The Lonely Bachelor Attempts to Gild Nature

For Marilynn Lawrence

(Burne-Jones, The Hand Refrains)

Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (Hippocampus Press 2010)

Georges Bataille, "The Cruel Practice of Art" (1949)http://supervert.com/elibrary/georges_bataille/cruel_practice_of_art

Christos Yannaras, Person and Eros (Holy Cross Orthodox Press 2007)

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!

That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

Of unreflecting love; -- then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,

Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

~ Keats

Ruskin remarked somewhere that there is really no bad weather, only different kinds of good weather. When gray and rainy weather forces me to gloomy thoughts, as it often does, I find that instead of engaging in salubrious activities, I read things that are reflective of the state of things outside my window. Such have been the hours spent this weekend. Finally, I have gotten around to reading Thomas Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. I was forced to stop many times to take a breather from the relentless, yes, gloom of the work. This is not to say that I disagree with his overall thesis. Ligotti is making the not very original (as he readily admits) claim that all is not right with our existence, that being alive is not a very great nor even a good thing. Drawing heavily upon the work of the Norwegian pessimist philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe, Ligotti articulates quite well the knowledge that every thinking person possesses -- buried often, as it were, deep in the less readily accessible regions of the mind -- that our consciousness is a source of immense pain, and far from being an evolutionary boon, requires us to "thwart it" in order to avoid going insane. "[C]onsciousness may have facilitated our species’ survival in the hard times of prehistory, but as it became evermore acute it evolved the potential to ruin everything if not held firmly in check. Therefore, we must either outsmart consciousness or drown in its vortex of doleful factuality" (p. 19). According to Zapffe (and Ligotti) we may "thwart" consciousness in four general ways: 1) by isolation, or hiding from ourselves and others the true ruinous nature of consciousness; 2) by anchoring our lives in "metaphysical verities" (Ligotti's phrase) such as God and religion, family values, law and society, et cetera; 3) by distraction (pretty self-explanatory), i.e., by engaging in essentially meaningless activities -- "a television screen or fireworks display" -- in order to think of anything but the curse of consciousness; and finally 4) sublimation (used here in a rather specialized sense), by which Zapffe and Ligotti mean "the process by which thinkers and artistic types recycle the most demoralizing and unnerving aspects of life as works in which the worst fortunes of humanity are represented in a stylized and removed manner for the purposes of edification and entertainment, forming the conspiracy of creating and consuming products that provide an escape from our suffering in the guise of a false confrontation with it—a tragic drama or philosophical woolgathering, for instance" (p. 18). In other words, making horror beautiful, or at least sublime. I could not help thinking here of the theories of Georges Bataille, who wrote, in an essay entitled "The Cruel Practice of Art" that "if there is any truth to the idea that human life is a trap, can we think -- it's strange, but so what? -- that, since torture is 'universally offered to us as the bait,' reflecting on its fascination may enable us to discover what we are and to discover a higher world whose perspectives exceed the trap?" I find it odd that Ligotti did not mention Bataille in his book; it seems appropriate that he should. I cannot think of any aspect of life more "demoralizing and unnerving" than torture. Bataille is quite right when he states that "what we call cruelty is always that of others, and not being able to refrain from cruelty we deny it as soon as it is ours." Cruelty, according to Bataille, is any act that we do not have the heart to endure. Aztec sacrifice, for example, was not cruel from the perspective of the ancient Aztecs (the victim, we are sure, felt otherwise); the contemporary sadist, about to take a whip to his "victim," repeats to himself that this act is cruel -- yet in fact, owing to the desire of the masochist to be whipped, the act is not cruel but simply a rather extreme form of sexual gratification. True cruelty occurs when the subject of the cruel act is destroyed -- but then, states Bataille, one is left with "a nothingness that abolishes everything." Art cannot overcome this, for art is an act of sublimation that takes us away from the truth of our being, which is being-toward-death, and gives us in place of the mind-shattering experience of cruelty some object about which to theorize.

Ligotti's book is such an object, even though he states at the outset that his "foregone conclusion is that our positive estimate of ourselves and our lives is all in our heads. As with many propositions that shoot for loftiness ('To be or not to be'), this one may be mulled over but not usefully argued" (p. 10). Of course, if one of the aims of art is to sublimate the inherent cruelty of existence by giving us edifying works to contemplate -- in place of the nothingness that is our ultimate telos -- another aim of art -- and this is the Romantic one -- is to "[exalt] the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and [add] beauty to that which is most deformed; [to marry] exultation and horror, grief and pleasure, eternity and change" (Shelley, A Defence of Poetry). The artist is not to remain passive in the face of nature's -- and humanity's -- cruelty, or to hide away from the stark reality of our nothingness; rather, the purpose of the artist, and of art, is to take this mad, sad, relentlessly sickening world and gild it in such a way that nature herself is defied, and a new reality is set up in place of the old.

Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow, in effect, into another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the heroes, demi-gods, cyclops, chimeras, furies, and such like; so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit. Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too-much-loved earth more lovely; her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden. (Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy, par. 10)

This may be a fool's task, especially since very few people read for authentic escape anymore; instead, most people watch movies -- and not to be transported to better places, but to see CGI superheroes or robots battle over the very world that is slowly sapping our intellects of whatever vitality they used to possess.

But back to cruelty, which is all too real. Our digitized world has produced a generation of so-called millennials for whom a very wide and deep safety zone has been placed between their cozy spot in the world and the reality taking place beyond their screens. My recent viewing on YouTube of an ISIS "fighter" kicking open the skull of a prisoner and then beheading him caused a response for which I am grateful: I sickened, my stomach churned, and tears came to my eyes. The cigar that I had been holding fell from my trembling hand. [If one is wondering why I was watching such a video, my answer is that I am a philosopher and a cultural critic, and I must encounter the world if I am to remain, uh, intellectually viable.] Now I am not sharing this to make my readers think that I am occupying a higher level of moral sensitivity than the apes who posted comments cheering the "fighter" on, or lamenting the poor quality of the video ("the fucker's hands were in the way! I wanted to see the knife go into the muthafucker's neck!"). Yes, a genuine quote -- and there were many more in that league. I am not going to post the link. Any interested person may easily find that video, or similar ones, for him or herself. But yes, I am grateful for my response. Even though I have been able to watch such grand contributions to cinematic art as the Saw films, or Hostel, and merely cringe in bilious amusement, the fact that an authentic film of real torture and death made me recoil in genuine horror (and upon reflection, sorrow) is sufficient evidence, for me, that I am not nothing, that a moral center exists in me, and that art must do more than provide a "false confrontation" with the sickness of our world. Art must defy the sickness, and produce realms wherein "the Spirit of Love reigneth and ruleth" (as Poe put it in "Eleonora").

(Boris Vallejo, Aurora and Tithonus)

I am an atheist, though not one of the types that routinely bash religion or seek to blame all the ills of our planet on believers in what Gore Vidal memorably called "sky-god religions." As a philosopher (albeit one who has wandered quite far from the mainstream academic world during the past few years) I have sought to temper my atheism -- which could easily lead me to the type of "miserablist" intellectual stance of a thinker like Ligotti -- with a devotion to the higher emotional aspects of life: poetry, art, music -- my writing. Unfortunately, love -- which I knew once upon a time -- has been naggingly absent from my life since She left me (and I feel that perhaps She reads my work from time to time, so if I am correct in that, I hope you are ... alone and thinking of me). Anyway, intellectually I am in the camp of Sartre and others, for whom the absence of a god is an "embarrassment." It is not so much that without "Him" we lose all hope of "finding values in an intelligible heaven" (as Sartre put it in Existentialism is a Humanism) but rather that we lose the emotional foundation that makes art more than just a diversion or, if one wishes to use the psychologically loaded term, sublimation. On a very personal note -- and is not a personal essay meant for precisely this manner of confessional writing? -- my atheism has been, is, largely an act of resigning myself to the gray exterior and hollow interior of my existence. When I was in prison some years ago (for a minor, alcohol-related offense) I found solace in listening to the classical music station and reading the poetry of Keats. Although the bible sat on my bunkside table, I rarely picked it up. And now, living the life of a somewhat bohemian (that is a nearly obsolete word, isn't it?) bachelor, I can use the words of Durtal, in the decadent masterpiece Là-Bas by Huysmans, to describe (in comforting third-person) my moral, ethical, aesthetic, and practical situation:

Unmarried, without settled income ... he sometimes cursed the existence he had shaped for himself. At times, weary of attempting to coerce words to do his bidding, he threw down his pen and looked into the future. He could see nothing ahead of him but bitterness and cause for alarm, and, seeking consolation, he was forced to admit that only religion could heal, but religion demanded in return so arrant a desertion of common sense, so pusillanimous a willingness to be astonished at nothing, that he threw up his hands and begged off.

Yet he was always playing with the thought, indeed he could not escape it. For though religion was without foundation it was also without limit and promised a complete escape from earth into dizzy, unexplored altitudes. Then, too, Durtal was attracted to the Church by its intimate and ecstatic art, the splendour of its legends, and the radiant naïveté of the histories of its saints.

