"Tristan lived at the bottom of the see..."

Every Thought...

Week 17: March To December

1990 was, all at once, the year I came to terms with my father’s death the spring before; the year my younger brother was diagnosed with cancer; the year I committed to becoming a writer, with a ten month journal half worth keeping.


04/22:

TWL, Lines 31-42: From Fresh Wind To Dreary Sea

31         Frisch weht der Wind
32         Der Heimat zu
33         Mein Irisch Kind,
34         Wo weilest du?
35     “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
36     “They called me the hyacinth girl.”
37     —Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
38     Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
39     Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
40     Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
41     Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
42     Oed’ und leer das Meer.

34. FRESH BLOWS THE WIND: See Wagner, Tristan und Isolde 1.1.5-8 (1865; tr. Richard le Gallienne 1909):

“Fresh blows the wind
For home:
My Irish child,
Where tarriest thou?”

This is a sailor’s song overheard by Princess Isolde, en route to her loveless marriage to King Mark of Cornwall; Isolde wants to drink poison to escape her fate, but her maid substitutes the poison with a love potion. She takes the potion in front of the king’s nephew Tristan, the potion takes its effect and they fall in  love. Compare Venus sending Cupid to poison Queen Dido with love for Aeneas, at Virgil, Aeneid 1. 684-685:

“let thy secret fire
breathe o'er her heart, to poison and betray.”

See note 92 for the extended story of Venus, Aeneas and Dido.

TRISTAN was, with Parsifal of the Grail legend, one of King Arthur’s knights. See Weston, The Quest of the Holy Grail.  See also Dante, Inferno 5.61-69, where Tristan commiserates with Cleopatra (see line 77) and the widow Dido (see above), condemned for their lust to the second circle of hell.

36. THE HYACINTH GIRL, reflecting the name of a perennial April wildflower, was initially a Spartan prince endeared by the sun god Apollo (and also, in other accounts, by the wind god Zephyrus). While playing quoits in the sun the prince was killed by a wind-blown quoit; Apollo raised a purple flower out of his blood, traced a mournful “ai, ai” on its petals and named it Hyacinth.  See Ovid, Metamorphosis 10:276-343.  For other hyacinth references, see lines 37, 125, 176 and 323 and notes 39, 42, 71, 74, 76.5, 111, 125, 138, 176, 209, 214, 227, 311.5, 312, 323, 378 and 429.

39. AMBIGUOUS IDENTITIES recur throughout this poem. See Eliot’s note at note 125, tying the hyacinth girl, whose gender is already changed from its Ovidian source, to the drowned sailor with pearly eyes; this as the speaker’s own eyes are failing.  See also lines 12, 39-40, 46-48, 54, 126, 207-08, 218-19, 312-18 and 320.

NEITHER LIVING NOR DEAD: See Dante, Inferno 34:25:

“I did not die, and I alive remained not.”

See also Bhagavat Gita 2:11 (ca. 100 BCE, tr. Kâshinâth Trimbak Telang, 1882):

“Learned men grieve not for the living nor the dead.”

Compare lines 117-126 (those who know nothing) and 182 (one who grieves).

41. INTO THE HEART OF ...SILENCE:  See Conrad, Heart of Darkness 3: While waiting for the tide to rise on the Thames, Marlow, “the only man of us who still followed the sea,” told his shipmates of a past journey up the Congo:

“into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there.”

Compare with Dante, Paradiso 12:30-31:

"Out of the heart of one of the new lights
There came a voice..."

42. WASTE AND DREAR: Eliot: “Id. iii, verse 24.”

See Wagner, Tristan und Isolde 3.1.24:

“The sea is waste and drear.”

This is the report to Tristan’s henchman Kurwenal, who was keeping vigil over his ailing master and had asked a shepherd to “Watch thou the sea” for Isolde’s ship to arrive.

JEAN VERDENAL, a friend of Eliot’s who died in World War I, appears to have influenced this poem on several levels.  See John Peter, A New Interpretation of The Waste Land (1952), and James E. Miller, T.S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons (1977).  Eliot met Verdenal in Paris in 1910, and they kept a long-distance friendship while Eliot was studying at Harvard in 1911 and 1912. See Eliot, Letters.  In one letter to Eliot, Verdenal had expressed a deep admiration for Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, which now bookends the hyacinth girl / drowned sailor story. In April 1915 (the cruelest month; see line 1), Verdenal was among troops sent to Gallipoli (see Mrs. Porter’s soldiers at line 199; see also the Stetson friend, line 69), where he was officially commended for helping to evacuate wounded soldiers:

“Scarcely recovered from pleurisy, he did not hesitate to spend much of the night in the water up to his waist.”

