Cakespeare

Happy birthday, Shakespeare.
Want to see more V and A cakes? Here.

You Asked no. 13: Reading, affinities and animadversions

Berlin, 1932
Collage in progress
Mary Boxley Bullington

In response to a request to interview some of my painter friends, I have been interviewing Mary Boxley Bullington. As she, in turn, insisted on interviewing me, a part of the You asked series will be composed of our questions to each other.

Bullington: Who are two or three of your favorite poets—the ones you return to over and over--and why? What do you look for in reading other poets? What gives you the most pleasure when you read or write poetry and what most annoys you? Why?

Youmans: Yeats. I have a love for Yeats that just won’t quit. This year I’m not dipping into him but reading him book by book, trying to get a better sense of the stages of his life in poetry. I admire the way he kept burgeoning and leafing out, and that he continued writing into age without becoming stale. He didn’t stay one thing; the young lyric poet of the Celtic Twilight is very different from late Yeats, though they have elements in common. And all this is true even though I don’t particularly care for some of his ideas, and even though I don’t always sympathize with his created mythology. Nevertheless, I like it that he has a mythology and framework and edifice of poetry, and that he mythologizes his own life and loves and concerns, placing it and them on a higher plane. I’m fond of his sense that what we see is not all that there is, and of his attempts to pierce various veils. Most of

all, I like it that his poetry always wishes to approach song.

Shakespeare. How can I not pick him? He is so myriad in voice, so infinitely varied in what he undertakes. I don’t expect any more explanation is needed, even if he is a dead white male, jettisoned by hip English departments.

Lots of other poets have left work that I return to: the Beowulf poet, the Gawain poet, Wyatt, Herbert, Vaughan, Donne, Marvel, Blake, Keats, Coleridge, Dickinson, Hopkins, Bishop, etc. And that’s just poetry in English (or Anglo-Saxon.) Whim will take me back to Li Po or Borges or Cavafy or Homer (or Lodge’s versions!) or Sappho or Virgil or Tranströmer or Rilke or Darío or Akhmatova—it’s hard to say where I might whirl off to next, though I have some contemporary poets I want to read or reread, and I’ve been wanting to take a look at more work from the classical world. I started the morning with a poem by Gabriela Mistral, but this month I’ve been reading Robert Walser and Yeats and Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse (clearly a strong source for Tolkien), and also Mary Kinzie’s The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose. 

What do I look for? Both a sense of kinship and utter difference please me. I am lured by sound, truth, muscular strength, metaphysical boldness, beauty, fearlessness, range of subject, wideness and depth—by many things. I suppose what pulls me most surely is the sense of captured energy and life.

You ask what most annoys me. I don’t think annoyance ever comes into my writing or reading. I’m simply going to stop reading if a work seems lifeless and without energy. I’ll also stop when a poetry book seems too prosaic, as if a bit of prose had been chopped into lines, helter-skelter. I’m especially likely to put a book down when that very prosiness does not work in terms of prose syntax. I tend to get tired of poems with a narrow scope of subject and lack of depth.  Poetry is a great sea, with room for little jellyfish and sharks and right whales. Just as the sea needs every sort, poetry may need every sort of poet. Even the sorts of poets whose work a writer dislikes may be important to him or her—important in strengthening and establishing what it is the writer does like and desire to see in poems. And even a smaller talent brings joy and growth to its owner, and surely that’s good.

Some other general tendencies and popular academic trends bother me. I don’t like to see poets who are scornful of the past lives devoted to poetry. The proper stance for any poet in relation to the past ought to be one of humility in the presence of mastery. The dead should not be dead to us if their work is alive. The academy-based desire to wage war on what is called cultural appropriation can be destructive to an art that has long been a kind of Silk Road of cultural exchange. Who could possibly untangle those world-spanning threads? Likewise, the idea of rejecting all dead white male writers is destructive to young poets, particularly women. Don’t read Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer? Cut them from the English major? Just slash yourself off at the knees and be done with it! The trajectory of many ideas now trendy in the academic world is destructive to poets. The misapprehension that we still have a living avant garde in poetry and so haven’t exhausted the concepts born of Modernism is, to me, simply wrong. The academy should be a fruitful place. Too often of late, it has crafted strictures that hobble the mind.

