GRAB-BAG: What Resonates

"Nights, I made fires from the wood you did not chop."
          --old poem

"What is the most beautiful music in the world?  The music of what happens."
           --Finn mac Cumhail, ancient Irish hero and king

"The body contains the life story just as much as the brain."
          --Edna O'Brien

"There's life on the page. You read it, and it's not your experience, but it expands your experience."
          --Nancy Packer

"The secret of happiness is freedom. The secret of freedom is courage."
          --Thucydides

The spiral:
my favorite shape,
my favorite motion,
my favorite plot-line.
           --

"The head understands what the heart won't. Which is wiser?"
          --old poem

"The truth is born as lightning strikes."
          --Archilochos

"The cure for anything is salt water -- sweat, tears, or the sea."
          ~ Isak Dinesen

"The law of gravity becomes complex under water, but it is not beyond our comprehension."
          --Honor Frost, Under the Mediterranean

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
          --Mark Twain

"Whole sight; or all the rest is desolaton."
          --John Fowles, Daniel Martin

"Mr. Jones wishes he was a little more funky.
When everybody loves you,
that's about as funky as you can be."
          --Counting Crows

"He suffered the most intense pang of the most terrible of all human deprivations; which is not of possession, but of knowledge. What she said; what she felt; what she thought."
          --John Fowles, "The Ebony Tower"

"Verde que te quiero verde."
          --Lorca

"I've looked on Ida With a Trojan's eye."
          --Lord Byron

"Up the slopes and at them!"
          Howard? de Camp and Carter?  Conan the Wanderer?

"I was born with luck as a twin," roared Fafhrd jovially, leaping up so swiftly that the cranky sloop rocked a little in spite of its outriggers. "I catch a fish in the middle of the ocean. I rip up its belly. And look, little man, what I find!"
          --Fritz Leiber, in "The Sunken Land"

"Stay thirsty, my friends."
            --The Most Interesting Man in the World (Silly commercials, but worthy attitude)


"Was there any comfort, he wondered, in seeing the outlines of life?"
          --Martin Cruz Smith, of his investigator Arkady Renko, from one of his novels . . . Havana Bay or Red Square?


In Anglo-Saxon, garsecg is a kenning for the sea. It means "the spear-man."

Three Coins from Guy Davenport

I love Guy Davenport's fine collection of critical essays: The Geography of the Imagination.  He had such a breadth and depth of knowledge, literary and humane, that he was able to bring to bear at a moment's notice, or so it feels, time and again.  Many of the essays began as lectures, composed while Davenport walked from his house to the university.  I wish I'd been in more than a few of those classes.

Here, I just want to share three quotations plucked almost at random from that fine book.

"Translation involves two languages; the translator is in constant danger of inventing a third that lies between, a treacherous nonexistent language suggested by the original and not recognized by the language into which the original is being transposed."

--from "Another Odyssey"


"Plutarch in the first structuralist study of myth, Isis and Osiris, demonstrates that there is no one way of telling the tales of the tribe. A myth is a pattern, not a script."

-- from "That Faire Field of Enna"



"Sir Walter Scott, out hunting and with some good lines suddenly in his head, brought down a crow, whittled a pen from a feather, and wrote the poem on his jacket in crow's blood."

--from "Finding"

Compassion's Compass

"Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries."
--Theodore Roethke

Rafting In The Studio

“Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity. I don't see a different purpose for it now.” 

--Dorothea Tanning

I was tempted to title this entry "Anger Management," which is true to an extent, but art's aid to essential sanity is something that I favor and recommend.  I took my own advice and managed to fit the studio into my day.

Three bowls and some silly little figures: feeling fairly sane right now.

"My Aim Is True": Novel Navigation?

Or, By Bluff and Blunder?
Or, Compassion As Compass?
Or, Pin The Tale On The Donkey?

I'll stop with the subtitles, the alternative guides, and move to my central concern.  Here are three quotations that I've probably offered before, but the last few days I've found them resonating alongside a certain ambition to craft a full-length narrative of mystery and adventure.

1.  "But I had learned long ago that resolution by itself is not enough; we are what we do, not what we think and feel."
--James Lee Burke, "Heaven's Prisoners"

Here I am quoting from memory, but this is a quotation that sticks with me, that offers a rather pitiless ideal, which draws me in even as I want to bring or find more compassion than those words offer. "Resolution" in the first part of the sentence definitely means "completion" or "finishing," not merely "deciding upon" or "resolving to do." I think this quotation will help me to set up the conflicts in the "novel" I'm attempting to outline/frame.

2.  Let's listen to my second-favorite ancient Greek poet:


I over-reached
And another
Bears the bother.

--Archilochos
trans. Davenport

I take that short poetic fragment with ruefulness, with regret in the tone, not triumph, though I can see the psychology that would exult in that way. I can see such, but save me and all of us from such, I say.


3.  And the last of the triad, for now:

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
--Maya Angelou

Fourth?  Frankly, on reflection, I can see how all three of the quotations above spiral around each other, twining thematically into one threefold strand, and so further sayings may be called for.  Somehow, the supposed opening line of my absolute favorite ancient Greek poet's lost comic-epic also horns in . . . .

"He knew many things, and all of them badly."
Homer, from his lost Margites . . . .


I'm quoting from memory again here, but I think you can see I don't plan to tell a tale overburdened by seriousness.  And a fallible, flawed, but well-meaning character?  Who wouldn't like a bit of that?  I mean, aren't we constructed in that way ourselves, however we may aspire and resolve to do better?

