Advancing & Receding

VIBRANT HORIZON, ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Red Sky ~ or ~ Red Sea?
Advancing ~ or ~ Receding?
Painting by Leonard Orr

An literary exploration of the intriguing concept
of a perpetual redistribution of human emotion:

"We seem to have learned of the horizon
the art of perpetual retreating and reference."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~
from "Experience" ~ 1844

"It was the tragic part of happiness;
one's right was always made of
the wrong of some one else."
~ Henry James ~
Portrait of a Lady (Chapter 35, 357) ~ 1888


"The tears of the world are a constant quantity.
For each one who begins to weep
somewhere else another stops.
The same is true of the laugh."
~ Samuel Beckett ~
from Waiting for Godot ~ 1953
See also:
Seen Through Tears & To Cry Or Not To Cry

"Every moment of one's existence
one is growing into more or retreating into less.
One is always living a little more or dying a little bit."
~ Norman Mailer ~
from Advertisements for Myself ~ 1959

"As in the fusion with Mercer, everyone ascended together or, when the cycle had come to an end, fell together into the trough of the tomb world. Oddly, it resembled a sort of biological insurance, but double-edged. As long as some creature experienced joy, then the condition for all other creatures included a fragment of joy. However, if any living being suffered, then for all the rest the shadow could not be entirely cast off. A herd animal such as man would acquire a higher survival factor through this..."

~ Philip K. Dick ~
from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? ~ 1968

"So how do we seize the past? As it recedes, does it come into focus? Some think so. We know more, we discover extra documents, we use infra - red light to pierce erasures in the correspondence, and we are free of contemporary prejudice; so we understand better. Is that it? I wonder. . . .

“The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is becalmed, one of the telescopes will be in continual use; it will seem to tell the whole, the unchanging truth. But this is an illusion; and as the boat sets off again, we return to our normal activity: scurrying from one telescope to another, seeing the sharpness fade in one, waiting for the blur to clear in another. And when the blur does clear, we imagine that we have made it do so all by ourselves.

"Does the world progress? Or does it merely shuttle back and forth like a ferry?" (100, 101, 105)

~ Julian Barnes ~
Flaubert's Parrot ~ 1984


"Their happiness is not her unhappiness. Unless it is.
What if there is only an equal ratio of happiness to
unhappiness in the world at any given time?"
~ Gabrielle Zevin ~
The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry ~ 2014


"But life is not a zero - sum game.
There isn't a limited quantity of success or happiness,
meaning that if one person achieves something,
the rest of us take an automatic step backward."
~ Natalie Hanes ~ "Introduction" ~ 2015
to Extracts from The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir ~ 1949

“It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.

"You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.” (48 - 49)

~ Mitch Albom ~
from The Five People You Meet in Heaven ~ 2003


"It's the universe showing us that we're all connected
and feel the love, happiness, and pain oif one another
-- we just have to be ready to listen."
~ Peggy Carriker Rosenbluth ~ 2014


"One fire burns out another's burning.
One pain is lessened by another's anguish.
Tut man, one fire burns out another’s burning.
One pain is lessened by another’s anguish.
Turn giddy, and be helped by backward turning.
One desperate grief cures with another’s languish.
Take thou some new infection to thy eye,
And the rank poison of the old will die."
~ Shakespeare ~
Romeo & Juliet ~ 1597
Quoted by Peter Abernathy in Westworld ~ 2016

Green Bird ~ and / or ~ Green Fish?
Sky ~ and / or ~ Sea?
Painting by Leonard Orr

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Thanks Len for multiple appearances on my blogs!
Previously Posted Paintings & Poetry:

Fortnightly
Capturing the Ginkgo Light
Like An Ant
I Will Show You Modernism In A Handful of Dust
The Ides of Whatever
Advancing & Receding
2020 ~ The Essential Sincerity of Falsehood

Quotidian
End of Summer Sounds
Golden Paintings by Leonard Orr
Excellent Images
Happy Birthday Dylan Thomas
The same war continues . . .
The Magpie Waiting for his Beautiful Partner
An Ant and a Grain of Sand
Bursting Into Light
Sun ~ Flower ~ Moon
Days of Optimism
Life Without Poetry
What To Do
Star - Spanlged But Unsingable
That Lost Time & Place

Book List
Lovely As A Tree
Evening ~ Timing ~ Floating: Poetry by Leonard Orr

Poems: "Past Tense, Future Tense" ~ "Yiddish for Travellers"
"The Loop" ~ "Desperate Times" ~ "Optimist" ~
"Sun and Wheatfields" & "Russian Olives" ~ "Monet's The Magpie"
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, August 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ Pie Safe
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Who's Afraid? Fear Not!

