"For we are all somehow dreadfully cracked" - a paragraph from Melville

An excerpt from "The Ramadan" chapter of Moby-Dick:
 
I love Ishmael very much, find him to be the best companion; of his time, of course, but always open, always willing to accept and even love all humanity. His reaction to his new friend Queequeg's intense Ramadan observances seems particularly relevant in January of 2015. 

I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals, pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits on these subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly entertaining the most absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan; -- but what of that? Queequeg thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to be content; and there let him rest. All our arguing with him would not avail; let him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all -- Presbyterians and Pagans alike -- for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.

                                                                                      -from "The Ramadan"
                                                                                        Moby-Dick, or The Whale
                                                                                        Herman Melville
                                                                                        circa 1851

Now that's a beard.

The Very Horny Pilgrim: a true story of the Plymouth Plantation

Pilgrim map

Totally by accident and having nothing to do with the holiday, I happened to be reading books by and about the Mayflower Pilgrims and their early descendants. In so doing, just this morning I ran across this passage in Of Plymouth Plantation, by the primary leader, second governor and Mayflower passenger William Bradford. It is part of a chapter called "Wickedness Breaks Forth." 

Please see my numbered annotations following, although sometimes I think I am being too callous and flippant and that I should have sympathy for this person, who was probably mentally ill:

  

After a time of the writing of these things befell a very sad accident of the like foul nature in this government, this very year, which I shall now relate. There was a youth whose name was Thomas Granger. He was servant to an honest man of Duxbury, being about 16 or 17 years of age. He was this year detected of buggery and indicted for the same, with a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves and a turkey.[1] Horrible it is to mention, but the truth of the history requires it. He was first discovered by one that accidentally [2] saw his lewd practices towards

Pilgrim book

the mare. (I forebear particulars. [3]) Being upon it examined and committed, in the end he not only confessed the fact with that beast at that time, but sundry times before and at several times with all the rest of the forenamed in his indictment. And this his free confession was not only in private to the magistrates (though first he strived to deny it) but to sundry, both ministers and others, and afterwards, upon his indictment, to the whole Court and jury; [4] and confirmed at his execution. And whereas some of the sheep could not so well be known by his description of them, [5] others with them were brought before him and he declared which were they and which were not. [6] And accordingly he was cast by the jury and condemned, and after executed about the 8th of September, 1642. A very sad spectacle it was. For first the mare and then the cow and the rest of the lesser cattle [7] were killed before his face [8], according to the law, Leviticus xx.15; and then he himself was executed. The cattle were all cast into a great large pit that was digged of purpose for them, and no use made of any part of them.
 
Upon the examination of this person and also of a former that had made more sodomitical attempts upon another... [9]

Notes:

1. Is this an indication of what we should be doing with our turkeys, if we really want to be like the Pilgrims?
2. Yeah, right, "accidentally." 
3. Bummer. Puritans are so frustrating.
4. Bestial and proud. I bet they tortured him, though. They tortured a lot. Puritans never change...
5. Where's that one sheep with the perty mouth?
6. Did that one, yeah. That one, too, oh yeah. No, not that one, c'mon, I do have standards.
7. Lesser cattle? Oh, right, that one goat really wasn't very accomplished.
8. Okay, this is getting brutal. 
9. Further Pilgrim wickedness I shall spare you. But there was some.

Happy Thanksgiving, Everybody. 

Pilgrim

What a poet told me

Wyoming sunrise, 2013

I recalled what a poet had told me once: the eyes want to see at all times, he said, and so you have lids to rest them, but the mind, the mind wants to think and there is nothing to stop it, to give it peace and rest, not even sleep, and out of all this perpetual churning comes occasionally a sound from some unknown place and you must listen for it, listen for it like it’s a bird you wish to identify from its song, or a conversation on the far side of a thin wall in an unfamiliar hotel room and you wish to eavesdrop; it might have something to do with you. It was a difficult, draining, often unsatisfying, often fruitless task, this hyper-vigilance, but if one wished to live as a poet, this was part of one’s daily toil. 

