This week continues what last week started: the raw prayer of a summer cold, in and out of a house with two low T-celled cancer warriors. After twenty five years, it remains a rough draft.
07/08:
TWL, Lines 185-206: Rattling Bones
185 But at my back in a cold blast I hear
186 The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
187 A rat crept softly through the vegetation
188 Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
189 While I was fishing in the dull canal
190 On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
191 Musing upon the king my brother's wreck
192 And on the king my father's death before him
193 White bodies naked on the low damp ground
194 And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
195 Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year.
196 But at my back from time to time I hear
197 The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
198 Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
199 O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
200 And on her daughter
201 They wash their feet in soda water
202 Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole!
203 Twit twit twit
204 Jug jug jug jug jug jug
205 So rudely forc'd.
206 Tereu
185. A COLD BLAST stifles the weeping and everything is turned around, at least momentarily. Tears (line 182) are replaced with a chuckle (line 186), and melancholy becomes musing (line 191). Each of these lines are malapropisms of the alluded sources: what is heard “at my back” distorts a phrase from Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress (see notes 141 and 197), and the ”musing” at line 191 modifies a line from the Tempest (see note 192).
The cold blast also marks the return of winter (line 190), as the sweet Thames of autumn (lines 173-184) becomes a dull canal beside a gashouse (lines 189-190). Compare winter’s dull roots being stirred by spring rains at the beginning of the poem (line 4). As the stir becomes a blast, Eliot also acknowledges the seasonal cycle of his changing emotions, rattled “year to year” (line 195).
186. RATTLING BONES occur here and at lines 22, 116, 195, 316 and 391. See also Whitman, Memories 15:
“I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them
And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them.”
See also Shakespeare, Tempest 1.2.398 (“of his bones are coral made”).
For an extended rattling bone image, see Ezekiel 37:1-9:
“The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry. And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest. Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the Lord. So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them. Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.”
191. SITTING ON A BANK: Eliot: “Cf. The Tempest, I. ii.” See Prince Ferdinand at Shakespeare, The Tempest 1.2.390-391:
“...Sitting on a bank
weeping again the king my father's wreck...”
For the moment Eliot has turned sadness to musing and chuckling (line 186), but there was weeping when he first sat down (line 182) and will be yet again (line 298, and see note 182). The riverbank setting and the somber subject of death remain the same, however, even as the emotions change.
197. HEARING HORNS: Eliot: “Cf. Marvell, To His Coy Mistress.” For the allusion here and at line 185, see Marvell’s impatient plea (see note 141):
“For, Lady, you deserve this state
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.”
See also John Day, Parliament of Bees (1641). Eliot: “Cf. Day, Parliament of Bees:
‘When of the sudden, listening, you shall hear,
‘A noise of horns and hunting, which shall bring
‘Actaeon to Diana in the spring,
‘Where all shall see her naked skin...’”
Day’s Parliament of Bees features a "vainglorious reveler" named Polypragmus the Plush Bee who speaks of a mechanical panorama he wants to build on the ceiling of his hive, depicting the tale of Actaeon and Diana. See Ovid, Metamorphoses (note 0.3) 3:206-312. After Actaeon the hunter saw the goddess Diana naked, she turned him into a stag to be hunted and killed by his own dogs. See also Sophocles, Electra (ca. 400 BCE) for the Greek counterpart with Agamemnon and Artemis. Compare Shakespeare, Cymbeline (note 77), in which Iachimo takes pleasure in seeing an image of Diana bathing on Imogene’s bedchamber walls.
198. SWEENEY is Eliot’s revival of a brutish character he used in three earlier poems, a counterpart to his more sensitive Prufrock (see note 0.4). Here Sweeney takes the place of Actaeon / Agamemnon (note 197), and Diana/Artemis becomes a brothel madame. Compare Eliot, Sweeney Among the Nightingales (1918), which opens with a Greek epigraph of the dying words of Agamemnon, suffering at the hands of his wife and her lover, as told in Aeschylus, Agamemnon 116 (458 BCE, tr. William Watson Goodwin (1906):
“Oh, woe is me! I am struck to the heart with a fatal blow.”
