mcswaney

[mcswaney]

yeats and flowers

So, there’s this beautiful poem by Yeats that goes:

I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea! We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can fade and flee; And the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the sky, Has awaked in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die.

A weariness comes from those dreamers, dew-dabbled, the lily and rose; Ah, dream not of them, my beloved, the flame of the meteor that goes, Or the flame of the blue star that lingers hung low in the fall of the dew: For I would we were changed to white birds on the wandering foam: I and you! I am haunted by numberless islands, and many a Danaan shore, Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more; Soon far from the rose and the lily and fret of the flames would we be, Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!

So, what the hell are lily and rose? I couldn’t understand a thing, but I still loved the poem.

Rose is this flaming red meteor, and lily is this blue star hanging like dew on the sky. Both these celestial bodies are called dreamers, one eternaly going away and another endlessly hanging on the rim of the sky, in a fragile balance, ready to fall at any moment.

One flower (lily) is compared to a dewdrop, another flower – to a ball flying through space. Both are flaming. Both are dreamers. 

The rose-meteor makes the narrator tired. In the third stanza there’s a hint that the rose is associated with Time. If so, its comparison to a meteor becomes clearer, it “goes” like time, and it is tiring like time.

The lily-dewdrop makes the narrator sad. This sadness “may not die” the same way the dewdrop may never fall, though seems ever ready to do so. Isn’t that a perfect metaphor for sadness: something that is but a premonition of a fall, but not the fall itself. 

So, in what sense Time and Sorrow can both be called dreamers?

Henri Bergson famously said:  Le temps est invention, ou il n'est rien du tout (Time is an invention or it is nothing at all). What that means is that time is something that takes shape only being represented in spatial terms, and all that’s spatial is rational, and thus dead.

Then, the Sorrow represented by a dewdrop hanging over the abyss would mean the premonition of death, of Nothing. The problem of Nothing, by coincidence, had also been treated by Bergson and deemed pseudoproblem, a man’s dream consisting of calling Nothing something that doesn’t suit him.

Both Time and Nothing are fundamentally practical constructs, representing ways to organize space by human beings. And both of them turned from constructs of mind (dreams) into fears. They took flesh and started to destroy life instead of helping organize it.

In the case of this poem, they destroy love. That’s why the author asks his beloved to stop dreaming these nightmares of Time and Nothing, that are destroying their love, and start living like white birds on the foam of the sea.

The images of rose and lily are both classic symbols made more complex and less allegoric.

The negative symbolic connotation of the rose derives from the context of the book The Rose, from which the poem is taken and where, according to Yeats himself, he imagined The Rose “as suffering with man and not as something pursued and seen from afar”. In this book, The Rose takes multiple shapes, sometimes contradictory – for example “The Rose of Peace” and “The Rose of Battle”. It is a “sad Rose”, a “proud Rose”. It really “descends” in the world, and so may indeed represent the Time as a curse of those humans who strive for Eternity.

It’s the same story with lily. Lily is a classic symbol of purity. Well, lily sure looks like a star, has its pentagonal form. Thus the purity becomes unattainable purity. That’s where Sorrow comes into place. Yates sees purity, represented by lily, as a romantic dream that can do nothing to a real love but to destroy it with regrets. That’s why it is not a guiding star, but a star ready to fall.

---

The lily-and-rose combination can very well come to Yeats from Tennyson. See the article  The Lily and the Rose: Symbolic Meaning in Tennyson's Maud by E. D. H. Johnson, where he discusses all kinds of combinations of the two flowers that occur in Maud. 

It is interesting that the rose, in Maud, symbolizes not so much love as the crazy passions that arise in connection to it. Waiting for the Maud in the garden, the author says: “And the soul of the rose went into my blood”. Here the soul of the rose does not represent love, but anger, impatience, jealousy (”…the rose was awake all night for your sake”). That’s why the rose stays longer in the narrative than the lily. After Maud goes into the shadow, the anger, the guilt stay, finally persuading the hero to go to war, for which the rose becomes the metaphor: “The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire.”

