Mental Models

Take your pick, right?

Macbeth Underwater

I'm trying to cut back on my book-buying, so about an hour ago I was faced with a dilemma. In my right hand, I was holding Antonia Fraser's history of the Gunpowder Plot (which I will refer to tangentially when I teach Macbeth this term); in my left hand, I was holding the Diving and Snorkeling Guide to Scotland. I also had tucked under my left elbow a book about 18th-century England that I'd already decided was necessary and inexpensive enough to buy (for another class).

In the spirit of adventure, of Macbeth Underwater, I chose the diving guide, though I'm already noticing that drysuits are preferred over wetsuits -- sure, cold cold water -- and that snorkeling or diving in Loch Ness is not recommended (too silty, too little visibility; no warnings about monsters).

(There's always later in the week for the Gunpowder Plot . . . .)

There may be some broad hints toward that book-plot I've been wrestling with . . . Macbeth Underwater . . . .

"A Seed-Sower": M.C. Richards

It took me half my life to come to believe that I was OK even if I did love experience in a loose and undiscriminating way and did not know for sure the difference between good and bad.  My struggles to accept my nature were the struggles of centering.  I found myself at odds with the propaganda of the times.  One is supposed to be either an artist or a homemaker, by one popular superstition.  Either a teacher or a poet, by a theory which says that poetry must not sermonize.  Either a craftsman or an intellectual, by a snobbism which claims either hand or head as the true seat of power.  One is supposed to concentrate and not spread oneself too thin, as the jargon goes.  And this is a jargon spoken by a cultural leadership from which it takes time to win one's freedom, if one is not lucky enough to have been born free.  Finally, I hit upon an image: a seed-sower.  Not to worry about which seeds sprout.  But to give them as my gift in good faith.

--Mary Caroline Richards,
Centering: In Pottery, In Poetry, and the Person, 1964.


(Thank you, JMcC, for first pointing me toward Richards' book.)

Robert Graves: Sharpness, Olives, Cure

THE SHARP RIDGE

Since now I dare not ask
Any gift from you, or gentle task,
Or lover's promise--nor yet refuse
Whatever I can give and you dare choose--
Have pity on us both: choose well
On this sharp ridge dividing death from hell.


UNDER THE OLIVES

We never would have loved had love not struck
Swifter than reason, and despite reason:
Under the olives, our hands interlocked,
We both fell silent:
Each listened for the other's answering
Sigh of unreasonableness --
Innocent, gentle, bold, enduring, proud.

THE CURE

No lover ever found a cure for love
Except so cruel a thrust under the heart
(By her own hand delivered)
His wound was nine long years in healing,
Purulent with dead hope,
And ached yet longer at the moon's changes . . .
More tolerable the infection than its cure.

--Robert Graves