Indeed, religion -- especially history-saturated Roman Catholicism and the equally storied and somewhat more exotic Eastern Orthodox Church (to which I belonged, with my ex-wife, for several years) -- can function in one's life as an intensely present work of living art. While never providing answers for me, religion -- when I practiced it -- provided responses, and that was sufficient to tame my roiling thoughts and lend force to my writing. The unmediated response to the love of a woman; the joining of emotion and the critical faculty brought about by the presence of a beautiful -- and yes I'll say it, divine -- soul with whom one is unquestioningly in love; the "torment" of beauty, as described so well by the Eastern Orthodox philosopher Christos Yannaras -- in a book that my ex-wife cruelly stole from me during our divorce: cruel because my copy contained numerous marginal and interlinear notes that I will never be able to recall or recover -- entitled, rather ironically, Person and Eros -- in words worth quoting here: "Erotic 'wonder' in the presence of the uniqueness of a physical beauty is always an invitation to communion and relation, an attraction which aims at union, at the satisfaction of the existential desire [to assuage] the agonizing character of physical beauty, the torment that accompanies the aesthetic experience of beauty" (pp. 83-84). Yannaras is speaking of the overwhelming desire to possess, in a transformative ekstasis, a beauty so perfect that it causes what can only be described as unbearable ontological pain. In his book he uses the term eros in the far-reaching sense found in the Neoplatonic philosophers and Platonizing Church Fathers, i.e., "an ontological condition, experienced by the soul that has forgotten its status as divine governor of the material realm and longs for its true condition" (Edward Moore, Plotinus, § d.ii, "Love and Happiness," in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://www.iep.utm.edu/plotinus/). This is neither poesy nor description of a dream-life; it is a reality known by anyone who has been simultaneously blessed and cursed with the inescapable condition of being in love with another person. That other person is the source of our salvation, the one with whom we will make the "about-face," as I have called the Platonic epistrophê, "resulting in an instant union of the soul with its divine principle, understood as an idealized, changeless form of contemplation" (cf. Moore, Origen of Alexandria, section 4.c, "Eternal Motion of Souls," in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://www.iep.utm.edu/origen-of-alexandria/). I wrote those quoted lines many years ago, when I still shared my life and self with Her, and believed that the "divine principle" -- which I will now call, with rather more maturity, and, perhaps, cynicism, the combination of intense sexual desire and emotional comfort -- was found in this world when the ontic space separating persons was bridged through love, to become an ontological reality. This Heideggerian language is more than intentional; it aids my recollection of Her, for whom Heidegger was Her own bridge into the realm of philosophy, wherein She has, I believe, found a permanent home, while I remain in my little space -- I will not call it home -- "Unrespited, unpitied, unrepriev'd" ... "And what is else not to be overcome?" (these lines are from Milton, Paradise Lost, for those who need to be told).

"That is all that any career pessimist can hope for -- to put on show the horrors he has seen with his naked eye and the pain he has felt with his frail body" (Ligotti, p. 25). And how does that help the situation, mitigate the lacerations of memory? Religion, as I have discovered the hard way -- that is, through the worst of all possible intellectual wake-up calls: divine mockery (I shall explain) -- can only pull one into a society of people who have either never felt real pain, or who have wrapped themselves so tightly in the shroud of living death that pain, or memory of pain, no longer matters -- indeed, it is as though it never mattered. "And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away" (Revelation 21:4 KJV). My hope, of course, was not that the former things should pass away, but that they should return, resume, so that I might be given the opportunity to undo the wrongs I committed in my youth (a relative term). As I prayed one evening with friends -- during my separation from Her; the divorce was not yet finalized -- asking, nay begging, God to touch Her heart, not even to lead Her to forgive me, but only to open the door (literally and figuratively) to me once again, so that I may put into action all that I had learned, I was told I had a phone call. It was a mutual friend -- so I thought -- telling me that if only I entered into recovery for my alcoholism, She would give our marriage another chance. Oh, how I rejoiced! My friends believed that our prayers had "worked," and that night was one of pure joy. But I found out, not long after, that the "friend" had simply felt sorry for me, and was sure (in his own mind) that She would eventually come around. So he jumped the gun, so to speak, and told me what he was certain would happen -- only it didn't. She had no intention of giving me another chance, nor even of speaking to me again. And so it remains to this day. Five years later. And my love for Her is as strong as it has ever been.

If one of the aims of art is to free one from the shackles of an unbearable existence, it is happening for me, slowly. My atheism, which took hold the moment I realized that, if God exists, He would never have permitted me that false hope, would never have allowed me to spend a night awake in blissful expectation of holding Her again, only to find out, the next morning, that it was all an ill-advised but well-meaning effort by a friend to bring me some comfort: he had never even spoken to her. No god would use one's faith against one. Sure, some told me that it was the work of the devil, in whom I had never believed anyway. So after my release from prison, I took to the bottle, and stopped thinking, for a while, about anything. Various women entered my life, only to dissolve into the morning or evening or some gray area in between. Several times the words "I love you" escaped my mouth, heard by the wrong person but meant for the one who will never be truly absent. I began reading again. Not philosophy or patristics, at least not as much as before. Today I am reading, as much as possible, the works of those who, in Sidney's words, attempt to "make the too-much-loved earth more lovely." For it is here that salvation is to be found, not in some hoped-for other realm, and certainly not in the presence of another person, not in a life shared with a beloved, however beautiful and inspiring of erotism she may be. As I write for no known audience anymore, I feel a freedom that I have not known until now. That freedom made its force felt just the other day, when I gave a lecture on personal essay writing at a local library. Mostly everyone there was yearning to communicate something about themselves, as one would expect, but there were a few -- I sensed strongly -- who were trying to reveal something to themselves. Such revelation, as James Baldwin stated so clearly in his essay on "The Creative Process," requires us to "cultivate ... the state of being alone." In the last analysis -- and I mean that literally, for I am through with analyzing that which allows me not only to live, but to flourish -- the darkest place is our own mind, our own inner self, and I suppose I'll say it, our soul. "The role of the artist," writes Baldwin, "is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that forest; so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place." In all my loneliness -- and it has nearly destroyed me over the past few years -- I have only at last come to understand that "a human dwelling place" need not be one that is shared with another person, no matter how beautiful they are. The gilding of nature, the flowering of the self, "the word stronger and more delicious than any" (Walt Whitman), the early morning rising with something to do that requires only ... my own mind and my laptop. Freedom. Religion is not necessary, nor is god, or "spirituality" (a term meaning everything and nothing); the only necessity is that I keep on seeking the one great escape that will bring me to a place where there is always good weather.

Many years ago I presented a paper entitled "Salvation and the Human Ideal: Plato, Plotinus, Origen" at Villanova University; and in the audience sat my beloved. The paper was written for Her, even though we had only been together for a few months at that point. My thesis was that the original goal of philosophy was to seek salvation through self-knowledge. Not an earth-shattering claim, I know. But what set my paper apart was my insistence on the intimate connection between intellect and emotion; that when these two are not artificially separated but entwined erotically (in the Neoplatonic sense mentioned above) we achieve a natural state of glory in the here-and-now. I was struggling, at that time (between 2000 and 2001), with the supernatural elements of religion, and felt strongly that true salvation occurs when two lovers unite, and that evil is not the absence of good (as Proclus and others argued throughout the ages) but the absence of someone to love. Religion, by placing evil on a metaphysical level, treats things like cruelty, torture, all the barbarisms of our life-world -- including, for me, the ever-present absence of Her -- as forces emanating from something beyond the world, caused ultimately by one Force that will eventually be overcome. "Such is the function of the concept of evil -- to give glamour, in both meanings of the word, to our lives. Pain, on the other hand, is an unglamorous fact of life and cannot be raised or lowered to the status of a concept, either moral or metaphysical, and compresses the distance between the condition of being and the condition of suffering" (Ligotti, p. 28). This might be true, if truth can even be invoked for the sake of such a topic as Ligotti's book covers, but for me the fact remains that I am alone, and my only salvation must come through art -- for it is the only way I know of doing what must be done -- that is, to do what a lover does (in Baldwin's words): "reveal the beloved to himself, and with that revelation, make freedom real."

(c) 2015 Edward Moore

Rubato, Vibrato, and Primordiality

Some hefty thoughts on a light-hearted topic: violin music and writing

© 2015 Edward Moore

I recently had the rare privilege of spending an afternoon discussing the art of the personal essay with several accomplished writers practicing in various genres, ranging from the novel, to the short story, poetry, and spiritual memoir. My main reason for proposing and conducting that little symposium was to prove to myself that the personal essay -- an august genre that seem to me to be fading or, rather, dispersing into the realm of tweetable textese effusions -- is still among us, even if it is mostly residing in desk drawers or on unaccessed sections of hard drives. One of my hobbies (it seem that term is rarely used anymore) is to seek out intelligent editorials, regardless of the positions being espoused, since I am a great lover of language and take delight in verbal virtuosity. Many years ago, when I was working on my doctorate, I used to take frequent breaks to check out commentary on Slate, for example -- Christopher Hitchens being my favorite contributor -- or Eric Alterman's Altercation weblog. The writing was always energetic and often gave the impression of having been executed in great haste, with devil-may-care abandon. Indeed, I would imagine Hitchens or Alterman walking away from their computer, after posting an especially incendiary piece, in dismay over a word or sentence or an entire paragraph that they wished they could "unsend" (if only such a button existed!). How many times have I -- all of us! -- felt the regret and even the knotted stomach after writing something for the masses that was out of line with our public image! Consistency, that "hobgoblin of little minds," in Emerson's ever-apt phrase, is what makes, if not a poor thinker, certainly a poor essayist. The daring excursion into new territory, the dangerous flirtation with the hydra of devil's advocacy -- heart-pounding challenges to the intellectual structure that protects us from the open fields of insanity or absurdity -- is what makes writing exciting, and more than just a production to be downloaded, scrolled through, and forgotten. It is what raises mere typing to the status of art. This notion of mine was discussed in the aforementioned symposium, and the analogy with music was brought up, by Yours Truly.

