Stone, Blue

Lover's Point, Pacific Grove, CA: April 2, 2011.


I was ducking beneath a wave, and I decided to take a photo while I was down there anyway.

(Once again, looking through old photo files pays off.)

Anticipation

Test Prompt: Is Roxane Worth The Trouble?

When I teach Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, I end up wanting to write lots of letters.  I also always assign the following topics--or roughly similar ones--for in-class or take-home writing:

Is Roxane really worth the trouble?

Is Cyrano just a fool?  (Use evidence from all parts of the play to support your position.)

Does the Comte de Guiche have any redeeming qualities?  And if so, are they enough, really, to redeem him?

Stuff like that.

The first is a particular favorite, and those of you who know the play understand that in the beginning, Roxane, aside from her beauty and liveliness, doesn't seem to merit such devotion from Cyrano and Christian.  In fact, in the second and third acts, she can seem petty and hurtful.  And yet if you keep reading . . . .

I also like to direct students to the balcony scene as a crescendo in the arc of the play.  What really happens amidst all those words back and forth?  Is it all just the "pretty nothings that are everything," as Roxane claims earlier, or is there something of greater depth at work?

Oh, Roxane--


I've also found the following quotation helpful in considering the overall arc of the play:


"The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
--Horace Walpole (1717-1797)


--a handful of thoughts at the end of a long day.

Isla Blanca

I like water-and-rock shots like this to feed my imagination.  I picture an island and I put my characters in play there.   This time, there's been a murder, and now that the fog has pulled back out to sea, well, Tom Dacre is about to wish the sunlight wasn't quite so bright.  Though that's not fair, he . . . .

Asilomar, actually.
Looking north toward what I call the Gazebo Rocks.
Perspective?  Memory for mourning?  Story-telling?  Uh-huhh.

McGuane: "Swallowing Hot Soup Upside Down"

Here's a piece from Thomas McGuane's Panama, a novel that made a lot more sense for me in 2006 or so than when I first read it back in 1985 or '86, in my mid-forties than in my mid-twenties.

If you know the novel, you just may know what I mean.

I have a lot of respect for how McGuane writes, for how he mixes the verbal gymnastics here with the practical considerations of characters in motion.


She put some music on--Tejas by Z Z Top, I think, something hard--stood up, and slid out of the rest of her duds.  I was transfixed, all my general views gone, everything withering to make room for the present, the furious rifle vision which riddles everything, that madhouse of what seems like a good idea at the time.


I had come with the flowers in addition to my usual maladies, been touched, and now found myself just as addled as thrilled.  My mental focus left like water for her to swim in; and suddenly we were on the floor and she was slipping away and I'm thinking, I can settle this.  And then I thought about Catherine and how it could be when it was with someone you loved.  This was the girl from the storm cellar.


She said, "You've got premature ejaculator written all over you."  I glanced into mid-air.


I felt completely there for it; but the feeling of the inside of her ran up spreading through me like swallowing hot soup upside down.  I looked down, as I do, and thought, as I am afraid I do, that she couldn't get away.  But she had some little movement that ought to be against the law.  And I was grateful, wondering where my old vanity had gone, when it was always my benificence that I thought was on the line, not these glorious collisions.  The earlier theater between Marcelline and me evaporated and it all grew dead serious; and probably, objectively, maybe even a trifle grotesque, as in knotty and wet and uncoordinated.


--from Thomas McGuane's Panama, Penguin Books, 1978: pages 50-51.

Totem Pool

Study session in progress.

(And what did Melville's Ishmael claim?  "I have swam through libraries . . . .")

Robert Graves: Gift, Glance, Green, Glint

Four poems by Robert Graves:

GIFT OF SIGHT
I had long known the diverse tastes of the wood,
Each leaf, each bark, rank earth from every hollow;
Knew the smells of bird's breath and of bat's wing;
Yet sight I lacked; until you stole upon me,
Touching my eyelids with light finger-tips.
The trees blazed out, their colours whirled together,
Nor ever before had I been aware of sky.


AT FIRST SIGHT
'Love at first sight,' some say, misnaming
Discovery of twinned helplessness
Against the huge tug of procreation.

But friendship at first sight?  This also
Catches fiercely at the surprised heart
So that the cheek blanches and then blushes.


VARIABLES OF GREEN
Grass-green and aspen-green,
Laurel-green and sea-green,
Fine-emerald green,
And many another hue:
As green commands the variables of green
So love my loves of you.


CHANGE
'This year she has changed greatly'--meaning you--
My sanguine friends agree,
And hope thereby to reassure me.

No, child, you never change; neither do I.
Indeed all our lives long
We are still fated to do wrong,

Too fast caught by care of humankind,
Easily vexed and grieved,
Foolishly flattered and deceived;

And yet each knows that the changeless other
Must love and pardon still,
Be the new error what it will:

Assured by that same glint of deathlessness
Which neither can surprise
In any other pair of eyes.

Robert Graves, New Collected Poems, Doubleday & Company, Inc: Garden City, New York: 1977.