A WRITER, ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONOUS
"Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully
in what is commonly thought big than
in what is commonly thought small. . . .
Down, down into the midst of ordinary things."

1902 & 1927


Rest in Peace Virginia Woolf:
25 January 1882 ~ 28 March 1941

"I am now galloping over Mrs. Dalloway. . . . The reviewers will say that it is disjointed because of the mad scenes not connecting with the Dalloway scenes. And I suppose there is some superficial glittery writing. But is it 'unreal'? Is it mere accomplishment? I think not. . . . it seems to leave me plunged deep in the richest strata of my mind. I can write and write and write now: the happiest feeling in the world." ~ Virginia Woolf, December 13, 1924

**********************

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Fear no more the frown o’ the great;
Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The scepter, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.

Fear no more the lightning flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finished joy and moan:
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.

No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renownèd be thy grave!

Shakespeare
from Cymbeline (Act IV, Scene 2, 2656 - 2689)

The opening lines of this Shakespearean song are quoted
several times by Clarissa Dalloway in Woolf's novel:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages. (13)

"Fear no more," said Clarissa.
Fear no more the heat o' the sun. (44)

. . . the world seems to be saying "that is all" more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking.” (59)

. . . she repeated and the words came to her,
Fear no more the heat of the sun.
She must go back to them. But what an extraordinary night. (283)

Google Doodle on Woolf's 136th Birthday

**********************

Sometimes the connections are all about connections.

Armin van Buuren:
"Everyone’s connected but no one is connecting."
from the song: "Alone"

Joan Didion:
"In this light, all narrative was sentimental. In this light
all connections were equally meaningful and equally senseless."
from the essay: The White Album

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
"If there's the slightest connection,
it's worth thinking about."
from the novel Player Piano

Donna Tartt:
"What held me fast . . . was the element of chance:
random disasters . . . converging on the same unseen point . . .
You could study the connections for years and never work it out
-- it was all about things coming together, things falling apart,
time warp . . . a way of seeing things twice, or more than twice.
. . . a field awareness of unseen patterns . . . ."(305)

"To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint.
Maybe I only see a pattern because I've been staring too long. But then
again. . . maybe I see a pattern because it's there." (768)
from the novel The Goldfinch

Annie Barrows
"In books . . . things were connected; people did something
and then something else happened because of that.
I could understand them. But outside, here in the real world,
things seemed to happen for no reason that I could see.
Maybe there was no reason." (374)

"Did most girls my age feel the way I did, as if the people
I thought I knew had turned out to have a thousand little tunnels*
leading away from the face they showed the world? . . .
The buried parts, now, they were fascinating but ominous, too." (128)
from the novel The Truth According to Us

Virginia Woolf:
"I should say a good deal about The Hours [later entitled Mrs. Dalloway]
and my discovery: how I dig out beautiful caves* behind my characters:
I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humor, depth.
The idea is that the caves shall connect
and each come to daylight at the present moment."
from A Writer's Diary
~ Thursday, August 30, 1923 ~

*I'm also seeing a connection here between Woolf's "beautiful caves"
and Barrows' "thousand little tunnels . . . fascinating but ominous"!