Many, many years ago -- before the dissertation, that milestone which brought on post-Ph.D.-partum depression (with which I still struggle) -- I was a budding young violinist, spending several hours a day carefully sawing my way through a second movement of a Mozart concerto, and later, planting the seeds of carpal tunnel syndrome with Paganini's 24 Caprices or the diabolically seductive D minor concerto of Sibelius. When I began to play publicly, the relatively easy pieces from the Baroque and early Classical periods satisfied me, to an extent; but with the backup of a good pianist or, later, with members of the string quartet for which I served as second violinist, a safety net (to use an old cliché) was in place, of sorts. Granted, one could screw up, but unless the error was glaring, the pianist or the other members with whom one was performing could play over the glitch rather easily, so that only an expert or a really well-attuned layperson would notice. The "fun" really began when I played solo -- i.e., unaccompanied -- pieces, like a Paganini caprice, or the "Last Rose of Summer" variations by Ernst, or one of the Ysaÿe sonatas, et cetera; for it was then that I became aware of the hobgoblin of consistency. Was I going to do my best to play each note exactly as it appeared on the page (following the fingering and bowing suggestions of Ševčik or Galamian)? Or was I going to engage in that wonderfully liberating practice known as rubato? This works quite well, as I discovered, with a rather tedious piece such as the second Caprice of Paganini, or, for a more recondite example, Ernst's D major Concertino, which easily lulls one into passivity if those seemingly interminable scales of thirds and sixths aren't rubato-ized. Even in the grandest piece of the violin repertoire, the sacred Solo Sonatas and Partitas of J. S. Bach, some embellishment injects an authentic periodicity and contemporary excitement to these immortal works, as Isabelle Faust has demonstrated so well in her recent recordings.

In the liner notes to her 2013 recording of pieces by one of Paganini's finest successors, Pablo de Saraste, Julia Fischer (pictured right) explains why the distinction between artistically serious works and virtuoso showpieces is often a spurious one. The effect of music is not either / or -- that is, there should be no effort to separate "highbrow" intellectual music from "lowbrow" emotional music; the profound Reformation Symphony by Mahler versus Wieniawski's Légende, for example. And in an earlier interview [http://www.violinist.com/blog/laurie/201010/11702/] discussing her recording of Paganini's 24 Caprices, Fischer states that she "approached them as I would a Mozart concerto." Taken by themselves, the pieces are indeed inviting of flashy playing, and a performer who prides himself on his ability to do a fine job dazzling an audience with, say, number 9, must -- if he is to take in, and communicate, the full scope of Paganini's accomplishment -- view the Caprices as a single work, or "cycle," as Julia Fischer puts it. "When you play [the 24 Caprices] in a cycle you have to pay much more attention to the musical differences of the caprices -- the audience shouldn't be bored after a few caprices and think it's all the same. If you just play, for example, 13 today and, let's say, 19 next week, it doesn't matter if the atmosphere is very similar. In the cycle, you have to find the differences." Indeed, differences. Not similarities or consistency. An effective essayist (to return to the topic that introduced the musical sidebar) will not compose pieces that are predictable. In a rather ironic statement, given the overall predictability of his opinions, the philosopher Nietzsche wrote that "The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind" (Daybreak § 573). ["Nietzsche needed persons, not masks, for his philosophy," wrote Thomas Ligotti, in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2007), p. 31. This is a most telling remark, and one needs to read Ligotti's book carefully to unpack it.] Music is, of course, a nondiscursive artform -- i.e., it is not concerned with language and the expression of communicable or iterable (to use a postmodern term) meaning. Rather, music strikes something in us -- I was about to say a chord -- that is primal, and which precedes such intelligible noetic constructs as the concept, the thesis, antithesis, synthesis, et cetera -- though music does function in a sort of logical manner, following rules that are more honored in the breach than the observance. When Julia Fischer speaks of the "differences" that make the 24 Caprices a "cycle" rather than just a collection of showpieces, she is referring, I think, to the artist's ability to don as many masks as possible, in order to gain a desired effect. Nietzsche also wrote that "the will to a system is a lack of integrity" (Twilight of the Idols I.26), and while donning masks may seem like a lack of integrity, I think that, given the unthinking blandness of so much commercial music -- and entertainment in all genres that attempt to pass as art -- the ability to don a mask while remaining artistically vibrant is to keep the life-force flowing in those areas of human expression where the person -- a unique, unrepeatable entity (ancient Greek, hupostasis) -- is still sufficiently protean to be interesting. T. S. Eliot remarked, in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) that "only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things." Indeed, as I write this I am listening to various performances by Julia Fischer on YouTube -- each one a new prosôpon placed upon her inimitable hupostasis; at the moment, Tschaikovsky's violin concerto. How different she is here, in the rather lugubrious transition to the ebullient final movement, from her light-hearted prancing in Paganini's La Campanella!

Poetry, it seems, is the closest linguistic artform to music, for obvious reasons. The rules are there, and a poet who is able, at the right moment, to bend or break the rules for the sake of personal expression, gains notoriety. Ezra Pound, I think, is a poet who came as close to being a musician of the word as it is possible to be. The reason for this, I believe, was his devotion to the art of translation: taking an existing work and from that raw material, that hulê (to again use an ancient Greek philosophical term), producing an entirely new work, albeit one which rests upon an hupokeimenon (another Greco-Roman, or more accurately patristic, philosophical term) or substratum from which one can only depart so far before the work degenerates into self-serving grandiosity. Pound's Canto I, a very loose translation of a Renaissance translation of part of Homer's Odyssey (the descent to Hades), displays the manner in which Pound's mastery of the rhythm -- if not all the grammatical niceties -- of Anglo-Saxon poetry enabled him to make free-flowing (rubato-ized) music out of this ancient substrate.

And then went down to the ship,

Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly seas, and

We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,

Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also

Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward

Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,

Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.

Translating in order to produce an effect -- an effect that the translator has already felt, through his or her experience of the work -- is what every fine poet or musician does. A performance of a composed piece of music is a translation; and success is measured by the performer / translator's ability to produce both admiration and a sort of misgiving in the listener or reader. I have often that felt the most successful performances -- whether they be essays, poems, novels, or interpretations of a musical piece -- are the ones that unsettle me in some ineffable way. To be taken beyond language, conception, cogency, into the realm of the primal, is to experience beauty emerging from the roiling darkness as the inspiration of the artist clarifies the prima materia. Now perhaps I am getting too philosophical about something that is supposed to liberate consciousness from the trammels of structure and stricture. But one would have to be sufficiently philisitinized, I believe, not to sense that something is seriously wrong with the artistic world of twenty-first century America. Agendas rule the day, and pure art -- Was there ever such a thing? I think so (topic for another effusion) -- has become utilized for socio-political purposes. Ezra Pound was perhaps writing "nonsense" (as his biographer Humphrey Carpenter stated) when he made the following statement about music (in his introduction to his 1911 translations of Cavalcanti):

Rhythm is perhaps the most primal thing known to us ... music is ... pure rhythm, rhythm and nothing else, for the variation of pitch is the variation of rhythms of the individual notes, and harmony the blending of these various rhythms.

But I think, on the primal level, we respond to rhythms in speech in a most powerful way -- which is why poetry was the first form of written communication. Easily memorizable, onomatopoeic, and susceptible to virtually infinite variations. Quite like music. And like vibrato on a violin ... when our pitch is a tad off, that wonderful shaking of the wrist permits the minor correction that only a bona fide expert would recognize as a pitch adjustment.

The Art of the Personal Essay

A Two-Part Seminar on Essay Writing with

Edward Moore, S.T.L., Ph.D.

at the

Sayreville Public Library

June 18 and 25, 2015

http://www.sayrevillelibrary.org/

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.

~ E. B. White

One writes out of one thing only -- one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

~ James Baldwin

The English word essay derives from the French essai, meaning "attempt" (from the verb essayer, "to try"). The self-obsessed, and utterly brilliant, sixteenth-century writer Michel de Montaigne called his collection of writings on numerous topics -- ranging from friendship, to cannibalism, and just about everything in between -- essais, and so we usually call a short piece devoted to a single topic which the writer is attempting to explain, an essay. However, an essay may be quite long, even book-length. Jacques Derrida's groundbreaking work Of Grammatology, for example -- which ushered in the deconstructionist movement in literary and cultural theory -- was called an essay. My entire career as a writer has been devoted to the composition of essays, some book-length and highly technical (my works on Origen of Alexandria and Plato's Academy, for example), others shorter and more accessible, on topics of personal interest, such as favorite authors, music, artworks, or -- less often -- political and social concerns. There are two types of essays: the formal, a carefully constructed defense of a position, concept, or idea (a doctoral dissertation or a master's thesis are examples of a formal essay), and the informal or personal essay, which can be as long or as short as the writer wishes, and on any topic or topics under the sun. There are no strict rules for the personal essay -- and therein lies the difficulty; freedom can lead to extravagance, sloppiness, logorrhea (diarrhea of the pen, or keyboard). For the personal essay is rather like the guitar -- it is easy to play a guitar poorly, difficult to play one well. But when one plays well, it can be an extraordinary experience. Just recall Jimi Hendrix or Eddie Van Halen at their best. A personal essay, when written poorly, might be rambling, or confused and confusing, or simply boring. When written well, it can have a profound effect on the reader, and bring lasting satisfaction to the writer.

