The Power of Music (Take Two)

It seems Wordsworth already said it. Here's the real poem, not my piffling blog post.

AN Orpheus! an Orpheus! yes, Faith may grow bold,
And take to herself all the wonders of old; —
Near the stately Pantheon you'll meet with the same
In the street that from Oxford hath borrowed its name.

His station is there; and he works on the crowd,
He sways them with harmony merry and loud;
He fills with his power all their hearts to the brim —
Was aught ever heard like his fiddle and him?

What an eager assembly! what an empire is this!
The weary have life, and the hungry have bliss;
The mourner is cheered, and the anxious have rest;
And the guilt — burthened soul is no longer opprest.

As the Moon brightens round her the clouds of the night,
So He, where he stands, is a centre of light;
It gleams on the face, there, of dusky — browed Jack,
And the pale — visaged Baker's, with basket on back.

That errand — bound 'Prentice was passing in haste —
What matter! he's caught — and his time runs to waste;
The Newsman is stopped, though he stops on the fret;
And the half — breathless Lamplighter — he's in the net!

The Porter sits down on the weight which he bore;
The Lass with her barrow wheels hither her store; —
If a thief could be here he might pilfer at ease;
She sees the Musician, 'tis all that she sees!

He stands, backed by the wall; — he abates not his din
His hat gives him vigour, with boons dropping in,
From the old and the young, from the poorest; and there!
The one — pennied Boy has his penny to spare.

O blest are the hearers, and proud be the hand
Of the pleasure it spreads through so thankful a band;
I am glad for him, blind as he is! — all the while
If they speak 'tis to praise, and they praise with a smile.

That tall Man, a giant in bulk and in height,
Not an inch of his body is free from delight;
Can he keep himself still, if he would? oh, not he!
The music stirs in him like wind through a tree.

Mark that Cripple who leans on his crutch; like a tower
That long has leaned forward, leans hour after hour! —
That Mother, whose spirit in fetters is bound,
While she dandles the Babe in her arms to the sound.

Now, coaches and chariots! roar on like a stream;
Here are twenty souls happy as souls in a dream:
They are deaf to your murmurs — they care not for you,
Nor what ye are flying, nor what ye pursue!

Billy Collins

I have always been adamantly anti-poetry. It's one of those positions you take because it's fun to ridicule the people you perceive as being smarter than you are. It's kind of like hating modern art, which I can say, because I DO hate modern art. Well... most of it. What I'm trying to say is, being someone who hates poetry is like being a member of a popular club where we can all get together and go rah-rah-rah and laugh and point and feel good about ourselves. It's one of those anti-intellectual stances that says "I don't believe there's really anything to this stuff. It's just a bunch of dumb show."

The problem is, I always knew it was a bit of a lie. I raised my eyebrows while reading Emily Dickinson in high school, but there was always a part of me that secretly admitted to being drawn to this form of writing, that resonated with her perspective and this odd way in which she chose to express it. Freshman year of college prompted me to be even less friendly towards poetry considering I had to read a collection of contemporary poems compiled (not written) by Billy Collins. Oh how I hated that man. I wonder how much of my dislike was due to the actual poetry and how much to the fact that that class was not going particularly well. Whatever the case, I never expected to fall in love the poems of Billy Collins. It can be traced back to two sources: his appearance on an episode of "A Prairie Home Companion" and fellow CA and pod resident Hannah's liking for him and loaning a collection of his poems to me. The humor is what clinched me. For instance, here is one of his poems from the collection "Ballistics."

Oh, My God!

Not only in church
and nightly by their bedsides
do young girls pray these days.

Wherever they go,
prayer is woven into their talk
like a bright thread of awe.

Even at the pedestrian mall
outbursts of praise
spring unbidden from their glossy lips.

----

Here are a few others from that collection of which I am fond.

Tension

Never use the word "suddenly" just to create tension.
-Writing Fiction

Suddenly, you were planting some yellow petunias
outside in the garden,
and suddenly I was in the study
looking up the word oligarchy for the thirty-seventh time.