**********************

The previous year, Woolf had written:

"Mrs. Dalloway has branched into a book;
and I adumbrate here a study of insanity and suicide;
the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side
-- something like that. Septimus Smith? is that a good name?"
~ Saturday, October 14, 1922 ~

And in 1998, film critic Jack Kroll wrote:

Mrs.Dalloway's day is climaxed by her party, Smith's by his suicide. But these contrasting events are two parts of a symbolic whole, Virginia Woolf herself. Mrs. Dalloway is a Woolf without the genius, while Smith's fate prefigures the troubled Woolf's own suicide in 1941 [on March 28th]. In her notebook Woolf wrote, 'Mrs. D seeing the truth. SS seeing the insane truth.'"

from "Down in the Upper Crust:
Virginia Woolf's Landmark Novel Dazzles on Screen"
in Newsweek, March 2, 1998

**********************

In conclusion, only last month I was dismayed to find this trivializing assessment (an opinion I suppose shared by many) of Clarissa Dalloway's immersion into the details of one perhaps ordinary yet fateful day. In a book about teaching that I otherwise liked very much, Heather Kirn Lanier writes:

"In college, I'd spent my years studying the narrative stances of Virginia Woolf, appreciating the relative plotlessness of Mrs. Dalloway a book in which, let's face it, not much happens."

Au contraire! For Woolf's characters, it is a day filled with grief, intropsection, tension; and enlarged understanding. Oh dear. One does not throw a party -- nor encounter death in the midst of that party -- everyday. Still, though, I was touched to read that Kirn Lanier's students mistook her black and white postcard of Virginia Woolf to be "some great - grandmother of mine" (47, 77).

Virginia ~ Woolfpack
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Saturday, April 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading ~ "Makin' a list, checking' it twice . . ."
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

I Changed My Mind

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS
Love's Labour's Lost, Act IV, Scene 3
by Thomas Stothard, 1755 - 1834

"Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves
Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths"

from Love's Labour's Lost
by William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)

**************************

Couriers

“They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other - since there are no kings - messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.”

from On Parables
by Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
I changed my mind ~ apparently easier done than said. At the very beginning of their careers, Kafka's couriers have the free will to make a choice, and the choice they make out of this free will is to be couriers instead of kings. Now they are locked into that choice, no matter what. Kafka reveals the meaninglessness of the messages they relay and he blames their meaningless lives on the fact that they adhere to a truth in the spoken word which, in fact, does not reside there.

The couriers initially made this choice as children would, referring perhaps to the excitement that seems inherent in travelling to and for with messages, the action and movement, and the nature of the responsibility such a position entails -- the satisfaction of a mission accomplished rather than that of executive decision making. Unfortunately, everyone has chosen the role of delivering the truth rather than the office of determining what the truth is or just what truth it is that needs to be pronounced. Now they experience the discouragement of carrying messages with no content and to no purpose.

They are like Stephen Crane's "ship of the world" which slipped away at a fateful moment before God adjusted the rudder:

"So that, forever rudderless, it went upon the seas
Going ridiculous voyages,
Making quaint progress
Turning as with serious purpose
Before stupid winds."

But the couriers do not have even the saving delusion of naive or wrongful belief that their purpose is serious. Not only does the reader know that their progress is quaint and ridiculous and stupid -- they know it as well; yet they persist in shouting their messages to the "stupid winds."

The couriers, unfortunately, have no auditor. They suffer from a disjunction of form and content in their profession. Surely, in their cases, silence is preferable to their hopeless and meaningless shouting. Yet they feel compelled to continue their "work." The last sentence of the parable suggests that the compulsion derives from a seriouis misunderstanding of the power of language. The couriers mistakenly believe that words are real, more real even than actions. Their miserabale lives belie the truth of their oaths of service but they hold fast, somehow convinced of the authenticity of the oath. They honor a commitment to the spoken word, even though they have been more or less betrayed by the profession they feel committed to. Keeping an oath is undoubtedly honorable, but the fact that the couriers lead a miserable existence suggests that greater truth and greater honor, as well as greater happiness, might be found in breaking or modifying or redefining the oath if the couriers had the strength of mind to do so.