The most difficult part of the personal essay is choosing a topic -- or at least it should be. Just because an event or experience or idea is important or interesting or profound to you, does not necessarily mean it will be so for your reader. My first trip to Providence, RI -- the birthplace and lifelong home of my favorite author, H. P. Lovecraft -- when I was nineteen, was a deeply moving experience for me, one of the milestones of my career as a writer, thinker, and -- without sounding too dramatic, I hope -- as a person. To simply write a chronicle of the events that occurred during that visit would be, I fear, to bore my reader -- which is why I have never done so. I could easily write of the John Hay Library, where I held Lovecraft's manuscripts (with the appropriate protective gloves on my eager hands) and flirted with the pretty librarian; where I strolled up the nearly vertical streets of Stamper's Hill, stopping before the various pre-Revolutionary homes that served as the loci of events in his tales; where, at sunset, I sat across the river and watched the sun set aflame the dome of the Christian Science church, which crowns the hill "as London is crowned by St. Paul's." Indeed, I could go into detail about my youthful and futile efforts to write like Lovecraft and how, after that visit, I came into my own, as it were, and decided that -- for all my love of belles lettres and the "dark side of life," as someone put it to me -- my mind is attuned to philosophy, and so here I am, philosophizing to you about essay writing. So, topics. Simply put, if you have to sit and wrack your brain for a topic, you are not ready to write a personal essay. If, however, you have sufficient interests, things you love, like, despise, or wish to change, et cetera -- in short, if you are a thinking human being -- you have the ability to write a personal essay. Some of my recent essays include book reviews, reflections on Manichaeism, a discussion of free speech and terrorism, and a little panegyric on the duos of John Coltrane and Paul Quinichette. Some of these have been published on my blog, The Aristocrat, where I am my own editor and anything goes. Yet I desire readers -- and I have quite a few of them, thankfully -- so I do my best to keep my essays entertaining, and to avoid self-indulgence (I think), which is the temptation of many writers, Yours Truly especially. Hemingway, James Baldwin, and other fine masters of the craft, advised writers to write from personal experience. That is all well and good, for some topics. But it is also fun to go out on a limb, and write of things of which you are not quite sure, to question out loud, as it were, to send your immature ideas out into the world and see if they can hold their own against the numerous linguistic predators lurking in the dark corners of social media. We are fortunate, I think, to live in the digital age, in which any piece of writing we feel like typing can be sent to hundreds of thousands of people instantly, and perhaps get tweeted, go viral, and cause our in-boxes to fill up with praise mail or hate mail or, sometimes -- and it's no big deal (so I tell myself) -- no mail at all.

So what is the difference between a personal essay and a memoir? In an ideal world, an utopian realm in which truth is always told (or written), the only difference would be the extent of topics covered: a memoir would cover the writer's entire life up to the point of writing, with no poetic license taken, nothing omitted, nothing embellished; a personal essay would focus on a single topic or perhaps a few inter-related topics, again with truth-telling the primary concern. However, we do not live in an ideal world. And the first and arguably the greatest memoir ever written, the Confessions of St. Augustine, is filled with pious embellishments, exaggerations, and not a few omissions (though it is easy to read between the lines, in places). Augustine's concern in his memoir was, of course, with himself -- and his goal in writing, to use the poet e. e. cumming's words, was to spill his bright illimitable soul. And in so doing he gave the Western world its first introduction to the inner life of a person. A millennia later, Montaigne allowed his bright, if not illimitable, intellect to shine forth as he ranged over numerous topics, attempting definitive explanations or elucidations of all, yet more often than not simply stopping short, leaving the continuing exploration to the reader. This is the personal essay par excellence, a conversation between the reader and his or her unknown audience -- a linguistic act demanding attention and, if the reader is so inclined, a response. Shakespeare knew the essays of Montaigne, in English translation, and we would not be amiss to call the Bard's inimitable Sonnets personal essays in verse. The subject of the personal essay, then, is not so much the events of the writer's life -- an essay is not necessarily an episode in an autobiography, although it can be! -- as the writer's response to ideas or emotions arising from or provoked by life-events. Indeed, consider Shakespeare's Sonnet 30, for example:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:

Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,

For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,

And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,

And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:

Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,

And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er

The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,

Which I new pay as if not paid before.

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.

A personal essay is akin to a caprice in music, i.e., a piece in which the composer allows him or herself free reign, for the sake of experimentation or simply for showing off. One might be familiar with Paganini's 24 Caprices for solo violin. These pieces were written by that outrageous fellow (it was said that he sold his soul to the devil in return for his mastery of the violin) for one purpose: to dazzle the listener with virtuoso fireworks -- and to bedevil the performer with finger-twisting scales and nearly impossible leaps and twirls of the bow. In composing a personal essay, similarly, one may use one's facility with language to show off in grand euphuistic style, to haul even the most mundane topic to the auroral empyrean wherein Tithonus himself will open his eyes wide in juvenescent wonder. In the Hawthorne essay that we are about to read, old Nathaniel takes something as literally yawn-inducing as insomnia and gives us, as we shall soon see, quite a memorable little performance. Here is Hawthorne's "The Haunted Mind": http://www.eldritchpress.org/nh/hmind.html.

Now, just for fun -- instructive fun -- we are going to listen to Hemingway read his piece, "In Harry's Bar in Venice" (recording on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE04BmNmgAI ).

He was rather intoxicated, or pleasantly buzzed, when he recited this. A truly fine example of Hemingway's personal essay style is A Moveable Feast, actually a collection of inter-related essays forming a more or less cohesive narrative. Let us take a moment to read chapter 12, "Ezra Pound and His Bel Esprit":

http://charlyawad.com/images/books/A%20Moveable%20Feast%20-%20Ernest%20Hemingway.pdf

Persuade or Convince?

The topic that one chooses for a personal essay need not be one that requires an argument for or against an idea or concept; in other words, you might not have to convince your reader of anything. However, to make the essay interesting, it is a good idea to at least introduce an idea that requires a bit of persuasion. Intelligent people enjoy having their preconceived notions -- or even their deeply held convictions -- challenged. I certainly do. Even if I am not persuaded or convinced (more on that distinction in a moment) I enjoy taking the intellectual ride with the writer. In Hawthorne's essay, he is not making any earth-shattering claims, rather, he is simply taking the reader on a little excursion into his night-world, which he finds valuable for moral and spiritual reasons. For my part, since first reading that essay, many years ago, I have had a different attitude towards insomnia; now, when I wake up in the wee hours, I think of Hawthorne's words, and I reflect on mortality and the purpose and value of life. Or I take a sleeping pill. But either way, Hawthorne's essay has been proven successful -- for I have not forgotten it; its idea has remained in my mind. That is not to say I have come to hold his views on the afterlife; I remain an atheist and a materialist. He would have had to write a very different essay to convince me of an afterlife and a glorious home on high.

The distinction between persuading and convincing: In ancient Greece, in the Classical era, the philosopher Socrates found himself at odds with the great Sophists, i.e., teachers of disputation who specialized in winning arguments by using beautiful language to persuade their listeners of the rightness of their positions. According to Socrates, and his brilliant student Plato, truth is one and indivisible, and can be communicated through accurate language, simple and accessible for all. The Sophists, however, were not concerned with truth; rather, their only concern was with winning arguments. They were the great lawyers of the age, and highly influential. Socrates, in his simple speech, which consisted almost entirely of questions, made the Sophists sound rather silly, as he gradually, through adroit questioning, poked holes in their elaborately constructed arguments. [Let us pause here to review Plato's dialogue Euthyphro: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/euthyfro.html] In essay writing, one may of course take the tack of the Sophists, and meander in zig-zag fashion, treating truth as something culturally determined. That is what the philosopher Nietzsche did. One of his famous sayings is: "There are no truths, only interpretations." I would add that while I do not believe in absolute, universal Truth (with a capital 'T') I do believe in personal truths -- and a fine, even a great, essay will communicate some personal truth. I think that Emerson comes closest to doing this, even though his style is rather slippery and aphoristic. Yet when one reflects upon his rather feverishly expressed words, one gets a sense of truth-saying that increases with each reading of his piece. He wrote many more essays besides Self-Reliance, and he is well worth the effort of careful study. [See the full text of Self-Reliance: http://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm] In fact, the late Harold Bloom (with whom I was fortunate enough to have studied back in my days at NYU, so long ago) made the characteristically hyperbolical statement that "Emerson is God." What he meant, I think, is that Emerson is a writer's writer, not merely a model, but rather a writer to study over and over again for inspiration -- and to me, the Emersonian well (to indulge in a silly pun) is well-nigh inexhaustible. So a personal essay, at its best, is more akin to the linguistic pyrotechnics of the ancient Sophists, for when we sit down to spill our bright illimitable souls we are not attempting to communicate universal truth(s); rather, we are only trying to -- at best -- persuade our readers that we are on to something, and to hopefully invite them to think and / or read about our idea(s) at greater length. If we are aiming to convince, however, we had best sit down to compose a rigorously argued treatise like the Summa Theologia of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Commentary on Romans by Martin Luther, or the Principia Mathematica of Betrand Russell. While these works are monuments of the human intellect, I doubt that many people have them on their bedside tables, or downloaded on their tablets. A well-worn copy of Emerson, however, may easily be found in the home of many a thinking person.

