"I Only Count the Foggy Hours"

I am invariably puzzled when I come upon the phrase printed on a sun dial: "I Only Count the Sunny Hours." It isn't hard to see the truth of the statement. It's obvious, and hardly worth mentioning. But is that supposed to be a good thing? As if the sundial's inability to register life's varied moods were an act of will, of denial, and a healthy one at that?

It was foggy this morning, and the streets in our neighborhood were somewhat slick. We proceeded around the block in the dark at a slower pace, and at one point I slipped and made a dramatic recovery, wrenching my back momentarily in the process.

The snow is gone, and the social element of the holiday season is over. It was grand while it lasted. 

Big family gatherings, a dinner or two with friends, breakfast with my cousin Pat, dominoes and lasagna (a fine combination!) with my sister Nancy. 

Hilary spent one afternoon baking cookies with her friend Carol. We stopped over to visit our friend Nadia, who's recovering from knee surgery with the help of a high-tech ice machine, and enjoyed an afternoon visit from another couple who were returning a hat I'd forgotten at their house a few days earlier.

It's been several years since we last tried to talk ourselves into attending midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, but we kept the house full of music, most of it vocal and "churchy" but not specific to the season—though Bach's Christmas Oratorio  and some carols performed by the Alfred Deller Consort did show up on the playlist.

One foggy afternoon we drove down to a viewing site at the airport out into the midst of the runways to see if we could spot the snowy own that's been reported out there. Success! Thanks to a gentleman from Kansas standing nearby with a very fine spotting scope. We then drove to the Fort Snelling Veteran's Cemetery nearby to take a look at the tombstone that was placed recently for Hilary's mom. There seemed to be a lot of traffic in the vicinity—people returning rental cars, light-rail trains whizzing by. Well of course, we're at an airport, and it's Christmas!

Now the hunkering down commences. After several weeks of too many sweets and too much rich food, we chop up some stray vegetables for a wholesome salade Niçoise. Fire in the fireplace. And books. Having finished The Invention of Curried Sausage by Uwe Timm, I decide to reread Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. (I must be in a "German" phase.) Hilary has been working her way through the "Blind Justice" mystery series by Bruce Alexander.  

The festive season has come and gone. I hope the snow returns soon.   

 

Christmas Moods

Scanning the shelves to find just the right book before heading off to the waiting room of a dentist, barbershop, or doctor's office can be a challenge. The one you select must be small enough to stick in a pocket, yet engaging enough to hold your interest, while also being dull enough so that you can let it go at a moment's notice, and perhaps forever. I can attest from experience that such a deliberation often takes place at the last minute

On a a recent trip to the doctor's office I selected a mid-sized trade paperback I hadn't thought about in decades: Ernest Gellner's Plough, Sword, and Book: The Structure of Human History. (I'm tempted to admit that I had never thought about it at all, except that when I began to read it, I came upon passages I underlined decades ago, even a good ways into the book.)

Gellner divides human activities into three categories—the productive, the coercive, and the cognitive—hence the title: plough, sword, book. And he has a lot of insightful things to say about the follies of modern economists, atavistic hippies, and tendentious anthropologists. For example, he typifies Marx as the "ultimate bourgeois," and offers sound reasons for doing so. He pokes holes in the then-fashionable theories of Marshall Sahlins concerning the lifestyles of the Hadza people.

Where Hayek damns early man for his gregarious social morality, Sahlins praises him for his freedom from greed and, even more perhaps, for his freedom from the work ethic. Where nineteenth-century populists idealize the peasant, Sahlins' neolithic populism goes much further back and idealizes the hunter/gatherer. The rot had set in not with the first bourgeois, but with the first peasant.

 Here we catch a whiff of Gellner's wit, which can often be heard gurgling just beneath the surface of his prose. All the same, large sections of the book remain a bit abstract, because Gellner is writing a typology of cultural and social forms, not a history of civilization. For example, at one point Gellner asks: "How can it happen not merely that the weak, the swordless, overcome  the swordsmen, but that the whole organization and ethos of society changes, that Production replaces Predation as the central theme and value of life? Everything in the standard condition of agrarian life militates against such a miracle. Yet it did happen."