They need to learn the lesson of Love's Labour's Lost, Shakespeare's play about "the sweet smoke of rhetoric." The four main characters have taken an oath "Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep" (I, i, 48). They swear to lead this ascetic life of contemplation for three years' time in order that they might become "heirs of all eternity" (I, i, 7). It seems a small price for such a reward, and the final bond of the oath is "That his own hand may strike his honor down / That violates the smallest branch herein" (I, i, 20 - 21). But contrary to finding that a violation of the oath is a violation of honor, they learn just the opposite. By the end of the play, Longaville questions, " . . . what fool is not so wise / To lose an oath to win a paradise" (IV, iii, 270 - 71) and Berowne proclaims: "Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves / Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths" (IV, iii, 359 - 60).

They are calling into question, as Kafka's couriers should have the sense to do, the power and value of the word, written and spoken. Is breaking an oath to gain what at least appears to be a paradise a wise choice? Of course, the decision must always be relative to the weight of the oath and possibility of paradise. The line between "losing our oaths to find ourselves" and "losing ourselves to keep our oaths" is not always as clear as it is for the lords in Love's Labour's Lost, whose oaths were perhaps not very weighty ones in the fist place.

However, since the couriers in the parable have been reduced to living meaningless, frustrating lives, it is time, Kafka suggests, that they examine the validity of their oaths of service. Initially weighty though it may have been, it should be reconsidered in light of prevailing situations and conditions. Instead of taking this initiative, though, the couriers continue acting against their better judgment because they said they would. Clearly they are losing their lives to keep their oaths. Language has failed them, leaving them unable to discern when it may be right action, right behavior, to throw over a commitment they have made, a commitment not to another person so much as to the words they heard themselves say.

John the Baptist Reproving Herod, 1848
by John Rogers Herbert, 1810–1890
I draw a similar conclusion whenever I hear the story of the beheading of John the Baptist. As you may recall, Herod offers his daughter "whatever you wish . . . Whatever you ask me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom," as a reward for her performance of a pleasing dance for the the guests at a banquet. The girl confers with her mother and requests John's head on a platter. Although Herod is "deeply grieved" (is he really?) at this morbid request, he proceeds to grant it. Why? "Out of regard for his oaths and for the guests" (Mark 6: 22 - 26). What? This story never sounds right to me. Herod has all the power in the situation, including the power to renege on his oath and the power to save a man's life, should he so choose. He has the power to change his mind.

We've heard it all our lives: you must be as good as your word. Perhaps the real challenge is to be better than our word.

Three Conspirators Swear an Oath, 1779
Henry Fuseli, 1741 - 1825

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MORE ON KAFKA

1. Parables on Parables:

"They were offered the choice between
CHOICE and NO - CHOICE."

2. Previous Blog Posts:
Little Door
Take Up Your Cross
Sancho Panza
Celtic Blessing
Imperial Messenger
Suffering
Go Over

3. Fascinating Artwork:
Illustrations for Kafka's Parables by Aimee Pong

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Thursday, May 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Sighs A Plenty

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

The Pained Heart or Sigh No More Ladies, 1868
by Engish Artist Arthur Hughes, 1832 – 1915
[To view more from Arthur Hughes]

Sigh No More
Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more.
Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea, and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into hey nonny, nonny.

Sigh no more ditties, sing no more
Of dumps so dull and heavy.
The fraud of men was ever so
Since summer first was leafy.
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into hey, nonny, nonny.

William Shakespeare, English (1564 - 1616)
from Much Ado About Nothing

A few more poems on the significance of a sigh . . .
1. O Blush Not So!
O blush not so! O blush not so!. . .

There's a blush for won't, and a blush for shan't,
And a blush for having done it:
There's a blush for thought and a blush for naught,
And a blush for just begun it.

O sigh not so! O sigh not so! . . .

There's a sigh for yes, and a sigh for no,
And a sigh for I can't bear it! . . .

~ John Keats, English (1795 - 1821)

2. When Love Flies In
When Love flies in,
Make – make no sign;
Owl-soft his wings,
Sand-blind his eyne;
Sigh, if thou must,
But seal him thine.

Nor make no sign
If love flit out;
He’ll tire of thee
Without a doubt.
Stifle thy pangs;
Thy heart resign;
And live without!