First, Second, or Third Person?

In a 1994 interview, the underread, if not underrated, writer of literary dark fantasy, Thomas Ligotti, recommended first-person narration for its ability to render all effects -- emotional, aesthetic, even intellectual (a rarity!) -- immediate and aesthetically promising. Ligotti mocked the third-person style, in which the writer gives us what amounts to stage directions. For example, "Tom jabbed a thumb over his right shoulder and said 'Scram!'" Or "Tammy stood at the water cooler wondering if Brandon would approach and say 'Hi'." Ligotti likened this style's effect upon the reader to listening to a radio station that plays one bad song after another. This is not to discount completely the third-person style; Somerset Maugham's novel Of Human Bondage, or Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, are two examples of the third-person being not only effective but necessary for the impact of the tale. Joyce Carol Oates's recent novel Carthage, however, commits numerous sins to which a writer is tempted when she or he uses third-person. In my recent review essay, "On Unreadable Writing," I take aim at Oates and others who waste our time with telling rather than showing. This distinction is especially important in personal essay writing. I shall quote briefly from that article (published in my blog, The Aristocrat: www.antiplebeian.blogspot.com):

The magic that I admire in writers like Tolkien, Somerset Maugham, Isaak Dinesen, Huysmans, and Donna Tartt (to name a few), which consists in drawing characters and scenes so vividly that unique faces appear in the mind, scents and sounds enter the olfactory sphere without any conscious conjuring on my part. In the works of these writers, the people and worlds being described are already there, and I am encountering them, instead of being told about them. I would revise Gore Vidal's statement that a story is what it tells and no more, by repacing "tells" with "shows." For the background of the characters, their motivations, their emotions, their vices and virtues, only become effective as art when they do not come alive for the reader, but rather enter the reader's mind as already existing.

Now essay writing is its own artform; even though it has many affinities with the short story and even the novel -- e.g., conjuring of atmosphere, immediacy, a tripartite structure that tends toward a conclusion and even, in the best essays, builds suspense -- a personal essay is just that, personal, and while it must show itself to the reader as an artform, it is crucial that the writer avoid artifice. I do not like being pulled aside by a loquacious person, saying to me, in tremulous voice, Listen to this! I've got to tell you something! You're not gonna believe it! Or, even worse, being a member of a captive audience where said loquacious person is holding forth. I am sure many of you, at some point, have been at a dinner party or other social gathering, in the presence of someone who wants to to tell a story, a personal anecdote. This person usually begins by making some mysterious remarks, in the hope that someone will ask them to continue. Of course, if no one asks, this person will invariably begin the anecdote anyway, much to the annoyance of the captive audience. We have all been in such situations. A very poor essay teller (I will not call him a writer), E. B. White (my apologies to anyone here who enjoys his work -- and I admit to enjoying Charlotte's Web as a child) has the habit, in his essays, of pulling at his reader's wrist, as it were, and insisting that the reader follow him on whatever excursion he has planned. It is amazing to me that anyone follows him. I certainly cannot. But I will quote, as an example of what not to do, the opening of his very long and ironically titled essay, "The Years of Wonder":

Russia's foolish suggestion that a dam be thrown [one does not "throw" a dam, one builds one] across the Bering Strait brings back happy memories of that body of water and of certain youthful schemes and follies of my own. I passed through the Strait and on into the Arctic many years ago, searching for a longer route to where I didn't want to be [if this were being told to me at a dinner party, I'd reach for more wine at this point]. I was also in search of walrus [hearty gulp of wine here]. A dam, I am sure, would have been an annoyance.

Such is the opening paragraph. The reader, of course, has the luxury of closing the book; our hypothetical captive dinner party attendee has no choice but to find out why the dam would have been an annoyance and why, in the name of all that is reverent, the author was seeking out walrus. So does anyone find this captivating? Would you read on? Why?

Before discussing the relative merits or demerits of White's effusion, allow me to place it alongside a much better (in my humble opinion) opening paragraph by James Baldwin, from his essay, "Every Good-bye Ain't Gone":

I am writing this note just 29 years after my first departure from America. It was raining -- naturally. My mother had come downstairs, and stood silently, arms folded, on the stoop. My baby sister was upstairs, weeping. I got into the cab, waved, and drove away.

That's it. Why should we care? Baldwin is showing (not telling) us a scene that has played out numerous times, in all times and all ages, in all countries ... The terse style is reminiscent of Hemingway (this essay was written in 1977, long after Baldwin had established his style) ... Nothing is really special about this opening paragraph. So why read on? Only two questions arise, and they are not earth-shattering: Why is he leaving America again? And why is it "naturally" raining? What does that mean? This is not enough upon which to build an essay -- but it is enough to nudge one gently to the next sentence, which is, "It may be impossible for anyone to tell the truth about his past." Now we are moving along. We have a mystery here. A possible confession of something kept secret for twenty-nine years. I had no problem reading on. But what about E. B. White? What follows his inane opening paragraph? He writes: "I was rather young to be so far north [What does age have to do with longitude and latitude?], but there is a period near the beginning of every man's life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place." More inanity. White is writing not to us, but at us, and using a cutesy mode of reminiscence that makes me picture him in a rocking chair, sipping an iced tea and gazing out over a garden in need of weeding. It is a warm, comfortable day, we have nowhere to go, so we might as well indulge the old man and let him ramble -- assuming, of course, we are in a kind mood. Baldwin, by contrast, is in earnest, grim-faced, speaking with gravity, wasting no words. He is not trying to sell us anything, nor is he attempting to buy our time with nice language. He has something to show us, and he is taking us there. That is good writing.

So, what of the second-person mode used by Hawthorne? It is not easy to pull off, frankly, which is why it is rarely used. It takes more than a fine writer to recognize when the subject matter calls for second-person. The opening to "The Haunted Mind" (the title itself is sufficient to pull one in!) involves the reader immediately in an experience that we all have had: "What a singular moment is the first one, when you have hardly begun to recollect yourself after starting from midnight slumber!" It is worth noting that a mundane topic, or the description or discussion of an experience that we all have had -- many times -- is cast in a new light when it is placed on the page (or on the screen). "In every work of genius," wrote Emerson, "we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." Indeed, Hawthorne rendered back to us an experience so common -- waking in the middle of the night, thoughts flowing hither and yon -- that we rarely, if ever, give it much thought -- unless, of course, we've experience a nightmare of rare power. What Hawthorne is describing in his little essay is what Wordsworth called "emotion recollected in tranquillity."

You speculate on the luxury of wearing out a whole existence in bed, like an oyster in its shell, content with the sluggish ecstasy of inaction, and drowsily conscious of nothing but delicious warmth, such as you now feel again. Ah! that idea has brought a hideous one in its train. You think how the dead are lying in their cold shrouds and narrow coffins, through the drear winter of the grave, and cannot persuade your fancy that they neither shrink nor shiver, when the snow is drifting over their little hillocks, and the bitter blast howls against the door of the tomb. That gloomy thought will collect a gloomy multitude, and throw its complexion over your wakeful hour.

The adjective "gloomy," repeated here, does not accurately describe the feeling of the moment, of waking on a frozen night, alone in the dark with thoughts of mortality -- one's own and others -- roiling in one's brain; the gloom will settle later, when one is awake in the clear light of day, and the tempestuous night-thoughts a distant, but still effective, memory. The power of the second-person style is more than evident here.

Even more rarely do we find the third-person used in personal essays. The intellectual autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, was written effectively in the third-person, but that work is not an essay -- although the section "The Virgin and the Dynamo" has often been extracted and presented in anthologies as a personal essay. This is not to say that one cannot 'get personal' in the third-person. In my own academic work -- wherein one is expected to be as objective as possible, and the third-person is the rule -- I have attempted many times to give a first-person flavor to my third-person account. Here is an example from a long article on Maximus the Confessor that I wrote for an academic conference back in 2003:

We have seen how the final goal of salvation, for Maximus, is the transformation of the soul into a receptacle of God involving the substitution of the human ego with the divine presence.  Indeed, as Maximus clearly states, in salvation "only God shines forth through the body and soul when their natural features are transcended in overwhelming glory."  Such a statement implies that the redeemed soul is stripped of its nature and of any defining characteristics qualifying it as a distinct, autonomous being, a person.

I am barely an inch away from first-person here, and am only adhering to the academic standard for the sake of conformity (something of which Emerson would not approve!). I, of course, disapprove of Maximus' position, as my choice of words makes clear. This paper later went on to appear as a crucial chapter in my doctoral dissertation, which was published as a book in 2005, and is still selling rather well today (for a recondite philosophical tome). I credit that minor success to the flirtation with first-person narration that I undertook throughout that work, and several others. In writing personal essays, of course, I always use first-person.

