Cucumber

Félix Vallotton, “Trois concombres et un vase blanc contenant des cerises,” 1911

      “Start her, start her, my men! Don’t hurry yourselves; take plenty of time—but start her; start her like thunder-claps, that’s all,” cried Stubb, spluttering out the smoke as he spoke. “Start her, now; give ’em the long and strong stroke, Tashtego. Start her, Tash, my boy—start her, all; but keep cool, keep cool—cucumbers is the word—easy, easy—only start her like grim death and grinning devils, and raise the buried dead perpendicular out of their graves, boys—that’s all. Start her!”

        —Herman Melville, out of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851)

—

      The first man I saw was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged, and singed in several places. His clothes, shirt, and skin, were all of the same colour. He has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me, he did not doubt, that, in eight years more, he should be able to supply the governor’s gardens with sunshine, at a reasonable rate; but he complained that his stock was low, and entreated me “to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers.”

        —Jonathan Swift, out of Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By
        Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships (1726)

—

We manage well enough with the elements, but when the elements become men, not so well; for they are no longer . . . pure, but have such quantities of alloy as to make them of very questionable use. You can extract sunbeams from cucumbers, but there is more cabbage than sunlight; & phosphate from cows, but the chemical phosphate is better.

        —Ralph Waldo Emerson, out of “Journal O” (1846), The Journals and Miscellaneous
        Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1843-1847 (1971)
        (“Entry . . . struck through in ink with two vertical use marks”)

—

Not the smallest event enlivens our little sandy village: we have not even rigged out a hay cart for a whortleberry party. If I look out of the window there is perhaps a cow; if I go into the garden there are cucumbers; if I look into the brook there is a mud turtle. In the sleep of the great heats there was nothing for me but to read the Vedas, the bible of the tropics . . . It is sublime as heat and night and a breathless ocean.

        —Ralph Waldo Emerson, out of a letter to Samuel G. Ward (18 July 1840)

—

      The Medeola [Medeola virginiana or Indian Cucumber] has blossomed in a tumbler— I seem to perceive a pleasant fugacious fragrance from its rather delicate but inconspicuous green flower— Its whorls of leaves of two stages are the most remarkable. I do not perceive the smell of the cucumber in its root.

        —Henry David Thoreau, out of the Journal (5 June 1852)

—

      What in the cut with any money and so, and so the climate is at stake, all the circular receipts are pears and linen is the stall to peep, likely and more the season’s chair and little grasses with a pole all the occasion is the wreath and many houses are baked. Many have the same in came and all the light is many wet all the burst in in the man and best to hide is only sweet. All is that and a little haste, a little pleading with a clouded pup all is chance to be the curl that sets and all the winding causes. All of it cucumber.

        —Gertrude Stein, out of “In the Grass (On Spain)” (Geography and Plays, 1922)

—

I am their crude and their sublimate, their precipitate and their unctuous, their male and their female, sometimes their hermaphrodite; what they list to style me. It is I that am corroded and exalted and sublimed and reduced and fetched over and filtered and washed and wiped; what between their salts and their sulfurs, their oils and their tartars, their brines and their vinegars, you might take me out now a soused Mercury, now a salted Mercury, now a smoked and dried Mercury, now a powdered and pickled Mercury: never herring, oyster, or cucumber passed so many vexations; my whole life with ’em hath been an exercise of torture; one, two, three, four and five times an hour ha’ they made me dance the philosophical circle, like an ape through a hoop, or a dog in a wheel.

        —Ben Jonson, out of “Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court” (1616)

—

The two figures are related, said Mr. O’Meldon, as the cute to its roob. The cute to its what? said Mr. Fitzwein. He means the cube to its root, said Mr. MacStern. What did I say? said Mr. O’Meldon. The cute to its roob, ha ha, said Mr. de Baker. What does that mean, the cube to its root? said Mr. Fitzwein. It means nothing, said Mr. MacStern. What do you mean, it means nothing? said Mr. O’Meldon. Mr. MacStern replied, To its which root? A cube may have any number of roots. Like the long Turkey cucumber, said Mr. Fitzwein . . .

        —Samuel Beckett, out of Watt (1953)

—

Beat stellar bottoms Emerson’s noble chemistry
Poured out
Sunshine from cucumbers come true.
Or is the shine of any kid’s pants seat
Reared from the floor
On a rainy day
A sign the solar universe
Is not running down . . .

        —Louis Zukofsky, out of “A” (1978)

—

Wasn’t it just divining that dog of a dag in Skokholme as I sat astrid uppum their Drewitt’s altar, as cooledas as culcumbre, slapping my straights till the sloping ruins, postillion, postallion, a swinge a swank, with you offering me clouts of illscents and them horners stagstruck on the leasward! Don’t be of red, you blanching mench. This Isabella I’m on knows the ruelles of the rut and she don’t fear andy mandy . . .

        —James Joyce, out of Finnegans Wake (1939)

—

Everybody remained mutely separate, either to make his tedium the rapture of gall and hyssop, or to wound human flesh. Golem skulked into candy stores or hid in halls to shun a familiar face; he imagined satyric hair sprouting from an ear, a lewd, bulby underlip made him diet for a week on fish, the radish, raw peas, and shun the amative artichoke and priapic cucumber.

        —Edward Dahlberg, out of The Flea of Sodom (1950)

—

We remember the fish which wee did eate in Egypt freely: the cucumbers and the melons, and the leekes, and the onions, and the garlicke.

        — Numbers 11:5, out of the King James Bible (1611)

—

Torrential rains, water rising at Fort, my husband’s cucumbers & squash swimming. Depend on nothing . . .

        —Lorine Niedecker, out of a letter to Cid Corman (14 September 1965)

—

      Sunshine from cucumbers. Here was a man who has occupied himself in a nobler chemistry of extracting honor from scamps, temperance from sots, energy from beggars, justice from thieves, benevolence from misers. He knew there was sunshine under those moping churlish brows, elegance of manners hidden in the peasant, heart-warming expansion, grand surprises of sentiment, in these unchallenged, uncultivated men, and he persevered against all repulses until he drew it forth.
      Now his boors are orphans are educated, his boors are polished, his palaces built, his pictures, statues, conservatories, chapels adorn them. He stands there prince among his peers, prince among princes. The sunshine is out & all flowing abroad over the world.

        —Ralph Waldo Emerson, out of “Journal O” (1846), The Journals and Miscellaneous
        Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1843-1847 (1971)

—

      Cucumbers Set by Bees.—If bees, who are much the best setters of cucumbers, do not happen to take kindly to the frames, the best way is to tempt them by a little honey put on the male and female bloom. When they are once induced to haunt, they set all the fruit, and will hover with impatience round the lights in a morning, till the glasses are opened. Probatum est.

        —Gilbert White, out of The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789)

—

It’s a little strange, I guess. It’s in an old brownstone, and is what Kenward accurately calls a pensione. I share a large bath, in which there is a small refrigerator. The first time I looked inside it there were six large cucumbers . . .

        — James Schuyler, out of a letter to Anne Dunn (1976)
        Quoted in The Diary of James Schuyler (1997)

—

      “How do you know that?”
      “Can tell by the way he watches television.” The two of them had gone off to watch Twi-Nite Theatre, which tonight featured John Ritter in The Bryant Gumbel Story, and soon they were deep into a discussion of Tubal nuances that could have gone on all night, but Hector had to run up to the Cucumber Lounge to catch Biliy Barf and the Vomitones, who might, if they’d work cheap enough, do some of the music for the movie. He didn’t get to the Cuke quite in time to miss Ralph Wayvone, Jr., in a glossy green suit accented with sequins, who was cracking jokes into the mike to warm this crowd, who in Ralph’s opinion needed it, up.
      Things work out funny sometimes . . .

        —Thomas Pynchon, out Vineland (1990)

Hugh Kenner (Stray Notes)

Wyndham Lewis, “Alcibiades” out of Timon of Athens, 1912

Everywhere in The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner makes distinct two forces: that of what’s done and stilled, replete with a kind of banal certainty against what seethes with unstoppable energy, restless for attending, unassuaged by it, and implacably uncomforting in its refusal of laxity or any final stasis. Putting forth Wyndham Lewis’s 1912 Vorticist “drawings for an edition, never produced,* of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens”—in particular one called “Alcibiades” (“called [in William Cookson’s Agenda] ‘arguably the greatest single manifestation of artistic energy in the whole of English painting’”), he writes:

It is one of history’s great feats of attention, attention to an uncountable array of elements, all interacting. Being pure lines, the elements have no survival power of their own, save by virtue of the interaction that attention guarantees. In a canvas crowded with naturalistic figures, Frith’s Derby Day for instance, much anecdotal detail can be left for the all-too-human recognizing eye to find it and perk up, cheered. Not so here. The calmest things on which Lewis lets the eye rest are a bowl and a carafe, and these are enclosed in an equivocal semicircular space whose perspective snaps in and out at whim. They are cubist props, relegated to accessory status. The rest is lightning, clouds, spears, posturing figures, Renaissance helmets, a pneumatic woman, a screaming head, all fixed in a slow-motion explosion whose next centimeter’s expansion will occupy all eternity. A harsh light, falling from some source in the upper right, bathes their grimaces. They radiate downward and forward from a generating node at the upper left. The perspective seeks equilibrium between these points, where at upper center a quadrangular darkness, stood upon its corner, half-obscures a quasi-solar geometry.
      Far in the foreground, vigorous glances meet across the center of the picture: a tension of human antagonism to which no drawn line corresponds. For much of the “Alcibiades”’ energy depends on the interaction of human figures, whose vectors of attraction and repulsion overlie and counter the thrust of all those hundreds of lines a hand has traced. Twenty-five years later Lewis was painting portraits of men aware that a painter is in the room.

