Also a Poet

The title of Ada Calhoun’s recent book, Also a Poet, refers to an obituary for the poet and bon vivant Frank O’Hara that appeared in the New York Times carrying that phrase dismissively in its title. At the time of his death—he was struck and killed on a beach on Fire Island late at night by someone driving a dune buggy—O’Hara’s off-the-cuff writing style was not taken seriously by many, and even today he remains somewhat of a cult figure, as far as I can tell. Calhoun herself never met O’Hara, but he was an important figure in her life all the same, because her father, Peter Schjeldahl, a poet and later an influential New Yorker art critic, idealized both O’Hara and the New York art scene in which he flourished as a self-styled later-day Catullus. Schjeldahl, born and raised in Fargo, abandoned his studies at Carleton College and moved to the East Village in Manhattan in pursuit of that lifestyle, and Calhoun’s childhood unfolded in a walk-up apartment surrounded by artists and intellectuals, booze and conversation.

Part of the book’s appeal lies in Calhoun’s descriptions of this scene—a theme she develops more fully in a previous book, St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of Americas Hippest Street. But her new book’s backbone derives from a discovery Calhoun made as an adult while scrounging in the apartment basement for a toy. Opening a cabinet drawer at random, she came upon a collection of cassette tapes with the names of famous and not-so-famous artists on them. 

“What are these?” she asks her father.

”I was going to write a biography of Frank O’Hara,” he replies, “but I never got his sister Maureen, who has the rights to his letters, to cooperate.”

Calhoun, who earns her living as a ghost-writer, decides that she’s fully capable of completing the project her father couldn’t. 

A major strand in the narrative deals with Calhoun's attempts to win the cooperation of O’Hara’s sister Maureen. Meanwhile, details about O’Hara’s life and the New York art scene emerge from the long-forgotten tapes of her father’s interviews with those who were closer to the center of the action at the time than he was. Calhoun soon determines that her father had torpedoed his efforts with Maureen right off the bat by inquiring too pointedly about her brother’s sex life and blatantly asserting that John Ashberry was the better poet—though O’Hara was more important “socially.” A faux pas trifecta, as one of her friends described it. 

Calhoun makes no bones about the fact that she and her father never got along. She admits that partying came more naturally to her parents than parenting, and she feels she never got the attention she deserved, though she has long since resigned herself to the fact. At one point she writes:

In 1983, my father said in an interview: “I think at the root of the critical impulse is some kind of adolescent outrage at growing up and discovering that the world is not nearly what you hoped or thought it might be. And that criticism is then a career of trying to move it over and make it more habitable for one’s sensibility.”

To which Calhoun adds:

That sounds like what we do both as artists and as children: look at our parents, critique them like a work of art, figure out how we can make room for ourselves.

Her hope is that by completing a project that meant a great deal to her father, she’ll finally be able to bask in his approbation for awhile.

A final wrinkle is thrown into the narrative when Schjeldahl is diagnosed with cancer. During a family discussion at the clinic, the doctor proposes various treatments and describes their likely side effects. As Calhoun remembers the scene: 

“I’m a writer,” my father said. “I’m still employed. I want to do whatever will help me keep writing as long as possible. I think chemo might make me too tired. Writing is the most important thing.”

The room was quiet. Across from me, my mother’s eyes were filled with tears. She looked scared....

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“You aren’t just a writer!” I said. “You’re also a husband and a father and a grandfather and a friend.”

Sounding exasperated, he said, “What am I supposed to do? Just sit around like a potted plant? I don’t make any sense to myself if I’m not writing.”

Another pause. My mother hadn’t said a word.

Calhoun keeps these various elements not only afloat but also fresh with a thinking-out-loud approach, as she bobs and weaves from interview text to childhood memory to current day pursuit of her publishing project. She recounts a few of her father’s publishing triumphs with pride, and notes his blind spots and self-absorption with honesty, but not rancor. The portraits that Calhoun extracts from the interviews suggest that many of the painters who figure in the narrative—and especially Larry Rivers—were unpleasant. Well, so are many of the paintings themselves. 

The poets more often come off more as thoughtful, decent people. And it’s fun eavesdropping on a conversation between Calhoun and Ron Padgett or Vincent Katz. The author, more prosaic and level-headed than many of the “famous” artists featured here, also makes a good story out of her own coming of age. When she was fourteen, her parents started to leave her in at their apartment in the East Village every summer while they vacationed in the Catskills—a turn of events that she admits to enjoying, for the most part.   

 How does it all end? I’d rather not say. But this passage, which appears two-thirds of the way through the book, may suggest something of its exasperated and endearing flavor.    

My mother says my father opens doors and drawers but never closes them. She’s always following behind him, closing things. She’s been complaining about it for fifty years. Still, she does it, because she doesn’t want to live in a home full of open cabinet doors and gaping drawers. When I found these O’Hara tapes, I saw an open drawer. The past year it’s like I’ve been trying to close it. Or perhaps I am just flinging open more drawers and cabinet doors—searching them for answers to questions about who my father is, who Frank O’Hara was, why people liked Larry Rivers so much, and how I can wring a happy ending out of all this.