Walter de la Mare, English (1873-1956)

3. When I Was One - And - Twenty
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
"Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;

Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free."
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
"The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;

’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue."
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

~ A. E. Houseman, English (1859 - 1936)

4. A Drinking Song
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

~ William Butler Yeats, Irish (1865 - 1939)

And a couple of songs . . .

My Love
Sung by Petula Clark

My love is warmer than the warmest sunshine
Softer than a sigh
My love is deeper than the deepest ocean
Wider than the sky

My love is brighter than the brightest star
That shines every night above
And there is nothing in this world
That can ever change my love . . .

As Time Goes By
Performed in the movie Casablanca

You must remember this
A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by . . .

[Spring Break Disclaimer: I feel a little lazy this time, just posting these poems and not contributing a single word, but maybe sometimes the connections can stand on their own without an editor.]

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
On Thursday, March 28th
~ Paintings by Marc Chagall & Poetry by E. E. Cummings ~

The Small Drawing Room

". . . arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here . . ."

Those Who Know

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS
Posting Early This Week, in honor of my friend
Victoria Amador, One Who Knows
(And one who gave me the above - pictured sari for my birthday!)

********************
THOSE WHO KNOW

A Steamy Classic
As a follow up to my recent post, Quotidian post concerning Dickensian references in Batman and Star Trek, here is another look at the phenomenon of literary allusion.

Way back during the summer before my Senior year in high school, I asked my father for some reading suggestions. He recommended the 1940s best seller Leave Her to Heaven (also a best selling movie) by Ben Ames Williams.

This looks more like the copy that I read!
The story involves a married couple: stoic Richard, who is the legal guardian of his disabled younger brother Danny, and obsessive Ellen, who grows increasingly jealous of their brotherly bond. One afternoon, Ellen offers to help Danny with swimming therapy and allows him to drown "accidentally," not knowing that Richard is watching from his study window. Ellen's guilty conscience leads to her suicide, leading to a trial in which the truth comes out and Richard is convicted as a silent accomplice. As for Ellen, both Richard and the audience must "leave her to heaven," just as the Ghost advises Hamlet.

I enjoyed the novel at the time, but I'm not sure that it would have remained so strongly impressed upon my memory had I not read Hamlet shortly thereafter in my Senior English class. Though the passage from Hamlet appears as an epigraph to the novel, it wasn't until I read them within the context of the play that I fully grasped the connection.

But, howsoever thou pursuest this act,
Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven,
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
To prick and sting her.
Act I, scene V, 84 - 88
Even in reverse, having encountered the allusion before before the originating source, I relished the exhilarating domino effect of one text bouncing off another! In highschool Shakespeare class and in again in Professor Herman Wilson's graduate seminar on "Style & Audience Interaction," we discussed the importance of Biblical and classical allusions in Shakespeare's plays, and in turn, the use of Shakespearean allusions by generations of later authors. As I mentioned last week ("A Far Far Better Thing") I have always been fascinated by the intertextual version of "six degrees of separation," with each reading experience perpetually preparing the reader for an allusion that may come in the future -- or bringing about the realization that one has already occurred, as happened for me with "Leave her to heaven."

However you think of it -- a contract between writer a reader, a shared frame of reference, a short - cut, an expansion -- the literary allusion can certainly make the Great Conversation a lot more fun! You have only to say, "Stella!" or "Madame Defarge" or "Nurse Ratched" to convey a second universe of character and conflict, a little meteor impacting Earth.

To be fair, an author cannot assume that every reader will catch every allusion. The reference must be independent enough to make sense on its own, in the context of the poem or story at hand; it should not detract meaning for those who are not familiar with the work or character alluded to. Rather, it is a special bonus for those make the connection, for those "who know."

Wait! That's another one:

“I talk to you in my mind because
I know you understand the things I want to mean.

There are those who know and those who don't know.
And for every ten thousand who don't know
there's only one who knows. That's the miracle of all time --
the fact that these millions know so much but don't know this.
It's like in the fifteenth century when everybody believed the world was flat . . . But it's different in that it took talent to figure that the earth is round. While the truth is so obvious it's a miracle of all history that people don't know.