Against that—“patterned energy” (“For the vortex is not the water but a patterned energy made visible by the water”)—Cubist forms seem idle, the playthings of a self-satisfied populace. Kenner:

      For the cubist . . . a man is a still life.
      Cubism, that great revolution of vision, had simplified its effort by banishing the human to that plane of sentiment where wine, violins, newspapers, tablecloths are cherished. Coy forms, in a cubist collage, invite relaxed recognition: beneath so much strangeness, the ikons of coziness dream.

According to Kenner, Wyndham Lewis’s energies, prior to 1912 (“annus mirabilis”) had “previously evaded design and yielded grotesques”: “A grotesque is an energy which aborts, as if to express its dissatisfaction with available boundaries, as a dwarf may be nature’s critique of the tailor’s dummy.” Evidence: Lewis’s 1911 “Smiling Woman Ascending a Stair.” Kenner labels it “the grotesque as a trammeling of energy.” (One notes a later form of grotesquerie à la Lewis: the portrait of Edith Sitwell without hands. One story is that Sitwell stopped sitting for the painting after Lewis’s unwelcome sexual overture.**) Lewis later wrote Sitwell into The Apes of God as Harriet Finnian Shaw, lesbian, with brothers Osmund and Phoebus. But “in the summer of 1912”—one hundred years back—Lewis (“about to turn 30”), found a way to accommodate energy in art:

That summer Art and Energy moved into sudden conjunction; forms filled his spaces, not forms arrested in grotesquerie but forms locked in passionate stases; oblique lines sprang from points of radiation to reverse the thrust of traditional perspective which tapers or dwindles toward a point of vanishing, but they bounded forms such as traditional perspective bounds, and so could capitalize on traditional principles of design. (Tradition is the artist’s stock of capital; it can tap impulses “older than the fish.”)

That final phrase out of Lewis’s 1919 essay “The Artist Older Than the Fish.” Begins: “The artist goes back to the fish. The few centuries that separate him from the savage are a mere flea-bite to the distance his memory must stretch if it is to strike the fundamental slime of creation.” And:

The creation of a work of art is an act of the same description as the evolution of wings on the side of a fish, the feathering of its fins; or the invention of a weapon within the body of the hymenopter to enable it to meet the terrible needs of its life. The ghostly and burning growths—the walking twigs and flying stones—the two anguished notes that are the voice of a being—the vapid twitter, the bellows of age-long insurrection and discontent—the complacent screech—all may be considered as types of art, all equally perfect, but not all equally desirable . . .

Lines that recall nothing so much as “posturing figures, Renaissance helmets, a pneumatic woman, a screaming head . . .” Patterned energies . . .

* See Kenner’s percipient damning of “the market” in determining “repute” (and apply it to the publicity machinations—and their lack—of current big-monied joints “and their representatives,” and wonder idly what’s now being “dropped out”):

The drawings have nearly all disappeared. We have them in reproductions made two years later by an ad hoc firm called The Cube Press, which disappeared likewise. The portfolio of prints is itself excessively scarce. Not being on the market where there is a vested interest in enhancing prices by talking up repute, the enterprise has dropped out of Art History, which in modern times has been written chiefly by dealers and clever collectors. (The Cubist enterprise in Paris had no such misfortune.) Lewis got beyond Cubism. The fact is virtually unknown . . .

** Lewis later wrote Sitwell into The Apes of God (1930) as Harriet Finnian Shaw, lesbian, with brothers Osmund and Phoebus. Sitwell next reviewed Lewis’s The Snooty Baronet (1932), with some pointed remarks concerning the Lewis-modeled protagonist Michael Kill-Imrie, calling him “bitter about the ladies, who are not attracted by him and, to revenge himself . . . he becomes a ‘gossip writer’ of the Novel.” And: “the fact that he has escaped being horse-whipped proves only, that he is too dirty to touch.” Of the sitting, one reads, in Sitwell’s autobiography Taken Care Of (1965):

      Before the collar calamity [Lewis, visiting the Sitwells at Renishaw, had “mislaid his collar on the morning after his arrival, and could not come down to luncheon until he had found it.” The butler eventually “tracked it down, and it flapped back on to Lewis’s neck, much as a weary and rather dilapidated black-bird might return to its nest.” Note: “A grotesque is an energy which aborts.”] I sat for Lewis for the portrait of me that is in the Tate Gallery, and also for several drawings. But in the end, his manner became so threatening that I ceased to sit for him, and his portrait of me, consequently, has no hands.
      His studio was situated in a piece of waste ground, off Kensington High Street, and haunted by pallid hens, squawking desolately and prophetically; and the appearance of Mr. Lewis’s hair aroused in some observers the conviction that the feathers of these had sought within its shades a refuge from the general confusion. Another school of thought, however, ascribed the alien substances by which it seemed to be bestrewn to a different cause, believing them to be a sprinkling of the snows of time. For the nature of his toilette, and his general appearance, undoubtedly aroused attention and gave rise to speculation.

William Powell Frith, “The Derby Day,” 1856-8
(“. . . anecdotal detail . . . for the all-too-human recognizing eye to find it and perk up, cheered.”)

Wyndham Lewis, “Stephen Spender,” 1938
(“Twenty-five years later Lewis was painting portraits of men aware that a painter is in the room.”)

Georges Braque, “Still Life with Playing Cards,” 1913
(“Coy forms . . . invite relaxed recognition . . .”)

Wyndham Lewis, “Smiling Woman Ascending a Stair,” 1911
(“. . . the grotesque as a trammeling of energy . . .”)

Wyndham Lewis, “Edith Sitwell,” 1923-35

Quince

Juan Sánchez Cotán, “Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber,” c. 1600

And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d,
While he from forth the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd ;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon . . .

        —John Keats, out of “The Eve of St. Agnes” (1819)

—

Quince is in Greek poetry (Ibycus, for example) a Cydonian apple, and botanically it is a Cydonian pear (Pyrus cydonia). Cydonia is in Crete, or as the Elizabethans (Chapman, for example) called it, Candy, so that “Candied apple, quince” reads “apple and pears from Crete, where Cydonia is, the sacred precinct of Aphrodite.”

        —Guy Davenport, out of Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art
        and Literature(1998)

—

’Ηρι μὲν αἴ τε Κυδώνιαι—Ibycus

        —Ezra Pound’s epigraph to “The Spring” (1915), out of Personae (1926)
        “In spring the Cydonian quinces . . .”

—

QUINCE.
      [coin, Fr. quidden, German.]

1. The tree.

The quince tree is of a low stature; the branches are diffused and crooked; the flower and fruit is like that of the pear tree; but, however cultivated, the fruit is sour and astringent, and is covered with a kind of down: of this the species are six.
      Miller.

2. The fruit.

They call for dates and quinces in the pastry.
      Shakesp.

A quince, in token of fruitfulness, by the laws of Solon, was given to the brides of Athens upon the day of their marriage.
      Peacham on Drawing.

        —Samuel Johnson, out of A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

—

      Next to Pine apples, for big and large, are the Quinces, which we call Cotonea, the Greeks Cydonea, because they were first brought out of Candie. So heavie and massie they be, that they bend the boughs to the ground as they hang upon the tree, and will not suffer their mother to grow.
      Many kinds there be of Quinces, to wit, Chrysomela, of a colour inclining to gold, & divided by certain cut lines. Secondly, there be the Quinces of our owne country, and so called*: these be whiter, & of an excellent smell. They also that come out of the realm of Naples, be highly esteemed. Now there be a smaller sort of the same kind called Struthea [i. the Peare-quince] & those doe cast a more odoriferous smell: late they be ere they come to ripenesse or perfection; whereas contrariwise the greene Quinces called Mustea, be as hastie and soone melow. Now if a man doe graffe the great Quinces upon the Struthea, the tree will bring foorth a kind of Quinces by themselves called Mulviana; and these are the Quinces alone of all other that may be eaten raw. In summe, all the sort of these are come now adaies to be entertained within the waiting or presence chamber of our great personages, where men give attendance to salute them as they come forth every morning; and in bed-chambers also they are to garnish the images standing about the beds heads and sides.
      There are besides small wild Quinces, next to the Peare-quince Struthea, for pleasant and odoriferous smell; and they grow commonly in hedge-rowes.