And, that fourth selection just may be another way to say "Pin the tale on the donkey."

Touchstone: Stevenson's Treasure Island

I love adventure stories, always have and always will. Homer's Odyssey, Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes, and Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island have been the stories with the earliest and longest holds on me. I think the version of Homer I first read was called The Adventures of Ulysses, giving the Roman name for the ancient Greek hero; someday I'll track down a copy. Here I want to share a little about Treasure Island, particularly two moments in the very first chapter of that book.

Read the book's opening words:

Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17--and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.

"And that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted"! That phrase always catches me, holds me suspended in the literary-present, in the now and how, as if this adventure had really only just happened, as if Jim, the captain, the squire, the doctor, and the few surviving crew had only just returned, and as if I too could join the adventure, could seek out that treasure, the treasure not yet recovered. When I was a boy, I might not have noticed why that opening sentence meant so much to me (though I just might have, being attuned to the telling--not just the plotting--from an early age). If asked, I would have pointed to the treasure, but probably also to the names, the island, the inn, the sabre cut, and even the allure of the 18th-century setting, with one thing offered after another. Glorious abundance, yes, but the phrasing of that "treasure not yet lifted" is the skeleton key to the triple lock of the engaged imagination.

Here's another passage from a bit later in the first chapter. (Though not much later. Stevenson can move from action to reflection to action as fast as anyone, when he wants to.) I give you a half-paragraph to set up the contract between (the as-yet-unnamed) Billy Bones, the scarred and domineering lodger at the Benbow Inn, and young Jim, our narrator and prospective alter-ego, and then there's the paragraph of true interest for me:

He had taken me aside one day and promised me a silver fourpenny on the first of every month if I would only keep my "weather-eye open for a seafaring man with one leg" and let him know the moment he appeared. Often enough when the first of the month came round and I applied to him for my wage, he would only blow through his nose at me and stare me down, but before the week was out he was sure to think better of it, bring me my fourpenny piece, and repeat his orders to look out for "the seafaring man with one leg."

How that personage haunted my dreams, I need scarcely tell you. On stormy nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the house and the surf roared along the cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions. Now the leg would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous kind of creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the middle of his body. To see him leap and run and pursue me over hedge and ditch was the worst of nightmares. And altogether I paid pretty dear for my monthly fourpenny piece, in the shape of these abominable fancies.

I first taught Treasure Island back in 1997 as an experiment. (Consider how the book now is marketed as a children's book, consider how the language of the book is somewhat dated and demanding, and yet consider the presentation of characters in action, the sustained narrative, and the payoff of pirate treasure.) As I reread this book that had mattered so much to me, this paragraph about Jim's imagination really struck me as a mark of Stevenson's quality and as, say, one finger of the grip the book has had on me. Of course, I love pirate stories in general, but young Jim Hawkins is the particular focus here. You can tell by how Jim stands up for his silver fourpenny piece each month that he's a remarkable lad, but he isn't just courageous, isn't just proof against anxiety or fear, isn't just oblivious and intent on the cash. Jim Hawkins is observant, has pluck, and holds within him both the empathy and imagination that will be the guides for his every action, though he will also suffer for those guides, those gifts. I loved that Jim had these anxious fantasies, these nightmares of the engaged spirit, because that made him more human, though still heroic, made him more like myself, and therefore I could also be more like Jim, couldn't I?

Such reflections are no doubt standard fare, the stuff of anxious therapy and reveries of childhood. I put my thoughts about these passages here to mark, for myself, their importance, and to model such reflecting. I don't discount or undervalue how most of us can tell these same self-absorbed narratives of how stories worked on us and for us; I care quite a bit about how stories shape us and how we aid and abet such shaping. How can I ask my students and my friends to read any books at all if I am not honest with myself how books may matter? Are we less susceptible, less malleable, or less open to the shaping power of narrative as adults? I think that's a question only to be answered by each of us, for each of us.

There's far more to Treasure Island than these two short passages, and Jim's arc of growth provides one good reason to read this fine book. Still, don't forget the adventure, the pirates, the parrot, the Hispaniola, chests full of pieces of eight, Ben Gunn, Israel Hands, and Long John Silver himself. Long John Silver: Jim Hawkins' strange surrogate-father; trustworthy betrayer; handy, glib, and deftly brutal. Long John Silver, "the seafaring man with one leg," just may haunt your dreams too.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. New York: Signet, 1981.

Touchstones: Duane, Robbins

I tend to gather quotations. I harvest the words and phrases in books or in conversation that arrest, jar, sear, soothe, explicate, or edify something somewhere somehow for me. There may be a sense of recognition, a glimpse of the past or of a possible future. Or, there may be a revolution, a shift in perspective, that sudden awareness where before there had been something only now grasped as false, facile, unearned, unreliable. Once or twice, I have felt caught, gripped, even gutted. When I've been lucky, there's been growth, an enlargement in my sense of the world, or in myself.

Here are two that I return to again and again. I'll let you imagine how each strikes me. How does each strike you?

The first voice is Dan Duane's, from his Caught Inside: A Surfer's Year on the California Coast:

"If there's a relief in discovering the life you most desperately dream of living, there's also a fear in discovering your soul's needs--after all, how then deny them?"

The second voice is Tom Robbins', from the narrator of his Jitterbug Perfume:

"Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer."

Feeling a bit thirsty, a bit in need of comfort. Cactus, here I come.