He died two days later. That summer, Eliot published The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and he dedicated his first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) to Verdenal. In 1934, Eliot wrote in T.S. Eliot, A Commentary, Criterion (April 1934):

“I am willing to admit that my own retrospect is touched by a sentimental sunset, the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later (so far as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli.”

Compare lines 1-11, referring to lilacs, memory, mixing, mud and sunlight coming over the lake.

DROWNING, or “death by water,” which might creatively describe the cause of Verdenal’s demise, is also suggested as the poetic demise of the hyacinth girl at line 38 (“Your arms full, and your hair wet”).  See also the shallow water death of Bavarian King Ludwig II (note 8), Ophelia’s death in Shakespeare, Hamlet (lines 170-172) and the drownings of the pearl-eyed sailor (line 48) and Phlebas the Phoenician (lines 312-321).  Phlebas’s end and the title to Part IV is also portended at line 55 (“Fear death by water”).  See also the simile of perfumes that “drowned the sense in odours” (line 89).


04/23:

The Hymn He Gurgled In His Throat

Notes from 1990

The Hymn He Gurgled In His Throat:

Tristi fummo

with to: refer, leave to another’s judgment
obsolete: offer, render, give; yield with courtesy:

“he defers to the opinion of...”

“To you, O great one, I defer all things—
My life, my livelihood, my daily living
And all that is given to me, I bring
To your altar in humble oblation.”

sacrifice, worldly obligation

“This is the hymn they gurgle in their throats
but cannot sing in words that truly sound.”

Dante’s fifth circle in Upper Hell
in the River Styx

“tristi” or “sluggish”

“acedia” or “sloth”

one of the seven capital sins

Go to the ant, thou sluggard —Proverbs 6:6

Adams: sloth, sleep and littleness —> rage like a lion

Chaucer: May will have no sluggard

Churchill: No room for the sluggard

The voice of the sluggard: you have waked me too soon.

Tristan lived at the bottom of the see...


04/24:

Tristan, Unboxed

Tristan lived by himself in a two story house tucked away in a cave at the edge of a valley. He rarely went out —only when he found his kitchen shelves bare of food— and he rarely invited visitors, although he had several neighbors who knew him and invited themselves for a visit now and then. Tristan did not object to his neighbors’ visits and even enjoyed their company, but mostly Tristan kept to himself and to the confines of his house.

His house, from the outside, was not remarkable; beyond its unkempt surroundings and its peeling paint, it was much like any other two story house in the valley. But the inside of Tristan’s house —and his neighbors after a visit would always mention this among themselves— was quite peculiarly decorated. Certainly, all of the items one might expect a bachelor homebody to have were part of the decor: a television, records, half-started repair projects, stacks of dishes; but surrounding the clutter, on all the walls, were long rows of shelves. They stretched from one side of the house to the other, on every wall and always at least five or six levels high. In the whole house, Tristan had left no more than three feet of wallspace shelveless.

A few of the shelves had items neatly stacked and organized on them: clothes, boxes, books; more shelves were less tidily piled upon without any sense of organization; but most of the shelves, certainly more than three quarters of these shelves so dominantly displayed in Tristan’s house, were empty. The strangeness of this emptiness was especially marked, of course, by the completeness of the decor —everywhere one looked were shelves and most of them were bare— but even odder, on the floor of Tristan’s house, everywhere, were stacks of boxes and piles of things, every imaginable knick-knack thing, that could have filled those shelves and given Tristan and his occasional visitors room to stand and move about. Instead, Tristan would crawl and leap and wiggle his way around the rooms and over his unshelved stacks, always telling his visitors with a most apologetic tone, “I’ve been meaning to get to this stuff.” And he was going to do it, too, he told them, as soon as he could find the time.

It was for this spectacle, one might assume, that Tristan’s neighbors visited him at all. He did not have an outgoing personality or a magnetic charisma and he never reciprocated with visits of his own. But Tristan was pleasant whenever called upon, and however busy he said he was he seemed to enjoy taking the time for a friendly conversation with his visitors.