When suddenly, without warning,
you planted the last petunia in the flat,
and I suddenly closed the dictionary
now that I was reminded of that vile form of governance.

A moment later, we found ourselves
standing suddenly in the kitchen
where you suddenly opened a can of cat food
and I just as suddenly watched you doing that.

I observed a window of leafy activity
and beyond that, a bird perched on the edge
of the stone birdbath
when suddenly you announced you were leaving

to pick up a few things at the market
and I stunned you by impulsively
pointing out that we were getting low on butter
and another case of wine would not be a bad idea.

Who could tell what the next moment would hold?
another drip from the faucet?
another little spasm of the second hand?
Would the painting of a bowl of pears continue

to hang on the wall from that nail?
Would the heavy anthologies remain on their shelves?
Would the stove hold its position?
Suddenly, it was anyone's guess

The sun rose ever higher in the sky.
The state capitals remained motionless on the wall map
when suddenly I found myself lying on a couch
where I closed my eyes and without any warning

began to picture the Andes, of all places,
and a path that led over the mountains to another country
with strange customs and eye-catching hats,
each one suddenly fringed with colorful little tassels.

The Effort

Would anyone care to join me
in flicking a few pebbles in the direction
of teachers who are fond of asking the question:
"What is the poet trying to say?"

as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson
had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts--
inarticulate wretches that they were,
biting their pens and staring out the window for a clue.

Yes, it seems that Whitman, Amy Lowell
and the rest could only try and fail,
but we in Mrs. Parker's third-period English class
here at Springfield High will succeed.

with the help of these study questions
in saying what the poor poet could not,
and we will get all this done before
that orgy of egg salad and tuna fish known as lunch.

Tonight, however, I am the one trying
to say what it is this absence means,
the two of us sleeping and waking under different roofs.
The image of this vase of cut flowers,

not from our garden, is no help.
And the same goes for the single plate,
the solitary lamp, and the weather that presses its face
against these new windows--the drizzle and the morning frost.

So I will leave it up to Mrs. Parker,
who is tapping a piece of chalk against the blackboard,
and her students--a few with their hands up,
others slouching with their caps on backwards--

to figure out what it is I am trying to say
about this place where I find myself
and to do it before the noon bell rings
and that whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed.

Baby Listening

According to the guest information directory,
baby listening is a service offered by this seaside hotel.

Baby listening--not a baby who happens to be listening,
as I thought when I first checked in.

Leave the receiver off the hook,
the directory advises,
and your infant can be monitored by the staff,

though the staff, the entry continues,
cannot be held responsible for the well-being
of the baby in question.

Fair enough, someone to listen to the baby.

But the phrase did suggest a baby who is listening,
lying there in the room next to mine
listening to my pen scratching against the page,

or a more advanced baby who has crawled
down the hallway of the hotel
and is pressing its tiny, curious ear against my door.

Lucky for some of us,
poetry is a place where both are true at once,
where meaning only one thing at a time spells malfunction.

Poetry wants to have the baby who is listening at my door
as well as the baby who is being listened to,
quietly breathing by the nearby telephone.

And it also wants the baby
who is making sounds of distress
into the curved receiver lying in the crib

while the girl at reception has just stepped out
to have a smoke with her boyfriend
in the dark by the great sway and wash of the North Sea.

Poetry wants that baby, too,
even a little more than it wants the others.

The Lanyard

The other day as I was ricocheting slowly
off the pale blue walls of this room,
bouncing from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one more suddenly into the past--
a past were I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that's what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sickroom,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,
set cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift--not the archaic truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hands,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

The Introduction

I don't think this next poem
needs any introduction--
it's best to let the work speak for itself.

Maybe I should just mention
that whenever I use the word five,
I'm referring to that group of Russian composers
who came to be known as "The Five,"
Balakirev, Moussorgsky, Borodin--that crowd.

