Grammar: Boundaries Tool

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In 1948, Swiss chemist George de Mestral was impressed with the clinging power of burrs snagged in his dog's fur and on his pant legs after he returned from a hike. While examining the burrs under a microscope, he observed many hundreds of small fibers that grabbed like hooks. He experimented with replicas of the burrs and eventually invented Velcro, a synthetic clinging fabric that was first marketed as "the zipperless zipper." In the 1960s, NASA used de Mestral's invention on space suits, and now, of course, we see it everywhere. You might say that de Mestral was the father of biomimicry, an increasingly essential field that stud- ies nature, looking for efficiencies in materials and systems, and asks the question "How can our homes, our electronics, and our cities work better?" As one biomimetics company puts it: "Nature is the largest laboratory that ever existed and ever will." Architecture is one field that is constantly exploring new ways to incorporate biomimicry. Architects have studied everything from beehives to beaver dams to learn how to best use materials, geometry, and physics in buildings. Termite mounds, for example, very efficiently regulate temperature, humidity, and airflow, so architects in Zimbabwe are working to apply what they've learned from termite mounds to human-made structures. Says Michael Pawlyn, author of Biomimicry in Architecture, "If you look beyond the nice shapes in nature and understand the principles behind them, you can find some adaptations that can lead to new, innovative solutions that are radically more resource-efficient. It's the direction we need to take in the coming decades." Designers in various professional fields are draw- ing on biomimicry; for example, in optics, scientists have examined the surface of insect eyes in hopes of reducing glare on handheld device screens. Engi- neers in the field of robotics worked to replicate the property found in a gecko's feet that allows adhesion to smooth surfaces. Sometimes what scientists learn from nature isn't more advanced, but simpler. The abalone shrimp, for example, makes its shell out of calcium carbonate, the same material as soft chalk. It's not a rare or complex substance, but the unique arrangement of the material in the abalone's shell makes it extremely tough. The walls of the shell contain microscopic pieces of calcium carbonate stacked like bricks, which are bound together using proteins just as concrete mortar is used. The result is a shell three thousand times harder than chalk and as tough as Kevlar® (the material used in bullet-proof vests). Often it is necessary to look at the nanoscale structures of a living material's exceptional properties in order to re-create it synthetically. Andrew Parker, an evolutionary biologist, looked at the skin of the thorny devil (a type of lizard) under a scanning elec- tron microscope, in search of the features that let the animal channel water from its back to its mouth. Examples like this from the animal world abound. Scientists have learned that colorful birds don't always have pigment in their wings but are some- times completely brown; it's the layers of keratin in their wings that produce color. Different colors, which have varying wavelengths, reflect differently through keratin. The discovery of this phenomenon can be put to use in creating paints and cosmetics that won't fade or chip. At the same time, paint for outdoor surfaces can be made tougher by copying the structures found in antler bone. Hearing aids are being designed to capture sound as well as the ears of the Ormia fly do. And why can't we have a self-healing material like our own skin? Researchers at the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois are creating just that; they call it an "autonomic materials system." A raptor's feathers, a whale's fluke, a mosquito's proboscis—all have functional features we can learn from. The driving force behind these innovations, aside from improved performance, is often improved energy efficiency. In a world where nonrenew- able energy resources are dwindling and carbon emissions threaten the planet's health, efficiency has never been more important. Pawlyn agrees: "For me, biomimicry is one of the best sources of inno- vation to get to a world of zero waste because those are the rules under which biological life has had to exist." Biomimicry is a radical field and one whose prac- titioners need to be radically optimistic, as Pawlyn is when he says, "We could use natural products such as cellulose, or even harvest carbon from the atmosphere to create bio-rock.

5. Londonderry Air

This song was already familiar to me from a childhood spent in church. Apparently someone had taken this Irish folk tune and set Christian lyrics to it. So this prior knowledge of the melody meant I was always acutely aware of any mistake I made while tackling this piece. The cross-hand playing we did in Nobody Knows made a come back, but for me the most interesting and novel aspect of the song was that the score's given on three staves. J. T. assures us that, rather than making things more complicated, it actually simplifies things. It certainly makes things less cluttered—and since clutter is actually an aspect of notation that bugs me, I definitely find this three-stave anomaly to be helpful. 

All in all, I think this song was good for me. I'm sort of conservative when it comes to flailing my arms all over the keyboard, and this song eases me into that. Apart from repeatedly crossing hands, a couple instances exist in which its necessary to walk arpeggios some distance down the keyboard—not too extreme, but graduated in a sense that makes it the perfect stepping stone for someone of my modest (but growing!) capabilities. 