There was always something to talk about: all one had to do was pick out something curious from among the stacks and ask, “Tristan, what is this thing?” or “What inspired you to save a thing like this?” And Tristan would cheerily answer about a someday plan he had or a reminiscence he intended to properly memorialize, or there was a simple appeal to the object itself that he could not resist. “I don’t know what it is,” he might say, “but I liked it and I just wanted to keep it. It’ll do good on that shelf over there, don’t you think?” And Tristan would hop over some stacks and put the thing on the shelf over there.

All the while, in fact, as Tristan and his company visited, he busied himself with putting things on shelves. If one must assume reasons for Tristan’s neighbors to visit him, this seemed more likely: their occasional visits always accomplished activity in Tristan’s house. But once they left they would notice through the window that the purposeful flurry would abruptly stop. Tristan would pick up a book he had been reading or go to the television, oblivious once more to the piles around him.

This led Tristan’s neighbors to believe they were being good neighbors, helping someone get things done. They agreed amongst themselves to rotate the duty of helping Tristan straighten his house up. It did not require much of them, other than time; just their visits would be helpful by merely promptingTristan to work. They were genuinely good neighbors, though,  and they would chip in, which Tristan was more than happy to allow.


04/25:

Tristan, In Verse

I’ve got boxes over there
that aren’t even opened.
I filled them up and sealed them
ten or twenty years ago,
or maybe more. I can’t remember.
They don’t have any labels
and they don’t seem to be stacked
in any order. All I know
is that they had some value
or I never would have saved them.
And each box holds a part of me,
a little bit of history,
and as the years pile up
I’m not inclined to let them go.

I’ve got shelves along my walls
but most of them are empty
and waiting to be used.
I put them up the other day
with the impetuous intention
of organizing things
to get rid of the clutter
that surrounds me. Anyway
I’ll have some room to walk now,
as soon as I get started,
except this next step seems to be
the hardest step to take for me:
to pick my life up off the floor
and put it on display.


04/26:

Redefining Solitude

English 240, 4/6/90, Prof. Gardiner 

In 1816, John Keats’ first published poem, “O Solitude,” was printed in the London Examiner. As the title implies, Keats spoke in this sonnet to a personification of his own seclusion. He followed with a fourteen-line suggestion to Solitude that it might be willing to allow for a couple of changes.

As I read this, I am led to picture young Keats alone in a “murky” city, not happy with his isolation, and trying to escape it by way of a stream of wishful thinking. His imaginary escape takes two distinct steps: first, to change the environment of his solitude, moving from the city’s dinginess to a more pastoral scene, and then to change his solitude’s parameters, allowing for a companion with whom to enjoy the “haunts.” In fact, then, this is not Keats’ escape from solitude at all, but his palliative reshaping of it. And he puts this wishful stream on paper, addressing Solitude itself, but implying---and, as the poem develops, explicating---that he wants to share his thoughts with another, more real audience.

Solitude does not change for Keats as he writes his wishes down, and there is no other audience for him, but just thinking of the possibilities, the two big steps, seems to raise the young poet’s hopes. Within the poem, he moves from his actual, present situation, one which seems to be lonely indeed, to a possible future of highest bliss. Thus he changes his attitude, not by wishing that he could step out of Solitude’s bounds or that it would disappear, but by optimistically redefining it, to the point that a future of solitude would be something to long for, even a haven to flee to. In two poetic steps he is away from a perspective that depresses him, and considering one that pleases him.

That initial perspective shows in the way that Keats begins: “O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell...” The exclamation sounds of weariness, and the “if I must” breathes resignation. He has pessimistically decided that it is possible, even fateful, that he will always live in some seclusion. Even the word “dwell” connotes a continual, exhaustive lingering, and when Keats goes on to show where he is presently dwelling, the tone is stressed further. He is not just in the city of London, he is “among the jumbled heap / Of murky buildings.” And it will not do for Keats.  “Let it not be,” he pleads to Solitude.

But Keats does not merely lament his condition here; he turns around and takes his first step in the new direction of optimism. He suggests that he might lead his Solitude to an alternate environment. It is not a fantastic leap: Solitude will still have its enclosures, and its passive, detached ways. But there would be new buildings and better things to see. There would be the improved architecture of “Nature’s observatory:” a valley walled by “flowery slopes,” a pavilion made of trees, a span defined by the dell itself, bridging between its hillsides. And, of course, there would be new sights in the observatory. Keats describes one imagined scene with what might be the most beautiful lines of the poem: “Let me thy vigils keep,” he writes,

...where the deer’s swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell.