 

Lines from a Salem 66 song

Haunted by this song since 1984, when I was 20.

"Pony Song"

I could love my murderer
but I could never love yours

There's something wrong
in a heart without a guiding light.
It flits from roof to roof in the night

 
I need to be locked on a planet
without a view
so I won't unravel at the sight of you

The sight of you consumes me

I am burning like the sun
and it isn't beneficial
I see now its sacrificial
I am telling you a secret 
that even I don't know

I could love my murderer
but I could never love yours

Lines from R.S. Thomas' poem "The Belfry"

The poem by R.S. Thomas ends with the possibility of faraway hope, but some days, today for example, I can't get past these lines:

 
                 There are times
When a black frost is upon
One's whole being, and the heart
In its bone belfry hangs and is dumb. 
     - from "The Belfry" by R.S. Thomas 

       (More from R.S. Thomas)


 

Bio of poet Denise Levertov from an old anthology

This is the brief note for Denise Levertov from the anthology New British Poets published in the United States some time shortly after WW II. I think it is fascinating, particularly that last job in the list. Odd indeed. Also interesting is the first one on the list, "land girl." Land girls harvested crops during the war. In the book, Levertov's poems stand out, as do those of W.R. Rodgers, W.S. Graham and Keith Douglas. For me, anyway. Although I haven't finished reading the thing so I probably shouldn't say that.

Denise Levertov was born in 1923. Her father is a Russian Jew who became an Anglican theologian; her mother is Welsh. She studied Russian ballet from the age of twelve to sixteen. During the War she served four years as a hospital nurse, and she has worked in various odd jobs such as land girl, charwoman, children's nurse and companion to an alcoholic. She has published one book of verse, The Double Image. She recently married an American G.I. and hopes to come to the States.

The stained and tattered anthology.

All Falls Past

Confident he will get his feet
back under him in time,

since over the green fields
he'd run with power and grace,

as against the faulty city throngs
he long had winged untouched,

he's peaceful as the landscape skews;
soon enough he will outgain its new velocity.

Even when his footsteps shorten
instead of lengthen,

if his grace quavers and he doubts
his powers it must be from exhaustion.

And later if kneeling he wincing
recalls that he only ever falls in spirit, for now

he holds -- eyes closed, braced for landing --
that that hard rising ground will not abuse him.
                                              -J. O'Brien

Poem by W.R. Rodgers about autumn

I ran across this poem completely by accident, in the morning on the first day of fall, in an old, stained anthology called The New British Poets. I can't even tell what year the book was compiled, by critic Kenneth Rexroth. But it's a great collection, and I turned to Rodgers first because I like him, and there was "Autumn." This poem is so full of playful sound. I especially like "such a running-over of clover." Also "dryly shuffling through the scurf of leaves." ("Scurf" means flakes.) I'm struggling with "substractions." Don't miss "How my heart...was silk and thistle/By turns..."

Of course, fall in the west isn't really like this. But I remember falls past. All of my falls past.