Sweeney Among the Nightingales concludes:
“The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,
And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud
And let their liquid droppings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.”
NIGHTBIRDS: The nightingale is the bird Philomela turns into after her rape (see note 99), but it has also come to symbolize the prostitute. See the nightbird of note 200, and see Franceschina’s song in John Marston, The Dutch Courtezan (1605) 1.2.220-227:
“The dark is my delight,
So ‘tis the nightingale’s;
My music’s is the night;
So is the nightingale’s;
My body is but little,
So is the nightingale’s;
I love to sleep ‘gainst prickle,
So doth the nightingale.”
See also Anthony’s affection to his queen, in Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra 4.8.25-26: “My nightingale, we have beat them to their beds. What, girl!”
200. THE SOLDIERS’ SONG: Eliot: “I do not know the origin of the ballad from which these lines are taken: it was reported to me from Sydney, Australia.” For the song's origin, see Thurland Chattaway, Red Wing (1907):
“Now the moon shines bright on pretty red-wing
the breeze is sighing
the nightbird’s crying.”
Australian soldiers corrupted the song in Gallipoli, Turkey, where Mrs. Porter was a favorite brothel madame among the troops; see C. M. Bowra, The Creative Experiment (1949), and see Ernest Raymond, Tell England: A Study in a Generation (1922):
“Oh the moon shines bright on Mrs Porter
And on her daughter,
A regular snorter;
She has washed her neck in dirty water
She didn’t oughter,
The dirty cat.”
Gallipoli is also where Eliot’s friend Jean Verdenal died at war (see note 42).
201. FOOT-WASHING: See Wagner, Parsifal (note 8) 3: At the end of his quest, Parsifal, the chief Grail knight (see note 0.2), has his feet washed in holy water to “be free from stain; from devious wandering’s dust.” He then continues:
“My feet hast thou anointed,—
Anoint my head, thou venerable knight,
That e’en today as king the guild may hail me.”
See also Paul Verlaine, Parsifal (1886; tr. John Gray 1893):
He heals the dying king, he sits upon the throne.”
This also alludes to the Lenten event of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples during the Last Supper. See John 13:1-17 (note 0.5).
202. CHILDREN’S VOICES: Eliot: “V. Verlaine, Parsifal.” Gray's translation (note 201):
And oh! the chime of children's voices in the dome.
Compare Whitman, Memories (note 2) 6:
“...with dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn.”
Children’s voices also sing out at line 385. For other voices see notes 321.5, 385, 388 and 400. See also Sweeney’s birds at note 198. Compare these voices to the nightingale’s song at lines 203-206 and at line 103, again alluding to the story of Tereus’s rape of Philomela (again, see lines 99-103).
203. BIRD SONGS: Lines 203-204 return to the nightingale’s song from line 103. For other bird songs, see the hermit thrush (line 357) and the rooster (line 393), and see their comparison to song syllables at note 172.5. As to interpreting these songs, see notes 185 and 200, reflecting our human nature to project meaning into the songs we hear and distort them to our own purpose.
07/09:
Out In The Cold, Part 2
July 6, 1990
I’m still here, for at least one more night. I still have the cold.
It’s a weird guilt I’m trying to sort out. I’m feeling sorry, because it’s been hard for Mom, with her husband and her youngest son both stricken with cancer. And I have no justification to make matters worse. But then I can’t help wondering —maybe being away from home is the best thing while I have this cold. What good could I do at home? This isn’t feeling sorry for myself. I’m being logical. And I want to feel sorry for what I’ve done, but I want to keep coming to this logic, as if I’ve inadvertently done the right thing and just can’t deny it.