For you see, when us people who know run into each other that's an event. It almost never happens. Sometimes we meet each other and neither guesses that the other is one who knows. That's a bad thing. It's happened to me a lot of times. But you see there are so few of us.

Why has this miracle of ignorance endured? Obscurantism.”

Carson McCullers
from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
[emphasis added]

and
"We divided people into two groups: those who knew, and those who didn't know. Aldous Huxley and Carson McCullers knew. Roy Rogers and Doris Day didn't. [Joan Baez and a] crazy singer called Bob Dylan knew.

Sara Davidson
from Loose Change: Three Women of the Sixties
(also a movie)

Parallax

A MUSEUM & LIBRARY WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

THE ROSENBACH:
"A WONDERLAND FOR LOVERS OF BOOKS AND ANTIQUES"
Two special days this week:

Tuesday, June 14th: Flag Day, since way back in 1777 (officially established in 1916).

Thursday, June 16th: Bloomsday, ever since 1922, (officially established in 1954).

My maternal grandmother, Rovilla Heidemann Lindsey, died forty - five years ago today, on Flag Day in 1966. That year, like this year, June 14 fell on a Tuesday; and Grandma Lindsey's funeral service was held on Thursday, June 16.


Her husband, my maternal grandfather, Paul Jones Lindsey, died seventeen years later, on Saturday, June 11, almost to the day of my grandmother's death, but not quite. His funeral, however, was also held on the Thursday, June 16. For all those intervening 17 years, Grandpa kept the 1966 calendar hanging on the kitchen wall, turned to June. Every January, he would place the new one on top, but you could always see the 1966 calendar just underneath.

By the time 1983 rolled around, I had read James Joyce's Ulysses several times, studied it thoroughly, and worked as an intern on the James Joyce Quarterly. I was well aware of Bloomsday that summer and the literary significance of my grandparents' two funerals being held not only on the same day of the week and month as each other's, but also on the anniversary of Leopold Bloom's legendary day in Dublin ~ Thursday, June 16, 1904 ~ when he too attended a funeral ceremony. The uncanny coincidence was not lost on me.

I sent a letter to my undergraduate Joyce professor, Jim Barnes, telling him of my grandfather's Bloomsday funeral service and sharing with him the remarkable symmetry of my grandmother's funeral taking place seventeen years earlier, also on Thursday, June 16, way before I knew anything about Bloomsday. I was honored when he wrote back to let me know that he read my note aloud to his Joyce students that summer, as an example of how life can echo art. [My previous posts on Professor & Poet Jim Barnes include: Missouri Poets, Quinton Duval, Tomatoes & Gravy]


I guess that's why I can never let Bloomsday slip by unnoticed, especially when it falls, as it does this year, on a Thursday, something which happens at repeating intervals of every 6 - 11 - 6 - 5 / 6 -11 - 6 - 5 years. If you get a kick (as I do!) out of the Perpetual Calendar, you can easily figure out that the next time June 16 will fall on a Thursday is 2016 (then add 6, 11, 6, 5, and so forth, in order to identify the years to come).

Googling "Bloomsday" has led me to another Quotidian blogger (no! I didn't steal my name from him). Interestingly, he maintains that June 16 can really only be considered Bloomsday when it falls on a Thursday, i.e., every 6, 11, 6, 5 years or so! Calendrically, this idea appeals to me, though it seems a shame to pass up a yearly opportunity to visit the nearest Irish pub -- or perhaps the Rosenbach Museum & Library, if you happen to be in Philadelphia -- in celebration of the life and times and peregrinations of Leopold Bloom.