The mysterious counterpoint of the lily-and-rose cross-talk reminds that of the “heaviness” and “tenderness” in Osip Mandelstam’s “Sisters heaviness and tenderness…”:

Sisters heaviness and tenderness – your signs are the same. Bees and wasps are sucking the heavy rose. Man is dying. The heated sand is chilling, And yesterday's sun is carried away on a black stretcher. Ah, heavy honeycombs and tender nets, It is easier to lift a stone than to repeat your name! I have a single care left in this world, A golden care – to overcome the burden of time. I drink the misty air like dark water Time is ploughed, and a rose was the soil. In the slow whirlpool the heavy and tender roses, Heaviness and tenderness are entwined into twin wreaths.

In Tennyson:

But the rose was awake all night for your sake, ⁠Knowing your promise to me; The lilies and roses were all awake, ⁠They sigh'd for the dawn and thee.

9.

Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls, ⁠Come hither, the dances are done, In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls, ⁠Queen lily and rose in one; 

It is possible that the rose comes in the Mandelstam’s poem precisely from here.

Mandelstam:

I drink the misty air like dark water Time is ploughed, and a rose was the soil.

Tennyson:

My dust would hear her and beat, ⁠Had I lain for a century dead; Would start and tremble under her feet, ⁠And blossom in purple and red.

Anyways, this concerns Mandelstam’s poetics, not Tennyson’s.

Back to Tennyson.

The destruction that lily and rose, symbolizing the impossible love, brought to the poet’s life is what ties them to the Yeats’ poem. “It is only flowers, they had no fruits“, writes Tennyson. “ A weariness comes from those dreamers, dew-dabbled, the lily and rose”, says Yeats. In both cases those are dreams that corrupt the reality, flowers without fruits:

And I almost fear they are not roses, but blood;

[mcswaney]

paul murray that’s my bike!

I’ve read a nice suggestion of a Christmas story from the Paris Review, That’s My Bike! by Paul Murray.

Upon finishing it I have recalled something I’d read some time ago somewhere in Dovlatov, where he says that there are two kinds of fiction writing professionals: writers (’писатели’) and narrators (’рассказчики’). I hope I am not inventing things, but it seems those were the two words he used. 

In brief, “writers” write about life as it ought to be and narrators write about life as it is. 

For “writers”, life is a big question to resolve. They are mystics who take writing and reading as transformative rituals: Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Byron.

For “narrators”, life is a big thing to tell. They are usually soberer (in a professional, not literal, sense), more down-to-earth, more contemplative: Chekhov, Wilde, Carver.

Those are ideas, and sure enough, any writer is more or less the mix of the two, but still, I think it is a useful distinction.

Dovlatov saw himself clearly as a narrator. He said: “We can stand in awe in front of Dostoyevsky’s genius, but we want to be like Chekhov”. It is close to what Salinger meant, I guess, when Holden says a good writer is the one you’d want to call.

Paul Murray is a really good narrator.

Though the thing with narrators is that usually they are good at short forms, and I know Murray wrote this log of a novel, Skippy Dies, and I am curious to see if he pulled it off.

[mcswaney]

not feeling quite yourself

In Kudos  Rachel Cusk looks at how one determines oneself through other people or objects, or, in other words, how people practice that reflective approach to the world which consists in constant adapting one’s life to the appearances that the world presents to them, while also keeping clear and constant in their minds an idea of what they would like their life to be.

Then appearances suddenly change and with them – peoples’ lives lose form, start adapting clumsily to a new environment. People begin to feel they have no control over their own lives and maybe also realize that it is because they have built them not around their profound desires, but around the features of the land they’ve found themselves living on. They feel the earth falling down from underneath their feet, the earth they once called home. The idea that they have of themselves, ever-present in the back of their minds and ever absent in their lives, then stands in front of them as a kind of specter, terrifying in its transparency, yet ready to vanish at any minute. They stand there in fear and shame, half wanting it to disappear and half dreading it.