Oh, I’m still ashamed. I called Mom every name in the book, I coughed in her face, I raised a fist —and I walked away with the lousy rationale that I had been provoked. And I’m still feeling like leaning on that rationale, even though I know I shouldn’t.
Tomorrow will be a hard day. On top of everything, I’m not sure my cold will be gone. Maybe I’ll call first, apologize and offer to stay away until the cold disappears. That sounds phony, I know, but I should propose that sincerely. God stay with me tomorrow, as ever. I need you.
07/10:
A Novel Without A Hero
Engl. 355, 7/9/90, Prof. Messenger
“Maybe a story is better without any hero,” scrawled Ernest Hemingway in an early manuscript of The Sun Also Rises. He was well into a story in which his narrator, his omnipresent point of view, was a man who was made sexually dysfunctional from a war wound; at this point heroism, though it might have been difficult, still could have been reached by circumvention. But a line of thought had been running through Hemingway’s head and was already woven into the novel, and perhaps he already had in mind the epigraph to this thread: an opening passage from the book of Ecclesiastes. This, with that passage in mind, would have to be a heroless novel; it would have to continue in the direction of thought of Qoheleth, the biblical philosopher [Qoheleth is the Hebrew equivalent to the Greek “Ecclesiastes,” which means preacher or leader of the assembly], because after all, whether it was written down or not, the epigraph was already being followed.
Rather than scrutinize those several famous verses from which the novel’s title came, and from which the standard Hemingway theme of a generation passing away was also born, the point might be made as clearly by looking at the verses in Ecclesiastes all around those of the epigraph and seeing how Hemingway did in fact parallel the philosophy of Qoheleth. Consider the two verses preceding the epigraph’s source: “Sheer futility, Qoheleth says. Sheer futility: everything is futile! What profit can we show for all our toil, toiling under the sun?” (Ec. 1:1,2, New Jerusalem Bible) In other words, the Hebrew preacher asks, How can a story of a suffered life ever have a hero? “What was, will be again,” the preacher continues after the epigraph verses, “what has been done will be done again and there is nothing new under the sun!” (Ec. 1:9)
On the surface, Jake Barnes is not nearly as pessimistic about life; but then, as always, there is that Hemingway iceberg, looming largely under the surface. Jake Barnes only occasionally lets show the “feelings of things coming that you could not prevent happening” (146), but in the same breath he reveals an “ignored tension” built around a memory of the war; and after the war he is emasculated, a fact he rarely talks about in the novel. “It’s all right,” he tells Bill, who had touched on the subject, “I don’t give a damn anymore” (124).
Qoheleth continues, and it might have been Jake himself writing at this point: “What is twisted cannot be straightened, what is not there cannot be counted” (Ec. 1:15). And in the second chapter the preacher finds, with less than heroic gesture, an ever-temporal solution: “I decided to hand my body over to drinking wine, my mind still guiding me in wisdom; I resolved to embrace folly, to discover the best way for people to spend their days under the sun” (Ec. 2:3).
In The Sun Also Rises, chapter two is devoted to a comparison between the philosophies of Jake and Robert Cohn. They are in a bar, “a good place,” with “a lot of liquor” (11). Cohn opens the discussion:
“Listen, Jake. . . Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?”
“Yes, every once in a while."
”Do you know that in about thirty-five years more we’ll be dead?”
“What the hell, Robert,” I said. “What the hell?”
“I’m serious. “
”It’s one thing I don’t worry about,” I said.
“You ought to. “
”I’ve had plenty to worry about one time or another. I’m through worrying.“ (11)
Qoheleth, too, had come to this. Everything, even worrying, is futile and even vain, and it is better just to eat, drink, and enjoy whatever lies under the sun.
In the same chapter, Robert Cohn wants to go to South America, and Jake discourages him.
“I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.... If you went there the way you feel now it would be exactly the same” (11). As if one mirrored the other, Qoheleth writes “Better the object seen (the here and now) than the sting of desire; for the latter too is futile and chasing after the wind” (Ec. 6:9).