But it still won’t be enough, considers Keats, even as he takes the imaginary step. He would be glad to “trace” such peaceful scenes, but he is still aware of his detachment from them, and his isolation, with Solitude, of looking in from the outside and not being a part of the action (i.e., he is not doing the “startling”).Keats does not want to cross the line; that would be walking away from Solitude, which hasn’t occurred to him as a possibility. Solitude, as “thee” and “thy haunts,” is referred to with all respect, even to the sonnet’s end. Instead, he wants to take his established companion with him on a second step of wishful thinking. He imagines, once more, an improved Solitude: this time, one that would allow for a population of two instead of one. He longs for conversation with an additional companion (the first one, Solitude, had not added to the “population”), and as he is explicit about how that conversation would go---sweet, innocent, refined---he implies that these are aspects that had been absent in his Solitude thus far. Innocence and refinement themselves imply a conversation of one voice undefiled by the other, one thought pure from the second, two spirits kindred, but apart; in other words, a conversation different from the one Keats had been holding, and a talk with someone other than himself.

“...It sure must be / Almost the highest bliss,” says Keats about this second revision to Solitude, reminding himself that he still isn’t there, but not yet abandoning all hope. Apparently, he has never been alone with anyone the way he has pictured it, sharing solitude with a kindred soul in a springtime (flowered and river-swelled) valley. He imagines, though, that it would be blissful (maybe just about the highest bliss), and, at any rate, his attitude has certainly improved since he first started dreaming: whereas at first he noted how he “must dwell with his present Solitude, now he appreciates “fleeing” to a future Solitude, just a “climb” and a “leap” away.


04/27:

O Solitude, By John Keats (1816), With Annotations

(from a college notebook)

O Solitude (personified, addressed)! (a weary exclamation)
if (resignation) I must with thee (Solitude) dwell (linger,
live),
Let it not be (not resigned to the parameters of Solitude:
something must change) among the jumbled heap (the city:
the present condition described)
Of murky buildings (conventional structures); climb with me the
steep, -- (first 8 lines, a chained Italian sonnet: ABBA,
ABBA)
Nature (personified)'s observatory (an alternative building)
  -- (emphasis added by break in rhythm, a visual dash)
whence the dell (valley),
Its flowery slopes (alternative to grey walls of steel), its river's
crystal swell (and glass),
May seem a span (bridge, another alternative structure);
let me thy (Solitude’s) vigils (diligent (holy) watches) keep
(holding on to the beauty)
'Mongst boughs pavilion'd (another alternative building),
where the deer's swift leap (what the vigilant one sees)
Startles the wild (abrupt rhythm break; startling within while the
vigilant one remains detached) bee from the foxglove bell
(more break in rhythm: emphasis).
  But (sextant, new thought, moving beyond the beauty beheld)
though I'll gladly trace (outline, scant sketch of the outer
profile) these scenes with thee (Solitude),
Yet the sweet (what Solitude isn’t) converse (what Solitude
doesn’t) of an innocent (undefiled) mind (rhythm breaks,
emphasizing the new thought),
Whose words (what Solitude lacks) are images of thoughts
refin'd (purified) (last 6 lines break from Italian sonnet
structure: CDDC DC),
  Is my soul's pleasure;  and it sure must be (trying to be
committal)
Almost (non-committal - he doesn’t know) the highest (sweetest,
most innocent, most refined) bliss of human-kind (not the
19th century “mankind,” thus embracing womankind),
When to thy (Solitude’s) haunts two kindred spirits (he longs for
companionship) flee.


Paraphrase (Para-pathy):

I can accept my solitude
though I’d rather be in Minnesota
than here in Chicago,
and I’d rather be with someone
than to walk these paths of solitude alone.


04/28:

Moleskin 2.9: The World

We perched for four years on the edge of the Buffalo River, and it was a peaceful place for a kid in his Huck Finn days. But the world was getting bigger. The sociopolitical scene of the late sixties and early seventies would dawn on me sometime afterwards; for the moment it was a greater deal to me that my family of four and then five was much bigger than our tributary bounds could hold. We vacationed, locally to an aunt and uncle’s cottage on Pelican Lake, a little farther to our grandparents’ newly built house on Lac La Belle, an extended family fishing vacation —guys only —to Lake of the Woods; and we visited cousins in North Dakota, southern Minnesota, and one summer all the way out to California. In the summer of ‘71 we had eighty people gather on the Buffalo River for a Vold Reunion, and in the summer of ‘72 we traveled to Chicago to see our cousins there. Then, in the fall of that year, the world changed more than I thought it ever would, when Chicago became our home.