I am utterly enamoured of the particular chord pictured above—the one the diminuendo sign seems to also find necessary to point out. It's located in one of the final phrases of the song and consists (as is apparent) of two flattened C's, one flattened G, an A, and an E. It was murderous to read when I first encountered it because just about every infernal note has an accidental against it! But I was more than rewarded at the end of that effort. (Turns out to be an inverted B7 chord when all the key-signature dust clears.) And, if I recall correctly, my response to the combination was to find it at first peculiar and unexpected, then almost in the same instant it became interesting, and finally it settled on just being really satisfying. 

4. Toreador Song

Georges Bizet, what can I say? I had him in the second grade book aeons ago when we played Habanera. That was fun—I really loved that syncopated rhythm. And the learning never stops. I have not perfected this bullfighter's anthem by any stretch of the imagination. My current weak spots are a couple small jumps in the 4th and 5th bars. I kinda realise I just need to isolate and work on them though, because they haven't always been my weakest spots. What happened, I think, is that the polishing that I've done to the other areas have caused what I might have previously considered strong areas to appear weak by comparison. This is good, of course. It means progress is being made... but the song, as I currently play it, still sounds pretty horrible.

The good news is that the above double-time, backhanded-F-major-scale-that-starts-on-C is looking and sounding a lot better as of yesterday! Molto crescendo! Also, that trill-esque passage in bar 9 (repeated in bar 21) is looking pretty okay too in the right hand; if I could only get my left hand to keep up, I'd be set. Oh yeah, and how 'bout those acciaccaturas? They're coming along... It's a work in progress though, and I'm learning to be patient and allow myself the time I need to grow.

3. Musette

Musette on the other hand is a perpetual stumbling block for me—so much so that about a decade ago when I first tried this piece, I gave it all up under the presumption that piano just wasn't my thing. (Dare I shake my fist at Bach?) Seriously though, I do like very much the modulation of volume and intensity prescribed in the piece: it's p  f  p  f alternating all throughout, and the contrast really works. Plus, that middle staccato section (below) is pretty sweet.

 

But... for the refrain with which the song begins and ends, I simply can't get both hands to simultaneously jump the measly octave and consistently land the middle fingers  on F# without at least one sliding off or hitting a neighbouring note. It seems to require a level of precision I haven't yet developed to perfectly balance my fingers on such a narrow perch while descending at the rate of however many feet per second is prescribed by the term giocoso. I've managed to do it a few times, of course. I've been practising it for almost 6 weeks, and I hit the right notes maybe 35% of the time (smh).

I could get discouraged—I have done—but I no longer am. Instead, I've determined to make everything into a learning experience. Therefore, my current approach to this piece is to play it as fast as I can. Speed runs. My hope is that after several weeks at this ridiculous pace, when I finally get it back down to giocoso, the jumps will seem like a breeze.

Thank you, Bach :)

Sincerely,

T

2. Melody

Luckily this time around, I found the courage to push past my incompetence in playing the first piece in order to tackle the second piece, (Robert) Schumann's Melody. For an intermediate player like myself (and one returning to the piano in adulthood after a long, loooong absence), I think this piece is a good exercise in developing hand independence.

The left hand notably doesn't just chip in with a harmonising note or chord now and then—once or twice a bar, or something. Rather, it plays continuously throughout, even more so than the right hand, and provides (as J.T. himself put it) "a subdued, but ever-moving background." I actually play this somewhat to my satisfaction, though I'm still working out some of the transitions. The legato "singing tone" required of the RH complements my style of playing, I'd say. And thank God it's not too fast: cantabile and moderato are just my "speed."

1. Nobody Knows De Trouble I've Seen

This song was arranged by John Thompson (J.T.) himself, and it is a pretty easy song, I'd say. I mean, it's in 4/4 time and it's all crotchets and minims, with a few semibreves thrown in here and there... and yet for the life of me, I can't seem to play it right! It just never feels right in my fingers, and my timing's all screwed up. Now, I'm a person who prides myself on my innate sense of timing, so (ahem!) I think I'm just gonna blame a huge chunk of this problem on those arpeggios sprinkled over the piece. (Two consecutive ones are pictured above.) I can never seem to get them perfect the first time. Every time I play them, I have to practice them once or twice before they sound right. What's the answer... finger drills you say?  No argument there. I'm working on those, too...

Beckett?

I have been doing some Beckett. Or Beckett has been doing me. There's really no difference in Einsteinian relativity. Either way, someone's getting cork-screwed right into the ground.

But there are elements of Beckett that are amenable to thought. Let's face it: I'm not that twisted, so as for any other "relatively" normal person out there, I struggle with Beckett.

But I like the score with the frogs in Watt. It (among many other things) has inspired me to combine my interests and rediscover some old ones. One of those is piano. I wonder what piano playing might add to my reading of Beckett. Piano learning, that is, since (like many other "relatively" normal persons, I quit piano somewhere between the second and third John Thompson books.)