And what do I find bothersome in my own work? I’m not exactly sorry when time shows me that a poem of my own isn’t as good as I thought it was—how terrible if I could never tell! I simply go on my path, pursuing the muse. But every poet knows that the fire in the head will never be fully matched by a poem. That’s why Yeats’s wandering Aengus spends his whole life chasing after a glimmering girl. The dream poem will always be better than the poem on the page, since no poem can quite catch the entirety of the flood that sweeps through when a poem arrives. And that’s fine. Perhaps an onslaught of perfection would put an end to future poems. 

Hodgepodge, with medieval prayer-nut

The Annunciation Carved in a Medieval Prayer Nut

Here's one of the poems I wrote for Phoenicia Publishing's Annunciation anthology, forthcoming in the not-too-far-off future. Being the sort of person I am (you can call that mad, or you can call it in love with making things and words), I wrote seven, so that editor Elizabeth Adams could pick one from a group. So this poem is not going to be in the anthology, but it is HERE, and also in the print version of "Books and Culture," edited by the most widely-read reader I have encountered, John Wilson. (The poems in the anthology will be: "Mystic Journey," "The Annunciation Appears in a Painting by Andrew Wyeth," and "Iconography of an Imaginary Medieval Painting.")

I also have a couple of poems in the just-out current (print, though I expect that issue 13 will eventually be up at trinacriapoetry.com) edition of Trinacria, edited ("by invitation") by the feisty, formal-poetry-defending Joseph Salemi. And those two are "Solitaire" and "In the Dream Behind My Eyes."

Photos: This is a sixteenth-century prayer-nut on display at the British Museum. Photo credit is unlisted at my source... though I'd be happy to credit more than the British Museum! If you want to see more prayer-nuts (they are fascinating) in a round-up of examples, go to My Modern Met.

"Macbeth" with gulls and Glimmerglass and Glimmer Globe Theater

Lovely evening at the new Hamilton amphitheater behind Fenimore Art Museum, starting with a champagne picnic with shrimp salad and duck enchiladas and baguette and meringue cookies, followed by "Macbeth" with newlyweds (well, a year out--still new!) Michael and Danielle Henrici as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Must say that a pregnant Lady Macbeth adds to the drama of many lines. So fine to see a great play with Glimmerglass lightly wrinkled in the background and gulls flashing white against the hills.

Photo from the Fenimore Art Museum album on Facebook.
Michael Henrici as Macbeth

Danielle Henrici, Lady Macbeth,
above Hamilton amphitheater at the Fenimore Art Museum.
Photograph by Macbeth, aka Michael Henrici!

Goodreads giveaway / jacket copy / pub date

"a haunting tale of dark obsessions and transcendent creative fire, 

rendered brilliantly in Youmans' richly poetic prose."  --Midori Snyder

Official pub date is rapidly approaching: September 1st.
I will soon be doing events in North Carolina and Virginia,
but if you have a special interest in my work, please spread the word,
as this is a book from a university press and could use a kiss
from the lovely Lady Word of Mouth.

Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.
Design by Mary-Frances Glover Burt.
Mercer University Press

If you are on Goodreads and haven't signed up for a chance at a signed copy of Maze of Blood, please do so! It's a short giveaway, with 330 people signed up so far. It helps spread the word, and some lucky person gets a free signed book and postcard.  

