Fool's Gold; Or, The Admonition

How good is the book in your head--if it isn't on the page?
What book?
I don't see a book.
In the head or in the heart?

Page, page, page--that's what matters.

Story of my life.

Read less; write more.
Keep on reading, but write more.
Get it down; revise it.
Do the thing that needs to be done.

Voices in my head.

I'd quote my father, but then I'd just be looking for pity or mercy or something.

Right now the book in my head is a mixture of Homer and Robert E. Howard, John Fowles and Robert Stone, edited by Hemingway. All of which ought to make very little sense at all.

Not on the page.
Doesn't count.

I picked up a new used copy of James Lee Burke's Heaven's Prisoners from Pegasus Downtown yesterday, and now the book falls open to the exact page I was looking for--the previous owner/reader had my same hang-ups, I'm guessing--page 262:

"But I had learned long ago that resolution by itself is not enough; we are what we do, not what we think and feel."

Ouch.

As one of my students once said when faced with this same passage: "No mercy."

Pound's "Villonaud For This Yule"

VILLONAUD FOR THIS YULE

Towards the Noel that morte saison
(Christ make the shepherds' homage dear!) 
Then when the grey wolves everychone
Drink of the winds their chill small-beer
And lap o' the snows food's gueredon
Then makyth my heart his yule-tide cheer
 (Skoal! with the dregs if the clear be gone!)
Wineing the ghosts of yester-year.

Ask ye what ghost I dream upon?
(What of the magians' scented gear?) 
The ghosts of dead loves everyone
That make the stark winds reek with fear
Lest love return with the foison sun
And slay the memories that me cheer
(Such as I drink to mine fashion)
Wineing the ghosts of yester-year.

Where are the joys my heart had won?
(Saturn and Mars to Zeus drawn near!) 
Where are the lips mine lay upon,
Aye! where are the glances feat and clear
That bade my heart his valor don?
I skoal to the eyes as grey-blown mere
(Who knows whose was that paragon?)
Wineing the ghosts of yester-year.

Prince: ask me not what I have done
Nor what God hath that can me cheer
But ye ask first where the winds are gone
Wineing the ghosts of yester-year.

--Ezra Pound

The Crash Test Dummies: "There Are NIghts When All My Aching Bones Won't Let Me Sleep"

THE GHOSTS THAT HAUNT ME

There's a skeleton in everybody's closet
I can think of one or two in my own room
But I would like to introduce them both to you
You'd shake their bony hands and so dispel the gloom

'Cause you're so kind
I know you would not mind
You'd send away the ghosts that haunt me now
And the things I fear
Just wouldn't seem so near
And when I stroll out late at night
There would be nothing rattling at my heels

There are nights when all my aching bones won't let me sleep
And demons come to plague me as I lie in bed
But I know if you were sleeping there beside me then
That you could fend them off and they would let me rest

There are nights
When the wind comes howling through my old place
I have dreams
And I wake up with the sweat pouring down my face
And I wait till the morning comes

There will come a time I fear when all my days are done
And they will come collect my corpse and bury me
And then I hope you'll come over to the Other Side
To join me in our new life, keep me company

--Brad Roberts

from the Crash Test Dummies' debut album:

The Ghosts That Haunt Me

Kavanaugh's "On Raglan Road"

ON RAGLAN ROAD
          (Air: The Dawning of the Day)

On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew 
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue; 
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way, 
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day. 

On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge 
Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion's pledge, 
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay - 
O I loved too much and by such and such is happiness thrown away. 

I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that's known 
To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone 
And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say. 
With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May 

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now 
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow 
That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay - 
When the angel woos the clay he'd lose his wings at the dawn of day. 

-- Patrick Kavanagh

And here's my favorite rendition of this poem by Mark Knopfler and Donal Lunny.

"Hooked, Slimed, and Gutted"

SONG: "CABIN'D, CRIBB'D, CONFIN'D"

There's a hammer in the head
And a pounding at the door.
You'll never sleep soft
Till you even out the score.
There's a question on the table
And a cupboard full of woes,
But your sole occupation's
Shooting blanks of Old Crow.

The innkeeper said,
It never fails, never fails.
Just make yourself at home:
Bed of nails, bed of nails.

Our ghosts just doze at dawn
In a soul-bin "Lost and Found."
Though hooked, slimed, and gutted,
Sorrows rarely ever drown.
(At every bottle's bottom,
Every sinner floats.
On this fishing trip to hell
You're still bailing out the boat.)

Opportunity's not knocking,
But Misery's banging pails;
You've made yourself at home:
Bed of nails, bed of nails.

--MD

Robert Graves: Ghost Stories

Here are five more poems from the incomparable Robert Graves:

A RESTLESS GHOST
Alas for obstinate doubt: the dread
Of error in supposing my heart freed,
All care for her stone dead!
Ineffably will shine the hills and radiant coast
Of early morning when she is gone indeed,
Her divine elements disbanded, disembodied
And through the misty orchards in love spread--
When she is gone indeed--
But still among them moves her restless ghost.