It is clear that Robert Cohn, a hopeless worrier and a futile dreamer, cannot be the hero of Hemingway’s novel, but there are several other possibilities, and in the course of the book Jake briefly considers each of them. Mike? He practically boasts that he is a loser with no medals, and most of the time he is “tight.“ Bill? He is a “lazy bum,” and usually ahead of Jake and Mike in the “utilization” of wine. Brett? No, Jake decides. “To hell with women, anyway. To hell with you, Brett Ashley” (148).
Again the mirror: “This is what I think, says Qoheleth, having examined one thing after another to draw some conclusion, which I am still looking for, although unsuccessfully: one man in a thousand, I may find, but a woman better than other women---never. This alone is my conclusion: God has created man straightforward and human artifices are human inventions” (Ec. 7:27-29).
Then Jake considers the bullfighter Pedro Romero, and at first he idolizes him, standing him next to erstwhile hero Juan Belmonte, who doesn’t stand a chance. Pedro Romero, though, has an unseen iceberg himself: he will one day be, provided he survives the cycle, an aging Belmonte to some other rising star. Furthermore, even within the novel and on the surface, he is shown to be painfully human. His face swells up from Robert Cohn’s punches, and in the end even Romero cannot hold on to Brett for very long.
“Another thing I have observed under the sun,” muses Qoheleth once more, “that the race is not won by the speediest, nor the battle by the champions; it is not the wise who get food, nor the intelligent wealth, nor the learned favor: chance and mischance befall them all”(Ec. 9:11). 17.
In Jake’s story, Romero almost got away with becoming the hero. He did in fact fight the battle and win the race, and as in a stereotypical hero-novel he even left town with the girl, riding off, as it were, into the sunset. But Hemingway devised a staggered ending to work against Romero. First we learn that his victory gift, the ear of the bull, was allusively left behind in the back of a bed stand drawer. And then we are shown, after everyone has gone off in different directions, Bill here and Mike there and Romero and Brett together and Jake alone, that just as the title told us from the beginning the setting sun also rises and continues on its never-ending cycle. Brett comes back to visit Jake and Romero is left to his bulls. “How sweet light is, how delightful it is to see the sun!” (Ec. 11:7).
The two enjoy their impossible life together again, and in the end, for a brief moment, Brett considers how sweet---and heroic---it might have been if their own sun would never have set at all. “We could have had such a damned good time together,” she says, and Jake replies with the book’s famous close: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” (247) In this we can hear Qoheleth’s closing comment, too, sounding less pessimistic and more matter of fact, concerning the mere prettiness of dreams and “couldabeens. “ ”Sheer futility,” he says once again, “everything is futile” (Ec. 12:8). There are no heroes, and isn’t it futile to pretend?
An Additional Thought for an Extended Paper
Certainly there is plenty to The Sun Also Rises that does not match directly with the book of Ecclesiastes, just as there is much in Ecclesiastes that doesn’t even get skimmed by the citing of several scattered verses, or the incorporation of four verses into a book’s epigraph. By the same token, there is much more that is comparable that 1 haven’t even touched on. For instance, Qoheleth’s and Jake’s ideas on fishing and solitude and companionship, on love and hate and on the contemplation and deference to God. But then, as Jake says, “You’ll lose it if you talk about it” (245), and as Qoheleth says, “Be in no hurry to speak. . . (and) be sparing of speech.” 07/11:
07/11:
Out In The Cold - Part 3
July 8, 1990
Still in the hotel. Called Mom yesterday, patched things up nicely. I am forgiven. But I stayed one more night here, trying to beat the last of the cold. I’m recovering, but now I’m all constipated; I think it’s from all the medicine I’ve been taking. Anyway, last night at 4 am I couldn’t take it anymore. I went to a nearby 7-11 and bought some Ex-Lax. Needless to say, I didn’t get much sleep.