Bloomsday at the Rosenbach,
#2008 & #2010 Delancey Street, Philadelphia
**************************************

Some Quotations for Bloomsday, by Joyce and others,
in honor of wandering the streets of Dublin, or wherever:
It is the epic of two races (Israel-Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life)... It is also a kind of encyclopaedia. My intention is not only to render the myth sub specie temporis nostri but also to allow each adventure (that is, every hour, every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the somatic scheme of the whole) to condition and even to create its own technique.
James Joyce (Irish novelist, 1882-1941)
Letters, 21st September 1920

"Think you're escaping and run into yourself.
Longest way round is the shortest way home."
James Joyce, from Ulysses, Chapter 13

"Who is it that can tell me who I am?"
William Shakespeare, from King Lear

"And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive
where we started and know the place for the first time."
T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"

"Happy Bloomsday, citizens, phenomenologists, throwaways, foreigners, gentlemen of the press, evermoving wanderers, weavers and unweavers, pedestrians in brown macintoshes, Wandering Soap, sailors crutching around corners, no-one, everyone! Hoping you're well and not in hell!"
Kathleen O'Gorman, my friend and fellow Modernist

P.S. Is reading Ulysses still on your "to do" list?
Well, for a few milliseconds of entertainment, you can
enjoy this minimalist version: it will quickly bring you
up to speed, or serve as a quick review if it's been awhile:
Ulysses for Dummies
Haha!

P.P.S. End of June 2012: my mother has written to let me know that her first cousin Mildred (my grandmother's niece) died earlier this month, on June 14th & the funeral was held on June 16th.

P.P.P.S. Bloomsday 2015: thanks to Michael Lipsey for this amazing photograph: "Happy Bloomsday! The inside cover of my dad’s copy of Ulysses, which he read and reread for over 70 years. The last two were from tapes, as his eyesight was failing. Between the third and fourth he notes that I read Ulysses in 1967 — quite a bit of it on a long camping trip in the Smokey Mountains."

see also his notes below in "Comments":

And in Joyce's own hand

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Scary Hair

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

"It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in our hair."
~~ Mixed ~ Up Shakespeare ~~
Moon & Stars Garden Mosaic by Ben McCartney, at age 12 (2002)

****************
Gathering Electrons
This hair gathers electrons
from the atmosphere & uses it
to perpetuate new ideas about
hair's role in the history
of civilization.
by Brian Andreas . . .
"telling people about a better way of seeing."
Go to the StoryPeople website and you'll notice that an appreciative reader named Becky has nearly taken the words right out of my mouth:

"This must have been written by someone who has natural curly hair like me! This is the story of my life... every day is a bad hair day... but only if you let 'them' dictate what beauty is: long, straight hair on a stick thin body! I prefer to let my curls express their own beauty!" [ellipses in original]
I know just what Becky means about "them" and their dictates. Most recently it was the television show, Arrested Development. I had the ill-timed fortune of sitting down to watch right at the part where they start making fun of the girl with glasses and frizzy hair. Writers seem to love that tired cliche, but I don't. Besides, it's such old material, it's not even funny, especially if you happen to have glasses and frizzy hair. Remember Princess Diaries? Anne Hathaway is "beautiful" when she puts in her contacts and straightens her hair but "ugly" with her curly hair & glasses. Now why is that?

What a treat when "Gathering Electrons" turned up as my Story of the Day! It seems that I have been telling hair stories for as long as I can remember. I could go on and on upon the topic and often do. Even my Royal Wedding tribute was a story about my hair:

See "Royal Hair" on the Quotidian Kit
Scary Hair / Scary Glasses !
In this picture from college days, my twin brother Bruce says that I have "Scary Hair." We also have fun describing an earlier photograph, from 8th grade [sorry, I don't have a copy] in which he appears to have his arm around my shoulder but is in fact suppressing my springy hair behind my back! My friend Eve, blessed with a texture similar to mine, refers to this as our "Easter Grass Hair."

Just last summer, my husband Gerry and I were out in the garden checking out our raspberries, and I mentioned that the mosquitoes didn't seem as bad as they had the night before. In reference to the fact that after swimming I had allowed my hair to air - dry in its naturally unruly fashion, i.e., pretty much standing straight out from my head, Gerry responded: "Maybe they're scared of your hair!" Now that really made me laugh.

I got a similar laugh out of the young heroine in the memoir Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets and Growing up in the 1970s by Margaret Sartor. I enjoyed the fact that she has crazy frizzy hair like mine! On 2 November 1976, she writes in her diary, "Jimmy Carter was elected president and Daddy said he won because it was such a beautiful day all over the South. This would seem to suggest a connection between the presidency of the United States and the frizziness of my hair" (198). This reminds me of the boy at my high school graduation (a day of high humidity) who said, "Kitti, your hair looks like the Wrath of God." Gee, thanks! But, really, I took it as a compliment!