Oh--and Hypsicles was a Greek astronomer.
He did something with the circle.

That's about it, but for the record,
"Grimke" is Angelina Emily Grimke, the abolitionist
"Imroz" is that little island near the Dardanelles.
"Monad" --well, you all know what a monad is.

There could be a little problem
with mastaba, which is one of those Egyptian
above-ground sepulchres, sort of brick and limestone.

And you're all familiar with helminthology?
It's the science of worms.

Oh, and you will recall that Phoebe Mozee
is the real name pf Annie Oakley.

Other than that, everything should be obvious.
Wagga Wagga is in New South Wales,
Rhyolite is that soft volcanic rock.
What else?
Yes, meranti is a type of timber, in tropical Asia I think,
and Rahway is just Rahway, New Jersey.

The rest of the poem should be clear.
I'll just read it and let it speak for itself.

It's about the time I went picking wild strawberries.

It's called "Picking Wild Strawberries."

See No Evil

No one expected all three of them
to sit there on their tree stumps forever,
their senses covered with their sinuous paws
so as to shut out the vile, nefarious world.

As it happened,
it was the one on the left
who was the first to desert his post,
uncupping his ears,
then loping off into the orbit of rumors and lies,
but also into the realm of symphonies,
the sound of water tumbling over rocks
and wind stirring the leafy domes of trees.

Then the monkey on the right lowered his hands
from his wide mouth and slipped away
in search of someone to talk to,
some news he could spread,
maybe something to curse or shout about,

And that left the monkey in the middle
alone with his silent vigil,
shielding his eyes from depravity's spectacle,
blind to the man whipping his horse,
the woman shaking her baby in the air,
but also unable to see
the russet sun on a rough shelf of rock
and apples in the grass at the base of a tree.

Sometimes, he wonders about the other two,
listens for the faint sounds of their breathing
up there on the mantel
alongside the clock and the candlesticks.

And some nights in the quiet house
he wishes he could break the silence with a question,

but he knows the one on his right
would not be able to hear,
and the one to his left,
according to their sacred oath--
the one they all took with one paw raised--
is forbidden forever to speak, even in reply.

Mysteries In Our Modern World

This essay pretty well describes my afternoon. After a very stressful week and with midterms looming on the horizon I've been no mood to buckle down and study. I woke up late today after a much-needed late night of hanging out with friends, but even though I was rested I was in no mood to work. All I really wanted to do was finish "The Dead Man's Knock." When I finished it I noticed this essay on the back and felt vindicated.

The mystery story is the answer of modern times to the problems of modern times.

A few years ago business logged along at an even pace behind a horse and buggy transportation. Radio was unknown, the telephone was only being perfected, mails were slow and businessmen copied their correspondence by placing a letter between sheets of moist blotting paper and screwing down the wheel of a letter press.

Then high pressure hit business. Everything is speeded [sic] up so much today that the great problem is how to relax.

The busy executive can't simply forget his problems. They are too pressing, too urgent and too intimate. The only answer is to find something else which will fully occupy the mind. The ordinary novel simply doesn't have the power, the punch, the action.

That's why the sale of sleeping tablets and of mystery stories have multiplied to astronomical proportions during the last twenty-five years.

It is, of course, a lot better to refresh the mind by giving it something new and interesting to work on than to dull it into oblivion by the use of drugs.

Several years ago I wrote a book dealing with what was at that time a novel adaptation of scientific principle. My publisher, fearing there might be some inaccuracies, asked on of the most noted scientists in the country to check certain pages, and sent him the entire manuscript.

That scientist was "up to his ears" in war work. The letter which he sent was a classic.

He said he had started to read the first page of the manuscript, had become interested, had dropped everything else, and didn't realize the passing of time until two and a half hours later when he finished the last page of the manuscript. Then he turned out the light and had the first uninterrupted, blissful eight hours of repose he had had in years. He awakened the next morning refreshed and eager to tackle the problems which confronted him. The mystery had been exciting enough to drive the problems right out of his mind.