Gellner lists as many as fifteen factors that might have made such a transformation possible. He analyzes them, rejecting some, accepting others as possible, others still as even probable.

It strikes me that Gellner's analysis of the cognitive aspects of human life, while riddled with insights, also suffers somewhat from a failure to clearly distinguish between concepts, categories, and ideas. On the other hand, he's adept at ferreting out the contradictions inherent in nostalgic and utopian attitudes toward the past, for example:

The tendency of societies, especially small and simple societies, to have reasonably coherent visions of the world, to inhabit such a cosmos, has often been noted. The passing away of such coherent visions in complex and unstable societies, and its replacement by an impersonal, law-abiding, indifferent Nature, is a source of much recent romantic regret, poignantly expressed. The coherence of the world we have lost was thematic or stylistic rather than strictly logical. A fairly coherent picture was sustained by devices which evaded or ignored logic.  

This remark highlights Gellner's appreciation of patterns of social organization that "work" fairly well even though they don't really "make sense." He returns to the same theme at one point late in the book:

A man following traditional ideas is at least deploying something unlikely to be wholly false, and will at least fall in with the social proprieties of his culture. By contrast, given the infinity of possible truths, a man experimenting with new ideas is unlikely to be successful ... and at the same time is likely to be socially offensive.

We live in an age when the scientific method is strangely under attack by paranoid and often aggressive nay-sayers.

But Gellner's analysis, multifaceted and brilliant though it may be, inadvertently offers a clue as to why this might be so. In his treatment of cognition—concepts, categories, ideas, and empirical information and analysis—he has nothing to say about the important realm of images, imagination, and vision. That realm continues to be important, and available to us. Many people find both solace and meaning in the material that religions offer along those lines.

*   *   *

It being Christmas time, the current of my thought naturally drifts in that direction. One scholar who can supply the perspective to flesh out this dimension is the English philosopher and critic Terry Eagleton.

To call Eagleton merely a critic is to damn him with faint praise. The man is uncommonly erudite and he writes with singular panache—so much so that when reading him we’re reminded of philosophers and social critics on the order of Voltaire and Nietzsche, with touches of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis thrown in for good measure. Like those brilliant and scurrilous gadflies, Eagleton is a counter-puncher. He feigns and jabs, often hitting his mark, while seldom planting his feet on the mat long enough for us to figure out where he really stands.

But perhaps this is a false impression, based on the fact that I’ve read only a few of the essays collected in his book Figures of Dissent: Critical Essays on Fish, Spivak, Žižek and Others. (I’m so out of touch, I thought  Spivak and Žižek were the same person!)

My favorite line from that book: “For postmodern thought the normative is inherently oppressive, as though there was something darkly autocratic about civil rights legislation or not spitting in the milk jug.”

That remark strikes me as both funny and true.

I recently stumbled upon Eagleton’s book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (2009) It was written largely in response to the then-popular works of Hitchen and Dawkins trashing religious sentiment. Reading the first chapter, “The Scum of the Earth,” I was impressed by Eagleton's grasp of Jesus’s mission, Aquinas’s analysis of first causes, and so on. He’s well aware, as few thinkers today are, that we live in the midst of several different "categories of being" and often partake of several simultaneously without contradicting any of them. Gellner would have agreed, I'm sure.

A few Eagleton sallies:

In Nietzsche’s view, the death of God must also spell the death of Man—that is to say, the end of a certain overweening humanism—if absolute power is not simply to be transplanted from the one to the other. Otherwise, humanism will always be secretly theological. It will be a continuation of God by other means. God will simply live a shadowy afterlife in the form of respectable suburban morality, as indeed he does today.