* That is, nostratia.

        —C. Plinius Secundus, out of The Naturall Historie, translated by Philemon Holland (1601)

—

They dined on mince and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon.

        —Edward Lear, out of “The Owl and the Pussycat” (1871)

—

You step from the bus into a sequencing tool that is moist and carries the scent of quince

You move among the eight banner-like elements and continue to the edges of either an object

      or a convention

And in Cascadia also

As in the first line of a nursery rhyme

Against cyclic hum of the heating apparatus

You’re resinous with falsity

        —Lisa Robertson, out of “The Present” (R’s Boat, 2010)

—

There were priests posing as nuns,
quinces and stuff.

Tilt me a little more to the sun,
I want to see it one last time. There,

that’s just fine, I’ve seen it.
You can roll me inside. On wings of what perturbation?

        —John Ashbery, out of “As Umbrellas Follow Rain” (2001)

—

I need not tell a magpie how to judge eggs but might I be supernumerary to this extent? On my left hat-brim, could the white wisps be effaced? And the back side of the dollar clip; i.e. where the clip is not right-side out I think it detracts. Could the twine on the stems of the flowering quince be darkened? Could the speckling of my eyebrows be overcome—especially along the lower ledge of the right eye? . . . Photography is a great help in these matters.

        —Marianne Moore, out of a letter to Richard Avedon (14 January 1958)

—

The apple rots, and the quince decayeth, and one by one they perish; the petals of the rose fade! I send thee my tears bound in a napkin, and what though the napkin burns, if my tears reach thee at last!

        —Theocritus, out of the Idyls, translated by Andrew Lang (1880)

—

The love-hour is ended.
Swallow-wings, dreams of a spiked iris,
Gipsy your eyes.

The hollows under your knees are sweet with love.
Your knees are quince-blossoms, bent back by the rain . . .

        —Bryher, “Blue Sleep,” out of “Hellenics” (1920)

—

Now labor his reward receives,
For ADORATION counts his sheaves,
    To peace, her bounteous prince;
The nect’rine his strong tint imbibes,
And apples of ten thousand tribes,
    And quick peculiar quince.

        —Christopher Smart, out of “A Song to David” (1762)

—

The whole world, he said, is a correspondence. And everything comes in a chord. The chord contains eight items. The center of the chord is the pivot. At one end of the chord is the avant-garde, and at the other end is the arrière-garde. In a fruit chord, let’s say, you have at one end the ripest golden pear, and at the other end is the quince, which never ripens. It remains as hard as a rock. And all of these corresponded with personalities . . .

        —Guy Davenport, talking about Charles Fourier with John Jeremiah
        Sullivan (The Paris Review, 2002)

—

Quince and vermilion for the common man.
        —John Latta, “To James Schuyler in Heaven” (2010)

—

      Way-laid made it known as quince cake. This is a perfect sentence because it refers to regretting.
        —Gertrude Stein, out of “How to Write” (1931)

—

Hints obiter are:—not to permit delicacy and exquisiteness to seduce into effeminacy. Not to permit beauties by repetition to become mannerisms. To be jealous of fragmentary composition,—as epicurism of genius, and apple-pie made all of quinces.

        —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “written in Mr. Lamb’s copy of the ‘Dramatic
        Scenes,’” out of Literary Remains

Hugh Kenner (Stray Notes)

Ezra Pound, 1885-1972

A pause. To consider how protean and undependable words can be. Writing like stringing together a necklace out of beads of mercury—shiny, motile, fissiparous, globular bits that hie out from under any defining weight. Malleable words, made-up words, words rendered skittish and intemperate by time’s own rampant lurch and recovery, its oddly human way of walking forth, a leaking sack of memory in tow. Kenner (The Pound Era), considering the epithet (οἶνωψ = “oīnōps”) Homer “applies 17 times to the sea and twice to oxen, and which Sophocles at one point applies to a human forearm.”:

We find it in Liddell and Scott’s Lexicon under a nominative singular form which occurs in no ancient text but has had to be invented to keep the lexicons consistent, and this invented form contains the judgment that the word is compounded from oinos, wine, and ops, eye or face. Wine-eyed? wine-faced? And of the sea, of oxen, and of a forearm? W. H. D. Rouse surmised that the etymology was false and the word simply an ancient blunder which there is no chance any longer of unstitching.* Tradition instructs us to understand that the sea, modified by this epithet, shall be understood to be “wine-dark,” and the oxen “deep red” or perhaps “brown.” About the Sophoclean forearm tradition leaves us free to guess. . . .
      Lexicography is compendious illusion; words are strangely inexplicit; they “mean” here, here, here. And traditions of what we are to understand here and here . . . guide us so constantly that we are only aware of them when they lapse . . . Mr. Auden has described an entanglement with Keats’ lines,

The wakeful bloodhound rose, and shook his hide,
But his sagacious eye an inmate owns;

two meanings, “inhabitant” for “inmate” and “accepts” for “owns” having dropped out of the current vernacular . . .

Without which, using the scoured markers, one postulates “a lunatic who had removed the dog’s eye.” (Somewhere Kenneth Burke points to a word found “at the end of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, . . . a word that, in its simplest translation, means shout.” Only to report how “scholarship . . . admonishes us that this word in Greek stands for a particular kind of shout (a shout such as announces the rebirth of the ritually slain divinity).” Or there’s Kenner’s note of how the old meaning-anchor Latin no longer holds: “When Dr. Johnson writes of a radical idea branching into parallel ramifications he is relying on radix and ramus for the tree that sustains his metaphor. Once Latin goes out of mind radical commences its vernacular slide toward extreme, and ramification toward entanglement. Parole, decidedly, in libertà.)

Lining up some of Pound’s definitions:

An “Image” is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time . . .

and (Kenner says, pointing to the shift out of any possibly inert stasis “just 20 months later”)—

The image . . . is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.*

Note how Kenner argues against a Poundian poetic stuck to the succinctly put principles of “A Retrospect”:

1.   Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective.
2.   To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3.   As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome. . . .

—what Kenner calls “specifications for technical hygiene . . . which can be followed by any talented person . . . to write what may be a trivial poem.” Kenner:

Pound’s Imagism is energy, is effort. It does not appease itself by reproducing what is seen, but by setting some other seen thing into relation. The mind that found “petals on a wet, black bough” had been active (and for more than a year on that poem, off and on). The “plot” of the poem is that mind’s activity, fetching some new thing into the field of consciousness. The action passing through any Imagist poem is a mind’s invisible action discovering what will come next that may sustain the presentation—what image, what rhythm, what allusion, what word . . .

Continual unit-forming work. Metaphor-making central to it. (Pertinent here: Kenner, faulting I. A. Richards for “supposing that metaphor does not blaze with process but unites two things, called tenor and vehicle.”) And Pound, out of “The Serious Artist” (1913):

      Poetry is a centaur. the thinking word-arranging, clarifying faculty must move and leap with the energizing, sentient, musical faculties. It is precisely the difficulty of this amphibious existence that keeps down the census record of good poets.

Later in that essay:

      Aristotle will tell you that ‘The apt use of metaphor, being as it is, the swift perception of relations, is the true hall-mark of genius.’ That abundance, that readiness of the figure is indeed one of the surest proofs that the mind is up borne on the emotional surge.
      By apt use, I should say it were well to understand, a swiftness, almost a violence, and certainly a vividness. This does not mean elaboration and complication.

Not belaboring mannerist décor. Not swerving off the thing itself. Making the continual apprehending of correspondences itself into “what is called thinking.” Kenner points out how “The ideal language”—see, say, Bishop Thomas Sprat’s 1667 reverie (out of The History of the Royal Society) for “a constant Resolution, to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things, almost in an equal number of words”—is a language without verbs, is “embarrassed by verbs, which it took for specializations of the copula, and scandalized by metaphor”: “When so many things are at last represented by an equal number of words, then everything will have its own name, and metaphor (whale’s acres, breast-cares) will be not only unneeded but excrescential.” According to Kenner, Fenollosa’s genius is to see précised how Chinese ideographs “supposed to correspond with things . . . corresponded with actions”:

His great, his unassailable originality stemmed from his conviction that the unit of thought was less like a noun than like a verb, and that Chinese signs therefore denoted processes (“the ideograph meaning ‘to speak’ is a mouth with two words and a flame coming out of it”). Metaphor so seen was a centrality, not an embarrassment (“Metaphor, the revealer of nature . . . The known interprets the obscure, the universe is alive with myth.”)

Fenellosa, “a Harvard-educated enthusiast [of Chinese] of Spanish descent,” who’d taught Emerson to Japanese in Tokyo: “there to find confirmation of Emerson’s etymologist who ‘finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.’”

