God's design behind the dance...

Every Thought....

Week 15: Walled Gardens

Walled Gardens, already cited several times, is my tributary restatement of passages from Sanai’s El Hadiqa, a Sufi monk’s 11th century pondering of God’s design, sometimes with the simple grace of a Child’s Garden of Verses.


04/08:

TWL, Lines 8-18: When We Were Children

8     Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
9       With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
10     And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
11     And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
12     Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch
13     And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
14     My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
15     And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
16     Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
17     In the mountains, there you feel free.
18     I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

8. STARNBERGERSEE, a lake southwest of Munich, was where Bavarian King Ludwig II was found dead in June of 1886, having drowned in shallow waters in much the same way as Hamlet’s Ophelia (see note 172).  Ludwig, known as the Mad King or the Swan King, was a dedicated patron of Richard Wagner and even decorated the walls of his palace, Neuschwanstein, with scenes from the operas of Richard Wagner.

WAGNER’S OPERAS, often inspired by Grail legend themes (see note 0.2), appear several times in this poem: see Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde 1.1.5-8 (1865; tr. Richard le Gallienne 1909) at notes 34, 42, 92 and 137 and lines 31-34 and 42; Götterdammerung (The Twilight of the Gods, 1876, tr. Frederick Jameson, ca. 1916) at lines 266-295 and note 266; and Parsifal (1882, tr. Henry Edward Krehbiel, 1920), at line 201.

WALLS THAT TALK, beyond the Wagnerian murals and tapestries at Neuschwanstein, will make several more appearances in this poem, through its allusions if not directly.  See the painted walls of Cymbeline’s daughter Imogen (notes 77 and 80); the walls in Cleopatra’s chambers, retelling the story ofPhilomela’s tapestries (lines 99 and 105); the ceiling panoramas of Cleopatra (line 93) and John Day’s Plush Bee (note 197), depicting the hunter Acteon coming across the goddess Diana bathing in the woods (see notes 77 and 197); and, at line 98, the painted sylvan scene of the Golden Bough (see note 0.2).   See also Virgil, Aeneid 1.456-493 and 6.14-31, where Aeneas finds his Trojan War retold “in sequent picture” (1.461) in Juno’s shrine, then later finds other stories told on the doors of the Sybil’s temple.  Finally, see Whitman, Memories 11:

“O what shall I hang on the chamber walls?”

10. HOFGARTEN is a Munich park with a central pavilion dedicated to Diana, the same goddess with whom Acteon and the Plush Bee and Imogene were infatuated (see note 8 above).

12. ORIGINS: “I am not Russian, I come from Lithuania, I am really a German.”  This statement, effectively an intertwining knot of dried up roots, appears to be an overheard fragment, contextually from someone other than the poet or his companion.  Compare Virgil’s introduction in Dante, Inferno 1.66-69:

“Not man; man once I was,      
And both my parents were of Lombardy,
...Sub Julio' was I born...”

See also Adrian, in Shakespeare, The Tempest: 2.1.82-83:

“Widow Dido, said you? You make me study of that.
She was of Carthage, not of Tunis.”

This refers to Queen Dido of Carthage; see Virgil, Aeneid 1.342-343, where Dido is introduced by her origins:

  “Upon the throne is Dido, exiled there
from Tyre.”

Tyre, now in Lebanon, was a seaport of ancient Phoenicia; see lines 47 and 312 and note 312 for other Phoenician references.  For other Dido and Carthage allusions, see notes 92 and 307.

13. REMEMBERING YOUTH: Not yet feeling old (see note 219), see Ecclesiastes 12:1,5:

“Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them; ...when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets.”

15. MARIE: These lines derive from Marie Larisch, My Past (1913), and from private visits Eliot had with her in Bavaria.  In 1889, Austrian Countess Marie was socially cast out after her cousin Crown-Prince Rudolph (the archduke) and his mistress, for whom Marie had acted as a go-between, died in a suicide-murder scandal. Rudolph was succeeded as crown-prince by Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose 1914 assassination triggered World War I (see note 61).  Meanwhile, another Prince Ferdinand, from Shakespeare, The Tempest, will be given repeated attention, beginning with the next passage (see line 26).

17. MOUNTAINS reappear throughout the poem, inspiring freedom but also fear and withdrawal.  See the Lenten “thunder of spring over distant mountains” (line 327); the desperate sense of “no water, only rock” (lines 331-359); the unnamed range surrounding Ernest Shackleton’s march (note 361); the inverted mountains beneath a city of decaying earth (line 372), a mountain hole that hides an empty chapel (line 386), and finally the snowy Himavant, a holy mountain in the Himalayas (line 398).

18. GOING SOUTH literally refers to the direction Marie went for winter breaks and Eliot went for recuperation in 1921-22 (see note 300), but it may also refer more figuratively to a decline in value or a departure from responsibility.  See, e.g., Elgin (Illinois) Dairy Rep. 11/13/1920: “Meat, grains and provisions generally, are like Douglas Fairbanks, headed south—in other words, going down.”  Fairbanks had starred in a 1918 film, no longer available, called “Headin’ South,” about a U.S. ranger who tracks a fugitive to Mexico, joins the fugitive’s gang then falls in love with one of the fugitive’s victims.