Hercules Germanicus

A Review of James Reston, Jr. (2015) Luther's Fortress: Martin Luther and His Reformation Under Siege (Philadelphia: Perseus Books)

© 2015 Edward Moore

Holbein, Hercules Germanicus (Luther represented as rampaging Hercules)

What a fine idea it was to place Luther's ten months spent in what amounted to house arrest at Wartburg Castle under a microscope, as it were. The period is fascinating, and Reston does a fine job of making a ripping good yarn out of it. And I mean this as high praise. The book is a page-turner, and I read it in one sitting. Of course, I am deeply interested in the various transformations of Christian theology as they occurred over the centuries; but one of my deepest interests is the art of translation, and the manner in which translation shapes dogma, and vice-versa. Martin Luther was a man of many talents -- and many masks. I do not mean to imply that he was insincere. But like any survivor -- and he was a master at keeping his head, literally -- his performance under "examination" showed that he knew when to use humility as a powerful shield against the destructive, sub-literate forces arrayed against him. As a writer and translator myself (of Anglo-Saxon poetry, rather different from Luther's translation of what was, in his time, a living and speaking text, to be handled with the greatest care -- poetic license being a big no-no) I can only contemplate with wonder Luther's burdensome task -- understatement is necessary here, as no proper words spring immediately to mind -- of translating the Holy Bible while isolated, in hiding, in a small, opaque-windowed room high above the Thuringian forest, waiting for the announcement -- which could have come at any moment -- that imperial forces were arrayed outside to arrest the "heretic." Yet he prevailed, and even though his translation contains examples of doctrinal, if not poetic, license, it is nevertheless a transformative achievement, rendering an ancient text into a German language which was, at the time, a salmagundi of mutually incomprehensible dialects. "I have so far read no book or letter," says Luther in the preface to his version of the Pentateuch (1523), "in which the German language is properly handled. Nobody seems to care sufficiently for it; and every preacher thinks he has a right to change it at pleasure, and to invent new terms" (quoted in Philipp Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 7, ch. 4, § 63 [1888]). This occurs today, not only in contemporary translations done by committees of the various denominations, many of which subtly alter the text to make it say, or at least imply, what they (the guardians of their own doctrine) wish it to say.

The Jehovah's Witness translation, ironically labeled the "New World Translation," adds an indefinite article in John 1:1, producing the translation "... and the word was a god" (my emphasis). The Greek of all versions reads: ... kai Theos ên ho Logos. With the definite article ho we get, "... and God was the Word" (as rendered in the 1996 Apostolic Bible Polyglot, edited by Charles Van der Pool); in contemporary idiomatic English, of course, it is "... and the Word [Logos] was God." Driving home recently with a JW friend, we debated a bit about this irresponsible toying with language (as I saw it, and see it) for the sake of maintaining what is, from a mainstream Christian perspective (and, indeed, from a contemporary scholarly, atheistic perspective -- that of Yours Truly), an heretical theological position. Christ was not -- according to all of the Church Fathers from Justin Martyr, Clement, Origen, and Athanasius, on through the Cappadocians, Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, and Aquinas (to name just some of the big guys) -- "a god," He was / is the God (if one wants to use that unnecessary definite article). That most difficult of Christian theological constructs, the Holy Trinity, is impossible to explain in a half-hour car ride -- indeed, it was impossible to exlain over the course of several centuries of earnest (again, an understatement) theological debate, sometimes at the end of a sword, or a set of hot pincers. Luther himself, however, who was heroically unconcerned with his physical safety, did not require rigorous scholastic debate nor piles of hair-splitting theological tomes to help him craft a translation that spoke to the German people of his age -- a translation which would, through the mediation of Tyndale's English, serve as a foundation for the great King James Version.

Luther went about his work in a spare cell, with no spirit-lifting view of the romantic countryside about the Wartburg. He had no library to consult, as Reston tells us, only the Greek and Hebrew texts he managed to carry with him on his sham abduction. "It would be easy to romanticize the process [of translation]," Reston tells us.

But a more realistic vision involves sweat and frustration, long hours, and a feeling of being overwhelmed. He approached the assignment with awe. Later, he would call it 'a great and worthy undertaking' and say that, given the unsatisfactory Bibles then available to the common person, 'the people require it.' But the language of the Bible dazzled him. He truly believed that he was dealing with the very words of God. (p. 141)

This is all well and good; reverence for a text that one is translating and / or interpreting is, indeed, a prerequisite, I believe, for the task. "A translation is an interpretation. Absolute reproduction is impossible in any work" (Schaff, History of the Christian Church, ibid.). But there is such a thing as "uncanny" interpretation, in which eisegesis -- i.e., reading into the text what one wants to find there -- becomes a temptation too powerful to overcome. Luther's struggles with his sinful nature -- well-attested in Reston's book, though not sensationalized -- especially the carnal aspect, led him to fall in love with the notion of sola fide ("faith alone"), and to translate Romans 3:28 (not 3:23-24 as Reston mistakenly cites on p. 214) as "daß der Mensch gerecht werde ohne des Gesetzes Werke, allein durch den Glauben," where the original Greek reads: ... pistei dikaiousthai anthrôpon khôris ergôn nomou. The phrase "without the deeds of the law" did not mean, as Catholics argued, good works accomplished in the course of one's life, but rather works pertaining to the Mosaic law, which Jesus fulfilled through the all-encompassing commandment of love. Indeed, the Greek reads quite clearly, khôris ergôn nomou. James 2:24 ("by works a man is justified"), which the Catholics cited to uphold their doctrine of charity and civic responsibility (at least ideally), led Luther to denigrate this letter as an "epistle of straw," but the Catholics, theologically, were in the right. After debating the issue for months, the Roman prelates finally proclaimed that "the believer is justified by the good works he performs by the grace of God and the merit of Jesus Christ" That is, not by circumcision and the observance of Judaic purity laws. "In short," as Reston sums it up, "good works purified and perfected faith, and the combination of the two led to salvation" (p. 215).

Luther himself was aware of this, but he felt the need to push his sola fide (and sola scriptura) doctrine to its logical -- many thought and said illogical -- conclusion. That this conclusion involved the destruction of centuries-old works of art was not Luther's doing. The great reformer called for moderation; indeed, he wanted a painfully slow transition from the old religion to the new Protestant form of worship, so as not to upset those whose faith was rooted in the old visually-oriented style of worship. Those were, of course, the many illiterates, who relied on preaching and especially artworks to help them understand the meaning of scripture. This is why so many drawing by Lucas Cranach were included in the editions of Luther's bible. Some of these were so incendiary -- like the Whore of Babylon wearing a papal tiara and riding, drunken and disorderly, on the back of a dragon -- that they aroused "more passionate umbrage among Catholic commentators than any other part of the translation" (p. 211). These "cartoons," as they were called, were quite effective, and many Catholics crossed sides and became Lutheran. The consequent closing of minds, resulting from the belief that the bible is the only book worth reading, and that no effort to better oneself through education or other liberal and liberating endeavors amounts to a scintilla in the scheme of salvation, did more than the 1527 sack of Rome to put the final nail in the coffin of the Renaissance. Thankfully, England, at that time still a rather isolated little kingdom, was slow in receiving the graces of the Renaissance; while "the Turkish juggernaut stood before the gates of Vienna" (p. 230), Sir Thomas Wyatt, Surrey, and other stars of Tottel's Miscellany were lifting English verse out of the alehouse and into the courtly realm, where it would blossom in the magnificently nimble lines of Sidney, Dyer, Spenser, and later the superlative Shakespeare -- and we must not forget Tyndale, Coverdale, and the grand cadenza of the scriptural concerto, the King James Bible of 1611. My concern of course is with language, my greatest love. And Luther took a rag-tag language and shaped it into a majestic vehicle for some of the most influential words ever written. "Und wenn ich alle meine Habe den Armen gäbe und ließe meinen Leib brennen, und hätte der Liebe nicht, so wäre mir's nichts nütze" (1 Corinthians 13:3). To put his life on the line so that every person should become a priest, and follow his or her own conscience; to preach to the repressed masses that sexual desire is not sinful, but a gift from God; to declare that love of Christ and faith in His all-embracing divine humanity is sufficient for salvation, was indeed to show a powerful love of his own that makes him one of the supreme champions of personalism. However, Reston displays admirable scholarly honesty by not ending his story there, but by telling us just enough about the dark legacy of Luther and Lutheranism to temper our admiration.

Luther was an anti-Semite, there is no way around it. Toward the end of his life he published two pamphlets, "On Jews and Their Lies," and Von Schem Hamphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi ("Of the Unknowable Name and the Generations of Christ"). In the former text, Luther wrote:

Here in Wittenberg, in our parish church, there is a sow carved into the stone under which lie young pigs and Jews who are sucking; behind the sow stands a rabbi who is lifting up the right leg of the sow, raises behind the sow, bows down and looks with great effort into the Talmud under the sow, as if he wanted to read and see something most difficult and exceptional; no doubt they gained their Shem Hamphoras from that place ...

