Epic Ambitions: "Notes From a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel"

Three or four times in the past, I have read around in this poetic labyrinth from Evan S. Connell, first published in 1962, and I have often enjoyed following the lines of thought a few steps or, plunging further, have gotten lost. I am going to attempt reading straight through, which may or may not be the proper path.

I first looked at the book purely because I was born in Carmel, CA, and am taken with message-bottles found on beaches and such. The poetry led me to purchase the volume--which is either a work of genius or a trickster's hoard of bits and pieces. Either may prove compelling.

I can't tell yet how many different narrative voices or personae Connell is utilizing; certainly, while some "notes" are in the first-person, many are in the third-, and the overall narrative voice is Legion.  The interwoven narratives involve multiple historical periods or moments.  Exploration, geography, history, mystery, divinity, humanity, life, death, loss--coins--philosophy, alchemy, heresy, punishment, fear, greed--coins--exhilaration, awe: these are the key words I'm noting on the endpapers as I work my way into this literary place, this world-out-of-a-bottle.

Here is one passage that caught my eye:

Some say the tuna swims around the world
searching for a better life because he is not at home
in the sea. It may be we have met, this obsessed fish
and I, somewhere beyond the Pillars of Heracles.

(I love the use of "Pillars of Heracles" for the antique feeling, like reading an L. Sprague de Camp novel about the ancient world from my youth.  Even more, I love the "obsessed fish / and I".  This is an idiosyncratic choice of quotation, but that's also one joy of not being in the classroom, of being off-duty: I can please myself--and be reminded that the individual response matters, that the social or communal or universal responses grow from the responsible, attentive individual ones.)

And here is a passage I have found particularly compelling:

We know of Saint Dionysius
that when his head had been chopped. from his body
he picked it up and carried it;
and walked to the place where he wanted to be buried.
To what prayer will you listen, if not to this?

Off-duty, as it were, I retreat to the poetic and intuitive, if only for the sustenance to shoulder the burdens of teaching once more. (But not only "if only", you know?). The power of that last line in the passage: "To what prayer will you listen, if not to this?"  How is the foregoing a prayer?  How could it not be, on reflection and assertion?  The power and movement of art and the mind of the reader, in this case.  This is a book made up of a thousand poetic fragments, possibly more, and reading these pieces requires mental ordering, assessing, connecting--requires a willingness to suspend knowledge, even comprehension, in the moment for the sake of an emerging pattern.  The process is certainly immersive; the experience can feel overwhelming, a drowning, or feel more positive, upwelling and fulfilling.

Reading the first forty or fifty pages in order so far, attuned to resonance and pattern-making, has led to a familiar reflection.  I can not-know exactly what something means and yet know that something carries meaning, is pregnant with meaning, and standing as a witness feels true and useful. Many of my students take their cues from pop culture and expect meaning to be delivered, upon demand, and to be consumed. So often, however, meaning must be discovered, must be explored, may be missed or mislaid, may be sweated out, must be uncovered--partially, gradually--and may or must be resisted.  Grist for the mill of the mind.

I don't fully know how to teach the absolute sneakiness of art, but I try, I try, I try.

Epic ambitions--Connell's, mine; writer's, reader's--afoot.

The Rule(s) of Threes

The Rule(s) of 3s:
today's linchpin in English 1B, a required Introduction to Literature course.

Triples: In Macbeth, we have three witches, three murderers, three apparitions.

I want to talk about a different set of triples, of threes.

Air: you can go three minutes without air.
Water: you can go three days without water.
Food: you can go three weeks without food.

But how does any of that relate to our English class?

Habits?
What do you think?
Three weeks--to break or to lose a habit?
Three months--to make, to create, a habit.

Students, I say as I heft Homer's Iliad and Shakespeare's Macbeth in my hands,
You've been reading steadily for three months now.  Don't stop.

Yes, some of you were already readers before you came to this class; good for you.  I've been cheering you on all term.

But some of you haven't been readers . . . but now you are.

Keep going.  Make being a reader a full-on habit.

After finals, take a week or two weeks off--I mean, why would you?  But okay, take a little time off--but before that three weeks' mark rolls around, pick up Homer's Odyssey or another Shakespeare play or a novel, crime or fantasy or science fiction or whatever.  Just don't stop reading.


(I think my students appreciated the effort I was making, and I pulled them in with the rules of threes.)

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"

Regarding Rules?

Rules and personality types: followers, breakers, makers, and unmakers.

I'm a weird mix of all four, especially the last two.

How about you?

F: Well, I don't know about the last two, but I'm a fairly strict rule-follower… until the rules make no sense.

M: Then you become a rule unmaker, right?

F: I don't know; how do you make the distinction between breaking and unmaking?

M: Attitude.