 _____________________________

Anyone who reads the New Yorker regularly will have come upon Schjeldahl’s pieces more than once or twice. After finishing his daughter’s book, I was curious to reread a few of them in light of this family portrait. I checked a collection of his reviews called Let’s See out of the library and also a slim volume of poems called White Country. The poems date from 1965, and they’re pretty bad: an uneven mix of political posturing, existential angst, and bohemian party-time frivolity a la Frank O’Hara, tossed off in the spirit of “one thing never leads to the next.”

The art criticism, written between 1998 and 2008, is often brilliant.

Schjeldahl had matured. In the introduction to Let’s See, he describes how poetry gave up on him:

I never had a real subject, only a desperate wish to be somehow glorious. When you lean too hard on anything, it breaks. This happens to all sorts of artists, all the time. I wish them the luck that I had: discovering that what you have been doing for money is what you were meant to do.

I had imagined that the meat of Schjeldahl’s collection would be devoted to recent artists and movements about which I know little or nothing, but quite a few of the pieces describe shows at the Met and other venues of the masters. Near the start of an essay about Vermeer, he reminds us of various theories being floated about the painter’s technique, that adds:

But Vermeer beggars any analysis. There is a discomfort—a prickling itch—in my experience of him. Looking and looking, I always feel I have only begun to look ...Vermeer is blatant and ineffable, like the Sphinx. His appeal is both populist and lofty: as if it mixed Norman Rockwell and the music of the spheres.

Two pages later, after reviewing a biography of the artist, he wraps up his piece:

A skeptical friend of mine surmises that our present Vermeer craze reflects yearnings for legitimacy in today’s lately expanded upper middle class. This makes sense. You might say that Vermeer apotheosizes material prosperity—not that he was ever well-off himself. (If only because of that horde of kids underfoot, his golden visions of bourgeois serenity had to be vicarious.) I think that Vermeer’s ideal was a classless, timeless truth that is returning to the fore in contemporary culture: the essential role that aesthetic pleasure must play in any seriously lived life. Each of us is born with a capacity to see and feel intensely and with precision. Ultimately, Vermeer’s appeal is about nothing other than the realization of that gift. Looking at his pictures, we approach the farthest frontiers of a necessary happiness.

 

Solstice Meditations with Gasparini

Ice in the air all morning—you could see it—

gray sky, cars creeping along the exit ramps,

and a chill sunk in on my

second trip to the grocery store.

 

I was amazed anyone showed up for work!

"You're exaggerating." Sure, but we could be

holed up for days, hiding from the

Arctic air, cultivating our coziness.

 

No bonfire tonight, no party.

The postman arrives at dusk and gathers up

the package of homemade cookies

we placed on the doorstep this morning.

 

How lucky we are as the smell of onion pie

fills the house and a cheery soprano sings out:

"A happy life did I lead among the enamoured."

Appalling Banality

 

I have never belonged to a book club. For that matter, no one has ever asked me to join one, and if they did, I'm sure I would decline, because I would not be likely to read the relevant books. 

I don't admit to this proudly, like someone who cherishes his "independent spirit." That's rubbish. I admire those who, like Hilary, forge through one book after another, whether or not she entirely enjoys it, taking notes and formulating opinions. And I enjoy hearing a little about the event later as well as various tidbits about what was served for dinner and what her friends, who are also my friends, have been up to lately.

To be honest, I also have difficulty reading the books that I myself chose for more than a chapter or two. Some other title often lures me away, or I feel that I GET the point, and the material to follow is mere window-dressing. There are so many other books vying for my attention.    

This may explain why I am not only thrilled, but also proud of myself, when I make it to the end of a book. like a teenager filling out a book card for English class at school.

When I see the annual "best books of the year" lists, I'm intrigued. But I sometimes wonder who has time to chase down and read even a few of the year's best books, when at this late date they haven't read any of last year's  "best books," not to mention Thucydides or Pushkin? (I haven't read either one.)  

Suddenly a scene comes back to me. High school, and my good friend Joe invites me to an intimate skating party. (His family lives on the lake. His dad's a professor. We play squash in his basement court. I give his little sister guitar lessons.) 

It's Carl, me, and Joe, I think. And there are some girls there. The snowball fight out on the ice-covered lake is over, we're drinking cocoa in the den. (I think Joe's parents may have organized this event; perhaps they're listening in upstairs). In the course of our tittering adolescent conversation I make mention of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground which my brother, a freshman in college, brought home from Duluth, and one of the girls says to me with perhaps a touch of disdain, "Oh, you've read everything."

Come again? How could that be possible? I'm only sixteen?

A half-century later, I'm painfully aware of how little I've read, but it no longer bothers me. I'm still exploring, and it's still great fun. If I ever had the desire to master the canon, that desire has long since been exposed as a childish chimera. It can't be done.

Just now I pulled the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz's Midaq Alley off the shelf. Why? Because it suddenly occurred to me that at the time of the winter skating party I'm describing, Mahfouz had recently won the Nobel Prize, and Joe's dad was reading him.

His thumbnail review: "So depressing!"

I find the first few pages engaging, but have soon turned my attention to Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jemenez's autobiography, Space and Time, which has been calling out to me from the shelf for decades, albeit very faintly. Opening it at random, I read: 

"Though the depths of creation are hidden and cannot be explained, one can see the connections, the broken ropes it trails, memories. These can have a appalling banality ... But without them one would not have lived." 