Jacket copy: Begin with what seems the end of things—how Conall Weaver lifts a gun to his head. And now dive backward into the labyrinthine worlds of home, where Conall is the center, into the maze of love, where Conall seeks and strives with his soul-mate, and into the maze of imagination, with its population of weapon-wielding heroes and local-color Texans…and then on, into the maze of childhood, where time seems illusion and all the threads and stories start. Red for the blood of frontiersmen and Indians, Conall thought, red for the blood of proven heroes and mother, the martyr of Cross Plains. Maze for the looping coils of a snake that ended in a rattle that shook out revolutionary warning: don’t tread on me! Maze for veins of blood. Maze for family. In Conall Weaver, the mundane world and the wonders of the imagination collide and shoot out sparks. Inspired by the life of pulp writer Robert E. Howard, MAZE OF BLOOD explores the roots of story and the compulsions and conflicts of the heart in a Southern landscape. “Marly Youmans is a great writer. Her prose is immaculate.” —Laird Barron “Marly Youmans is a novelist and poet out of sync with the times but in tune with the ages.” — First Things “I cannot recommend an author more than Marly Youmans, whose fantastic prose is absolutely gorgeous and haunting.” —Seb Doubinsky 

Maze of Blood page at Facebook

Maze of Blood page at the blog

Maze of Blood page at Mercer

Maze of Blood is still in pre-pub pricing at Amazon and bn.com, 
and perhaps in a few others....

Find an independent bookstore at indiebound.org.

One of the gorgeous division pages
with art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

Diminishing language and culture

Clive Hicks-Jenkins vignette for Glimmerglass

No one in the English speaking world can be considered literate without a basic knowledge of the Bible. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., James Trefil, Joseph Kett, The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (Houghton Mifflin, 1993)

Late night and early morning exchange...

Me: I would say that if you can read Shakespeare, well, then you can read anything else in the English language.

RT (who is teaching at the college level in what used to be called the Bible belt): Students, however, remain convinced that Shakespeare did not write his plays and poems in English. It is, apparently to students, a foreign language that no one speaks in the 21st century. Really.

Me: Part of the problem for current students from the deep South is that many used to grow up with the King James Bible or some early translated version (and some with the 1928 revised or the Cranmer Book of Common Prayer.) Accustomed to those, they could read anything. But we can't count on any Bible literacy any more, and we choose to reduce that gorgeous language full of rhetorical tropes to pablum. And now I hear so many complaints that many young people cannot read language that is beautiful and contains depths and long-established rhetorical figures.

    Older translations refreshed the target language (English) by bringing in the Hebrew as much as possible. The KJV enlarged not only the language but also the conceptual apparatus of English speakers, as more or less common words and concepts like table and cup and staff took on the religious aura of the psalm.
     If we were talking about poetry, it would be a tragedy to keep texts from surprising us, to tell Lear to be just one thing, to do as little as possible.... Clive James' lament returns: translation and linguistic theories emasculate Scripture, depriving it of much of its linguistic, cultural, and political potency, and perhaps even of its religious power...
     --Peter J. Leithart, Deep Exegesis (Baylor University Press, 2009)

Don't follow your bliss--

William Blake, "The Genius of Shakespeare"

The idea of "following your bliss" seems to have successfully invaded all precincts of our world. I seem to meet it everywhere online, but I don't approve of its sentimentality, smarminess, and false illusions. No doubt I have mentioned it before. But my mentioning it hasn't stopped the flood of bliss-advocators. I'm like the little boy with his thumb in the dike, except that I'm not going to freeze to death (unless I go and stand in my Yankee back yard for an hour or so and tell the birds about the need to ignore the popular version of Joseph Campbell. But since they're making music with joy without any worry, I probably don't need to make that sacrifice.) Here are some stray quotes celebrated by friends and snitched from social media:

Find your passion, say 'no' to anything that is a waste of time and keep on going. Focus on what you love. --Rebeca Plantier 

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time. --Joseph Campbell 

I have quite mixed thoughts about this sort of recommendation. On one hand, I had an overweening, intense passion to read and then read and write as a child--fine, I've followed it, made lots of large sacrifices because of it. I gave up achieved tenure and promotion, dropped out of the helpful-to-a-writer academic machine, and in general slept less and had less of what people call fun than others because I wanted to pursue the glimmering goal of art. And I don't regret any of that because I still have a fire to make stories and poems. That's my kind of fun, a deeper and more curious pleasure than most. I'm grateful that I've been able to have so much of it, thanks to my own obsessive nature and a husband who likes to cook.