Reston does not shy away from discussing, albeit briefly, the use put by the Nazis to Luther's disgusting anti-Jewish onslaughts. This discussion is relegated to an "Author's Note," which is understandable, since the subject of the book is admittedly Luther's time at the Wartburg and the subsequent impact of his return to Wittenberg. As an atheist, I find religious figures interesting only insofar as they contribute something positive to the furtherance of personalism. Luther was rather inconsistent here, as one readily sees in his shameful backing of the nobility during the Peasant's Revolt, for example. Yet such error is mitigated by his devotion to an ideal -- indeed, an ideal that was born of great personal suffering, both physical and existential. He was, in a way, the Hercules of Germany. But he was a suffering and very human Hercules. No son of Zeus was he. His fear that God would abandon him, and his continual struggle against the Devil, made for a life of trials that cannot be compared to the mythical tests of Hercules. The son of Zeus might have placed Cerberus in a headlock, but Luther threw a pot of ink at Satan. That takes balls.

Luther's Fortress is not only a valuable contribution to Luther scholarship, it is an introduction to the way a sincerely religious thinker can become -- as Harold Bloom said of John Milton, William Blake, and Emily Dickinson -- a sect of one. In whatever area of life we find our intellectual and emotional outlet we should remain unique, a great I AM; for the crowd, as Kierkegaard said, is untruth. Luther cared not for the crowd, which is an agglomeration of people; he cared rather for the community of persons which, if each person remains unique and unrepeatable through a vibrant intellectual life of his or her own, each person has the ability to become a member of a society, that is, a commonality that is a conscious sharing of moral and ethical ideals, not a blind devotion to externality, or the bugaboo of authentic existence, as Emerson would say, conformity.

Finally, as a musical enthusiast, I was pleased to encounter, at the end of the book, some words about Luther's musical compisitions. I have always been moved by Bach's arrangements of "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," and Mendelsohn's Reformation Symphony never fails to raise my mind to lofty things, and even to regret , as did Sartre, my inability to believe in God. I think Luther would applaud my sincerity and, if he had the power, place me in Dante's first circle, where I would be able to spend eternity gabbing with Socrates, Plato, and other great "Christians before Christ."

"Butcher-Bird; impales victims on thorns"

© 2015 Edward Moore

She works in a book store, but wait until you see her behind.

~ Shrike describing his girlfriend to Miss Lonelyhearts in Nathanael West's novella Miss Lonelyhearts

Do you remember those musty, dusty, often dimly lit shops specializing in "used, rare, and scholarly books"? It is within such books that one occasionally discovers marginal or interlinear notes jotted down by an unknown reader. Once in a while these jottings prove to be of value, illuminating a certain difficult passage, or providing a cross-reference or biographical detail that one would have otherwise overlooked. The literary world is becoming a less personal place, due to the encroachment of digital media and the consequent vanishing of independent bookshops. It was in one of these endangered habitats that I recently picked up a few well-worn tomes, literally for a song. The pretty college-age woman behind the counter was listening to Bob Dylan, and I began singing along, in my best Dylan impression, to "Visions of Johanna." The latter-day hippy was impressed, and as a reward for my hipness pointed me in the direction of a pile of books that were there for the taking, too battered and marked with readers' glosses to be sold. I picked up Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts and flipped to the first page, where I encountered the jotting that serves as the title of this little piece. The name of one of the main secondary characters, Shrike, is circled, and this definition provided. It struck me as odd, so I took out my phone and did a quick Google search. The definition for "shrike" that came up was: "a songbird with a strong, sharply hooked beak, used for impaling lizards, insects, and small birds." Oddly, the rest of the little book is unmarked; the anonymous studious reader of a bygone era did not provide more notes. I showed the shrike comment and definition to the hippy woman, and remarked that Derrida would have found material for an essay in that one little jotting. Alas, the young literature major had not read Derrida. What that portends for the state of literary studies at the present time, I cannot say. I snatched up a few more freebies -- Demian by Hesse (with lots of underlining), a collection of short stories by Richard Matheson (lots of illegible comments), and a collection of poems by e. e. cummings with markings that betray the unknown reader's inability to scan the lines -- and, so as not to seem like a cheapskate, purchased for a reasonable sum the score of Paganini's 24 Caprices (my ex-wife discarded my own irreplaceable copy, which had my own bowing and fingering notations and comments such as "Damn! this kills my wrist!"). The young student, who finally introduced herself as Julia, was again impressed by my musical acumen, although I had to admit that I no longer played the violin, and that I wanted the score so that I may follow along with recordings. Nevertheless, the Paganini score received that day its first jotting, the lovely Julia's phone number -- yes, written by hand, not thumb-tapped directly into my phone! Will I call her? Let's see ... She likes Dylan. Good. She hasn't read Derrida. Bad. She likes classical music. Good. I didn't see a cat in the shop. I'll have to ask her if she likes cats. If she does, I shall ask her out, despite the fact that I find it strange that a very attractive young woman of no more than twenty-one or -two should be interested in a not ungainly but certainly not model-material man of forty-one. I suppose that mystery will solve itself. In the meantime, let's discuss Miss Lonelyhearts.

A dreary, depressing, nihilistic yet deeply human novel, awash with symbolism -- some likely unintentional (Miss Lonelyhearts and the self-proclaimed virgin Betty bathing nude in the pristine Connecticut countryside, making me think of baptism and the virgin Mary), some clearly intentional, even overwrought (the grisly dream of the lamb; Miss L. feeling like a "rock" conjuring for me St. Peter, the rock [petra] upon which Christ will build his church [Matthew 16:18]; also Peter's eventual martyrdom, in the patristic tradition, came to mind, foreshadowing Miss L.'s demise) -- Nathanael West's mini masterpiece (and I do not use that term loosely) breaks most of my own private rules for a great piece of literature. Not a single character is likeable; all are profoundly flawed and therefore deeply human, by which I mean that every character is motivated by some desire that will take them beyond their immediate reality and into a space where their value as a person will be recognized. It might be trite to say that each character simply wants to be loved -- but is that not the primal human desire that lies at the root of all tragedy, comedy, romance, and even satire? In this tiny novel -- a novella, to be precise (58 pages in the 1946 New Directions paperback edition that I picked up at Julia's bookshop) -- West gives us all of these perennial genres, yet the whole is enflamed with a feverish desperation, a breakneck racing after something -- perhaps merely a momentary rest in a place of acceptance. Transitions are abrupt, indeed, the art of the segue is absent from this work. Dialogue, except for the superbly surrealistic imagisms of the memorable and aptly named Shrike, is sparse and journalistic -- but it works. Events do not develop in this novella, they occur, up to the finale, which was like a punch in the face.

Nietzsche remarked that pity is the most debasing of emotions, both for the one feeling it and for the one being pitied. West's eponymous male character began his stint as an advice columnist with the idea, fed to him by Shrike, that the whole thing was a big joke. But we see, at the very beginning of the tale, that the letters received by Miss Lonelyhearts (we never learn his real name) are provocative not of laughter but of pity; even if some -- like the letter from a woman with no nose -- produce a guilty chuckle, we are quickly brought to pity when we read the final line of the noseless woman's letter: "Ought I commit suicide?" Shrike's constant joking, while a petty torment to others, is to Miss Lonelyhearts a spur driving him to seek meaning in what he does, that is, to do more than provide insipid advice. He has a Christ complex, which Shrike mercilessly lampoons; but despite Shrike's cynicism and strained rhetoric and mixed metaphors, this impaler of small creatures occasionally spits some gobs of wisdom, as when he dictates the opening of a column to Miss L.:

"The same old stuff," Shrike said. "Why don't you give them something new and hopeful? Tell them about art. Here, I'll dictate:

"Art Is a Way Out.

"Do not let life overwhelm you. When the old paths are choked with the debris of failure, look for newer and fresher paths. Art is just such a path. Art is distilled from suffering. As Mr. Polnikoff exclaimed through his fine Russian beard, when, at the age of eighty-six, he gave up his business to learn Chinese, 'We are, as yet, only at the beginning. ...'

"Art Is One of Life's Richest Offerings.

"For those who have not the talent to create, there is appreciation. For those ...

"Go on from there."

Later in the story, we are shown just how unkind (to put it mildly) Shrike is; but this brief encomium for art, offered at the very beginning, before we witness the full power of Shrike's psychic vampirism, is almost a meta-commentary on the work itself. There is appreciation. Not all works of art must edify. For art is distilled from suffering. And I know, having suffered greatly over the past five years -- loss of home; loss of career; abandoned by wife; abandoned by friends; alcoholism; violent, drug-addled girlfriends -- that I am, indeed, at forty-one, only at the beginning. I write because I must. I have a survival instinct that drives me to seek meaning, and when meaning is absent, to appreciate the mobile nature of the mind, which is not "its own place" (as Milton's Satan believed) but rather the inveterate seeker after places, finding rest in none but some value in all. This manner of intellectual or noetic existence does not lead to happiness (or joy) -- "whose hand is ever at his lips / Bidding adieu" (Keats, Ode on Melancholy) -- but it does lead to achievements, accomplishments. And no matter how small these may be, they are moments in the ever-expanding consciousness of the self, and are therefore of infinite value to the unique, unrepeatable entity that is the I, the ego. So I do not believe, as did Nietzsche, in a morality of joyous freedom; but I do believe in creativity born of suffering.