Another Bayfield Jaunt

We mentioned to my cousin Pat during our post-Thanksgiving breakfast that we were heading to Bayfield later that morning.

"What are you going to do there?" she asked, perhaps a little doubtful. Good question. The response must have sounded lame.

"Oh, take a few hikes, do some reading, maybe visit the Ashland bakery, fry up some fresh herring from Bodin's for dinner ...."

And that's basically what we did. The weather was very fine—mostly warm and sunny—and the countryside was largely deserted. Our drive north was punctuated by a stops on Highway 23 south of Jay Cooke State Park to harvest a few branches of winterberry, at the Brule River canoe landing, and the Michele Wheeler Wetland just west of Port Wing.

The Halverson fishery in Cornucopia was closed, as usual. Bodin's in Bayfield was open, but they were out of fresh fish. We contented ourselves with some smoked whitefish, and the young woman behind the counter promised she'd save us a few filets of herring the next day. "Stop by any time after two."

We checked into our little studio apartment—essentially a motel room with a kitchen—on the second floor of a small condo tucked into the woods behind the Superior Marina, and drove down to the nearby beach to enjoy the sunset.

We also wandered the marina itself, just to familiarize ourselves with the neighborhood, though the slips were empty. After a cold dinner in our room we went out to the parking lot to take a look at the stars, which were brilliant against the inky black. I was puzzled by the star cluster I could see just above the horizon through the naked trees, and made a mental note of the distance from Perseus and Cassiopeia.

A shooting star streaked by from left to right—the first I'd seen months. I struggled to spot the Andromeda Galaxy; I know where to find it but didn't dare look straight overhead with binoculars while standing on the faintly icy pavement. We could hear the sound of bongos coming from one of the units in the other building, which looked more prestigious than ours because all the doors were painted red.

The leather lace in one of my moccasins had come undone and insinuated itself between my toe and the side of the shoe, as if  a pebble had found its way in. This trivial distraction was undermining my full appreciation of the night sky--a scene which nevertheless I will remember for the rest of my life.

Back inside, I took a paperback of Horace's satires from the stack I'd brought along, and it occurred to me they resemble Montaigne's essays, but pithier, and with more of a lilt:

And so it happens that those who in having

A more than moderate share the floor-raging Aufidis

sweeps away with its crumbling bank, but he

who wants only what he needs neither drinks water

churned up with mud nor loses his life in the waves.

 

Obvious, but well-put just the same.

_____________________________________

Saturday morning, 6 a.m. Coffee brewing, still dark outside. I probably woke up the entire unit with the coffee grinder—though I'm not sure anyone else is staying in this building. Plans for the day? Maybe breakfast in Washburn, a hike to Houghton Falls, a stop at the Great Lakes Visitor Center on Highway 2, then on to the bakery in Ashland and the Black Cat coffee shop across the street. We might well stop at the huge used bookstore in Washburn on our way back to Bayfield to pick up our herring fillets at Bodin's.

Which is basically what we did, though not in that order. We picked up a brochure of local hiking trails at the visitors' center, and decided to hike up the gorge that cuts through the middle of Bayfield. But not before stopping at the Washburn community center where they were holding a Christmas Bazaar—herbal soap, spicy pickles, wicker baskets, hand-painted pottery.

The Bayfield Gorge

I chatted briefly with the man selling wicker baskets, asked him where he got his withies. "Anywhere and everywhere," he said. "Road construction sites are good, especially the second year after the work is done." That's good to know, I guess.

I liked the guy behind the counter at the bakery, and the guy behind the counter at the Black Cat, where, in the back-room used bookshop, we found (and bought) a copiously illustrated full-color history of jazz. (“Jazz is a music played by Americans to get rid of the blues.”) I liked the girl behind the counter there too, and also the young woman at Bodin's, who told us she'd never been out in the fishing boats, two of which were tied up outside the shop, but would like to go someday.

This litany of events does nothing to convey the nuances of light and shadow, vegetation and snow cover, that moved us repeatedly during the day. Nor the tenderness with which we viewed a flock of pine siskins feeding in a clump of alders in the swamp behind the visitors' center. Not to mention the tundra swans we spotted at Mikowski Beach in Ashland, Or the fifteen common goldeneye we flushed just beyond the mouth of Pike Creek along the Salmo Trail at dusk. 

Nor the underlying concern during our hikes that we might get shot by deer-hunters during the last weekend of the season.

On our way to the Houghton Falls trail just after daybreak that first morning, I spotted a bright orange bag in the ditch beside the road, pulled onto the shoulder, stopped the car, and retrieved it. Printed on the side were the words: "50 lb. kernel corn." When we reached the trailhead Hilary sliced it open with a pocket knife and cut a hole in the middle large enough for me to stick my head through. It looked a little odd, but it was bright, and not the kind of thing a deer would wear.