He responds to Christopher Hitchens assertion that “thanks to the telescope and the microscope, [religion] no longer offers an explanation of anything important” as follows:

But Christianity was never meant to the an explanation of anything in the first place. It is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.

Pursuing the issue of God as creator, Eagleton continues:

God for Christian theology is not a mega-manufacturer. He is rather what sustains all things in being by his love, and would still be this even if the world had no beginning. Creation is not about getting things off the ground. Rather, God is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever. Not being any sort of entity himself, however, he is not to be reckoned up alongside these things, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

In case we haven’t quite wrapped our heads around this concept, Eagleton lays it on a little thicker, jumping from point to point as if he’s afraid our attention might be wandering.

God and the universe do not make two. In an act of Judaic iconoclasm, we are forbidden to make graven images of this nonentity because the only image of him is human beings. There is a document that records Gods endless, dispiriting struggle with organized religion, known as the Bible. God the Creator is not a celestial engineer at work on a superbly rational design that will impress his research grant body no end, but an artist, and an aesthete to boot, who made the world with no functional end in view but simply for the love and delight of it.

He goes on:

Or, as one might say in more theological language, for the hell of it. He made it as gift, superfluity, and gratuitous gesture—out of nothing, rather than out of grim necessity. In fact, for Christian theology there is no necessity to the world at all, and God may have long ago bitterly regretted succumbing to the sentimental impulse which inspired him to throw it off in the first place. He created it out of love, not need. There was nothing in it for him. The Creation is the original acte gratuit.

The danger implicit in this position is that morality relinquishes pride of place to delight. But once again, do we really have to choose between the two in every case?

If we are God’s creatures, it is in the first place because, like him, we exist (or should exist) purely for the pleasure of it.

And where does Jesus fit into all of this? The radical Romantics (according to Eagleton) including Marx, find in Jesus a character who fully grasped this radical disjunct between instrumental reason and the ontological freefall we actually live.

 Jesus, unlike most responsible American citizens, appears to do no work, and is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. He is presented as homeless, propertyless, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdain­ful of kinsfolk, without a trade, a friend of outcasts and pa­riahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, careless about purity regulations, critical of traditional authority, a thorn in the side of the Establishment, and a scourge of the rich and powerful. Though he was no revolutionary in the modern sense of the term, he has something of the lifestyle of one. He sounds like a cross between a hippie and a guerrilla fighter.

Excesses of energy about, and Eagleton's insights and combativeness are both ever-present.

At this holy time, I'm not much in the combative mood. I enjoy seeing a pine tree covered in lights and colorful glass balls, tiny ceramic statues of the Holy Family sitting on top of the stereo, from which  the sweet, mellow harmonies of Dufay, Victoria, Palestrina and others waft across the room.

It's a different zone of thought, of being. Cookies get made, friends stop by, we take a walk in the pre-dawn snow. And a poem by Thomas Hardy drifts into view that I haven't thought about in years. I think you know it. Hardy spends a few stanzas describing a manger scene in which the oxen kneel before the infant Jesus. He concludes:

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel,

 

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.     

 

A Literary Ramble

Korean novelist Han Kang recently won the Nobel Prize for literature. I'd never heard of her. That's not unusual. I logged into my library account immediately and placed holds on a few of her works. I was tickled to see that no one else had done so; I was first in line for The Vegetarian—or so I thought. By the next morning I'd slipped to 96th. I guess they collate that kind of data overnight.

Now, many weeks later, the first of the novels I'd requested has come through. The White Book. It's a short book devoted to one- and two-page observations by a woman reflecting on a family trauma that took place before she was born. 

I liked the format. Reading it last night, I came upon the following sentence.

"Were it not the case that life stretches out in a straight line, she might at some point become aware of having rounded a bend." 

Hmm, I say to myself, Is life really like a straight line? Not exactly. 

