Sundry on Wednesday

Cooperstown arts news:
Ashley Norwood Cooper's solo show is still up.
New York City friends, please go...

The Likes of Usat First Street Gallery
through 23 February 2019
526 West 26th Street, Suite 209
New York, NY 10001
Tel: 646-336-8053

What a rugged two weeks it has been! The weather was a little too focused on snow and ice. The sweet, tiny Puffcat died. The long author questionnaire was sent in. The novel manuscript was turned in at three in the morning. Many other things were accomplished that chewed up time. And now I must deal with my neglected house, for I have been giving most of my home attention to words and cat.

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Tomorrow, out pops the Valentine edition of The Rollipoke, which you (naturally) won't want to miss. Advance peek at the next book, available only to Rollipokers... Click on the link to Be Mine: that is, to be a Rollipoker. 

Nobody loves you? Nobody sends you a Valentine? Weep not! Have a Rollipoke Valentine!

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If you're at all interested in a sharp-edged critique of the state of the humanities (particularly English studies) on our campuses, I think this article by Gilbert T. Sewall is a must read--hat tip to the Prufrock newsletter. Thank God that I dropped out of academia after getting tenure because that preserved the freedom of my mind for my books. I might have been weak-willed. Who knows? Leaving the academic world protected me from rampant ideologies, which are the ruination of art.

After reading it, I was thinking about teaching Huckleberry Finn, talking with my students about that crucial, deep-down beautiful scene where Huck says, "All right, then, I'll go to hell." With no understanding of our Christian heritage and how it has been the underpinning of Western history, how can a reader even understand the huge thing that Huck is willing to give up out of love for his friend, a slave? Can a reader even feel the depths of sacrifice in that love? How can a reader see and understand that Huck is turning away from a false morality and a false vision of God and toward a true one, even though he does not know it? How can a reader have the slightest understanding of how huge the scene is, a turning point in our literary history, walking us into an American literature where the growth of the individual soul and the rule of the individual mind is central? 

Also, I was remembering what sheer fun it was to teach Chaucer in a survey course, and how much laughter and joy there was in the classroom as students had a brief lesson in pronunciation and then read aloud. To feel the words in the mouth, to have a sense of another time, another world--yet so strangely close to our own!--how precious that was. And now an English major might not encounter Chaucer at all.

There are a million things to say in response to that article, but one that has bothered me for a long time is the way that we are depriving our young writers of the best that has been thought and written. As makers, we want to stand on giants, not on little hobbits. We want enduring stone, not fragile papier-mâché novelty. We want vellum, not foolscap. To discard, to encourage young writers to assume that Chaucer and Milton and Shakespeare and the King James Bible (all those writers and translators, so dead! so white! so long ago!) are of no literary account and have nothing to say to us today is to harm young writers in the West. It is to plant their feet on sand. Yes, we want to know the writing of our own times. Sure, we want to read new voices of all sorts. We want to praise and support worthy voices of our era. But we also want to pay the obeisance owed to the glories of the past. To move forward, we dive through the past. It saddens me that such things need to be said.

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Snow is falling (I know, I know--it's the Cooperstown usual for February.) But these are lovely whirls of snowflakes as big as feathers, crisscrossing on wayward currents. And the bird feeders are busy with juncos and chickadees and pine siskins. Best of all, I finally have a squirrel-defeating feeder, so I am watching a morbidly obese squirrel (no doubt fattened on our seeds) climb up and then slide down. I've always disliked the word chuckle except when it describes something other than a laugh, but maybe this is the right place for one. Keep cosy...

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Happy St. Valentine's Day, y'all!

Rock doves by photographer Juha Soininen of Finland at sxc.hu

Fowles in the frith

At seven, birds and squirrels flit and climb in the lilacs, and a lovely morning light lies in weightless panels on the green grass. To think that the air was juggling flurries so few days ago! And this little bit of 13th-century medieval marginalia runs in my head:

Fowles in the frith,
The fisses in the flood,
And I mon waxe wood
Much sorwe I walke with
For beste of bon and blood.

Wodewose being tamed by a lady,
15th-century tapestry, Basel
Wikipedia, public domain

Is it a courtly lyric in the voice of the lover in spring, thinking of his lady, to him the best of bone and blood, the best of all mortals? Is his unrequited love what sends him mad, to "waxe wood"?

Or has he suffered a great loss (death of the beloved lady, loss of a loved child, death of loved friends in battle?) Does he flee to the wild wood to be a wodewose, waxing mad in grief?

Or is he thinking of the Fall of Man and how all walk in sorrow because mortals are but beasts of bone and blood, mortal and sinful? (I'm remembering Chaucer's "Balade de Bon Conseyl," where a man is a kind of beast in a stall: "Forth, pylgryme, forth! forth, beste, out of thi stal!")

Or is the writer thinking of the Fall, sorrowing and thinking of Christ as the union of God and earthly man, the best of bone and blood? The fowls and the fish have no such need for reflection and are so without his sorrow.

Or, could it even be in the voice of Christ, so often portrayed as retreating in the wilderness? Could it be Christ, reflecting on Creation's fifth-day birds and fish and grieving for the human beast of bone and blood?

Is the poem somehow, mysteriously, all of these things at once, braided together, all those riches compacted? It's such a simple little abbab stanza, tied beautifully together by alliteration, jotted down in the midst of facts and numbers, with a bit of musical notation.

And somehow, also mysteriously, drifting in my mind.

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A few notes

Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vita Merlini:

Merlin as war lord, mad in the Caledonian Forest.

Translation information and notes here

And [Merlin] mourns the [three brothers lost in battle], nor ceasing to pour out tears, he sprinkled his hair with dust and ripped off his clothes and lying flat on the ground he rolls now this way now that. Peredur comforts him, as do the nobles and dukes, but he desires neither solace nor to endure their supplicatory words. By now he had lamented for three days entire and had refused food, such great grief had consumed him. From that time on, after he had filled the air with so many and such great laments, he suffered a new madness and stealthily withdrew and fled to the woods, nor does he wish to be seen while fleeing, and he enters the forest and rejoices to skulk beneath the ash trees and marvels at the beasts grazing on the grass of the glade; now he follows them, now he passes by them at a run. He consumes the roots of plants, he consumes the plants, he consumes the fruit of the trees and the blackberries from the bramble bush; he becomes a man of the woods as though devoted to the woods. From then on during the whole summer he was discovered by no one and forgetful of himself and of his own kindred he hid himself in the woods, clothed in the manner of a wild beast. But when winter came and it had carried off the plants and all the fruits of the trees and he could not enjoy what he had, he poured forth such complaints as these in a pitiable voice: “O Christ God of heaven, what shall I do? In which part of the earth will I be able to remain since there is nothing here that I can eat?”

Vulgate Psalm 48: 21 

21  homo cum in honore esset non intellexit conparavit se iumentis et silebitur:
(Man when he was in honour did not understand: he hath been compared to senseless beasts, and made like to them.)

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Only yesterday I thought that I might stop blogging--thought that perhaps it would be best. And now here I am again, all because of the little fowls in the frith, the happy fishes in the flood.