Autumn
                              Going out, those bold days,
O what a gallery-roar of trees and gale-wash
Of leaves abashed me, what a shudder and shore
Of bladdery shadows dashed on windows ablaze,
What a hedge-shingle seething, what vast lime-splashes
Of light clouting the land. Never had I seen
Such a running-over of clover, such tissue sheets
Of cloud poled asunder by sun, such plunges
And thunder-load of fun. Trees, grasses, wings -- all
On a hone of wind sluiced and sleeked one way,
Smooth and close as the pile of a pony's coat,
But, in a moment, smoke-slewed, glared, squinted back
And up like sticking bones schockingly unkinned.
How my heart, like all these, was silk and thistle
By turns, how it fitted and followed the stiff lifts
And easy falls of them, or, like that bird above me,
No longer crushing against cushions of air,
Hung in happy apathy, waiting for wind-rifts.
Who could not dance on, and be dandled by such a day
Of loud expansion? when every flash and shout
Took the hook of the mind and reeled out the eye's line
Into whip and whirl-spools of light, when ever ash-shoot shone
Like a weal and was gone in the gloom of the wind's lash.
Who could not feel it? the uplift and total substraction
Of breath as, now bellying, now in abeyance,
The gust poured up from the camp's throat below, bringing
Garbled reports of guns and bugle-notes,
But, gullible, then drank them back again.
And I, dryly shuffling through the scurf of leaves
Fleeing like scuffled toast, was host to all these things;
In me were the spoon-swoops of wind, in me too
The rooks dying and settling like tea-leaves over the trees;
And, rumbling on rims of rhyme, mine were the haycarts home-creeping
Leaving the rough hedge-cheeks long-strawed and streaked with their weeping.
                                                                              - W.R. Rodgers

Poem by Richard Wilbur

Something about that need and yearning to answer each call, each temptation, or each possibility, and then the resonance of regret that becomes a part of you:

The Sirens
I never knew the road
From which the whole earth didn't call away,
With wild birds rounding the hill crowns,
Haling out of the heart an old dismay,
Or the shore somewhere pounding its slow code,
Or low-lighted towns
Seeming to tell me to stay.

Lands I have never seen
And shall not see, loves I will not forget,
All I have missed, or slighted, or foregone
Call to me now. And weaken me. And yet
I would not walk a road without a scene.
I listen going on,
The richer for regret.
                - Richard Wilbur, Ceremony, 1950

Excerpt from an Isaac Babel short story

From the short story "Guy de Maupassant." I love the line, have long, long loved the line -- think about the line frequently -- that reads, "I was sober and could have walked a chalk line, but it was pleasanter to stagger, so I swayed from side to side, singing in a language I had just invented." In the story, Raisa is a publisher's wife in St. Petersburg who wants to translate a new edition of Maupassant's works. Polyte, a literature professor whose French is better, is hired to assist her. They drink a lot. (In this scene, it's a whole bottle of very expensive Muscatel.) He falls for her, and "makes love" to her, in that old-fashioned sense, that 19th Century sense, where it might mean sex, but it might only mean attentiveness, flirtation, confessions and maybe a few stolen kisses. Or a grope here and there. Whatever it means, to me it can seem simultaneously more chased and more lecherous. I like that. The 29 books he refers to are the works of Maupassant, to whose greatness the story by Babel is a worthy tribute.

Raisa held out a glass to me. It was the fifth.

      "Mon vieux, to Maupassant."

      "And what about having some fun today, ma belle?"

       I reached over to Raisa and kissed her on the lips. They quivered and swelled.

      "You're funny," she mumbled through her teeth, recoiling.

      She pressed herself against the wall, stretching out her bare arms. Spots began to glow on her arms and shoulders. Of all the gods ever put on a crucifix, this was the most ravishing. 

      "Be so kind as to sit down, Monsieur Polyte."

...

        Night had blocked the path of my famished youth with a bottle of Muscatel '83 and twenty-nine books, twenty-nine bombs stuffed with pity, genius and passion. I sprang up, knocking over the chair and banging against the shelf. The twenty-nine volumes crashed to the floor, their pages flew open, they fell on their edges...and the white mare of my fate went on at a walking pace.

      "You are funny," growled Raisa.

      I left the granite house on the Moyka between eleven and twelve, before the sisters and the husband returned from the theater. I was sober and could have walked a chalk line, but it was pleasanter to stagger, so I swayed from side to side, singing in a language I had just invented. Through the tunnels of the streets bounded by lines of street lights the steamy fog billowed. Monsters roared behind the boiling walls. The roads amputated the legs of those walking on them.

                                                                     - From "Guy de Maupassant" by Isaac Babel