I've been thinking  lately about how the richness of life is, at least in part, a result of  time doubling back on itself as it moves ahead, compounding impressions and creating a firmer, more intricate, and more beautiful fabric. Anyone involved in a healthy long-term relationship is nourished by the steady stream of echoes, reminders, and shared experiences that make up an average day, often without thinking much about it. And the material culture that many of us surround ourselves with--books, music, posters--serves the same function.

A case in point: Charles Dumond died a few days ago. He composed many of the songs that Edith Piaf made famous, including "Non, je ne regrette rien." Basically, "I Regret Nothing." Some friends were coming over that night and I was looking for a Piaf CD to play at the appropriate moment—though conversation is often  so lively no one cares, including me. During that search I came upon a recording of Darius Milhaud's piano music that Hilary's brother Paul made for me many years ago. I put it on the stereo. I hadn't heard it in years. It was a revelation.

I like Milhaud and occasionally listen to a William Bolcom recording of his piano music, but Bolcom's approach is boisterous, whereas these interpretations were quietly lyrical, almost as if Milhaud had been channeling Mompou. They were simpler and more open, though still pleasantly awkward and adventurous harmonically. I loved them. I played the CD three times. Something from my past had been returned to me, and it was precisely the "space" I wanted to be in.

The same thing also happens with books. After devouring Olivia Laing's The Garden Against Time, I found myself in need of a breather and began to read short books that I happened to spot on the shelves, almost at random, even though I'd read them before. The first, Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene (1978),is about old age and memory loss in the Swiss Alps during a weather catastrophe, though the parts I liked best were about mountain climbing. 
The second, Yasmina Reza's Hammerklavier (1997), was better than I'd remembered. Thirty years ago  I enjoyed the whimsy and the slightly cruel humor but missed the occasional moments of tenderness, honesty, and insight into the fleetingness of time and how hard it is to capture. Then again, the New Yorker wrote not long ago, "Reza is an adversarial writer even in her tender moments, which are infrequent, and she has a gift for derision which Flaubert might have admired."

The fleetingness of time also figures prominently in the third of the slim volumes I happened upon, Eugene Ionesco's Fragments of a Journal (1967). I suspect few readers have stuck with this collection of meditations from beginning to end. Ionesco is obsessed with death, absurdity, nothingness, but in an almost childlike way that resurfaces again and again like a bubbling fountain rather than congealing into an indigestible paste of theory. Along the way he relates sad and charming episodes from his childhood in a French village so small it doesn't appear on a map. You never know what's coming next. For example:

Two possible atitudes:

To imagine, because imagining means foreseeing. What we imagine is now true, what we imagine will be realized. Science fiction is becoming, or has already become, realistic literature.

A second possible attitude to consider: reality as something beyond reality, to be aware of it not as surrealistic but as unfamiliar, miraculous, a-real.

And a page or two later:

"What is life? I may be asked. For me life is not Time; it is not this state of existence, forever escaping us, slipping between our fingers and vanishing like a ghost as soon as you try to grasp it. For me it is, it must be, the present, presentness, plenitude. I have run after life so much that I have lost it."

Plenitude is a good word, I think, but it would be a mistake to associate it too closely with mere 'presentness.' Life is not a straight line. It's squiggly. The lines circle around and overlap. That's what gives life dimension. Memory is the mechanism by which life fleshes itself out, bolsters itself, and lays the groundwork for rounding the next bend--or heading off in an entirely new direction. 

Shared memories are even better.

I step into the den where Hilary is deep into Percival Everett's James, and there, sitting on the stereo cabinet, is the brightly lit, three-foot, artificial Christmas tree we've stored in the basement for her mom for many years, returning it to her for a few weeks every holiday season. Dorothy died in May at the age of 97. A few days ago Hilary set up the tree, took a picture, and sent it around to her brothers. "Anyone want it?"

No one responded. Meanwhile, we've grown to like it. The colored lights are cheery, and as Hilary says, "It reminds me of all the years I used to go over and help mom decorate it."    