My homework is done for this week. This has been a productive time. I still have to write one more short story that I feel good about, and that’s hard to do. It’s not due for a couple more weeks, but time has a way of flying.
~~~~
Will it always be the same? I talked to Josh tonight. He’s very tired after taking a round trip sailboat ride between Chicago and Kenosha, Wisconsin. Well, Josh, you know how to live. Anyway, we talked, and I realized some troubling things about myself, selfish thoughts beyond the imbalance of his weekend and mine, and now the lead question rings in several directions.
Will I ever be able to forgive Mom for kicking me out of the house for having a cold? Will I ever forgive myself for a foolish provocation? Will I get over the uncomfortable feeling that it’s best that I had been out of the way? God that’s a scary feeling, and yet it feels like it will eternally recur. Does it have to be this way?
As I talked to Josh, I privately thought that things would be okay once I got past some “X” stage of my life. But what stage? When I move out for good? When (and if) I ever get a career going? When I’m married, have kids? When I retire? When I die? God I don’t want to go through any of that if it’s just more of the same. It all seems so scary. Will it always be this way?
I realize, too, that nothing I’ve written in this journal will impress anybody, but after today I feel like at least doctors will want to take a look. God, God, God, God, God, God, God, you’re out there, aren’t you? Bless Mom. Bless Don. Bless Josh.
07/12:
Scavengers
I’ll start this one in the middle:
We’re fighting even though, or just because,
We both believe in the same things
And nothing really matters
Beyond the business at hand.
We jump into our wars
And pick every little battle
As scavengers collect aluminum:
No scrap is too small
As long as it’s redeemable;
Never mind how silly we look
Dragging garbage down the street;
They’ll weigh it in the end
And we’ll have some money to eat.
Here’s one of those positions, by the way,
We share but fight about endlessly:
Having enough tender
To pay the bills, a little more
To get through rainy days,
That, and being allowed to be a dreamer:
See, I’ve, and you’ve, had dreams of better days
And both of us are wondering
And worrying the same things:
About the balance of suffering,
Today and tomorrow, and how
We’ll bear it now
And weigh it in the end.
07/13:
Coming In From The Cold
A Prayer
He’s living, he’s dying
she’s quiet, she’s crying,
and look at me, I’m none of these
and slowly going crazy.
And he’s working and she’s playing,
and —how would they term my deliberating?
Poor dullboy Jack,
he’s never gonna win.
They’re praying all the time,
and I’m praying right beside them
but it’s what we’re doing in between
that’s gonna save us in the end. See?
He’s living and he’s dying
and she’s quiet and she’s crying,
and I run on like my prayers
hadn’t said a goddamn thing.
So let him live, God, he deserves it,
and let him die, he’s well-prepared.
Let her find her peace in you
and let her cry right in your ear.
But God just let me be
among the living dying sitting crying
God just let me be
no more in limbo,
that’s my prayer...
07/14:
Moleskin 3.10: Staying Alive
But this is —I am —more than a collection of anecdotes, so let me get to the point. Chapter One: I was born; Chapter Two: I am alive; and Chapter Three: ...It’s true, I don’t want to leave chapter two. I want to stay a little more in the trump of innocence and recreate those days with a parade of self-told anecdotes; let me tangent off in a dozen directions: friend Paul raising my musical awareness of Elton John; four square and fart jokes at school; the discovery, by a friend’s Hanukkah/Christmas present, of Pachinko; the legend and tribute of the kid squished by a steamroller; the Easter snowstorm of ‘74; regularly visiting our Chicago cousins; the all-orange decor of our living room; playing ice hockey on a frozen pond, without blades or proper sticks; the odd, sad story of the Zilligans; having, briefly, a dog and a cat at the same time; being given a punching bag for Christmas; being served Rommegrot on Lenten Wednesdays; weekends with Dad at the library; afternoons with Mom at the nursing home...