Quite by accident that scientist had learned the secret of perfect mental repose.

Which is why the modern mystery story is selling like hot cakes to the more intelligent class of reader. It is no accident that mystery stories have been in the White House for the last twenty-five years. The "intelligentsia" may speak disparagingly of the mystery, but the best minds in the world are reading them.

~Erle Stanley Gardner

So this definitely gives me the justification I need for my afternoon. I'm not wasting time, I'm finding the "perfect mental repose." Reading that mystery was my way of coping with the constant pressures of my crazy student life. The speeded upness of it all and technology and things. Plus at the end he just strokes my ego by placing me in the company of the best minds in the world. I can see why the marketing department of that publisher decided to use that essay. And I am perfectly willing to use it as an excuse for my liesurely afternoon.

The Little Prince, cont.

So I'm realizing that there is a lot you can say about children's lit. So here goes.

I love the first chapter of the Little Prince because it is such a good example of what divides my closest friends from the rest of my acquaintances. I also love it because if I had ever run across a book of jungle stories when I was six, I'm sure my response would have been similar. Not that I would have drawn a picture resembling a hat, but that I just tend/ed to really get into things like that.

I was also very aware that adults just didn't get it most of the time. And like Peter Pan I was terrified of becoming one of them eventually and losing, I guess you'd call it the freedom to imagine, or create. And I have done my best to resist this ever since, which accounts in part for why I am so weird.

But eventually we do have to grow up and come to grips with the practical and uncomfortable realities of life. We do have to "put away childish things" and emerge from our idyllic fantasy land to the world of uncertainty, confusion, complicated relationships, bills, inconveniences, monotony, routine, stress and responsibility. This picture of adulthood isn't the sunniest, but I think it's pretty accurate and also not entirely a bad thing. I mean, that's how we grow and that's also how we impact the world. Yet it seemed appropriate that, as I'm on the verge of becoming independent, to look back and not completely lose that childlike perspective. But we have to give up some of the wonderful yet impractical pursuits of childhood in order to study geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar. We can't all become artists. Some of us must become airplane pilots, which actually is pretty cool as far as adult professions go.

I always assumed that being an adult was equivalent with maturity. But the more I interact in workplaces the more I realize how truly selfish and childlike people can be. I suppose I'm not exempt from this. But as he says "I have seen them at close range...which hasn't much improved my opinion of them." The adult world is crazy and often laughable. All the petty motivations that drive people. Sometimes I just don't know how to respond.

But then there's the pay off. How often have I wished to have such a straightforward litmus test of whether or not someone really has that fundamental understanding of what I find to be beautiful and worthwhile in life. I wish I had a drawing Number One that I could pull out to test people with. And how often have I found myself masking my actual observations and feelings in order to make myself acceptable and reasonable. It's like that section in Jane Eyre where Rochester and Jane randomly start talking about "the men in green" and Mrs. Fairfax is entirely puzzled. There are just certain people you have an affinity with, who understand why stars and jungles and boa constrictors are important, even though it sounds silly to the rest of the world.

The Little Prince

Once when I was six I saw a magnificent picture in a book about the jungle, called True Stories. It showed a boa constrictor swallowing a wild beast. Here is a copy of the picture.In the book it said: "Boa constrictors swallow their prey whole, without chewing. Afterward they are no longer able to move, and they sleep during the six months of their digestion."

In those days I thought a lot about jungle adventures, and eventually managed to make my first drawing, using a colored pencil. My drawing Number One looked like this:I showed the grown-ups my masterpiece, and I asked them if my drawing scared them.

They answered, "Why be scared of a hat?"