Sacred Nature: The Dark Enigma Gate

In her latest book, Sacred Nature: Restoring Our Ancient Bond with the Natural World, the religious historian Karen Armstrong has taken up the question of whether we might succeed in averting environmental catastrophe by modifying our attitude toward the environment—coming to view it as sacred, rather than merely useful. She argues that Christianity devotes less attention, and affords less respect to living things beyond the human realm than do other religions. I'm not sure this is true, but  Armstrong does a good job of highlighting attractive elements of Buddhist, Hindu, Confucian, Moslem, and even Jewish religious thought and practice that Westerners in general, and Christians in particular, might benefit from exploring. She writes:

In the Middle East ilam, meaning "divinity" in Akkadian, was a radiant power that transcended any singular diety. In India, the Braham, the ultimate reality, was indefinable; it was a sacred energy that was deeper, higher, and more fundamental than the "devas," the gods who were present in nature but had no control over the natural order. In China, the ultimate reality was the "Dao," the fundamental "Way" of the cosmos; nothing could be said about it, because it transcended all normal categories."

Armstrong explores these various sacred traditions, mostly dating from the Axial Age (900-200 BCE) and along the way relates a string of telling, and sometimes amusing, anecdotes. For example, the seventeenth-century Confucian scholar Fang Yizhi, after engaging in theological discussion with the Jesuits, concluded that the West was "detailed in material investigation," but deficient in "comprehending seminal forces."

In another chapter she informs us that the medieval Jewish mystics who developed the tradition of the Kabbalah were, in part, "responding to a popular demand for a more immanent notion of the sacred." These thinkers argued, contra the Biblical view, that God hadn't created the world “out of nothing.” Rather, "creation had proceeded stage by stage 'out of God.' " It followed, by their way of thinking, that what we take to be the original, primal "nothing," is always present, and more "real" than the things right  in front of our eyes. We can't perceive it only because  "the core of divinity is forever unknowable."

This kind of lore really tickles my fancy, notwithstanding the fact  that the subject is beyond words and basically unknowable. It seems to me that we may catch glimpses of the sacred out of the corner of our eye, but if we turn our head for a better look it's gone. We always want more, though we probably wouldn't know what to do with it if we met it face to face.  

On the other hand, though I haven't read the book cover to cover, it strikes me that Armstrong tends to give Christianity short shrift in her effort to make her point. She mentions St. Thomas Aquinas's argument that God wrote two books—the Bible and the Book of Creation—but goes on to suggest that such notions were crushed underfoot by the critical and investigative spirit that culminated in Newton's mathematically based conception of the universe. This is true enough. Yet Aquinas was never a source of popular understanding of natural processes, which was far more often derived from the alchemical and magical practices espoused by healers and proto-scientists of whom Paracelsus was perhaps the most famous.Newton himself spent a great deal of time investigating such things, when he wasn't tracking the planets.  

Armstrong is on firmer ground with St. Francis of Assisi, and she reproduces a lengthy passage from one of his poems. But in order to bend it to her thesis, she counsels us to consider that the "Lord" to whom the poem is addressed, and who appears in almost every line, is the "transcendent force that imbues the whole natural order," rather than the more conventional celestial father of Biblical tradition.

Really? I doubt it. To my ears, it sounds as if St. Francis were address a specific person or presence. And isn't that simply another way of drawing our attention to the third "person" of the Trinity—the Holy Spirit? But such a reference actually proves her point. Whereas several Eastern traditions enshrine a natural energy or flow, nameless and elusive, the Judeo-Christian tradition has developed largely as a dialog between "the people" and their God, who is basically a transcendental vision of themselves. In the process, the wonder and mystery of the natural world is devalued. And that's a bad thing. 

Armstrong spends little time describing her own connection with nature. It isn't that kind of a book. Her purpose is to bring us to a wider and deeper awareness of the sacred element in nature as it manifests itself in a variety of "classical" traditions. And along these lines her thoughts and erudition are welcome.

But the fundamental question remains to be answered: Is nature really sacred? For that matter, does the word "nature" refer to anything real?

A Zoroastrian temple

It strikes me that sacred things—or places—tend to be unusual or remote, set off in one way or another from day-to-day experience. For example, few are allowed to visit the inner sanctum of a temple. Not only would they be likely to despoil it due to inexperience or "uncleanliness," but it would begin to lose its hallowed character were we to become too familiar with it. By the same token, a sacred bundle in the care of a Native American elder is not a thing for young children to play with. Rather, tribal members approach it with ceremony and call upon its energy only on rare occasions. In the presence of such objects or locales, we are often gripped by a feeling, difficult to describe but compounded of beauty, pleasure, preciousness, and latent energy or power.

But everyone doesn't feel the same way about such things. I'm thinking here of all the churches and monasteries that were used as stables and munitions dumps during the French Revolution, or the scene in the film Ladybird during which Saoirse Ronan and her friend lie on the floor in a hallway of a church munching down a few communion wafers as an afternoon snack. Shame on them! 

Many of us were brought up under the injunction to "fear the Lord," which was an old-fashioned way of advising us to revere him, I think. But I find it hard to see how nature broadly considered can be placed in the rarefied category of the sacred. Most of us can recall specific times when, in the presence of awesome or pristine natural phenomena, we were gripped with that feeling of reverence, or ecstasy even. Depending on how much time you spend outdoors, this can become almost a common experience.