Did a black swan land on my head as a result of my fire to create? No. Do I expect to hear the whirring of wings at my back? No, not unless it's the whirring of Marvell's "time's wingèd chariot." Yes, that could be what I hear... Would I be glad if a black swan dropped in for a visit? Sure. I love readers, and a work is completed each time it is read.

(Missed the black swan theory? In the words of Wikipedia, "The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight." A theory laid out by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, it was picked up and refined for writers by the Grumpy Old Bookman, whose writings on the scalding truth about the role of luck in the writing world had been an inspiration to Taleb. In literary terms, what happens when a book is anointed as lead book by a publisher and then shoved into the public's face is a bit of a black swan. The amazing success that overtook Jo Rowling's Potter books is a gigantic, morbidly-obese black swan. Black swan literary success, then, comes as a surprise, may have a huge effect, and is rationalized by people afterward.)

I know a lot of people who just don't fit that popularized, overly-sweet image of the hero following his bliss. (Here I should note that I have found Campbell's ideas about the hero's journey to be interesting, particularly when I am thinking about stories, which have a lot to say about human life but are not the same. If they were, they would be human life.) Some of the people who don't fit the pattern are people without a passion. And some of them are people who did or do have a passion.

Take the people I know who did not have a passion, who fell into something and became very good at it. I don't think that's a problem. In fact, I think it's great. We don't all have to chase a muse through hollow lands and hilly lands. I believe that becoming very good at something is plain old satisfying. A simple goal of becoming good at something is a better goal for a lot of people. It's not a little goal, either; it's a large, worthy one. The satisfaction that comes from slow accomplishment and a degree of mastery is highly underrated.

Here's a dramatic example: I have a friend who was a successful concert pianist, touring nationally. At some point, he felt that he would never be of the very highest rank, and that he simply didn't like the loneliness of the life. He dropped out and went back to school and eventually became a physician at a teaching hospital, where he is a different, more familiar sort of success and has plenty of people contact that eliminates the solitude of the single life. A smart man, he had been following his bliss and doing quite well in worldly terms. But bliss turned out to be less satisfying than the original advertisement. It didn't fit his life well. So he went through new training and became good at something else, something very different. I admire the strength of mind that made him quit one pursuit and set out on another path--a path that was not his bliss.

The popular "follow your bliss" goal is a sentimental mirage that has harmed others I know, particularly in the arts. The concept is supposed to lead the hero upward to heroic success. It's intended to be more than an internal journey. Anyway, people tend to be unsatisfied by being Hawthorne's secret artist of the beautiful. It's that pesky old human nature, never content! I know people who were unable to handle their lack of worldly success in the whimsical world of the arts, unable to come to terms with the way of the world and accept that there's an awful lot of luck in what happens, and that black swans don't plop down on most people's heads. Even though lack of success diminished and in some cases spoiled their affection for a pursuit, they were unable to change course and find another goal. I'm not sure what the answer would have been for these people, aside from an earlier understanding of the ways of the world (hard in an era that forces self-esteem down children's throats) and a clue that "follow your bliss" is an often-delusional path that may lead to a place that does not satisfy a desire to have one's art be known.

Despite what I've said, I don't happen to think that a life in the arts that isn't rewarded with huge success is a disaster, or even a major problem. And I don't say that because many of the writers and artists I admire for various reasons failed to have the kind of success the world admires and never met up with a black swan until after death, when it was a bit too late to enjoy the sound of those beating wings. I say it in part because I think being a part of the building-up of culture is a noble thing. It's a selfless thing, far away from the "self-esteem" school movement of recent years, far away from the me-focus of "follow your bliss" as it is commonly understood. We ought to admire it, though I don't think we do, at least in this country. Without the lives of the sea's tiniest residents, how can there be great whales? Without mice, how can we have eagles?