One thinks, naturally enough, of Pound’s lovely rendering of a visit to Emil Levy, expert in Provençal, in Freiberg in 1911, copies of Arnaut Daniel in tow (Canto XX):

And he said: “Now is there anything I can tell you?”
And I said: “I dunno, sir,” or
“Yes, Doctor, what do they mean by noigandres?”
And he said: “Noigandres! NOIgandres!
“You know for seex mon’s of my life
“Effery night when I go to bett, I say to myself:
“Noigandres, eh, noigandres,
“Now what the DEFFIL can that mean!”

** How derivative Olson’s “high energy-construct” in the 1950 “Projective Verse” seems of a sudden: even the paced breathlessness of “get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen” recalling Pound’s syntax.

Guy Davenport (Stray Notes)

Roy R. Behrens, “Portrait of Guy Davenport,” c. 1978

Perfectly moving and impeccably wrought, Guy Davenport’s sense of the Greek tatters of Archilochos*:

Fragments, when they are but notes (the unfinished works of a Spenser or a Michelangelo are a different matter), touch us as the baby glove of the pharaoh that moved William Carlos Williams to tears, or the lock of Lucrezia Borgia’s hair that drew Bryon back day after day to gaze (and to steal one strand for Landor); they “brave time” with a mite’s grip, missing by a rotten piece of linen or a grammarian’s inadvertent immortality the empty fame of the sirens’ song. To exist in fragments and in Greek is a doubly perilous claim on the attention of our time.

That writ to introduce the “Carmina Archolochi”—“the hundred and fifty-three fragments” rendered succinctly (“I have been as literal as an amateur’s Greek can manage”) by Davenport in an early number of Arion (II:2, 1963). Some fourteen of the bunch printed previously in that year in Henry Rago’s Poetry (CI:6, 1963). Some rewriting evident (Davenport, of the Archilochos: “much revised, more than anything I’ve ever done.** First it was simply Harvard homework: class in early Greek lyric with dear Cedric Whitman. . . . Then a version for [Poetry] . . . then another [Arion], and another [Carmina Archilochi, 1964]. When Hugh Kenner got California to bring it out [Archilochos Sappho Alkman, 1980], I then revised the whole damned thing again.”) A couple of versions. Out of Poetry:

Campaign in Thrace

there’s a lost shield
damn the luck
left by that bush with no
two ways about it
and some Saian hill-billy
will strut with it
but I save my skin so
to hell with the shield
I can get me another
just as good

Out of Arion:

Some Saian mountaineer
Struts today with my shield.
I threw it down by a bush and ran
When the fighting got hot.
Life seemed somehow more precious.
It was a beautiful shield.
I know where I can buy another
Exactly like it, just as round.

(Added in the rewrite: narrative clarity, a “moral” prop (“Life . . . precious”), vague regret. Lost: vernacular immediacy, the all-too-human taunt (“hill-billy”), the discontinuity of battle-tumult.) Here’s another couple. Out of Poetry:

Euboians

no bowstrings drawn to the bow-notch
no slings whipped
in a battle with Ares egging on
but a hell of a lot of sword work
and spear sticking
when the fight’s with
those Euboians

Out of Arion:

When the fight’s with those hard Euboians,
No bow-strings’ whine or snap of bow-notch
Or whip of sling do you hear, but a delirium
Of Ares, sword work and spear sticking.
The tall Euboians famous for their knives.

(“Ares egging on” needed replacing: too much the gum-snapping teenage girl shouting out obvious advice. Lost: the sense of a seasoned fighter’s own talk (and shrug-off) of “a hell of a lot of sword work / and spear sticking”; the Arion version might be the work of journalist witnessing the combat.) And another. Out of Poetry:

Stonewall

I despise me a tall general
a swaggerer
a curly-haired, cheek-filled
whisker dandy

for me a proper officer’s
short and bow-legged,
both feet firmly planted
tough in the guts

Out of Arion:

I do despise a tall general,
One of those swaggerers,
A curly-haired, cheek-frilled
Whisker dandy.

For me a proper officer’s
Short and bow-legged,
Both feet planted well apart,
Tough in the guts.

And out of Archilochos Sappho Alkman:

I despise to see a tall,
Swaggering general
With a beard of curls.

Give me an officer
Who’s short and bow legged,
With his feet planted well apart.

Paring off the dandified swagger of “curly-haired, cheek-frilled,” &c. And the merely stance-reiterant “Tough in the guts.” Why “despise”? None of its forms seem right: “I despise me a tall general” too forcedly folksy; “I do despise a tall general” too languorous and precious; “I despise to see” merely awkward. (I am wont to go with “Nothing but contempt for . . .” or something—that welling up with Olson’s plaint “I am no Greek, hath not th’ advantage.”) Davenport, answering—for Arion (III:4, 1964)—a questionnaire regarding “The Classics and the Man of Letters”: “A good translation should take the captivated reader to the original. Should.” And, refuting any claim that the classics be “used up,” repeats a lovely story about the geologist Raphael Pumpelly (1837-1923):

Pumpelly, having lost his equipment, opened the Anacosta silver mines (or whatever mine)—well, I've just found the book (Pumpelly, Reminiscences, 1918, vol. I, page 198): “A thousand firebricks had, indeed, been sent by wagon from the East, but the Comanches in Texas had killed the driver, burned the wagon, and stolen the horses. In vain I studied carefully Kerl’s Metallurgie for methods used in out-of-way places.” He proceeded by methods he remembered from Agricola and Pliny. The mine was the Santa Rita, in Arizona. The dime in your pocket, minted with so many classical motifs, may contain some of its silver.

Forthright immediacy, apt, untrammeled as speech itself. One Archilochos fragment reads: “Yes, yes, / As sure as a poppy’s / Green.” Another is simply “Plums.”

* According to Davenport—out of 7 Greeks (1995)—Archilochos, “a professional soldier from the Aegean island of Paros,” is, after “the archpoet Homer,” “the second poet of the West.” Of Archilochos’s milieu (its daimon and its loss):

The clear minds of these archaic, island-dwelling Greeks survive in a few details only, fragment by fragment, a temple, a statue of Apollo with a poem engraved down the thighs, generous vases with designs abstract and geometric.
      They decorated their houses and ships like Florentines and Japanese; they wrote poems like Englishmen of the court of Henry, Elizabeth and James. They dressed like Samurai; all was bronze, terra cotta, painted marble, dyed wool, and banquets. Of the Arcadian Greece of Winckelmann and Walter Pater they were as ignorant as we of the ebony cities of Yoruba and Benin. The scholar poets of the Renaissance, Ambrogio Poliziano and Christopher Marlowe, whose vision of antiquity we have inherited, would have rejected as indecorous this seventh-century world half oriental, half Viking. Archilochos was both poet and mercenary. As a poet he was both satirist and lyricist. Iambic verse is his invention. He wrote the first beast fable known to us. He wrote marching songs, love lyrics of frail tenderness, elegies. But most of all he was what Meleager calls him, “a thistle with graceful leaves.” There is a tradition that wasps hover around his grave . . . To the ancients, both Greek and Roman, he was The Satirist. [Here I add a sentence out of the 1980 Archilochos Sappho Alkman, removed for 7 Greeks: “And we have not a single whole poem of Archilochos.”]
      We have what grammarians quote to illustrate a point of dialect or interesting use of the subjunctive; we have brief quotations by admiring critics; and we have papyrus fragments, scrap paper from the households of Alexandria, with which third-class mummies were wrapped and stuffed. All else is lost. Horace and Catullus, like all cultivated readers, had Archilochos complete in their libraries . . .

** Davenport’s hardly one to resort to self-puffery, I think. To put the Archilochos work in context, see the remark made to Joan Crane (c. 1987), regarding the composition of Flowers and Leaves: “If the poem is to judged ‘as poetry’, I’ll risk the two stanzas on Pierre Loti’s cat as the best I could do at the time (1951-1966, time of composition, through a good hundred revisions).” The stanzas hold up marvelously:

The cat of Pierre Loti. Hippolyte on l’appelle.
A sardine of paleological silver the great artist
Gave him when he sat for his portrait, aromatic
And with the soupçon of huile d’olive about it,
As was proper, whose family reached back
To Nilotic tax collectors in porcelain wigs,
To the bee gums of Beersheba, Akkadian hotels,
(A cousin removed was friend to Mr Smart the poet);
Leo Alektor kept the high gates at Mycenae.
Quite Hebraic the family tree, rich in detail.
But we are companion to Monsieur Loti.

The cat of Pierre Loti are we. We are civilization.
Our tribe has resided beyond the borders of France.
Mr Rousseau, master in the modern manner,
Has depicted us in forests of flowers, inquisitive
As catfish, intelligent as Miss Gertrude Stein.
Under starlight we have sniffed the desert arab;
Aztec vegetables and Perelandrian trees
Have been our precincts, and the gardens of Tchad.
But in footballeurs idiotic with motion
We take our delight, in Gruyère and sincerity,
Innocence, bicyclettes, Apollinaire, industry.