Let's say it was the third book. What if I resume playing alongside reading Beckett. (And Stein). And alongside some rudimentary education in mathematics? If I resume all this and chronicle my progress, difficulties, moments of epiphany (however few), would you read it?

Would it matter?

entanglement distilled

I bought a book on quantum mechanics, but I haven't cracked it yet because I also bought a text on classical mechanics that I'm determined to finish first. (I've been forced into autodidacticism by an incapacity to pay tuition for everything I'd like to learn.) On break, I've been cheating by reading The Age of Entanglement by Louisa Gilder--a good little book whose only "fault" is maybe getting a bit too involved in the narratives that hold the physics together, though that was perhaps her purpose for writing it. So for those interested in the physical insights and less so in the action that filled the interstices, I've embarked on creating a distilled version of the text that'll nevertheless bore you with my musings on the topic.

Entanglement refers to one thing's continued involvement with another with which it has previously been in contact despite its being spatially divided from the object after its initial encounter with it. Two electrons, for instance, that have touched each other and then been ripped asunder and flung far apart--these electrons will continue to transfer information between them as though they were still in physical contact despite being far enough apart that all known methods of communication would (should) occur too slowly to facilitate their interaction. A condition exists for the objects' continued entanglement: that they refrain from touching any other object once the initial connection has been established. In such an event, the connection with the initial partner is broken and a new one established between the objects involved in the latest pairing. Such a condition can usually only be met by very tiny particles.

Much talk and conjecture has been generated about such manifestations of faster-than-light (ftl) communication. The science fiction (fact!) of it all bores me. What I find interesting is the way the particles involved seem to disregard space almost entirely.

stuff I don't understand: the story of e

Pi (π) and e are numbers. Strange and ethereal numbers that cannot be quantified. Because the phrase "be quantified" denotes the perfect tense, which implies a perfected action. Done. Complete. Finito.

Well, actually, finito means finite. But it still captures the anomalous nature of the situation because these numbers (π and e), though less than 4 and 3 respectively, cannot be said ever to end. It makes one wonder how anyone ever computed π, since it's defined (in words) as the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. A ratio is by definition rational, is it not? Someone measured the length of a circle's circumference and its diameter and divided the first by the second. What's irrational about that? A rational number, after all, is defined as one that can be expressed as a ratio of two integers. Yet π is nothing if not irrational.

But this blog isn't about π. That's not the book I read. This blog is about e.

Let's say you have a curve that if the value of the function that defines it is checked at any given point of x (that is, what's y equal to at any given x?), you find out that that value is the same as the slope of the curve at that point. And what if this is true no matter what point you pick on the curve? This represents an exponential function--but not just any exponential function. It's the exponential function. The one that's related to e. The one we'll have to come back to shortly.

Now, we all know that functions are usually expressed in terms of x. Such as x plus two (x+2) or x squared (x²) or x cubed (x³). Usually if you work out these formulas by putting in a numerical value for x, you'll get a numerical answer back. Since this answer changes for every value of x, we usually just call it y till we know what it is for sure. Example: x+2 = y. But exponential functions are different. They have the variable (the x-value) in the exponential position. Like this: three to the x (3^x) or four to the x (4^x) or anything to the x (a^x).

I wrote above about the slope of a curve at any given point (2 paragraphs up). It might seem strange to think of a curve having a slope at just one point, because the direction of the curve is always changing. (Actually, mathematicians usually call even straight lines curves, but let's think of the really curvaceous ones right now). Think of the slope as the general direction that the curve happens to be taking at that point. What if it stopped turning right then? Which way would it be headed? It's something like that. And it turns out that if you know a formula for a given curve, there's a way use it to find a new formula that will give you the slope at any time. (Remember, this e curve I described above is special. No other kind of curve would ever have given us the value of the slope at a point simply by finding out y. In fact, for a long time, no one even knew it existed.)

But exponential functions in general are kind of special too. When you follow the method for finding the slope-at-any-given-point (which math people call the derivative), you just end up with the function you began with multiplied by some constant. The value of that constant would depend on the function we started with in the first place. So someone brilliant thought, what if we could find that number that when it's at the base of the exponential function (as 3 is at the base of this exponential function: 3^x) the constant that comes back to multiply it in the derivative is 1? What if we could find that number? That would mean that we found a function whose derivative (slope-at-any-given-point) is itself (since anything times 1 is itself). This is a HUGE deal, because that would make it so much easier to work out a bunch of high-level mathematical things that I don't even know about yet.