If I read her right, Emily Dickinson had such feelings, though they didn't last long.

Did Our Best Moment last —

'Twould supersede the Heaven —

A few — and they by Risk — procure —

So this Sort — are not given —

 

Except as stimulants — in

Cases of Despair —

Or Stupor — The Reserve —

These Heavenly moments are —

 

A Grant of the Divine —

That Certain as it Comes —

Withdraws — and leaves the dazzled Soul

In her unfurnished Rooms –

 

I suppose it's a matter of temperament and circumstances, but I receive such grants of the divine fairly often, and there are times when I see evidence of beauty and order almost everywhere I look. 

I often get that feeling when I turn on my computer.

No, I don't worship technology. But my computer has a very large screen, and over the years I've accumulated quite a few exquisite screen-savers—photographs I've taken myself. Some of them are classically picturesque images of mountain peaks and crashing surf, almost worthy of a Sierra Club calendar, but the ones that fill me with the greatest awe are photographs of random vegetation. There is no point of focus. The eye wanders from one flower, leaf, or twig to the next, admiring the harmony and intricacy of an exquisite but obviously unplanned arrangement.

Unplanned, yes. Random? No. These plants have followed divergent evolutionary paths to their present shape and dimensions, each one different, but guided by the same need for sunlight and nutrients. They share a chunk of soil, a plot of ground, perhaps uneasily, but often beautifully, as they scramble for a place in the sun. As my eye roams here and there amid the vegetation vividly illuminated on my screen, I pause to take the measure of, and appreciate, a particular leaf or plant that I would certainly never have noticed on a tramp through the fields, and it fills my heart with awe and affection.

But we ought to acknowledge that the "nature" I'm describing here is a thing I chose and framed myself. Not every rotten log and weedy roadside produces the same effect. So perhaps their sacred character is the result of both natural processes and my own aesthetic sense. But isn't this the connection—this communion—we're looking for?

It all ties in, I think, with a fundamental but, as Armstrong admits, all but inexpressible logic that poets and thinkers have been attempting to describe for millennia. 

Another route to sacred nature, I think, lies in cooking. It's easy to enjoy the flavors we concoct in the kitchen, many of them natural enough. But how often do we take to time to pay homage to the living things we're making use of to sustain us. Here again, it might be simply that I have the good fortune to see the vegetables I'm chopping up for a carrot-based pot of chili in a spectacular slant of light coming into the kitchen through the dining room windows.

It's a temple--and a sacrifice--right in front of my eyes.

Taoists use the phrase "the ten-thousand things" to denote the diversity of stuff in the universe. In the introduction to his translations of the Tang poet Po Chu-i, David Hinton writes that Po "came to realize that the self was also one of those ten thousand things that are utterly themselves and sufficient." This was an important step, because it bridged the chasm between individual and environment, allowing them to settle into one another.

On the next page, Hinton introduces us to a few Chinese concepts: hsien—profound serenity and quietness; lan—the heart-mind of trust; wu-wei—the practice of tzu-jan, which he describes as "occurrence happening of itself." 

For Po, Hinton writes, idleness was "a kind of meditative revel in tzu-jan, a state in which daily life becomes the essence of spiritual practice."

  

Our garden path to the compost pile.

 In such an environment the tea bowl and the flagstone path through the moss become sacred entities—though perhaps little that's worthwhile ever gets done. 

Here's a piece by Chui-I, chosen almost at random.

OVERNIGHT AT BAMBOO PAVILION

Sit through dusk beneath eaves of pine
at Bamboo Pavilion, sleep night away:

it’s such empty clarity, like some drug,
isolate mystery deep as a mountain home.

No cleverness can rival a simple mind,
and industry never outshines idleness.

Done struggling, done cultivating Tao:
here it is, this remote DarkEnigma gate.

You won't find much of this quietistic appreciation in the lyric poetry of the Greeks, but the broader notion of a cosmic order appears in the concept of logos. Armstrong misses a trick here, I think, her vast erudition notwithstanding, when she writes, "The logos deals with facts." Not so.

Nowadays we translate logos as “word,” but consulting an on-line dictionary at random, I am confirmed in my understanding that “logos” carried a wealth of meanings in ancient times. To the pre-Socratics, it was the principle governing the cosmos, the source of this principle, and the human reasoning that struggled to come to grips with it more fully on a personal level. The Stoics held a similar view, though they more explicitly associated it with God as the source of all activity and generation, and with “mind” (nous), which, through the power of reason, develops the wherewithal to illuminate the order in experience and even, on occasion, make a leap to the divine.

In short, “logos” is not merely “the word” or language, and it has nothing to do with facts. It's a logic that unites the cosmos and the individual in some sort of quivering harmony. I am reminded here of the quivering mosquito twins in the Book of the Hopi that sustain the universe, and the musical meters which, in the Satapatha Brahmana, are the cattle of the gods.

I think Armstrong would approve of such associations. Her intention is to familiarize us with them through her acute descriptions of the rituals, myths, and metaphors of ancient times and foreign traditions. The hope is that they will allow us to embrace nature's sacred dimension more fully.