Restraint, poise, accuracy (that “paleological silver”—radiant bone-glare in dull sedimentary rock—is perfect; “idiotic with motion” wry and correct—somewhere Davenport makes “grace, the justice of motion”) Recall Fourier. (I see how Emerson, in a journal entry of 1850, remarked that “Fourier’s walking stick was marked off into feet & inches” and quoted the Fourierist adages Davenport loved to repeat:

                  La Série distribue les harmonies.
1. All the harmonies of the Universe are distributed in progressive series.
2. Les attractions sont proportionelles aux destinées.
3. Analogie Universelle.

And, in “Montaigne, or The Skeptic,” Emerson writes:

Charles Fourier announced that “the attractions of man are proportioned to his destinies”; in other words, that every desire predicts its own satisfaction. Yet all experience exhibits the reverse of this; the incompetency of power is the universal grief of young and ardent minds. They accuse the divine Providence of a certain parsimony. It has shown the heaven and earth to every child and filled him with a desire for the whole; a desire raging, infinite; a hunger, as of space to be filled with planets; a cry of famine, as of devils for souls. Then for the satisfaction,—to each man is administered a single drop, a bead of dew of vital power, per day,—a cup as large as space, and one drop of the water of life in it. Each man woke in the morning with an appetite that could eat the solar system like a cake; a spirit for action and passion without bounds; he could lay his hand on the morning star; he could try conclusions with gravitation or chemistry; but, on the first motion to prove his strength, —hands, feet, senses, gave way and would not serve him. He was an emperor deserted by his states, and left to whistle by himself, or thrust into a mob of emperors, all whistling: and still the sirens sang, “The attractions are proportioned to the destinies.” In every house, in the heart of each maiden and of each boy, in the soul of the soaring saint, this chasm is found,—between the largest promise of ideal power, and the shabby experience.

What, in some measure, so much of Davenport’s fictive assemblage attempts to combat.) Le chat Hippolyte, Pierre Loti’s cat—with the terminally “staunched” look of the “civilized”—is found in Henri Rousseau’s 1910 Portrait of Pierre Loti.

Henri Rousseau, “Portrait of Pierre Loti,” 1910

Beginning and Ending with “Bah”

Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine (1871)

Bah. Half a morning expended dashing at various “scholarly” ramparts, mostly repulsed, mostly determining a need for patience, for laying a considered siege. Wonder and chagrin at a sudden apprehending: how the brain, in its dilatory piggish rooting way, noses down into the damp districts of “sources and citations” of late. That in lieu of arranging “mere flagrancies,” or words fleet and singular “in riotous conjunct.” Need up-tossing itself, then, to cease the pointed burrowing. To violently shiver oneself dry like a dog. (Here, though, comes the admonitory Marianne Moore, she who, too, got constricted / freed by such rootings: “Any genius is three-fourths curiosity. Most people doze.”) (Or Guy Davenport: “Art is always the replacing of indifference by attention.”) What, though, becomes of attending’s glut, its verdant continual rampancy of “inputs and effects”? One fossicks the nearby pages. One scans the ubiquitous downloads. Print-out city, its teem and grue. Lost in a reverie of a reverie of knowing’s ubiquity, attaining its fremitus, its fug. I read in Davenport’s Flowers and Leaves*—

The story-tellers have honied minds,
Sweet hives of hatching ups and downs.
A bald Egyptian out of Pharphar wrote
Thre Tales of Puppa Divus, his alephs now
And asps and kas a looped and copper ruin.
How his mother Isha bore him from her ear.
A wisp of flax was his only father.
She shook him out as a swimmer knocks his ears.
Annotations by the scholar Sut, of On.

And Hetty Pegler’s Tump, old wife of Goshen?
The Babylonian Milhoot, his beard in curls,
Wrote up the worthies, wanax, warrior, wizard,
In the year of the comet Hu, in scratch.
Tubal Cain, Huwassanas, Dedalo, Adam,
Odtheus the Tyrian and Popo the Sailor.
Popo was whittled from a Lebanon pine,
Drew out Leviathan with a hook of lightning
And ferried to Shool to get a riddle’s answer . . .

—and acquiesce to its jumble deftly arrayed and deposited, only momentarily wondering if that “Sut, of On” pertains to George Washington Harris’s backwoods braggart Sut Lovingood, out of Harris’s Sut Lovingood. Yarns Spun by a “Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool.” Who’s “Hetty Pegler’s Tump”? Who’s “The Babylonian Milhoot”? Davenport, in a subsequent stanza: “There are tales in old throats that Poppadeius / Woke slyly, and they knew they’d snared a god. Mankind has no such light beneath the skin.” Inventing “for the fun of it.” (In Davenport’s Carmina Archilochi: The Fragments of Archilochos (1964), one finds a fragment “numbered 18” that is “a deliberate fabrication, made for the fun of it after two critics assumed that the Poetry and Arion versions [of Archilochos] were a fabrication . . . No Greek would have specified ‘blue’ javelins, so I knew I wasn’t twitting any classicist.” Fragment 18 is suppressed in subsequent gatherings of Davenport’s Archilochos translations.)

Pertinent, perhaps: comments registered by Steve Evans in conversation with Stephen McLaughlin at Jacket 2. He’s talking about constantly accessible (and somewhat extensive, though I’d argue Balkanized) poetry audio (“the ubiquitous surround sound of poetry online”) versus an earlier model of analogue bootleg and swap, and questions of scarcity and value. Here, beginning at, roughly, 30:50:

In the days before the easily accessible audio archive online (what Al Filreis and I talked about as the ubiquitous surround sound of poetry online), we used to have these cassettes that we were really worried might break some day because they were all we had [. . .] Jennifer [Moxley] and I have a drawer full of audio cassettes that, that was our favorite poetry to listen to because that’s what we had, there was, you know, you were dependent on other poets turning you on to stuff, people making the equivalent of bootleg cassettes of Frank O’Hara’s reading at Buffalo in 1966, for instance [. . .] So there’s this great analogue thing that, you know, I think it’s warranted to have a little nostalgia for, because the age of ubiquity has its downside: value plummets in a way once everything is so totally, obviously available to everyone at every moment. I don’t think we’re really built, I always think Nietzsche had this, like, we’re not really built to do value outside of conditions of scarcity. So when we’re trying to do value in conditions of ubiquity and everything all the time, we get a little all lost in the supermarket or something. So some of my favorite sound recordings are still the ones like Louis Zukofsky reading “A”-7 on a cassette tape that someone stole from me eventually . . .

Near palpable the sweet-honied voice of the collector in the detailings of the goods. And that fraught sudden chill in the voice at “value plummets.” I wonder at the way the loss of some gone kingdom (with, no doubt, its clubs of the haves against the welter of the have-nots) of “scarcity” is lamented—not against the unmanageability of the subsequent glut—but for itself. No talk of democratization in the ready availability of resources. It’s a curious riff, a sort of slightly jocular cri de coeur for lost scenes of the select, the rare, the coterie-exchangeable. Bah.

* “The title ‘Flowers and Leaves’ is a quotation from Babbage [Charles Babbage, 1792-1871], whose computer (the Analytical Engine which he and Augusta [Augusta Ada Byron Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron] built of brass and walnut, now in the South Kensington Museum) was to ‘weave algebra as the Jacquard looms weave flowers and leaves.’” —Guy Davenport to Joan Crane. Davenport’s pre-ubiquity weavings exemplary in their control of the onslaught of particulars. Of the poem he writes, too, and aptly: “Part I says that the way one sees the world is the world. Part II says that only repeated forms are meaningful. . . . Part IV says that a particular mind’s memory is a harmony.”

“. . . strain at a gnat . . .”

Robert Hooke, “Gnat,” out of Micrographia, or, Some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses (1665)

A calendar to tell the day;
A handkerchief to wave away
The gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm
Pouching a bottle in one arm;
A whiskey bottle full of worms;
And bedroom slacks; are these fit terms
To mete the worm whose molten rage
Boils in the belly of old age?

        —Robert Lowell, out of “The Drunken Fisherman” (1946)

—

“Isn’t is gnats midges, sorry Kennexth,”
Oh un-city club berry milk gorilla!
Fashion’d of silver lama pot plant tea.
They drink. It. And. The. China
velly big, belly old, rope quoit hoop
O Cincinnati! Plowed under Rome bee . . .

        —James Schuyler, out of “Kennexth” (Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems, 2010)
—

      Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.
      Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.

        —Matthew 23:23,24, out of the King James Bible (1611)

—

      Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.
      One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life. Rather, it is human, and only its possessor and begetter takes it so solemnly—as though the world’s axis turned within it. But if we could communicate with a gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself.

        —Friedrich Nietzsche, out of “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873)
—

      “What sort of insects do you rejoice in, where you come from?” the Gnat inquired.
      “I don’t rejoice in insects at all,” Alice explained, “because I’m rather afraid of them—at least the large kinds. But I can tell you the names of some of them.”
      “Of course they answer to their names?” the Gnat remarked carelessly.
      “I never knew them do it.”
      “What’s the use of their having names the Gnat said, “if they won’t answer to them?”
      “No use to them,” said Alice; “but it’s useful to the people that name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?”
      “I can’t say,” the Gnat replied. “Further on, in the wood down there, they’ve got no names.”