It turns out that number does exist somewhere too. And since the constant that comes back to multiply 2^x is about 0.693 and the one that comes back with 3^x is about 1.099, then they knew the number they sought had to be between 2 and 3. Trying a whole bunch of different numbers in between brought back the answer 2.7182818284 (continuing forever), which they shortened for mortality sake to "e". So e^x is our special function whose derivative is e^x.

This was my first introduction to the number e.

a pertinent idea

The idea expressed below demonstrates the spirit of life which, like Henry James, does routinely include tragedy and doesn't offer happy endings "at any cost." Interestingly, this passage was clipped from a blog entitled The Art of Fiction by Mauricio Salvador:

"Como diría el narrador de Muerte en la tarde, de Hemingway: 'Señora, todas las historias, si continúan lo suficiente, terminan en la muerte, y no es un auténtico narrador de historias quien se lo oculta.' Y Philip Roth, sin duda, es un auténtico narrador de historias. "

A crude translation: "Like the narrator of Hemingway's Death in the afternoon said: 'Madam, all stories, if they go on long enough, end in death, and he who tries to hide that is no true storyteller.' And Philip Roth, without doubt, is a true storyteller."

I've left only to add: Y Henry James, sin duda, es un auténtico narrador de historias.

The Art of Fiction, pt. 2

My goal with this blog is to revel in the literature rather than criticise to death. It's not always easy, especially when the subject matter is itself critical—as in The Art of Fiction. I know I've already been guilty in several other posts, but I'm going to be especially careful from now on.
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James writes that the work of fiction is to catch "the very note and tick, the strange irregular rhythm of life." Yet these irregularities do often seem to be beneath the surface, because the plots of his novels rarely contain anything too far out of the ordinary, as far as I've seen. I think earlier we touched on the idea of "the happy ending at any cost." James avoids this—but life often does too, so his plots don't strike me as being too strange.

Here's a humorous selection of James' own thoughts on those who consider art in terms of rainbows:

For many people art means rose-coloured windowpanes, and selection means picking a bouquet for Mrs. Grundy. They will tell you glibly that artistic considerations have nothing to do with the disagreeable, with the ugly; they will rattle off shallow commonplaces about the province of art and the limits of art till you are moved to some wonder in return as to the province and limits of ignorance.

James a sample... (read: James is classic...)

To me, Henry James' charm is that he fills in the interstices between conversation tags. According to Annie Dillard, "there are no events but thoughts." Therefore, it is in the mind that any occurrence becomes an event. James echoes this himself in his preface to The Portrait of a Lady when he writes, "but what is truer than that on one side—the side of their independence of flood and field, of the moving accident, of battle and murder and sudden death—her adventures are to be mild? Without her sense of them, her sense for them, they are next to nothing at all; but isn't the beauty and the difficulty just in showing their mystic conversion [...] into the stuff of drama?" This "sense for them" is what transforms the incident into the event, and it is just this sense that James succeeds in illuminating.

I’ve certainly always considered Henry James to be the most dramatic of all writers. But when I’m able to get outside myself, I believe that I’m able to see how others might consider him boring. I’ve actually heard it expressed. As an undergraduate while in the dorm computer lab I once overheard someone say, “Jane Austen’s books are so-o boring.” And while I was in the middle of feeling as though a stake were being run through my heart, her companion replied, “Yeah. And have you read Henry James? He’s even worse!” Needless to say I needed oxygen by that point. I didn’t get up to note the faces of the heretics; hatred is unchristian. But after thinking about it—and at times even while reading James, I distinctly get the impression of how a person could come to such a perfidious conclusion. If it weren’t for my peculiar interest in a subject’s sense for his experiences—however mundane—I’d never be interested in the text. So while it is inaccurate to say nothing happens in the stories, the truth is that the events occur so slowly that it is no doubt an interest outside of the plot that propels me as reader.

he is holy; he is firm, pt. 4

Everything I see [...] looks brittle and unreal, a skin of colors painted on glass, which if you prodded it with a finger would powder and fall. A blank sky, perfectly blended with all other sky, has sealed over the crack in the world where the plane fell, and the air has hushed the matter up.

Clearly, something that had to do with eternity took place here where the plane fell. Something ripped time for a brief moment, a split second. To "fall from the dark" is, I suppose, to wake up. Our narrator fell from the obscurant light of the stars--visible light, which by itself is darkness--and she found the truer light of knowledge. But knowledge of what? Of good and evil? Knowledge of pain? Does pain split illusion like the plane split the sky? The millstones of time and space are illusory, yet the pain of their churning is "undeniably real." But if it's true that "only the good is real," what then does that say of pain?