James Baldwin, in an essay on "The Creative Process" (1962), wrote that "The states of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we fall prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge." In West's novella, Miss L. is experiencing, by way of poorly worded letters dumped on his desk each morning, varieties of and variations on these extreme, universal states and is compelled to respond. Since he is neither an artist nor one who appreciates "that life is tragic, and, therefore, unutterably beautiful" (as Baldwin wrote), far from correcting delusions, he falls victim to a destructive delusion of his own, that "His heart was the one heart, the heart of God. And his brain was likewise God's." We , the reader, witness Miss L. engaging in violent, destructive and self-serving behavior, nothing Christ-like. After discovering that he has impregnated no-longer-virgin Betty, Miss L. has a nervous breakdown of sorts -- and we feel no pity for him. A fool of the worst kind, he turned out to be; a fool who thinks he has God on his side. "Miss Lonelyhearts was very happy and inside of his head he was also calling on Christ. But his call was not a curse, it was the shape of his joy." We know such fools for Christ all too well. So when the finale of his accidental death arrives, abruptly and shockingly, we are relieved. Thinking that God will aid him in the performance of a miracle, Miss L. rushes out the door to meet the "cripple" with whose wife he had been sleeping, and finds out too late that the seemingly harmless fellow with the bad leg and distorted features has decided to light somebody up with a shotgun. There is confusion, but Miss L., now no longer a "rock" but a "furnace" (the biblical symbolism is inescapable), tumbles down the stairs "dragging the cripple with him." Perhaps Betty -- no catch herself, but at least tethered to the here-and-now -- will hook up with Bill Wheelwright (if she hasn't already done so) and live in mediocrity ever after ...

* * * * *

Short novels, or novellas, have always appealed to me. I agree, to an extent, with Edgar Allan Poe's remarks about the ideal length of a fictional or poetic work: that the capable writer has the opportunity to produce a single, concentrated, and lasting effect upon the reader in a piece that can be read in a single sitting. Indeed, I read Georges Bataille's novella The Story of the Eye nearly twenty years ago, at the height (or depth, as it were) of my Surrealist phase, and have not forgotten it: the episode in which the lady squats over the saucer of milk and ... ahem ... the bullfight after which the bull's bullhood becomes a meal ... and of course the business with the eye. But my recollection has nothing to do with the "shock value" of the piece (it has been described as literary pornography -- it is not that); rather, the morbid anti-sexuality of the short work forced Yours Truly to seek a meaning, a parable, allegory, anything -- only to realize that life does not contain literary devices. I read the Marquis de Sade's gargantuan "novel" 120 Days of Sodom around the same time (someone, I think it was Klossowski, quipped that reading this work was like reading a pornographic phonebook) and am only able to recall a single phrase: "He embuggers bucks." Hilarious, but not profound -- at least not in a literary sense. Our lives are episodic -- as well as "nasty, brutish, and short" -- and novels that accurately reflect or imitate life -- even if that life involves coprophiliac fantasies or sex games with eggs -- should be episodic as well, if not nasty, etc. Yesterday, I went out early to pick up some books at the local library and then ate lunch in the park -- it was a gorgeous day -- after which I took the bus to the next town -- a quaint, almost mediaeval-looking place with houses dating back to the early nineteenth century -- and paid a visit to the bookshop where dreamy Julia works. And there I found her, sitting behind the counter, engrossed in some activity with her phone. She looked up, smiled, and gave a warm hello. Now these brief sentences would, I think, meet with Poe's approval; they are certainly economical. My reader's imagination is called upon to fill in what most of our contemporary novelists would have laboriously spelled out: minute details about the park, exactly why and how the day was gorgeous, people on the bus, architecture of the town, and so on. West doesn't belabor such points in his novella, and so he achieves economy. A single reading has been sufficient to maintain his work unsullied in my mind. Similarly, seeing Julia for a second time added nothing to her beauty, nor did it detract. A changeless angel is she -- short, yes, but so far no evidence of nastiness or brutishness.

After exchanging pleasantries, I told her about Miss Lonelyhearts and the sharp-beaked Shrike who pierced so many hearts but could not pierce the "rock" Miss L. "So you liked the book?" Like is too comon a term. "I appreciated it," I said, "the way one appreciates a drawing by Masson, for example." I brought up Masson because I was returning in thought to my Surrealistic youth, when my satchel was stuffed with books by Breton, Soupault, Artaud, Bataille, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, and other Surrealists, proto-Surrealists, and anti-Surrealist Surrealists, and the Village was my home. Julia did not know Masson, so she did a quick Google search. I told her to check out "The Massacre," a brutal drawing, executed (no pun intended) with frenzied lines suggesting the manic haste of the artist and the feverish rage of the knife-wielding brute doing the killing. Julia was not convinced of its artistic value, and when I gazed upon it again, after many years, I found that I could not give a coherent statement as to its value. With Max Ernst's painting, The Daughters of Lot, things were different. I told her the biblical story, of which she was -- and I don't know why I am still surprised at these educational lacunae -- unfamiliar. After God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot went with his daughters to a cave up in the mountains, where they got their dad drunk and slept with him, in order to "preserve the seed" of their papa. They each bore Lot a son (Genesis 19:30-38). Julia was amazed that the Bible contains such tales. I told her that there are many more such scandalous episodes in the Hebrew scriptures, mentioning Noah's drunkenness, and giving her an embellished account of David and Bathsheba. She was suitably impressed, but since there were now several customers in the store, we could not continue our conversation. A perfect opening was provided then. So I quickly asked her if there is a pet store nearby, as I needed to get cat food. She said yes, there is, and with a smile asked me what kind of cat I have. I told her Siamese, and she said, in a breathy voice, "I love Siamese, they're my favorite." Splendid, I thought, she likes cats -- and I asked her out for lunch on her next day off. She accepted. Two days from now I will be having lunch with the changeless angel.

Of course, the first date will go well. And the second, and the third. But eventually, sooner or later, she will pierce my heart with her own shrike-beak and tear it out. It will soon regenerate, to be torn out yet again by another Erinye (I am mixing myths here, I know). Such is the story of my life. So why do I endure? Well, some clues are given above. I find purpose in accompishments, however small. Next week I will begin conducting a two-part seminar on essay writing at the local library. My hope is that at least one of the participants produces an essay that is publishable. A feeling of accomplishment would result, for me, from that. But what I really want is love. Again. I had it once, and it taught me that Tennyon was full of shit. "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all." My ass. To lose at love is to have one's heart and balls ripped out on a daily basis. Memory is a bitch of a vulture that preys upon the open wound that will never heal -- until someone greater comes along who will heal the wound and restore one to loving and loveable wholeness again. That is what I seek. Is Julia the one? Too early to tell. I certainly hope so. The eyes of the beloved are the windows to the soul, as classic Platonic philosophy held; and James Baldwin has described precisely the experience of the beloved's gaze: "anyone ... who has ever been in love ... knows that the one face which one can never see is one's own face."

One's lover ... sees the face you wear, and this face can elicit the most extraordinary reactions. We do the things we do, and feel what we feel, essentially because we must -- we are responsible for our actions, but we rarely understand them. It goes without saying, I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less. ("The Creative Process")

And so, another trite-sounding conclusion: we can only love another person to the extent that we love ourselves. Loving is not understanding, however. I agree with Baldwin that if I understood myself better -- if I had understood myself better, back then -- I would not have done so much damage to myself, nor would I have allowed others -- one "other" in particular -- to damage me to the extent that they (she) have (has). I have pulled myself together, put down the bottle for good, entered therapy, and returned to the struggle for meaning -- not because I understand myself, but because I love myself. I am a noetic seed that has been cast into this world to either sprout or rot away ... or get gobbled up by a bird.

* * * * *

"You spiritual lovers think that you alone suffer. But you are mistaken. Although my love is of the flesh flashy, I too suffer." These words of Shrike, of the harpoon beak, when spoken to Julia over a giant stromboli that we were unable to finish, produced luscious laughter that made a kiss inevitable. And so it was. She had just told me of her last boyfriend, of a whopping eight months, and how it had taken her several weeks to get over him; that is what provoked the Shrike quote. Before that, we had been speaking of safe, comfortable things, such as places we would like to visit -- and I, being forty-one to her twenty-four (I was pleased to discover that she is two years closer to my middle age than I had previously thought), have visited several of the places on her list, and so was able to keep her interested as I embellished my memories with anecdotes taken from books I was sure she had not read. Very odd, a literature major whose reading seems to consist solely of the Twilight series, Toni Morrison, and a biography of Amy Winehouse ... Literature is dead, they say. Long live literature! After the lunch and the kiss, we strolled about the college town and did some shopping. I bought for her Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, and pointed her to my review of that superb work. Then, just when I thought the date couldn't possibly get any better ... it didn't. Julia asked me about my ex-wife. My mind reeled. Memories of joyous times, long romantic walks, fetish-spiced lovemaking, deep conversations ... I couldn't talk of that stuff, I might tear up. Memories of bad times, my drunkenness, being left home alone at Christmas, no more lovemaking thanks to demon alcohol, no more conversations thanks to same ... No way I was speaking of any of that. The gray area, not her fault for leaving me, I brought it on myself by refusing to get help ... But no, she made a vow, she left me when I needed her the most, took everything I had, left me penniless and homeless with an addiction ... She is surely in a very satisfying relationship by now and I am walking about with a woman seventeen years my junior -- who has not read Milton! "So, do you and your ex-wife keep in touch?" "No." "What's her name?" "Butcher-bird. She impales her victims on thorns."