It is a feeling of a man that has projected on his dog his own role of protector of the family, and having faced the fact of his incapability to reappropriate this role, vents his impotence on the dog itself, ritually killing it, performing a suicide of his failed life in the other. Considering himself the “creator” of the dog that gradually becomes what he has always failed to be, he wants, in this act at least, to have the last word in the family which is no longer his.

It is also a feeling of a woman traumatized by maternity, whose becoming a writer was a way of alienating herself, firstly, from her own “broken” body (which she “ignores” when she writes) and, secondly, from her husband that she doesn’t love and a child whose company drives her mad. And she doesn’t really see her writing career separately from her unhappy family life, and thus she walks in circles, incapable neither to stop writing nor to start loving, because she can’t see a way of dealing with her own “death” during pregnancy.

It is a feeling of a woman who has built her life watching others live up to her ideals, hoping to get there, too, somehow, without quite suffering or sacrificing as much as these ideals required.

It was an interesting idea, I said, that the narrative impulse might spring from the desire to avoid guilt, rather than from the need – as was generally assumed – to connect things together in a meaningful way; that it was a strategy calculated, in other words, to disburden ourselves of responsibility.

The reflective approach to one’s life is a way to disburden oneself of the responsibility of living it by ways of projecting it; in other words, by ways of attributing to the world what would otherwise be attributed to self; re-creating yourself in your visions of the world and not in your body; craving for your dreams realized in others, nourishing them, hating them, not being strong enough neither to abandon them nor to be them; creating a circle of attachment to your guilt, impotence, trauma.

Reading Rachel Cusk is not quite like reading a novel, it is more like having a conversation. And even if, speaking metaphorically, you can compare the two, it is not the same form. At first, I saw her as a new kind of Marguerite Duras, but it is not enough. What Cusk does is also close to the moralist tradition in line with Montaigne or Pascal. Kudos is more a moralistic essay than a novel in a way that all Cusk really does is put forward dialogues around a theme that they develop with analytic strength and rigorousness of a philosophical essay.

It is also surprising to see how tricks invented by Sebald and that seemed tailor-made for his own style (overwhelming use of indirect speech, characters who start narrating the minute they start speaking, etc.) continue to live on and develop in the writings of others.

[mcswaney]

revisiting stoner

I read Stoner several years ago during the boom its reprint suddenly provoked. Then I read in one gulp everything else by Williams, and he hadn’t written much. It was clear after the first pages that there was nothing quite like that and that I’ve discovered another great writer.

I reread Stoner recently and sheer brilliance of the text swept me off my feet again. 

Here he had a task: to describe how a son of barely literate parents from a small village comes to the University of Missouri to study agriculture and suddenly falls in love with literature. Look what Williams does.

Stoner does well in all science courses. Then he takes a mandatory semester survey of English literature with an eccentric professor Archer Sloane.

He found that he could not handle the survey as he did his other courses. Though he remembered the authors and their works and their dates and their influences, he nearly failed his first examination; and he did little better on his second. He read and reread his literature assignments so frequently that his work in other courses began to suffer; and still the words he read were words on pages, and he could not see the use of what he did.

The actual revelation attained through a poem, a feeling of timelessness that makes Stoner feel very distant from his life and somehow very close to its heart, will happen later in the text, yet you can already see it in the quote above.

 ...and still the words he read were words on pages, and he could not see the use of what he did. 

I guess this “ignorant” attitude towards words that Stoner didn’t know he had is what made him discover his sensitivity to them in the first place. The kind of logic of knowing that comes from a profound shock of not being able to know is a strong argument when it concerns a learner as straightforward as Stoner, whose mind has not yet been obliterated by the unpractical use of language.

It is narrative choices like this one, clear in their truthfulness and yet not trivial, that make a good author, I guess. 