But there's more here. She writes, "The pain [...] is real, for our love [...] is real," and in so doing almost equates pain with love. Yet we detect the even greater depth of this equation's significance in the subsequent revelation that those seraphs who are "aflame with love for God" are higher than those who have "perfect knowledge of him." The love they possess consumes them again and again. And here we have a culmination of the paradox we felt coming.

The flames that issue from the throne of God are themselves the conduit through which the seraphs are transported to their world. Presumably, the flames are also the material from which these angels are made, as well as the substance that destroys and returns them again to their source. All is one is God. For you, O Lord, are a sun and shield--the sun that scorches; the shield that guards. From him we have both everything and nothing to fear. Love and hate commingle. You know, we could contract ourselves to a point running to and from him at the same time.

It would take immeasurable faith to believe in a favourable view of things, because God seems so absent from this illusory present. His love is manifest in his abandonment of humans to the shackling laws of time and space. And the pain of it seems so much more real than the love--which we're told are one and we are confused. He treats us with pain as with love, and we seek to love him back in kind. So our love is a forgetting and, of necessity, a misinterpretation of everything in the universe. For now that creation, as predicate, has been slashed "loose at base from any roots in the real," it is effectively divided from its subject, and all is gibberish. We shuffle objects to make sense of it all.

Faith would be, in short, that God has any willful connection with time whatsover, and with us. For I know it as given that God is all good. And I take it also as given that whatever he touches has meaning, if only in his mysterious terms, the which I readily grant. The question is, then, whether God touches anything.

In creating the laws of the universe and in requiring that they be kept, does God also restrict his own power? Well... without messing with his omnipotence, she describes this restriction as "a contraction of the scope of his will." If that's the case, then the separation is complete, for wouldn't his of all wills be the most unbending? Even Christ's advent might be seen as succumbing to the laws of gravity, as he descends to his suffering, to his death. And he might have conquered the material experience on earth, but he can't have liked it any better than we, for he left again--abandoning us twice. Yet she (as I) searches for a trail he must have left, some significance in the ceremony of his returning at all.

Is there no link at the base of things, some kernel or air deep in the matrix of matter from which the universe furls like a ribbon twined into time?

Yes he might have saved our souls, but what of all this matter? Is there nothing that extends this redemption to the temporal, to our breakable bones and decaying teeth?

he is holy; he is firm, pt. 3

Didn't I fall from the dark of the stars to these senselit and noisesome days?

Our days are illuminated by our senses, for it is through them that we are connected to all that we experience. We see, feel, hear, taste, and smell our universe, and are therefore tethered to the notion that this is what's real. But "by what freak chance does the skin of illusion ever split, and reveal to us the real, which seems to know us by name?" And how does it know us, and why do we know that it does?

In The Writing Life Dillard briefly revisits this problem when she asks, “Why does death so take us by surprise?” The reality of being one day finished-- being "over"-- jolts us every time we look at it because there's something about us that simply expects to continue forever. We take immortality for granted, and are shocked every day to find out that it isn't granted. Even time's passage is enigmatic; we hardly even feel it. Of course, physics itself considers this arrow of time to be strange and perhaps illusory. In The Fabric of the Cosmos, Brian Greene writes this:

All the physical laws that we hold dear fully support what is known as time-reversal symmetry. This is the statement that if some sequence of events can unfold in one temporal order [...] then these events can also unfold in reverse. [...] Not only do known laws fail to tell us why we see events unfold in only one order, they also tell us that, in theory, events can unfold in reverse order (p. 145).

This passage isn't exactly referring to time travel, but in such a universe--this universe--the uncharring of Julie's face should be a definite possibility.

Still, what is this thing we call time and what are these its constraints? We feel we should be able to splash about in it as we do in space. Of course, space does have its own problems and it is spacetime itself that distracts us from what we intuitively feel to be real.

My niece at four inquired, awed, if I knew that everybody was going to die.

The Art of Fiction, pt. 1

No blog of mine could be complete (or even properly begun) without a discussion of Henry James. This will be an on-going project.

In The Art of Fiction, James takes an opportunity (afforded by the writer and critic Walter Besant) to speak on the subject to which he devoted most of his time: fiction writing. The introductory paragraphs demonstrate his belief that fiction written in the English language was at that time undergoing a change from the naïveté of such authors as Thackeray and Dickens to a more complex form. It appears that people began to require more of fiction. Prior to this shift in sentiment, James writes that "there was a comfortable, good-humoured feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that our only business with it could be to swallow it."

He writes later: "That, I think, represents the manner in which the latent thought of many people who read novels as an exercise in skipping would explain itself if it were to become articulate." This is reminiscent of Ezra Pound's reference to readers of "habitually slack attention" who desire fiction that can easily be lapped up.