        —Lewis Carroll, out of Through the Looking Glass (1871)

—

Why do gnats always get into white wine?

        —Frank O’Hara, out of “On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday & About Arshile Gorky” (1963)

—

Some of them have a sharpe pricked weapon in their muzzle, as namely, the Breese or great Horse-flie, called in Latine Asilus or Tabanus, whether you will. Likewise Gnats also, and some kind of flies. And these prickes serve them in good stead both for mouth and tongue. Some of these are but blunt, and not good for to pricke, but onely handsome to sucke withall, as flies, which have all of them a tongue, beeing evidently fistulous and like a pipe.

        —C. Plinius Secundus, out of The Naturall Historie, translated by Philemon Holland (1601)

—

. . . there be other Gnats, that soure things will engender.

        —C. Plinius Secundus, out of The Naturall Historie, translated by Philemon Holland (1601)

—

. . . swarms of minute light-colored gnats, looking like motes in the sun.

        —Henry David Thoreau, out of the Journal (19 September 1858)

—

On the willow oak under which Mikkel and Magnus were lying one summer afternoon there rained down every second on every square centimeter of long sunlit leaf a quintillion photons.
—A thousand quadrillion photons.
—What’s it look like as a number? Mikkel asked. And what are those midges doing, bouncing up and down in the air and turning like a wheel?
—They’re happy, Magnus said in a drowsy voice. You write quintillion with a one and eighteen zeros. That’s nothing compared to the neutrinos falling through the leaves rather than onto them, through us too, and the dithering gnats. They are so little that to them the spaces between the leaf’s atoms is like from here to the moon.
—Midges. Gnats are bigger. You think they’re happy, like us?
—They have minds. They’re frolicking in existential ecstasy, dancing and spiralling. The old Greeks put mind everywhere, as things have to know how to be. This tree knows how to be a tree . . .

        —Guy Davenport, out of “The Playing Field” (2002)

—

. . . the fremitus of things, the jigget of gnats, drum of the blood, fidget of leaves, shiver of light, boom of the wind.

        —Guy Davenport, out of “C. Musonius Rufus” (1976)

—

Pussy in the cradle lies—and sweetly dreams of gnats and flies.
        —Marianne Moore, c. 1895 (aetat. 7)

—

      They were marching through a wide defile, hedged in by two chains of reddish hillocks, when a nauseous odor struck their nostrils, and they believed that they saw something extraordinary at the top of a carob tree; a lion’s head stood up above the foliage.
      Running towards it, they found a lion attached to a cross by its four limbs, like a criminal; his enormous muzzle hung to his breast, and his forepaws, half concealed beneath the abundance of his mane, were widely spread apart, like a bird’s wings in flight; under the tightly drawn skin, his ribs severally protruded and his hind legs were nailed together, but were slightly drawn up; black blood had trickled through the hairs, and collected in stalactites at the end of his tail, which hung straight down the length of the cross. The soldiers crowded around the beast, diverting themselves by calling him:—“Consul!” and “Citizen of Rome!” and threw pebbles into his eyes to scatter the swarming gnats.

        —Gustave Flaubert, out of Salammbô (1862)

—

They are armed with a strong sharp beak or proboscis, shaped like a lancet, and sheathed in flexible thin valves; with this beak they instantly pierce the veins of the creatures, making a large orifice from whence the blood springs in large drops, rolling down as tears, causing a fierce pain or aching for a considerable time after the wound is made. There are three or four species of this genus of less size but equally vexatious, as they are vastly more numerous, active and sanguineous; particularly, one about half the size of the first mentioned, the next less of a dusky colour with a green head; another yet somewhat less, of a splendid green and the head of a gold colour; the sting of this last is intolerable, no less acute than a prick from a red-hot needle, or a spark of fire on the skin; these are called the burning flies. Besides the preceding tormentors, there are three or four species of the asilus or smaller biting flies; one of a grayish dusky colour, another much of the same colour, having spotted wings and a green head, and another very small and perfectly black: this last species lie in ambush in shrubby thickets and Cane brakes near water: whenever we approach the cool shades near creeks, impatient for repose and relief, almost sinking under the persecutions from the evil spirits, who continually surround and follow us over the burning desart ridges and plains, and here in some hopes of momentary peace and quietness, under cover of the cool humid groves, we are surprised and quickly invested with dark clouds of these persecuting demons, besides musquitoes and gnats (culex et cynips).

        —William Bartram, out of Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws. Containing an Account of the Soil and Natural Productions of Those Regions; Together with Observations on the Manners of the Indians (1791)

Hugh Kenner (Stray Notes)

Hugh Kenner, 1923-2003

Hugh Kenner, out of Geodesic Math and How to Use It (1976), talking about constructing a Tensegrity (see R. Buckminster Fuller) out of string and straw-made struts:

The parabola has a theoretical zero point, where it touches the baseline, but this resembles the famous ideal point with position but no magnitude: we can never really say that it is occupied. In the real universe where winds blow, invisible forces tug, and molecules are in ceaseless motion, a Tensegrity will no more quite settle down than will anything else: there will always be minute motions, tiny strut displacements at the order of magnitude where elasticity multiplication is truly enormous and compensating forces have enormous advantage. The parabola’s zero point is that ideal condition of rest which nothing real ever attains, and about which a Tensegrity in particular dances an eternal jig of pre-Socratic derision.

To arrive at that (Guy Davenport points to its final sentence in a November 26, 1976 piece in National Review wherein, too, he reports how “a model cuboctahedron (a dozen sticks in orbit around nothing, untouching, kept from leaping all over the room by a cat’s cradle of strings)” unfailingly stops visitors: “The question ‘What is it?’ can only be answered in terms that double back to the fact that it is a model of itself . . .”*)—to arrive at Kenner’s “invisible forces tug, and molecules are in ceaseless motion” in the midst of rereading—dilatory, rapt, étonné encore—The Pound Era (1971) is to be struck by how consistent Kenner’s thinking is: “a model of itself.”

Two things: integrity of form and constant motility: “the vortex is not the water but a patterned energy made visible by the water.” (Isn’t Kenner suggesting that language itself is a vortex? “Language is not words but a patterned energy made visible by words.”**) In the chapter called “The Invention of Language,” a sense of how lively burgeonings in the fields of philology and etymology and lexicography*** precipitate a shift against the supposed aplomb of linguistic stasis****: out of a place wherein “Words, since the 18th century . . . seemed fixed upon a rigid and authorized grid, each little violation of which incited the Great Anarch” (see Pope’s Dunciad (1743): “Lo! thy dread empire Chaos! is restored: / Light dies before thy uncreating word; / Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall, / And universal darkness buries all . . .”) one moves to “the slow discovery of language, a complex coherent organism that is no more the sum of its constituent words than a rhinoceros is the sum of its constituent cells, an organism that can maintain its identity as it grows and evolves in time; that can remember, that can anticipate, that can mutate.” The upshot: the processual poetics of high Modernism flowers forth largely out of a new sense of language’s own processual nature, words “in ceaseless motion.” Another species of “eternal jig of pre-Socratic derision.” (Davenport: “As for my cuboctahedron on the desk, it quivers all the time.”)

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, “Brass Toy,” c. 1913

* “A model of itself.” The phrase (and the cuboctahedron) recall Kenner’s report of Gaudier-Brzeska’s cutting “about 1913” a brass toy—

that embodies in its four inches several hundred formal decisions: that two triangles, one fish-tailed, shall have open centers and beveled edges, that four finger-like rectangularities shall prolong but displace the downward thrust of a straight vertebral gesture, that next to that descent in high relief shall lie a concavity, its far side curved. . . . T. E. Hulme used it for a pocket toy to occupy his restless fingers. It is a sacred object, elusively anthropo- and ichthymorphic, with no god but its own vigor. I do not know what has become of it.

“No god but its own vigor.” Kenner: “God is concentrated attention; a work of art is someone’s act of attention, evoking ours; there have been great feats of attention.”

** Kenner:

Language, which permeates our minds and obeys not the law of things but its own laws, which has an organism’s power to mutate and adapt and survive, and exacts obligation from us because no heritage is more precious. The things against which its words brush are virtually extraneous to its integrity.

*** Kenner:

      Skeat’s Dictionary appeared in four parts, 1879-82; this last date was also the year of Joyce’s birth. In January 1884, when he was almost two, the first part of the New English Dictionary (A-Ant) was published. By the time he had commenced Ulysses it had reached the S’s and T’s. Its 125th and final fascicle is dated April 1928; several installments of the polyglot Wake were by then in print.
      The insight behind the great Dictionary is that meanings, arrayed in chronological sequence, display a seamless intelligible continuity.