Entirely aside from success, the process of making art has its own rewards and pleasures, even if the artist is a Dickinson who knows few others involved in the arts or a Herbert, immured in the countryside, or a Melville, forgotten in old age but still not letting go of the thread of narrative. But what is a problem is this pernicious, me-focused "follow your bliss" myth that trips up so many, in and out of the arts. So don't think about following bliss. Think about becoming good at something . . .

Memory Palace, no. 3

Image courtesy of Michaela Kobyakov of Leonding,
Austria and sxc.hu

I find your project to memorize poetry and then write about it intellectually stimulating, lovely, and touching. You may be right about only poets wanting to read about poetry, but a huge percentage of people are poets who just don't write poetry. If they have the ability to be moved, they can and do love poetry. --Philip Lee Williams

What do you think about that lovely summation? Is it true?

Perhaps I'll continue writing notes about the poems I memorize; perhaps not. At any rate, I am learning and feeling things about poems that one can't learn in any other way. A memorized, delivered poem (in the mind or outloud) seems to engage the whole person, and the importance of pauses increases. One is not longer juggling words and doing a degree of study about how to read the poem when the poem flows forth, memorized. I find that the longer one repeats a poem, the more subtle variation in in pause and emphasis becomes evident. A memorized poem partakes of a natural out-springing like a stream from earth and rocks.

The second poem I memorized was this one by Shakespeare (no. 98), not one of the best known of his sonnets. I memorized it once in college for an exam, but had forgotten much of it over the years.

From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue
Could make me any summer's story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew;
Nor did I wonder at the lily's white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
   Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away,
   As with your shadow I with these did play.

This one does not want to stay lodged in my head, and though I have it now, I fear that I'll have to work to keep it from tumbling out again (rather like the two knotty lines in the Hopkins poem I memorized first.) Some of the difficulty may be due to inversion of syntax, but while memorizing it I noticed other things as stumbling points. "Nor the sweet smell / Of different flowers in odour and in hue" always feels a little redundant to me, so I kept thinking that I had the lines wrong. The stop in the third quatrain gives a bit of trouble because the quatrain splits into related parts, and the jump from the rose and lily to the "figures of delight" (which seem to work both as images and as rhetorical figures) drawn after the red and white complexion trope beloved of Renaissance writers made me go blank a few times.

Also, the turns in thought that mark the Shakespearean sonnet happen remarkably early, and so I didn't expect a shift in the fifth line. In fact, the whole poem with its yets and nors becomes turn, turn, turn, long before the closing couplet and the closing turn from summer to winter, from bright to dark.

Courtesy of Istvan Benedek of Budapest, Hungary and sxc.hu

Reading and dreaming by Glimmerglass

The Feckless Marketer
I become one of Mary
Boxley Bullington's
exuberant people... 

Shakespeare and Sendak

Here's a clip from Stephen Greenblatt's lovely New York Times article on Shakespeare and Sendak:

But it is not in the early comedies nor in the great middle tragedies that I feel the most intimate connection between Shakespeare’s work and Sendak’s sensibility: it is in those strange late plays known as the romances. Here Shakespeare turned to stories of children stolen from their parents and then miraculously found again; stories of wicked stepmothers who take advantage of fathers in the grip of sloth or depression; stories of sudden, violent outbursts of mad jealousy; stories of terrifying loss and the sweet, autumnal experience of reunion.

During his lifetime, Shakespeare was ridiculed for this unexpected turn in his work. “If there be never a servant-monster in the fair,” Shakespeare’s rival Ben Jonson snorted contemptuously in the preface to a new play he was mounting, “who can help it?” Jonson was loath, he declared, “to make Nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like drolleries.” Drolleries: it was for Jonson as if Shakespeare, near the end of his career, had started to write children’s books. But the author of “The Winter’s Tale” and “The Tempest” did not care. He understood that to reach down to the deepest wellspring of creative power, he needed to explore the child that was still miraculously alive and intact within him. The courageous ability to plunge into that strange innermost being, as into a dark, fathomless pool, was Maurice Sendak’s special gift, and it is the indelible sign — like a birthmark — of his Shakespearean inheritance. That inheritance, so rare and so precious, commands our gratitude and our wonder, for we know that it means that Sendak’s work, like Shakespeare’s, will continue to give intense delight, long after we have all vanished, like breath in the wind.