Then, there is this:

She continued to talk, and after a while, he began to hear what she was saying. Years later it was to occur to him that in that hour and a half on that December evening of their first extended time together, she told him more about herself than she ever told him again. And when it was over, he felt that they were strangers in a way that he had not thought they would be, and he knew that he was in love.

Or that:

...she seldom smiled any more, although she laughed a great deal. And when she did smile it was as if a ghost flitted across her face. Once, while Edith was upstairs, William and his daughter passed each other in the living room. Grace smiled shyly at him, and involuntarily he knelt on the floor and embraced her. He felt her body stiffen, and he saw her face go bewildered and afraid. He raised himself gently away from her, said something inconsequential, and retreated to his study.

Williams’ realism is of a high and curious nature, comparable to that of Dostoyevsky, in a sense. Though it is psychologically accurate, it is also surreptitiously based on the paradox, which reveals the ontological side of everything. It is a “high” realism, meaning that it doesn’t really care about reality. What it does care about, though, is the underlying hum of magic, religion, mystery that the human soul alone can comprehend. It is a kind of realism that knows that reality in all its appearances is not there to show or teach or entertain but to hide. And that the true goal of a writer is not to describe it but to pierce it.

Thinking of Stoner, I often think of a “curious nature” of deafness that struck him in his fifties, and I think this absolutely fantastic detail is maybe the most telling in the novel:

Though he sometimes had difficulty understanding one who spoke directly to him, he was often able to hear with perfect clarity a murmured conversation held across the noisy room.

[mcswaney]

zadie smith white teeth

“It’s broken. You don’t need this. See? See?” She plugged it into a socket and demonstrated the dead switch. Archie took the plug out and silently wound the cord round the Hoover. If it was broken, it was coming with him. All broken things were coming with him. He was going to fix every damn broken thing in this house, if only to show that he was good for something

1st rate example of harmful over-explaining. The phrase should have ended there:   If it was broken, it was coming with him. All broken things were coming with him. He was going to fix every damn broken thing in this house, if only to show that he was good for something

all secret and interest have gone because where it is enough to show character's attitude, Zadie explains it.

He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar rations:

Pebble: Beach.

Raindrop: Ocean.

Needle: Haystack

That is very bad. You do not need to go into the “significance” of people in the first place, it is a childish attitude. But if you want desperately to do so and tell your reader that a character is ordinary, there is no need to invent a Greater Scheme of Things and put forward some binary banalities that are not even fun. 

And sentences like

Madam Posterity stuck Archie down the arm of the sofa and forgot about him

Never say words like madam posterity, miss fate, or mister chance. It is bad taste, a winking kind of joviality with rotten teeth.

And there is no getting away from Ryan Topps. Just as a good historian needs to recognize Hitler’s Napoleonic ambitions in the east in order to comprehend his reluctance to invade the British in the west, so Ryan Topps is essential to any understanding of why Clara did what she did.

There are comparisons so awkward in their complete fortuity, they make you wonder if the author just had nowhere to stick his knowledge of Nazi geopolitics.

Jehovah's Witnesses part is funny. Though her ironic treatment of grotesque characters is not far from smart-assed bullying. 

The principles of Christianity and Sod’s Law (also known as Murphy’s Law) are the same: Everything happens to me, for me. So if a man drops a piece of toast and it lands butter-side down, this unlucky event is interpreted as being proof of an essential truth about bad luck: that the toast fell as it did just to prove you, Mr. Unlucky, that there is a defining force in the universe and it is bad luck... Likewise, when Clara fell, knocking the teeth out of the top of her mouth, while Ryan stood up without a scratch, Ryan knew it was because God had chosen Ryan as one of the saved and Clara as one of the unsaved.

This one is really fucked up. And not because of the absurd equation between the principles of Christianity and Sod’s Law, not even because the principles of Christianity are set equal to a fanatic stupidity of a teenager, but because it is the author herself who enounces the equation.

I guess she is generally not very accurate with equations: in the only interview of hers I’ve seen she’d described 6 million Jews killed during Holocaust as “6 million slaves”. 

can’t go on p. 38 of 405