“Energy made visible.” So, Kenner reports, Joyce writes in Ulysses: “The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh.” Too, Kenner reports how—

An elder colleague of Skeat’s, Richard Chenevix Trench, “gave the first impulse” to the N.E.D by a paper read before the Philological Society in 1857, and this same Trench (later Anglican archbishop of Dublin) had defined in 1851 the state of awareness, at length transmitted to Joyce by philological tradition, within which such a thing as Finnegans Wake was conceivable: “Many a single word . . . is itself a concentrated poem, having stores of poetical thought and imagery laid up in it.”

Thus Charles Olson, a century or so belatedly: “whatever you have to say, leave / the roots on, let them / dangle // And the dirt // Just to make clear / where they come from . . .”

**** Kenner:

With no grasp of language families, with no hint that linguistic morphology follows laws, and with only a few thousand years since Babel to contain all the borrowings and derivations that have ever occurred, ingenious people etymologized at whim. Johnson derived crocodile from Greek words meaning saffron-fearer, he did not say why, and was uncertain whether the peacock was named from its “peak” of head-feathers or from the French beaucoq. (He had the Latin pavo at hand, but no way of perceiving how Old English had made it into pāwa which became pēa.)

“Torn foolscap . . .”

Raphael, “Head of Saint Catherine and sketches of cupids,” c. 1507-8

Post-putsch (or potlatch) grubbing under a cold sun. A stoat (or an angel) dashed off sloppily. Torn foolscap. Unlocatable fevers: puerperal fever, jail fever, hectic fever. Agues and poxes. (Kerouac, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”: “No pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatological buildup words till satisfaction is gained, which will turn out to be a great appending rhythm to a thought and be in accordance with Great Law of timing.”) That nowhere blurt of the incipient throttle. Contumaciously revving up an indispensability. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in an essay called “An Open Portfolio” (1890):

Emerson said, many years since, in the “Dial,” that the most interesting department of poetry would hereafter be found in what might be called “The Poetry of the Portfolio”; the work, that is, of persons who wrote for the relief of their own minds, and without thought of publication. Such poetry, when accumulated for years, will have at least the merit of perfect freedom; accompanied, of course, by whatever drawback follows from the habitual absence of criticism. Thought will have its full strength and uplifting, but without the proper chastening of literary expression; there will be wonderful strokes and felicities, and yet an incomplete and unsatisfactory whole. If we believe, with Ruskin, that “no beauty of execution can outweigh one grain or fragment of thought,” then we may often gain by the seclusion of the portfolio, which rests content with a first stroke and does not over-refine and prune away afterwards.

(Is Ginsberg’s “First thought, best thought” less Blakean than Ruskinian?) The Ruskin line is out of Modern Painters (1843), its chapter called “Definition of Greatness in Art”:

The picture which has the nobler and more numerous ideas, however awkwardly expressed, is a greater and a better picture than that which has the less noble and less numerous ideas, however beautifully expressed. No weight, nor mass, nor beauty of execution can outweigh one grain or fragment of thought. Three penstrokes of Raffaelle are a greater and a better picture than the most finished work that ever Carlo Dolci polished into inanity. A finished work of a great artist is only better than its sketch, if the sources of pleasure belonging to color and realization—valuable in themselves,—are so employed as to increase the impressiveness of the thought.

One loves the sense of vanity decreed to “finish.” Out of the pertinent Emerson essay, called “New Poetry” (1840), with its opening nod to the era’s “tendencies” being “so democratical, that we shall soon have not so much as a pulpit or raised platform in any church or townhouse, but each person, who is moved to address any public assembly, will speak from the floor”:

Is there not room then for a new department in poetry, namely, Verses of the Portfolio? We have fancied that we drew greater pleasure from some manuscript verses than from printed ones of equal talent. For there was herein the charm of character; they were confessions; and the faults, the imperfect parts, the fragmentary verses, the halting rhymes, had a worth beyond that of a high finish; for they testified that the writer was more man than artist, more earnest than vain; that the thought was too sweet and sacred to him, than that he should suffer his ears to hear or his eyes to see a superficial defect in the expression.

Emerson, too, adjudges any previous “prescription which demands a rhythmical polish may be easily set aside” and suspects “men of genius” to be “more incapable than others of that elaborate execution which criticism exacts” and “incapable of any perfect exhibition”:

They are humble, self-accusing, moody men, whose worship is toward the Ideal Beauty, which chooses to be courted not so often in perfect hymns, as in wild ear-piercing ejaculations, or in silent musings. Their face is forward, and their heart is in this heaven. By so much are they disqualified for a perfect success in any particular performance to which they can give only a divided affection.

“Their face is forward, and their heart is in this heaven”—isn’t that whole note—with its contrapuntal of “wild ear-piercing ejaculations” against “silent musings”—a kind of Urtext for Frank O’Hara’s “My Heart” (“I’d have the immediacy of a bad movie, / not just a sleeper, but also the big, / overproduced first-run kind. I want to be / at least as alive as the vulgar / . . . / I want my face to be shaven, and my heart— / you can’t plan on the heart, but / the better part of it, my poetry, is open.”)?

Raphael, “Saint Catherine of Alexandria,” 1508

“. . . a shape it is chiefly . . .”

David Jones, “Self-Portrait,” 1928

What I have written has no plan, or at least is not planned. If it has a shape it is chiefly that it returns to its beginning. It has themes and a theme even if it wanders far. If it has a unity it is that what goes before conditions what comes after and vice versa. Rather as in a longish conversation between two friends, where one thing leads to another; but should a third party hear fragments of it, he might not know how the talk had passed from the cultivation of cabbages to Melchizedek, king of Salem. Though indeed he might guess.

        —David Jones, out of the Preface, The Anathemata (1952)

—

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax—
Of cabbages—and kings—
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings.”

        —Lewis Carroll, out of “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

—

It wasn’t without a certain pleasure that I surveyed my ruined espaliers, all my flowers torn to pieces, the disheveled vegetable garden. As I contemplated all these factitious little man-made arrangements which five minutes of nature had sufficed to destroy, I admired the way the true order had reimposed itself on the false. These things so tormented by us—trees pruned and shaped, flowers growing where they don’t want to, vegetables brought from other countries—they all found a kind of revenge in this atmospheric rebuke . . . It is too generally believed that the sun has no other function here below than to help the cabbages along. Now and then we must restore God to his pedestal.

        —Gustave Flaubert, out of a letter to Louise Colet (1853)

—

A yak is a prehistoric cabbage: of that, at least, we may be sure.
But tell us, sages of the solarium, why is that light
still hidden back there, among house-plants and rubber sponges?

        —John Ashbery, out of “Notes from the Air,” Hotel Lautréamont (1992)

—

Or when someone places a cabbage on a stump
I think I am with them, I think of their name:
Julian.

        —John Ashbery, out of “The Suspended Life,” The Tennis Court Oath (1962)

—

And it is Inness on the meadows and fruit is
yellow ripening in windows every minute
growing brighter in the bulblight by the
cabbages and spuds—
                                          And all there is is won

What are black 4 a.m.’s after all but black
4 a.m.’s like anything else: a tree
a fork, a leaf, a pane of glass—?
                                          And all there is is won . . .

        —William Carlos Williams, out of “Struggle of Wings” (1926)

—

CABBAGE.
      [cabus, Fr. brassica, Lat.]

A plant.

The leaves are large, fleshy, and of a glaucous colour; the flowers consist of four leaves, which are succeeded by long taper pods, containing several round acrid seeds. The species are, 1. The common white cabbage. 2. The red cabbage. 3. The Russian cabbage. 4. The flat-sided cabbage. 5. The sugar loaf cabbage. 6. The early Battersea cabbage. 7. The white Savoy cabbage. 8. The green Savoy cabbage. 9. The boorcole.10. The green broccoli. 11. The Italian broccoli. 12. The turnep-rooted cabbage. 13. The cauliflower. 14. The turnep cabbage. 15. Curled colewort. 16. The musk cabbage. 17. Branching tree cabbage, from the sea coast. 18. Brown broccoli. 19. Common colewort. 20. Perennial Alpine colewort. 21. Perfoliated wild cabbage, with a white flower. 22. Perfoliated cabbage, with a purple flower . . .
      Miller

Cole, cabbage, and coleworts, are soft and demulcent, without any acidity; the jelly or juice, of red cabbage, baked in an oven, and mixed with honey, is an excellent pectoral.
      Arbuthnot on Aliments.

CABBAGE-WORM.

An insect.