Marly in the tower

Am I the sort of poet and novelist one pictures hunkered by the fireplace in a little tower? I'd like to live in our Kingfisher Tower, which I can see standing in the edge of frozen Otsego Lake (a.k.a. Cooper's Glimmerglass) from my writing window. At least I'd like to live there if it could be made warm and snug. I could live in Kingfisher and dream my dreams and occasionally emerge blinking in the sunlight, only to be bewildered by the mad, busy ways of the marketplace.

Why might I be that sort? Fecklessness, it seems--

I declared myself a marketing maroon yesterday. After 11 books, I finally grasp that the Amazon algorithm for sharing and promoting work depends on Amazon reviews! And that's despite having had several agents and lots of book friends and so on. That's what comes of dreaming up stories and poems in an ice hut, a snow hill, a positive igloo in Utter Boondocks. So this is a thank you to those who have posted reviews on Amazon--I was pleased, but all this time did not realize how much they mattered. I hope some of you who wrote me lovely letters or notes on facebook and twitter about my three 2012 books may wander over as well.

Capote

Did you see Kevin Helliker's Wall Street Journal article about Truman Capote's evasions and fabulations on the little matter of facts and In Cold Blood? While I find things to admire about Capote, In Cold Blood has never been one of them. For me, it is one of those books that feels like cold iron burning the soul. I read the book long ago, and would never reread.

Paula Byrne on NPR: Jane Austen

I expect Janeites will be interested in Paula Byrne's entertaining interview about her biography of Austen, traced through emblematic possessions. The biographer says that she was inspired by character Fanny Price looking over the objects--her small, special treasures--in her modest room.

Interview clip:

The topaz cross was a real-life present, it's her own cross I used, that Charles Austen, who was in the Navy, gave to [his sister] Jane Austen. ... And she repays the compliment in Mansfield Park when Fanny Price is also given a topaz cross as a present from her brother. And there's this amazing moment in Mansfield Park, when she wants to wear it to go to the ball, but she doesn't have a chain for it. And she's given a chain by Henry Crawford, and the chain won't go through. And she's secretly delighted because she doesn't like Henry Crawford and she doesn't want to marry him. And then Edward gives her a chain, and the chain goes through the cross. It's a wonderful symbolic moment. But you know, it's also a reflection of the fact she was a Christian. He didn't buy her a locket, he bought her a cross. So these objects lead us into all sorts of different alleyways...

The teeth of Richard III

The owl shriek'd at thy birth,—an evil sign;
The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time;
Dogs howl'd, and hideous tempest shook down trees;
The raven rook'd her on the chimney's top,
And chattering pies in dismal discords sung.
Thy mother felt more than a mother's pain,
And, yet brought forth less than a mother's hope,
To wit, an indigested and deformed lump,
Not like the fruit of such a goodly tree.
Teeth hadst thou in thy head when thou wast born,
To signify thou camest to bite the world...

and

The midwife wonder'd, and the women cried
"Oh! Jesus bless us! he is born with teeth!"
And so I was: which plainly signified
That I should snarl and bite, and play the dog.
        Shakespeare, History of Henry VI, Part III

and

Then forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept
A hellhound that doth hunt us all to death—
That dog, that had his teeth before his eyes,
To worry lambs and lap their gentle blood.
        Shakespeare, Richard III

The battle at the end of a long game of hide and seek has begun. Richard III has his adherents who claim that he was unjustly maligned--that he was a good and pious king distorted in the view of history by being the last of the House of Plantagenet. Thomas More and Shakespeare (in Richard III, particularly) and others suggested that a twisted body was an outward and visible sign of a twisted soul, though Francis Bacon praised him as a lawmaker.