MOOD: Right after recalling a feeling of youthful freedom, the tone becomes somber again.  The mood of this poem may have been set by the convergence of several key events: the great war and the loss of a friend to that war (see notes 15, 42 and 61), the pain of a dysfunctional marriage and the grappling with sexual identity (notes 92 and 218), recuperation from mental exhaustion (note 300), and, generally, the loss of innocence.


04/09:

Bedtime Stories

Tell me a story said the child
No said pragmatic it’s time for bed
Sensing tactics the skeptic smiled
Just close your eyes denial said
And dream said ignorance sweet dreams
I’ll be in the next room said fear
I love you said despite what seems
Maybe tomorrow said next year
We’ll read two stories busy lied
If you’ll be good condition said
Now say your prayers the hypo- cried
And go to sleep said get to bed
Said once upon a time good night
And nothing read turned off the light


04/10:

The Naming Of Parts

from Walled Gardens

Being told we are made in
the image of God, we imagine:
the foot that walks beside,
the hand that reaches out,
the fingers and the touch
and the change of place,
the grace of one descending,
the image of a man,
the form of one who sits upon a throne
with a face that shines upon us
and words to gather round,
with flesh and blood and
a body to embrace.
It is this God that we imagine,
this God we wear around our necks,
that leads to arguments and war,
but I will believe there is a better God than
this God of blind design, a greater God
than mortals can conceive.


04/11:

The Elephant

from Walled Gardens

“I come from the land of Ghur.
    You may have heard
the story I’m about to tell,
    but I’ll tell you more
        than you’ve heard before.
You may have heard
    how soldiers came
and set up camp in the land of Ghur,
    all in the name
of world peace, but did you hear
    about their king
visiting his army troops,
    so full of pomp
and circumstance, riding up
    on his elephant
across our piece of the world
    to claim it as his own?

We’ve seen our share of elephants
    in the land of Ghur,
but this great beast,
    like none we’ve ever seen before,
stood battle ready,
    armored head to toe and armed
with long hollow weaponry,
    all set to blow
our world apart,
    and on its heavy limbs it rose
above us like
    an ancient tower in the sky.

“I never saw this for myself
    but I believe
what I’ve been told by several
    first-hand witnesses
who travel through the land of Ghur
    and testify
to all they’ve come to know. ‘That armor,’
    says the first,
‘seemed like a carpet stretched across
    the desert floor.’
‘That weapon,’ says the next,
    ‘loomed like a Howitzer,
its heavy barrel sweeping o’er
    the poppy fields.’

‘That tower,’ says the third,
    ‘casts shadows on us all.’

“There may be truth in everything
    that’s ever said,
and wisdom at the core of every
    argument,
but in the end we’ll never see
    the elephant
for what it is; we’re ignorant and blind,
    and when
the war begins we fight against ourselves,
    and when
it’s over we are all that’s left behind.”


04/12:

The Owl

from Walled Gardens

Whoever remains forever behind a veil
Is like the owl who would avoid the sun,
Aware the sun would make its eyesight fail,
It hides, and still the sun keeps blazing on.

But if the owl is blinded by the dawn
It is because the owl’s eyes are weak
And not because the sun keeps blazing on
As though it were some terrible mistake.

You dream your dreams, you make use of your eyes
And yet beyond your eyes and dreams you’re blind
And even as the sun lights up the skies
You cannot see the surface and the line,
And what’s the point of having eyes that can-
not see the way the sun keeps blazing on?


04/13:

mosquito

the little-brained mosquito dances
'round the room on paper wings

there's wisdom in the way life sings
to give us fools a fighting chance

there's grace in every circumstance
of life if one keeps listening

for God's design upon the wings
and nature’s music in the dance

there's also pain sometimes disease
that pierces through the leather veil

and then eventually there's death
but first despite life's tragedies

there is the whisper of a breath
that grace and wisdom will prevail

the little-brained mosquito dances
round the room on paper wings

with God's design behind the dance
and nature's way to make life sing


04/14:

Moleskin 2.7: Lawrence And Julia

Lawrence and Julia Olsen were our nearest neighbors, just across the gravel road and down a long driveway to a tuckaway farmhouse. It was through Lawrence, a homebound invalid who needed a big hoist to move him from bed to wheelchair to living room chair, that I first got to really know my father. As a pastor, it was Dad’s duty to bring the communion bread and wine to Lawrence, and he would often let me tag along. But Dad would visit Lawrence and Julia a lot more that the once monthly communion Sundays, more than his job seemed to require or the social structures around us seemed to compel: he visited them often, as a neighbor and a friend, and he brought me along, to play in their yard, to play with their bulldog, to play with their grandkids’ toys, but also, I think, to be closer to our closest neighbors.