My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. Then I drew the inside of the boa constrictor, so the grown-ups could understand. They always need explanations. My drawing Number Two looked like this:
The grown-ups advised me to put away my drawings of boa constrictors, outside or inside, and apply myself instead to geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar. That is why I abandoned, at the age of six, a magnificent career as an artist. I had been discouraged by the failure of my drawing Number One and of my drawing Number Two. Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is exhausting for children to have to provide explanations over and over again.

So then I had to choose another career, and I learned to pilot airplanes. I have flown almost everywhere in the world. And, as a matter of fact, geography has been a big help to me. I could tell China from Arizona at first glance, which is very useful if you get lost during the night.

So I have had, in the course of my life, lots of encounters with lots of serious people. I have spent lots of time with grown-ups. I have seen them at close range...which hasn't much improved my opinion of them.

Whenever I encountered a grown-up who seemed to me at all enlightened, I would experiment on him with my drawing Number One, which I have always kept. I wanted to see if he really understood anything. But he would always answer, "That's a hat." Then I wouldn't talk about boa constrictors or jungles or stars. I would put myself on his level and talk about bridge and golf and politics and neckties. And my grown-up was glad to know such a reasonable person.

Cussedness

Sir Henry Merrivale, known to all as H.M., is very quickly becoming one of my favorite fictional characters. We're reading "The Judas Window" in Crime and Punishment, and I find it to be quite excellent, not least because H.M. is a barrister who addresses the jury (and others) with "Well, my fatheads." But the following passage was the clincher and simply had to share its amazingness.

"I love to be a Corrector of Cussedness. You've heard me talk a lot in the past about the blinkin' awful cussedness of things in general, and I suppose you thought that was only my way of lettin' off steam. But I meant it. Now, ordinarily, this cussedness is supposed to be funny. You can't help bein' amused even when you kick the wastepaper basket all over the room. I mean that the one morning you've got an important engagement is the one morning you miss the train. The one time you take your best girl out to dinner is the one time you call for the bill and find you've left your wallet at home. But did it ever occur to you to think how that applies to whackingly serious matters too? Just think back over your own life, and see whether most of the important things that happened to you were prompted by anybody's effort to do malice, or anybody's effort to do good, or, burn me, by anybody's effort at all: but simply by the sinful, tearin' cussedness of things in general."

"You don't make a religion of that, do you?" I asked. "For if you think that things in general are all banded together in a conspiracy to administer a celestial kick in the pants, you might as well retire to Dorset and write novels."

"Y'see," said H.M., with ghoulish amusement, "that goes to show that the only sort of cussedness you can imagine is the kind that lands you in the soup. Like the Greek tragedies where the gods get a twist on some poor feller and he's never got a chance. You want to say, 'Hey, fair play!--take a few wallops at him if you must, but don't load the dice so far that the feller can't even go out in a London fog without comin' home with sunstroke.' No, son. Everything works both ways, especially cussedness...Call the whole process by any fancy name you like: call it destiny or Mansoul or the flexibility of the unwritten Constitution: but it's still cussedness."

My Essential Tales of Father Brown

I've been reading the complete father brown stories courtesy of the awesome Vic Bobb, English professor extraordinaire, generous book-lender, and all-around nice guy. "Forty-nine quietly sensational cases investigated by the high-priest of detective fiction." Here is a list of favorites for my own amusement and perhaps yours too.

From "The Innocence of Father Brown"


The Blue Cross
The Secret Garden
The Queer Feet
The Flying Stars

(These first four are a great introduction to Father Brown, and Flambeua too).

The Sign of the Broken Sword
The Three Tools of Death

From "The Wisdom of Father Brown"

The Head of Caesar
The Purple Wig
The Perishing of the Pendragons
The Salad of Colonel Cray

From "The Incredulity of Father Brown"

The Miracle of Moon Crescent - One of the more metaphysical ones, if C.S. Lewis wrote mysteries, I think they'd be like this.

From "The Secret of Father Brown"

The Chief Mourner or Marne

From "The Scandal of Father Brown"

The Quick One
The Blast of the Book
The Vampire of the Village