The Garden Against Time

In Olivia Laing's new book, she describes her effort to restore—or better put, re-envision—a decrepit garden in Suffolk that was originally developed by the well-known author and garden designer Mark Rumary. But within a page or two Laing reveals herself to be a woman of wide reading, restless energy, and deep conscience. She finds herself unable to tell that simple tale without also asking herself questions about what a garden is for and why she is so keen on having one. This leads on to an examination not only of the things a garden includes within its enclosure but also the things, and people, it deliberately excludes. 

I wasn't far into the book before it occurred to me that it's cut from the same cloth as W. G. Sebald's book-length meditations—Vertigo or The Rings of Saturn, for example—that wander here and there while keeping us mesmerized by the lugubrious tone, the casually shaped sentences, and the sense that great mysteries lie just beneath the surface. Laing's prose is more vigorous, less uncanny, but it's certainly up to the task, and she interweaves garden history and lengthy literary references adroitly, along with numerous details about her personal life the like of which Sebald would never mention.

A communitarian spirit runs through the book, consistent with Laing's earlier career as a herbalist and eco-activist. Among the duller parts of the book, along those lines, are the ones in which she exposes the slave-trading origins of the wealth that fueled many of the great landscape gardens of the seventeenth century. Yes, it's true. Yes, we get it. But perhaps we don't need to know quite so much about generation after generation of Jamaican plantation owners.

 Among the literary figures she draws upon in the course of developing her thesis are John Milton, John Clare, William Morris, and Iris Origo. One reviewer found these interpolations tedious, preferring Laing's gardening exploits. I felt just the opposite. I skimmed quite a few paragraphs describing Laing's garden plantings, buoyed by the music of the language but entirely at sea regarding the specific plants she was mentioning. For example:

As bare patches were revealed I started to draw up embryonic planting plans. I wanted a group of Narcissus cyclamineus under the magnolia, the ones that look like Piglet with his ears blown back. Acid yellow, ballet pink. More hellebores under the hazel, the yellowy-green Ballard hybrids with a maroon splash at the eye, plus a fine blue mist of Anemone blanda under the tree peony, which had just opened an abundance of crumpled yolk-yellow petals. Irises everywhere. Dying plants were discarded and new plants took up their stations. A Rosa rubrifolia, dead as a doornail. Great mats of lamium that had conquered and pillaged the shadier border in the pond garden. A variegated euonymus, hideous anyway, and blocking two-thirds of the path. Arbutus, sick, ceanothus, deceased. In their place I planted more pinkish-green astrantia and Geranium psilostemon, Verbena hastata ‘Pink Spires’ and a mass of tawny heleniums. We got six goldfish, four orange and two black, and the garden instantly felt more animated and alive. The tulips went over, replaced by a wave of purple and white dame’s rocket, aqui- legia, purple drumstick alliums and the first glowing roses.   

The eye trips along, but such passages don't mean much to me. On the other hand, I found the long section about the garden themes of Paradise Lost and Milton's persecution following the civil war to be fascinating, likewise the story of Iris Origo's Italian villa and the part it played harboring refugees and partisans during the Second World War. Laing praises Origo's courage while upbraiding her for maintaining the medieval mezzadria land management system on her vast inherited estates under which the workers had no opportunity to purchase the land they worked, generation after generation.

That aspect of gardening—its elitism and escapism, if you will—is one of the many themes that contribute to Laing's long meditation. But that being the case, it strikes me as strange that she never says a word about the financial arrangements that made it possible for her to buy an estate in Suffolk and spend two solid years investing heavily in repairing, rebuilding, and replanting it. Royalties from her previous books? I doubt it. Early on, she mentions marrying a Cambridge don named Ian. Do retired academics in England really make that much?  

It's a minor point and does nothing to obscure  Laing's intense curiosity about literature and history, her vast knowledge and love of plants, her concern about all manner of social inequality, or her desire to create a verdant enclosed landscape and oasis for herself. No book that I know of describes that process more richly.