TROUGHS OF SEA
'Do you delude yourself?' a neighbor asks,
Dismayed by my abstraction.
But though love cannot question love
Nor need deny its need,

Pity the man who finds a rebel heart
Under his breastbone drumming
Which reason warns him he should drown
In midnight wastes of sea.


SHE IS NO LIAR
She is no liar, yet she will wash away
Honey from her lips, blood from her shadowy hand,
And, dressed at dawn in clear white robes will say,
Trusting the ignorant world to understand:
'Such things no longer are; this is today.'


A LOST JEWEL
Who on your breast pillows his head now,
Jubilant to have won
The heart beneath on fire for him alone,

At dawn will hear you, plagued by nightmare,
Mumble and weep
About some blue jewel you were sworn to keep.

Wake, blink, laugh out in reassurance,
Yet your tears will say:
'It was not mine to lose or give away.

'For love it shone--never for the madness
Of a strange bed--
Light on my finger, fortune in my head.'

Roused by your naked grief and beauty,
For lust he will burn:
'Turn to me, sweetheart! Why do you not turn?'

I'D DIE FOR YOU

I'd die for you, or you for me,

So furious is our jealousy--

And if you doubt this to be true

Kill me outright, lest I kill you.

--Robert Graves

Not That Nisus

In the ninth book of his Aeneid, the Roman poet tells the tale of two friends, Nisus and Euryalus, who volunteer to deliver a message from the besieged main camp of the Trojans to Prince Aeneas himself, exploring and seeking allies in the Italian countryside. Aeneas' son Ascanius entrusts the two friends to find his father, their commander, and attest to the peril facing the camp. Unfortunately, the two Trojans are distracted from their mission by bloodlust and the lure of glory, and they stop to slaughter some sleeping Italian warriors. The younger Euryalus is seized after the moonlight gleaming off the helmet he'd taken for a prize gives him away, though Nisus has gotten free and could continue on his mission. He does not continue, but returns, wanting to free his younger friend. Nisus throws a spear at one of the warriors holding Euryalus, killing the man, but the Italian leader kills Euryalus in retaliation. (What else was likely?) Tormented by the death of Euryalus, Nisus then rushes in suicidally. The Italians cut him down and take both Trojans' heads as trophies.

Virgil calls forth Homer's very successful night-foray by Odysseus and Diomedes, catching the spy Dolon and slaughtering Rhesus and his company in their sleep, from The Iliad, and he recasts that episode into a fairly obvious fiasco with sentimental and sentimentally ridiculous overtones. Euryalus' mother's speech about the loss of her son and the brutality of war is moving, but the men are still dead. Later readers and writers have appreciated the martyrdom of the two Trojans, casting this episode as sentimentally heroic. Others have seen this episode as Virgil's clear commentary on Homeric pride and selfishness, on Greek "glory", in contrast to the more Roman virtue of honorable duty: Nisus and Euryalus acting as stand-ins for, say, Achilles and Patroclus. Virgil, being Virgil, all is possible, at once. To me, the effect of the episode is complex, morally and emotionally, more complex than I can easily explain. (I may attempt to better this treatment in a future blog entry.)

I've always been drawn to a key question that Nisus raises, which I offer in the English translation of Robert Fitzgerald: "This urge to action, do the gods instil it, / Or is each man's desire a god to him, / Euryalus?" What is the source of motivation? Of desire? And, where does it come from? Is it an external force or purely internal, however we dress it or explain it to ourselves? "This urge to action": the older I've gotten, the more complex my sense of motivation and drive. And yet often what drives us is simple, dress it up as we like. Still, for every action, the riddle of motivation, and only each one of us can truly understand the internal or external forces involved. That's my comforting--sometimes discomforting--fiction, anyway.

For some odd reason, I've always wondered What If Nisus Had Not Died Beside His Friend? What if Nisus survived the ill-conceived, luckless night-foray? Would he be haunted by his friend? Would he be haunted by guilt and remorse?

Back in the mid-90's, I started making notes for stories involving this Nisus-who-survives, casting him as a fugitive moving through southern Italy and the Greek isles to return to Troy, an exile masquerading as a fisherman and a sponge-diver. In my imagination, he gets caught up in Odysseus' scheme to salvage Greek ships sunken in storm on the way home laden with Trojan gold and other treasures. Does Odysseus realize that Nisus is a Trojan, a blood enemy, and if he does, does he care?

Back then, I also wrote the following poem, which I recently rediscovered.

NOT THAT NISUS

"I thought you were dead,"

The old ghost said,

The familiar boy with the helm

Too great for his head.

His arms so unsteady--

Yet his voice readily refrained--

"That you'd fallen with me,

That your devotion I'd gained."

"But I'm not that Nisus,"

The clay-gray dreamer denied.

"Not that epic figure, that hero--

If I were, I'd have died.

When you fell to the foe

Like the rose to the plow,

That Nisus was striving--

Scything Fortune knows how."

"I'll return with the night,"

Swore the young warrior at dawn.

But old Nisus had known

That he'd not slumber long

Without the bronze forms of fright

Cast into shadows of shame:

Marked by the might

Still sculpting his name.

--Matt Duckworth