I have neglected to mention one important and illuminating aspect of the sacred: it's political dimension. In his farewell address of 1796, George Washington refers to it when he writes:

“The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. But the constitution which at any time exists, until changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all."

Yes, the agreements that preserve and protect our individual and social freedoms are sacrosanct. But what about the birds, the eels, and the mountain springs? 

 

Wordle Wonderland

Everything I know about Wordle, which is nothing, I learned by playing Wordle, a word game that seemed to spring up overnight, though by now it commands the attention, albeit briefly, of millions every day. The challenge it presents is to guess a five-letter word simply by selecting five letters.

You have six tries.  If a letter in the word you choose  is somewhere in the mystery word, its background will change to orange, unless that letter is also in the correct position, in which case the background will become green. Once you have chosen your suite of letters and hit the "enter" button, the letters seem to flip open like the squares in old-fashioned  TV game shows. And the thrill of watching the tiles flip, one after the other—gray, gray, orange, gray, green—is considerable. But the sensation when  the word you enter flips green, green, green, green, green must resemble that of a game-show contestant who has just won a trip to Hawaii.

Among Wordle's many attractive features is the fact that the meaning of words has no part to play in it. Some experts no doubt calculate word combinations and frequencies, but I love the freedom of choosing any word that strikes my fancy as a starter.

If it's a lovely morning, I might enter the word PEACH. If I got up on the wrong side of the bed, my opening word might be GRUNT. There are times when I tempt fate by beginning with an unusual word like EPOCH or FRACK. I go through phases where I emphasize the vowels—ALIEN—and others during which I play it safe, as it were, with ho-hum words like CRANE or MEANT. For a while I had a working rule of excluding S and T from my opening guess. I believe the letter H is the key to the entire business. But I have no idea how that could be. Or why.

Another attractive feature of the game is the fact that you can play it only once a day. And it only takes a few minutes to complete, unless you find yourself in a position where several boxes are green, many letters have been eliminated, and you're sure the answer lies within your grasp. In that case, you could spend twenty minutes on a single guess.

If you happen to get the word in three guesses the rest of the day goes well. It you get it in two, which is always pure luck, you pass the hours enveloped in an unseen transcendent glow. If you drag out the procedure to five or (shudder) even six guesses, gray clouds appear on the horizon.

Well, there's always tomorrow.

A third attractive feature is the fact that your previous effort vanishes forever the day after you submit it. I find it difficult to remember what today's word was a few minutes after I've discovered it, perhaps because the word's meaning has nothing to do with its correctness. But I tend to remember how many tries it took me to get there.

So far I've played Wordle 229 times (they provide you with the statistics automatically ) and have failed to guess the word within the allotted six tries only three times. Is that good or bad? How would I know?

The words I've failed to guess in the six allotted rows have all be easy words, but very similar to many other easy words: LOVER, COVER, HOVER, MOVER, ROVER.  Sheer luck if you get such a word in four or five guesses. On the other hand, a few weeks ago I got the Wordle in two, and the Wordle Bot told me I'd picked the correct answer from 507 remaining possibilities. A true shot in the dark.

What was the word? STEIN.

Then just the other day, I got the correct word in two again. This time it was my first guess that was lucky: SALTY. Only the first and last letters were wrong, and the second guess came easy: WALTZ.

According to the bot, which I sometimes take a look at after I've solved the puzzle, that was the only possible guess left.

The bot has no genuine heuristic advice to offer, but it has access to lots of statistics, and it can tell you what the average score for that day's round has been.

The Recondite Rambles of Javier Marías

Near the end of an interview with the New York Times in 2019, the Spanish novelist Javier Marías was asked the formulaic but often illuminating question of what he was planning to read next. He replied, "To tell the truth, I never make any plans. Not in my reading, not in my writing, not in my life."

For someone who never made plans, Marías got an awful lot done during his years on this planet. He died a few weeks ago at the relatively young age of 70, of pneumonia. But no one who has read his work would imagine that death caught him unawares. Marías was not a morbid soul—quite the contrary—but his novels are steeped in questions that a philosopher might group under the heading "contingency." 

His narrators almost invariably assume the same curious and slightly bemused tone from one novel to the next, though there is no telling whether he's the same man. (Marías himself often questioned whether he himself was the same man from one day to the next.) These protagonists often ponder minor quirks of fate, wondering about people they see often but seldom met and musing more generally on the profound impact on people's lives of random and fortuitous events. Though Marías attests at the opening of one of his books that he has never confused life with fiction, it's reasonable to assume that such a focus of interest--or lack of focused interest--stems from two haunting aspects of his personal life: a brother who died at the age of three and a father who escaped the firing squad during the Franco era only because a witness called by the prosecution felt impelled to offer a favorable impression of his character. Both events occurred before Marías was born.

But pondering such issues is one thing; turning them into literature is something else again. Here Marías was undoubtedly inspired by his early work as a translator, and especially by his translations of  two English writers: Lawrence Sterne, whose work abounds in odd coincidences and willful, self-indulgent narrators, and Sir Thomas Browne, whose exploration of seemingly random arcana is undergirded by a rambling and wordy but nevertheless attractive style.