        —Samuel Johnson, out of A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

—

                  Place of importance as in the old days
stood on the ramparts of the fort
                                                      the open sea outside
alone with water-birds and cattle
                          knee-deep in a stream
grove of reeds
              herons watching from the bank
henges
      whole fields honeycombed with souterrains
human
                      bones through the gloom
        whose sudden mouth
surrounded my face
                    a thread of blue around the coast
                                                      feathery moon
eternity swallows up time
                                    peaceable as foam
                      O cabbage gardens
summer’s elegy
                      sunset survived

        —Susan Howe, out of Cabbage Gardens (1979)

—

Johnson said, that Dr. Grainger was an agreeable man; a man who would do any good that was in his power. His translation of Tibullus, he thought, was very well done; but “The Sugar-Cane, a Poem,” did not please him, for, he exclaimed, “What could he make of a sugar-cane? One might as well write the ‘Parsley-bed, a Poem;’ or ‘The Cabbage-garden, a Poem.’” BOSWELL. “You must then pickle your cabbage with the sal atticum.” JOHNSON. “You know there is already The Hop-Garden, a Poem: and, I think, one could say a great deal about cabbage. The poem might begin with the advantages of civilized society over a rude state, exemplified by the Scotch, who had no cabbages till Oliver Cromwell’s soldiers introduced them; and one might thus shew how arts are propagated by conquest, as they were by the Roman arms.” He seemed to be much diverted with the fertility of his own fancy. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
James Boswell, Esq.
                                                        He lost one of his shoes
                                                        among the cabbages.
                                                                            Peter Rabbit
                                                                            Beatrix Potter

        —Susan Howe, out of Cabbage Gardens (1979)

—

There are, however, many others to whom I may be as, or more, indebted. Who should say how much may be owing to a small textbook on botany; a manual of seamanship; various items in the magazine Wales edited by Mr Keidrych Rhys; a guide to the Isle of Wight; a child’s picture-book of prehistoric fauna; a guide-book to the parish church of Cilcain, Flintshire, by a local antiquary, 1912; a glossy 1949 bookstall purchase on the pontifex Isambard Kingdom Brunel; a brochure on the composition and permanence of colours; a pamphlet on the prevention of collisions at sea; a paper read before a London conference of psychologists; the text of a guide to a collection of Welsh samplers and embroideries; a catalogue of English china or plate; a neglected directive from Rome on the use of the Chant; a reference in The Times to the cry of a bittern in Norfolk, or to the bloom on a thorn-bush in Herefordshire, or to an Homeric find on Karatepe ridge?

        —David Jones, out of the Preface, The Anathemata (1952)

A Short History of the Fragment

Sappho Papyrus
(Lobel-Page Fragment 98)
ξανθοτέραις ἔχη [/] ταίς κόμαις δάιδος
. . . has hair more yellow than a torch . . .

Reluctant Eliot with those “fragments . . . shored against . . . ruins”—pushed to it by Pound. Hugh Kenner, in a chapter (“The Muse in Tatters”) of The Pound Era, tracing a short history of the fragment, the modern onslaught seemingly to begin with scholar-salvaged bits (“thin scrapings . . . : single stanzas, . . . stray lines, stay phrases, single words, cited by Alexandrian commentators in passing illustration of meters, or of Aeolic forms”—here he’s talking of Sapphic pieces—“we know how she would have spelled the word for carbonate of soda”) tendered out of “masses of illegible papyrus scraps that came to Berlin from Egypt in 1896.” Swinburne’s approach to the fragment, along with countless others: “to dilate . . ., to reduplicate, to amplify, to prolong” with “cumbrousness of detail.” Kenner reports how one Sapphic fragment—the “tautly paced disclosure” “I loved you once, Atthis, long ago”—

roused Swinburne into eight lines of slow-motion re-enactment:

I loved thee,—hark, one tenderer note than all—
Atthis, of old time, once—one low long fall,
Sighing—one long low lovely loveless call,
Dying—one pause in song so flamelike fast—
Atthis, long since in old time overpast—
One soft first pause and last.
One,—then the old rage of rapture’s fieriest rain
Storms all the music-maddened night again.

Kenner, kindly, calls it a “champion expansion.” Swinburne is “never at a loss for more words.” Against that rhapsodic sumptuousness with its glut of rehash, its aesthetic hyperventilating, Kenner posits the Poundian approach: fragment comme “radiant gist.” Against any such stuffed and overweening aesthetic, any gussying up of the implicit, “an aesthetic of glimpses,” of ellipses rooted in the fragment’s own reticence, the ringing plausibility of its hints. (Kenner points to one source of such restraint in Walter Pater: “To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense of it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our lives fines itself down.”) An arrangement, then, of intensities—

Spring . . . . . . .
Too long . . . . . .
Gongula . . . . . .

(Kenner quotes Pound in 1950 saying: “Points define a periphery.” And, noting a sensibility that is constantly re-emergent, quotes Eliot speaking of Byron’s “imperceptiveness to the English word—so that he has to use a great many words before we become aware of him.”)

Reading all that, and thinking of the current use of the fragment, ubiquitous, largely untheorized (“as they say”), or copping to simple mimickry (“a broken way of attending calls for broken forms.”) The tendency is toward pure fragment, a undifferentiated slurry of brokenness, fragments to be churned through, used up, a glut of fragments. Look:

Words torn, unseen, unseemly, scene
some far suburb’s mall lot
Summer’s theme: this year’s humid
—to sweat is to know—
pen squeezed too tight yields
ink as blood or pus
so the phrase scraped, removed
offending thine eye: “Outsource Bush”
Against which, insource what? Who
will do it? Most terrible
predicate—high above mountains snow-capped
even in August in-flight motion
picture Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind infuriates many No
action, no funny, plot too
dense to follow, unless (unless!)
mind’s eye gives attention . . .

Out of Ron Silliman’s “Revelator.” No radiant gists in that wash—verbiage, broken and current, is all. A leveling occurs: “some far suburb’s mall lot” equals “to sweat is to know” equals “ink as blood or pus” equals “‘Outsource Bush.’” Not exactly “champion expansion”—but in a similar realm, hyper-attending to a pandemonium of bits makes its own dull rhapsody wherein naught shines. Or look:

Horror of senior liquidity managers, aversion to strategy consultants, disgust at lead auditors, impatience with industry relations directors, shrinkage from financial modellers, fear of property loss adjusters, suspicion of corporate accountants, distrust of branch compliance officers, antipathy for growth managers, nausea at contract administers, distaste for equities client service heads, abomination of senior enterprise application architects, dread of heads of international payments, dismay at dispute consulting vice presidents, chagrin at directors of pricing strategy, detestation of reporting and valuations accountants, irritation at fund controllers, mortification at renewables project finance associates, hostility to high yield analysts . . .

and so on for an equal stretch, with all the fun of the cumulus, the humor (and implicit critique) in such pointed excess, and hence veering into

. . . denial of structured credit surveillance analysts, mockery of assurance managers and illness of disposition toward regulatory affairs consultants getting social housing means that you don’t really want communism, but you needn’t be ashamed only of that; your ear of shredded lichen is disproved din the kitchen salesroom, one made to resemble a mock kitchen, try it on as a polite form of fuck-up, down-payment or even for only the least, last or least lost scrap, no luck, shred or speck of kitchen, it is a good ear and has been licked but it will not pay for the annealed ultimate fragment of empty fridge or glossy glory spigot to glut on lately sublimed into a loss leader whose loss is implicitly infinite, in instalments, for in your defence it emerges that the kitchen was always and on purpose unsalable, whatever sort of incredibly weird noise you made in peace signs.

Out of Keston Sutherland’s “Ode to TL61P 3” in the new “Crisis Inquiry” issue of Damn the Caesars (Concilium Plebis: Richard Owens). Isn’t there a severe drain-off of attending (and ferocity) at the entry of the quasi-surreal “ear of shredded lichen” and its diminuendo into a frazzle of fragmentary dolings-out? (That precise intent is one likelihood: a new paragraph begins: “Since not a single song I made is comprehensible to you, I fear I must be too bourgeois or indigent to praise you . . .”) I can’t help but read Sean Bonney’s “Letter on Spectres” (dated: Saturday, August 20, 2011) as an indirect response to Sutherland (or, more precisely, to any claim to political efficacy in the distressed gamut—fragment to fragment—of experimental style that runs currently rampant (and unheeded). Bonney:

Yours was such an obvious bourgeois response. Pandemonium is suburbia, pure and simple. The rioters are speaking in perfect English. Its the middle-class, the magistrates, and you, who are all talking some weird, ignorant slang. All of your mouths are stitched up with some kind of weird gaffer tape. Your laboratory is a slum. Sorry. I don’t mean to be rude, but things have been pretty stressful. You know how it is when you read an account of a situation you’ve been directly involved in, but each one of its constituent parts has been extracted, polished, entirely rearranged?

And, at the end: “Each syllable is a different tonal cluster, penned in with police-wire and used electricity. I hear you’re thinking about becoming a bailiff. In any case, I’m glad they burnt your laboratory down. Now send me some fucking money.” Against the ubiquity of a poetics of fragments unleashed helter-skelter, consumed without pause, without particularity, without “gist”—“churned through” in unwholesome resemblance to capital and its endless “goods”—the “rioters are speaking in perfect English.” In arrangements, that is, of intensities, Pound-finicky holdouts against mere gush and glut.