Yet James identifies the fact that no longer were people just "swallowing" novels, and this appetite for masticable prose apparently gave rise to such authors as James himself, whose fiction represents a psychological exploration. Other authors of this persuasion imbue their fiction with philosophy and thereby make the work "discutable."

James goes on to imply that this group of persons who demand more of their fiction might still represent a minority. He alludes to an idea that fiction was once even considered "wicked" in England--though wicked perhaps in the sense of being jocular and inconsequential. I believe that impression to be correct, because I remember reading such works by Jane Austen and perhaps the Brontës in which people would remark that they were only reading a novel. This activity seemed (chauvinistically) relegated to women, as if only a "feeble" mind would even consider engaging in such a mawkish activity as reading a novel.

Yet, he laments this pervasive idea that all novels should admit to being "only a joke." He also laments "certain established novelists [who] have a habit of giving themselves away which must often bring tears to the eyes of people who take their fiction seriously." He identifies Anthony Trollope who is often in the habit of reassuring his readers parenthetically that the events of his novel are only make believe. "He admits that the events he narrates have not really happened, and that he can give his narrative any turn the reader may like best." James considers this a "terrible crime." I do too.

In fact, it seems to me that any serious story does lead the writer as much as it takes its readers on a journey. According to my experiences, a writer is little more than a midwife who delivers each sentence as it is begot by its predecessor. A major difference is that the writer too feels the pangs of birth. Therefore, any writer who could be in such charge of the events of a story that he/she can make it take any turn desired has to be guilty of some kind of literary crime. Their stories usually end up lacking unity. No one could accuse Henry James of this.

He goes on to speak of the parallels between the novel and the painting, as both attempt to reflect life.

The artistic novelist is often spurned by the "public" who consider the goodness of a novel to lie in its ability to divert--perhaps through containing lots of action. Other such persons would denote such "goodness" as being dependent on a "'happy ending,' on a distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks." lol...

He continues: "The 'ending' of a novel is, for many persons, like that of a good dinner, a course of dessert and ices, and the artist in fiction is regarded as a sort of meddlesome doctor who forbids agreeable aftertastes." So true. I am not strictly opposed to happy endings myself, but unity and artistic integrity dictate that the author go where the work takes him. Or her. That seems a bit more important and noble than writing-the-happy-ending-at-any-cost.

he is holy; he is firm, pt. 2

The corner where eternity clips time must be the point at which life has any meaning at all, and if she has touched it, then hasn't she somehow touched God?

The sailor who helped her draw a key to the islands spoke with authority like Christ. Yet she comes upon a new thing, a new island whose name she does not know. She labels it "Waiting for Sailor," as (for some reason) a name is necessary to a thing. Why? Again, it was Walker Percy who brought up this question in his essay Metaphor as Mistake. He spoke of the charm he found in some inadvertent misnomers of his childhood. Whenever he found some new spectacle, he had to know what it was called--something about not being able to truly appreciate the innerness of the thing without knowing its name. I don't know about all that; I think you could more or less still appreciate a thing without having a name for it. But, something still compels you to pin it down. I think it might be the fact that names are containers that allow you to hold (and express) all that you do know and feel about a thing. It aids communication. I admire those Ents in The Lord of the Rings whose "words" were as long as the entire history of the thing to which they referred.

In our text, the significance of the word itself is in the way it concretizes idea, as though it had been a word--the same word for which she awaits the sailor--that had called forth her islands from the sea.

Yet we suspect the idea must be realer than these diversions: stones, trees, sky. So she, as I, suspects fraud in all this material--"the world, a dream forced into my ear and sent round my body on ropes of hot blood." She tries looking past the sky to see the real, as we all must in some way and at some point. Because we know there's something behind the facade, and it galls that the illusion forces itself so convincingly upon the senses and disguises the real when we try to see it. The mind betrays; it's in on the fraud, and pretends that the sky really is the blue canopy that it appears to be. But, avoiding our inquisitive eyes, the real peeps out behind our backs. Like wave-particles, they resist the probe.

The earth, she writes, "fizzes up in trees." Yes, trees are a visible frenzy. Yet Julie Norwich's father must have overlooked the one that felled their plane. This god--let's call him November 19--was a cruel day. How can we wish for God when he stands back and watches us suffer--or worse, has a hand in our suffering? Who would want to have anything to do with a god like that? She calls him as she sees him: a "hounding and terrorist" god.

But God is good. We have to take it on faith, don't we?

Time itself can trick us into thinking all is well here. Even our bodies join the illusion and betray; for some days are fun days governed by "heyday" gods. But when we hurt, the body mutinies by translating all the pain to us and taking for itself none of the agony. It is we who bear all. So it turns out we are periodically disillusioned--we who are "connected by cells right down to our feet, and those feet likely to fell us over a tree root or jam us on a stone." And it is then that we are reminded that we don't really belong here.

