Sunday (London Trip 2018)

 

Literature is the irreplaceable human art. “A book,” wrote Franz Kafka, “must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us.” Reading not only illuminates our souls, it makes the lives of others more real to us — in all their diversity and complexity. Books enlarge, enhance and refine our humanity, and slowly transform our society to match our dreams.

from Literary L.A. with no apology 

http://danagioia.com/essays/literature-in-california/literary-l-a-with-no-apology/

The New Recute

 It started innocently enough. I had one nutcracker that looked like Santa. Then I saw others and well the die was cast. As of Wednesday that number has grown to 22. I am sure the collection really expanded once we began buying ornaments for our tree from Pier One Imports. They tended to put their Christmas merchandise on sale before Christmas and the temptation was too much. While I purchased a few elsewhere most of them came from Pier One as well as many of the nicest ornaments on our tree. 

“Marley was dead, to begin with ... This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.” 

Pier One was a store we enjoyed, it was close and did not require a trip to a big shopping mall. We bought everything from bedroom furniture to candles but is was an especially important part of our life at Christmas. We could also get lovely Unicef cards there. 

“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.” 

When they closed earlier this year we dropped by and picked up a few candles. But we also realized it was one less place we would go simply to browse. Online shopping is convenient but rarely a shared experience. The last time I purchased a nutcracker at Pier One I was retired and had been to lunch with a group of friends from work. I was walking by with Manuela a lovely lady who had been telling us about a vacation home she was building in Mexico. The two of us wandered in and well the nutcrackers were on sale.  I realized when Pier One closed this was one yearly ritual that was no more and I decided the collection was complete. But recently we were watching a program on the Nutcracker and I knew there was one character missing. Yes I bought it online and yes I am now content with the collection as it is. 

“It is required of every man," the ghost returned, "that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and, if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death.” 

            

 

“No space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused” 

Why a pickle? As a student, 40 plus years ago I spent several summers working at the H.J. Heinz Co. in Leamington, Ont. It has been an ongoing joke in the family ever since. This was long before the capitalists bought the plant to grab the brand, degrade the product, and break the union. May they wear the chains they forged in life, mankind was their business. Not as charity after the fact, when they have no further use for wealth, but as an ongoing part of a life richly lived.

" But when I came to stop

Below a hill that marked one end of the valley

That had pierced my heart with terror, I looked up

Toward the crest and saw its shoulders already

Mantled in rays of that bright planet that shows

The road to everyone, whatever our journey.

Then I could feel the terror begin to ease

That churned in my heart's lake all through the night.

As one still panting, ashore from dangerous seas,

Looks back a the deep he has escaped,"

                       Inferno from Canto 1

                                    Dante Pinsky trans.

 Our weather which has been unseasonably warm was 

interrupted by a skiff of winter snow last night. So I took 

these photos while out in the yard with the dogs on the

morning of Good Friday. My poetry selections are made

because I remember something that seems apt or because

I am reading some particular work at the time. Today

it is both, I have several translation, courses etc of Dante's

Divine Comedy and have been collecting

materials on him for years. So this afternoon while 

looking through Pinsky's translation I found a passage

 that seemed to fit my present mood. Eventually

it occurred to me that Dante sets the first Canto of the 

Inferno  on Good Friday of the year 1300. These connections

are one of the great joys that literature can bring to my life.

It was while looking through Longfellow's note to his translation

that I found the passage below on one of the end pages of my  

Routledge edition.

"How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers!

This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves

Birds build their nests; while canopied with leaves

Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers,

And the vast minster seems a cross of flowers!"

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

                             

“Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, 

We fell them down and turn them into paper,

That we may record our emptiness.” 

Kahlil Gibran

Sand and Foam?

We have been alternating here between the hopeful signs 

of spring and the return of winter. Helen and I have managed

to finish a long delayed project and converted one room in 

the basement into a library for some mysteries, science fiction,

my Darwin/biology books and the bulk of my poetry collection.

two more libraries and a wood working shop to go.

 

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"

from The Summer Day

by Mary Oliver

I am having trouble with spacing on blogger today, sorry.

Both quotes are from Ross Lockwood's fascinating
1948 novel Raintree County. 



Spoiler alert it is over 
1000 pages long. The first copy I read was from a university
library, it still had a stamped slip in the back indicating
it had been been taken out 5 or 6 time but by about 400
pages I found it had been misbound and the central section
of 100 pages were missing. Apparently no one else had 
it mentioned  that was their loss.. I then scoured town until I 
found a copy of the January Book-of-the-Month Club edition.
Eventually I also contacted the Raintree County Home Page
and Ross's son Larry generously sent me a copy of his
biography of his father Shade of the Raintree. The novel also
won a $150,000 prize from MGM for the movie rights which
then became by all accounts an terrible movie starring among others
Elizabeth Taylor.  The novel make use of the stream-of-consciousness 
techniques and in many ways reminds me of Whitman's work 
where one is swept along by the beauty of the language and the 
breathless pace and scope of the of the author's vision

For more information I encourage you 
visit the Raintree County Home Page, or visit Raintree County
itself through the pages of the novel 


"... which had no boundaries in time and space,

where lurked musical and strange names and mythical

and lost peoples, and which was itself only a name

musical and strange."



Another week at the Research park included fleeting
glimpses.



The beauty of the ordinary, I love the feet.

  






A meditation on the uses of small twigs by small birds

intent on baffling predators and photographers.

And  glimpse of an old friend.

 

" Hard roads and wide will run through Raintree County,

and its ancient boundaries will dissolve. People will hunt it

on the map, and it won't be there. For America will become

the City. America will hunt for a tree of life whose fruit is gold.

And that man shall be the Hero of the County who plucks from

the high branches the heaviest dividends. "

We seem to be lucky today so far we have not much snow compared

to the rest of Canada. But it does leave me wondering whose white world

should I enter next Emily Bronte's, the Otter's or Stan Roger's?

"COLD in the earth—and the deep snow piled above thee,
Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!
Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee,
Sever'd at last by Time's all-severing wave?"                                                             Remembrance                                                    Emily Brontë

“so I came straight off here, through the Wild Wood and the snow! My! it was fine, coming through the snow as the red sun was rising and showing against the black tree-trunks! As you went along in the stillness, every now and then masses of snow slid off the branches suddenly with a flop! making you jump and run for cover. Snow-castles and snow-caverns had sprung up out of nowhere in the night--and snow bridges, terraces, ramparts--I could have stayed and played with them for hours. Here and there great branches had been torn away by the sheer weight of the snow,”

                                                         Wind in the Willows

                                                                    Kenneth Grahame
           

"Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea;
Tracing one warm line through a land so wide and savage
And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.
Westward from the Davis Strait 'tis there 'twas said to lie
The sea route to the Orient for which so many died;
Seeking gold and glory, leaving weathered, broken bones
And a long-forgotten lonely cairn of stones."

                                      Northwest Passage

                                       Stan Rogers

The evocation of history and memory seen through a snowy curtain

can be pretty effective for me. 

It leads me to appreciate the connections we

form not just to our own past but the past of others through art and literature.

Winter seems  a perfect time for reflection, stories, music and armchair

adventure.