Thornfield, what is she really complaining of?
5. Is Jane a woman like Lot's wife?  Will she look back?  And what if she does not depart?  What might this indicate of Thornfield, if this is indeed an apt comparison?
6. What's with the sudden usage of "Janet"?
7. "I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you—especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapped; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you—you'd forget me."  Is Bronte referring to the taken rib from Adam to make Eve?  Is she referring, strangely, to the umbilical cord?  What is going on in this absolutely fascinating quotation?
8. More poetry!  Considering the period of the book's composition together with the heavy Romanticism of the book and this particular chapter respectively, check out Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" HERE, a truly masterful and hugely influential poem (at least as much so as "Mariner" above).
9. I do love to see the fire of Jane's childhood reemerge here in conversation with Mr.R, but culminating in a kiss!?  What is the man trying to do to our poor girl?
10. Name the many reasons Jane has to doubt Mr.R's sincerity of proposal.
11. What of the change of weather and general tone shift at the point of Jane's acceptance?  Remember the weather at the beginning of the book when we spoke of Gothicism, especially as it conflicts with Romanticism.  There is a strikingly similar moment in The Sound of Music (today, apparently, is the day of comparative literature).
12. What of the lightning-struck tree, so like a tower?  If this is indeed reference to Tarot, what of the shift from Tower to Tree?