I was interested to see that his supposed birth with teeth noted in comments on novelist Elizabeth Hand's facebook page this morning. Folklore extends its long hand...

Oddly, my husband had just been reading to me about that little matter of folk beliefs and birth teeth. Recently he has read me startling bits from a book by that extremely odd personage, Montague Summers. Our daughter brought home a copy of The Vampire, picked up at Willis Monie's, our used bookstore, and he dips into its curiosities now and then. Here is Summers on what it means to be born with teeth, and how that might "signify thou camest to bite the world":

Since the vampire bites his prey with sharp teeth and greedily sucks forth the blood it is not surprising to find that those who are born with teeth in their heads are considered to be already marked down as vampires. Even in countries where the vampire belief was lost this circumstance was considered of the unluckiest, and in Chapman and Shirley's Chabot, Admiral of France, V, 2, Master Advocate exposing the villainies of the Chancellor declares: "He was born with teeth in his head, by an affidavit of his midwife, to note his devouring, and hath one toe on his left foot crooked, and in the form of an eagle's talon, to foretel his rapacity. What shall I say? branded, marked, and designed in his birth for shame and obloquy, which appeareth further, by a mole under his right ear, with only three witch's hairs in it; strange and ominous predictions of nature!" [Summers quotes from George Chapman and James Shirley's The Tragedie of Chabot Admirall of France: As it was presented by her Majesties Servants, at the private House in Drury Lane. Licensed by the Master of the Revels on 29 April, 1635.]

Historian John Rous praised Richard III while living under his rule, but was quick to jump to Tudor propaganda under his successor. Suddenly Richard is described as ill-favored, the sinister shoulder rising higher than the right (due to his scoliosis) and marked by ominous birth signs--teeth and shoulder-length hair, said to be caused by having stayed in the womb for two years. The Montague Summers quote suggests how neatly teeth in the head and bodily distortion went together as signs of the demonic:  "It is evident that the old physical characteristics which mark a creature of demoniacal propensities had been remembered as of ill-omen and horror when exactly what they portended and betrayed had been lost in the mists of ancient lore."

Shakespeare comes very close to declaring the king a vampire: "thou camest to bite the world." However, looking at the various portrayals, it seems that the teeth are more those of the bad dog who hurts the lambs (the princes in the Tower and others.) It seems that "old physical characteristics" of the vampire are recalled as "ill-omen and horror."

Clearly the preferred Tudor vision of Richard III was that of a monster. We no longer believe that a child born with teeth or who grows into a "slantdicular" shape is demonic, but the war over whether Richard III came to "bite the world" or not is now renewed with the finding of his crooked bones.

The Better World

Photograph courtesy of sxc.hu
and Thomas Rathbone of Chagrin Falls, Ohio.

Ten years gone: was the hour so long ago when all those people were brutally thrust into eternity, throats slashed, passengers burned, and office workers chased into air by fire, the wind unable to do anything but tear at their clothing and let them plunge? No, they were not hounded by fire but by men with fire and lovelessness at their command.

Create. Imagine a better world. Live.

One might have thought like Macbeth that "virtues will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against / The deep damnation of [such] taking-off; / And pity, like a naked newborn babe, / Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed / Upon the sightless couriers of the air, / Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, / That tears shall drown the wind." Had I not known already that writers were fallible instruments of wisdom, I would have learned it then, when so many American writers jettisoned the love and compassion demanded by the moment and flew to use those losses as a weapon against their own government. Therefore I make no attempt to climb some mount of wisdom and lay some tenth-year wreath of heartsease flowers but remember other words.

Create. Imagine a better world. Live.

"If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing." 1 Corinthians 13: 1-3

Create. Imagine a better world. Live.

If I speak with the tongue of man or angel but without love, if I give up all I have and allow my body to be burned without love: how apt these words seem to that bad time! Not long ago, Makoto Fujimura ended an address on the purposes of art with these words of hope that make good instructions for the living: "By continuing to create and imagine a better world, we live."

Create. Imagine a better world. Live.