My own discovery of Marías was fortuitous enough to justify a slight digression. Many years ago I ran across a copy of A Heart So White in the used bookshop at Southdale Library, read the flap—"best Spanish novel of the last fifty years"—but let it go. Yet it wouldn't let me go, and a few weeks later I went back, hoping the book would still be on the shelf.

Once I'd read it, I knew I was likely to read more, and in the next few years I did. Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, All Souls, Your Face Tomorrow (three volumes). I found The Infatuations less compelling, perhaps because that ruminative, diffident "voice" was growing slightly monotonous or tired or overworked.    

This is probably a minority opinion. When the book came out in 2013, one reviewer described The Infatuations as an ideal introduction to Marías's work. "The Infatuations is mysterious and seductive; it's got deception, it's got love affairs, it's got murder—the book is the most sheerly addictive thing Marías has ever written. It hooks you from its very first lines."

Well, maybe so. I still have Marias's subsequent last novels, Thus Begins Bad and Berta Isle, waiting for me, unread, on the shelf. 

When I read of Marías's death, it occurred to me that it was time to crack open another of his books: Dark Back of Time. It consists of a series of meditations in roughly the same vein as Marias's novels, though the themes he wanders through here are closer to life. For example, he spends many pages musing on how a novel he wrote set in Oxford, All Souls, was received by the people he knew when he taught there for a few years early in his career. This gives rise to speculations about the relative "truth,"  value, and accessibility of an event, in comparison to the memory of the event, the words being used to record and preserve the event, and those words that a novelist uses as he or she concocts a imaginative series of events similar to those that actually took place.  

From here Marias moves on to spend many pages analyzing various reports of the career and death of a friend he made while at Oxford, an obscure English writer named John Gawlsworth along with one or two other minor writers. Near the end of the book Marias's attention turns to a miniscule island in the Caribbean named Redonda, of which he became king as a result of these friendships, but not before he enters into an extended meditation of the brother he never knew and the father he almost lost. His Spanish-Cuban grandmother, his mother, and various distant ancestors make an appearance. All in all, it's a heady witches brew of associations fully worthy of the Shakespearean title, "Dark Back of Time."

I am not the first writer nor will I be the last [he writes] whose life has been enriched or poisoned or only changed because of what he imagined or made up and wrote down and pub­lished. Unlike those of truly fictional novels, the elements of the story I am now embarking upon are entirely capricious, determined by chance, merely episodic and cumulative—all of them irrelevant by the elementary rule of criticism, none of them requiring any of the others—because in the end no author is guiding them, though I am relating them; they cor­respond to no blueprint, they are steered by no compass, most of them are external in origin and devoid of intention and therefore have no reason to make any kind of sense or to constitute an argument or plot or answer to some hidden harmony, and no lesson should be extracted from them (nor should any such thing be sought from real novels; above all, the novels themselves should not want it)—not even a story with its beginning and suspense and final silence. I don’t be­lieve this is a story, though, not knowing how it ends, I may be mistaken.

This might be the worst of Marias's books with which to begin an exploration of his career, but I relished every page, as if I had reconnected with an old friend, and didn't worry overmuch about following the plot.

 There was none. 

Botticelli Comes to Minneapolis

A remarkable exhibition has arrived in town containing first-class paintings from the Italian Renaissance paired with drawings and in some cases the classical sculptures that inspired them all.

Often such shows consist of one or two masterworks, around which a promotional campaign is built, surrounded by all sorts of mediocre stuff, but in this case, the level remains high from first to last. You'll still have to go to Florence to see Botticelli's Primavera or The Birth of Venus, but the exhibit contains fine works by not only Botticelli but also Piero del Pollaiuolo, Fra Fillipo Lippi, Fillipino Lippi, and other masters whose names I forget. And on a chilly Sunday morning in late October, wandering through five or six large rooms filled with colorful, lyrical paintings and appealing statues can be just the ticket.

Botticelli himself has long been a favorite among art-lovers, of course, offering feminine grace and beauty that we might refer to as "idealized" except for the fact that we sometimes meet up with such harmonious and appealing features in life. Botticelli's aesthetic is, in any case, very different from Raphael's cutesy perfection or Michelangelo's agonized and grotesque muscularity. And after spending two hours wandering the galleries, many viewers are likely to come to the same conclusion I did: among the many fine works of the period on display here, his are the best.

My favorite was Madonna and Child and the Young St John the Baptist (1495). The event being depicted doesn't move or even much interest me, but every aspect of the work is superb, from Jesus's toes resting on the finely rendered grass, to the tangle of Mary's garments, to the vegetation on the upper left. Though now that I think of it, Botticelli's much earlier Madonna in Glory with Cherubim (1470), also included in the show, offers us an appealingly homely Christ child, half-asleep, seemingly waving at the viewer as Mary carries him off for his afternoon nap. 

And half of the fun of viewing his Adoration of the Magi, front and center in the last room, is trying to identify Lorenzo, Giuliano, and Cosimo de Medici in the adoring crowd. Botticelli himself appears on the right-hand side of the scene, glancing over his shoulder at the viewer and looking quite a bit like the Suburbs' pianist Chan Poling.