A Letter from Li Po

Conrad Aiken's genius is far too great to be completely unearthed here, but I'll mention some highlights.

I read this poem a few years ago, and just rediscoverd a note I made at the top of the page: This kind of poetry doesn't just happen, it says. The man was a slave to the English language.

The poem begins,

Fanfare of northwest wind, a bluejay wind
anounces autumn, and the equinox
rolls back blue bays to a far afternoon.

This is a delicate, almost elusive way of expressing that stretching of days to the breaking point which occurs at the height of summer. Like Annie Dillard's "hundred hollow and receding blues" it touches--even challenges--the temporal nature of the sea. Li Po communicates by stringing letters down generations, from his children's children all the way down to us. The "light" he possesses is of unknown origin, but though it may be "a slant of witch-light" on silk, when it hits the page, it becomes "a slant of genius." Light enables vision, and on the text promotes reading. Yet, this powerful melding of light and text seems to signify something more--even something incarnational. It marks words with greater significance; and the poet's words, thus strung, are evidence of this strange fact.

Who is this Li Po? A wine-loving Chinese Poet in the habit of considering time's passage.

Aiken expresses that time exists in a place "such as imagination dreams of thought." This is how we see things, isn't it? At least, it's how we see those elusive things that come to mean so much to us: inklings, epiphanies, limits. And it is, perhaps, the only way we can express those thoughts of which our imaginations can only dream: by expressing meaning in images directed at the sub-conscious, perhaps even by-passing the brain's logic.

"Yet to spell down the poem on her page [...] parsing forth the seven-fold prism of meaning [...] is to assume Li Po himself: as he before assumed the poets and sages who were his." This is interesting and powerful. It suggests that Li Po is somewhat like a guardian of all meaning and beauty. It makes him a central point or a prism into whom all meaning is poured and from whom it all later flows. Comparison to Christ seems inevitable, too, especially in light of the poet's subsequent claim that like Li Po, "we too have eaten of the word." Li Po's burden is that of the universal poet: to become master of all beauty hitherto expressed and somehow to reflect it all through her own (hitherto unexpressed) uniqueness, through her own singularity.

Here, constrained by (or in) the bottleneck of Time, we as lovers of literature must seek something divine in all this--and Aiken helps us when he declares, "all is text, is holy text." It passes into poet after poet...

Gertrude Stein's work is memorable, and gives off a similar vibe: text into text, text out of text... But Aiken hides meaning "individually" in every single line--and we find it. Whereas, with Stein meaning is a general impression we have of the text. Yet both make literature an event worth attending because we know that these writers will probe the questions worth asking. They are like the calligrapher Chang Hsu who "needed to put but his three cupfuls down to tip his brush with lightning," and on whose scroll "wreaths of cloud rolled left and right, [till] the sky opened upon Forever." For in this ephemeral span between birth and death, how can we be compelled to act without being moved? How can we endure our days without the kind of inspiration we can get only from those "intimations of immortality" that remind us of Elsewhere, which seems so much more our home than here?

Who knows but one day we shall find,
hidden in the prism at the rainbow's foot,
the square root of the eccentric absolute,
and the concentric absolute to come.

Marginal

Ezra Pound airs his wit in his book ABC of Reading.

When he writes, "Fenellosa emphasizes the method of science, 'which is the method of poetry', as distinct from that of 'philosophic discussions,'" I cringe a little. Because despite the fact that this idea rings true, it identifies a certain conflict in my interests. What soothes me, however, is my realization that the method of the dialectic is the method of weaving. And that means that philosophy might touch art at some level--as I do believe it has.

Pound's ideas on generalizations are both lucid and diverting. Here:

"Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it. If Mr. Rockefeller draws a cheque for a million dollars it is good. If I draw one for a million it is a joke, a hoax, it has no value. If it is taken seriously, the writing of it becomes a criminal act." hehe...

I was reading an essay on language this past week by Walker Percy. Interesting it was, as he marvels at the existence of language as a phenomenon in man and in no other animal. A Martian, he observes, (who would perhaps communicate telepathically and at the speed of light) would wonder at the constant chatter and gesturing in which man engages. Pound hits on the importance of language in ABC as well, observing that "Greece and Rome [were] civilized BY LANGUAGE" (his emphasis). Of course, the pressure arrives when he identifies writers as having "a definite social function exactly proportioned to their ability" and it increases when he says, "it doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the bad writer wants to do harm." So the primary way to be of use is to improve one's skill as a writer. How could I have forgotten?

Literary inertia is fuelled by those persons "who know a little more than the public, who want to exploit their fractional knowledge, and who are thoroughly opposed to making the least effort to learn anything more." Reminds me of a certain 20 year old aspiring writer in a book I once read, who didn't like sentences.