The sculptures sitting here and there in every room offer a change of pace visually, and they also serve the purpose of allowing us to see firsthand where the inspiration for some of the anatomical details in the paintings came from. Scholars love this kind of thing; it allows them make causal connections between works of art upon which to develop chains of "influence," thus absolving them from the riskier task of making and defending personal judgments about the quality or even the character of the pieces.

In this show you'll be unlikely to come upon a bit of text like the one I hit upon last night by Lionello Venturi, which dates from 1937:

"Botticelli has neither the synthetic rigour nor the monumental grandeur and moral plentitude of Masaccio; not has he the infantile celestiality or resigned gentleness of Fra Angelico, not the theoretical heroism or chromatic creativeness of Piero della Francesco. Among the achievers of physical realism, the assertors of moral energy, Botticelli seems archaic, wavering between Jove and Christ, between Venus and the Magdalen."

At the very least, it would have been worthwhile, I think, to offer a panel or two speculating about possible connections between the paintings of Botticelli and the philosophy of his contemporary Marsilio Ficino. It would also have been nice to say a few words, accompanied by a schematic diorama, of the development of Italian art from the days of Giotto on to Fra Angelico, Piero de Francesco, and Botticelli and on further to the masters of the Venetian school, the high Renaissance, and the Mannerist era (Italian painting 1-001). It's a complex subject, to be sure, but we meet up with this pattern of development again and again in art history, and similar "phases" of development could easily be identified in the history of jazz, film, and even chess openings!    

In short, the exhibition is a feast for the eyes, less so for the historical intelligence hungry for a broader enlightenment. 

We returned home to a lunch of left-over squash risotto and a beet salad allegedly doused with truffle oil that we'd picked up at the new Alma Provisions shop on 46th and Colfax before the show. The salad was ho-hum. Our home-made risotto held its own after spending the night in the refrigerator.

But we were eager to keep the Renaissance mood alive, and a few hours later we returned to south Minneapolis—31st and Chicago, to be exact—to attend a concert of vocal music by John Dowland and Carlo Gesualdo performed by our local Consortium Carissimi. It was an ingenious coupling, in so far as the two composers are contemporaries, yet their styles have little in common. Dowland's ayres are rich enough, while retaining the openness and melodic simplicity of classic folk songs. (But maybe they sound like folk songs because we've heard them so often on the soundtracks of films about the Elizabethan era?) 

 Gesualdo's music is riddled with chromaticisms that soon begin to sound like mannerisms; such harmonic peculiarities don't return to the history of music until the late nineteenth century.

Aside from a few glitches on the lutes—and nobody but Bream can play the lute without glitches and squeaks—the consortium handled the material with expressiveness and aplomb. Clara Osowski's rich mezzo voice once again touched those shivery zones of emotion, as if we could see and feel sound itself, like the incoming sea, and countertenor Keith Wehmeir held his own alongside her in one dialog number.

All the Italian art and music veritably cried out for a pizza. Our frozen pizza of choice is Sabatasso's Gluten-Free Four Cheese Pizza, upon which we add chopped onions, black olives, and red bell peppers. The gluten-free element is irrelevant. They just happen to be very pleasantly chewy.

And considering the prevailing  mood, we could think of nothing better to watch, in the absence of Rossellini's long film, The Age of the Medici, than our four-DVD set of Kenneth Clark's Civilization, which first ran on television back when I was in high school.

But I'll save my analysis of that fine show for another time.

 

That Leaf Thing

A friend recently emailed me a photo of the spectacularly red tomato sauce he was making, with fresh basil leaves floating here and there in the middle of it. He added that he had heard that Hilary and I were up north "gazing at leaves."

Of course, there is almost always something worthwhile to be gazing at "up north" and in many other places: vistas, birds, landforms, lichens, clouds. An island of mature sumac can be stunning, not only for the color but also for the way it drapes itself handsomely across the hillside. An unexpected show of winterberry, or a spectacular toad trying to scale a rock shelf. Even the slant and intensity of light differs markedly from hour to hour, from day to day.  

On the other hand, at this time of year the birds are gone and the changing leaves do draw our attention. But it starts early—let's say in mid-September, when the sarsaparilla plants begin to turn in sizable numbers. Hilary and I were up on the North Shore hiking up the Caribou River in early morning light when we came upon this shady grove.

It's always exciting when the vibrant reds appear, especially when they arrive early and can display themselves against the still intense surrounding greens. Here's a view along the Namekagon River north of Trego in northern Wisconsin later in the month.

The next day we caught sight of some great flashes of red looking down on the St. Louis River from the north bank, flaming in stark contrast to the pale purple crown vetch right in front of us. 

And the following afternoon, hiking down to Wolf Creek Falls in Banning State Park, the variations in color were very fine.

We made a slight detour, traveling sections of the Old Military Road and the Old Ferry Road to reach Wild River State Park, where we watched a woman pull a half-decent  catfish out of the St. Croix and also admired the leaves.

The coup de grace was a trip to Itasca State Park with friends for a day of cycling and exploring. With the sunlight shining in across the lake from the west, the leaves along the road were remarkable. The green was gone, but the yellows and oranges were iridescent. 

  Yet there were plenty of other things to admire as well, for example, the light on a patch of lichen on a log, 

Or a family of trumpeter swans who had eaten every water lily in the bay.

The variations are endless. And welcome.