But it struck me that ABC of Reading included so little on prose. The sole reference was a pathetic, scribbled slip of a thing attached to page 61. He doesn't write prose so much, though, and maybe that's it. Here we go: "Had I written a dozen or so good novels I might presume to add something." As I suspected. But he says one only reads prose for the subject matter. Where did he get that idea? He continues: "Glance at Burton's 'anatomy' as a curiosity, a sample of NON VERSE which has qualities of poetry but that cannot be confounded with it." Should I be offended? His reading list: "Fielding; Jane Austen; the novelists that everyone reads; Kipling; H. James. James' prefaces tell what 'writing a novel' means." Yes, they do.

"Incompetence will show in the use of too many words." To live by.

More words: "The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain WHATSOEVER on his habitually slack attention." Vindication.

A friend was telling me of someone who left academia because of the influx of all the theories and critical methods that distract from the examination of the work itself. I didn't realize that other people disliked that academic tendency. I never spoke of it. How was I going to tell my other literary friends that I refrained from taking our literary criticism class because I didn't want anyone to tell me how to enjoy my literature? (I did do some reading on those theories later just for the sake of knowledge.) But here I find something that again speaks to this issue: "You can spot the bad critic when he starts by discussing the poet and not the poem." Thank you, E.P.

he is holy; he is firm, pt. 1

"Christianity [...] is not a system into which we have to fit the awkward fact of pain: it is itself one of the awkward facts which have to be fitted into any system we make. In a sense, it creates, rather than solves the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless, side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimately reality is righteous and loving." --C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

For years I have found daunting not the task but the responsibility that would attend making known my truest thoughts on Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm. Yet since this blog aspires to reflect at least some of the ideas which most compel me to live when I dare not, I think it appropriate also to begin by writing what I dare not.

If one considers "time" in its temporal aspect--that is, time as the materiality of the universe, it begins to become clear how holiness can be said to "hold forth" in it. But where? Christ himself called men "gods," who, according to the Bible, hold forth their own treasures in earthen ware. And men move in days. In fact, a day might be defined as the sum of all the movement it contains. This would make it immense. Of course, the whole is generally thought to be greater than the sum of its parts. So days--slivers of time long enough to contain man and all his haps--surely might be considered gods themselves.

But I'm intellectualizing it.

Do you know what a day does? It turns shadows--mere shadows, but whose shades add up to the difference between life (birth) and death. Reading Holy the Firm is almost like peeling from the background of Puget Sound the film of November 19 (and the days surrounding). It's unreal the way they're different, but the same.

"Each day is a god." And this one has to be, because, my God!--look at him!! He "lifts from the water" like a new creature: baptism not just by water but by earth, wind, fire and light; baptism into time and all its material. The day "clicks... into place" taking ownership of the earth. It is a fleeting ownership...

I love the way she describes her trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains, her reason for going: "And I read every night by candlelight." The "and" here is so instrumental, and the line itself takes you somewhere into the deep centre of a need. She read every night because she needed it. (To live?) And the rhythm!

I also like the synopsis of her moth story: "One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held." That about sums it up. Except, she (the narrator, "I") could now see colours. The moth gave herself to the light. And in probably the most poignant of all her runs she explains how the moth burned "like a hollow saint [...] while night pooled wetly at my feet." (This final image I saw as that watery iridescence of a flame's flicker, that continual trading of dark for light, like one hand washing the other...) Of course, the artist, too, must give his life. Someone recently pointed out to me James Joyce's idea that the artist does for the world something similar to what the Eucharist does for the Host.

The mountains held their weather aloft, she points out.

Could holding aloft and holding forth be similar? Being east of East Itself is eerie enough, but what of this mystery that she finds in the mountains that hold themselves up so effortlessly? Weather is partially the work of mountains. Do they hold their weather--their work--up as an offering to God in the same way that artists spin their time and offer it up holy as art?

Meanwhile time blows over us like the winds over the seas, or over pages of books, and our lives change. Those seas, those "hundred hollow and receding blues" I see every day from this corner of the planet (Montego Bay, Jamaica). Dillard describes time as that "film" mentioned earlier--that zero-dimensional outline of everything. It's funny how much it looks like its the wind that's blowing. She stacks eternity, time, and ... land, is it? Hmm. So eternity laps at time, and time laps at land in its poured fastness. So eternity is wispy (or fast, in its way), while time is faster, and land fastest? Of course, time is fixed (fast...) like the islands (or is it fixed upon them?), and eternity is fluid like the sea.

Well then, in all this serenity, how does the forementioned suffering figure? Well, there's no saying it better: "Nothing is going to happen in this [blog]. There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time."

For more like this.