Margaret Atwood
Novelist, poet and playwright
And it's not just me and Margaret Sartor; there are numerous literary connections! When I met Margaret Atwood back in the early 80s, in addition to discussing her novels, we shared stories of how people kept mistaking our natural curl for fake and asking us where we got our hair permed. Alice Walker and Anne Lamott have written at length about their naturally curly hair. Even understated Emily Dickinson wrote: "My hair is bold like the chestnut burr." And remember Shakespeare's Dark Lady: "Dark wires grow on her head" (Sonnet 130). Sounds like natural frizz to me!

More recently, take The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, in which two pen-pals describe themselves to each other before meeting for the first time. Isobel warns Juliet: "I do not have a pleasing appearance. . . . my hair is wild and will not stay tamped down." Isobel has seen a photograph of Juliet and observes: "It must have been a windy day because your curls are blowing all about." Juliet responds: "It wasn't a windy day; my hair always looks that way. Naturally curly hair is a curse, and don't ever let anyone tell you different" (53, 117 - 18).

And then there's The Help, which I'm sure many of you have read in the past few months. Along with all the weighty social and personal conflicts with which the various characters are struggling, there is also Skeeter's relentless quest, urged on by her beauty - conscious mother, for smooth straight hair. With her naturally curly / frizzy hair, she is considered less lovely, taken less seriously. Thus she willingly subjects herself to the "Magic Soft & Silky Shinalator," complete with "Miracle Straightening Cap," (127 - 28). By the end, however, "Her hair's long without no spray on it. The weight of it's worked out the curl and frizz" (461). That also sounds like magic to me, something that might not really work for most people in real life, but still the message is clear: Skeeter has made a choice against convention and repression. She has decided in favor of her own individuality. No more fake straight hair.

Shinalator
The symbolism works differently for Liv, the main character of Jennifer Belle's lovable, sarcastic novel High Maintenance. Whereas Skeeter's long, untended hair represents her independence, Liv's rebirth is symbolized by going from curly to straight, with a little professional assistance. The title -- High Maintenance -- refers not so much to emotional neediness as it does to the condo fees that go along with the properties that Liv sells in her job as a New York City realtor. At the very end of the novel, the phrase describes Liv's newly styled hair: "With my new keys in my pocket, I stopped in at Tortolla to have Tom do my hair. He blew it out straight for the first time. My long black wavy hair became . . . straight and Japanese looking . . . I loved it. I sat beaming in the chair. 'I always want my hair like this.'" Tom warns her how difficult it will be to maintain this look, how costly and time - consuming: "It's way too high maintenance for you," he concludes. But Liv is determined: "I want high - maintenance hair!" Not because she wants to be dependent upon Tom or the dictates of hair fashion; but because she wants to shape her own destiny: "I can handle it" (335).

These are just a few of the many electrons I have already gathered from the atmosphere for perpetuating new ideas about the role of hair in literature.

More to come . . .
Anne Lamott







Alice Walker









Post - Swim Easter GrassFrizzy Hair and Glasses (and Beaumont)
My real hair: somewhere in between
the Wrath of God and Fake Straight
P.S. My advice for the coming summer: if you have to choose between straight hair & swimming, don't fight the curl: CHOOSE SWIMMING!

Wise Fool

"Who is it that can tell me who I am?" ~King Lear

Favorite Museum:
The Lady Lever Art Gallery
Port Sunlight, Merseyside, England
Gerry and Ben at the Lady Lever, Ten Years Ago
The names alone are enough to take one's breath away: Cordelia's Portion, Lady Lever, Port Sunlight! Port Sunlight is one of the most charming towns in all of England, a nearly perfect early twentieth century model village. Its premier feature is the jewel - like Lady Lever Gallery, which contains an amazingly extensive collection of pre-Raphaelite paintings, including Ford Madox Brown's tableau of the tragedy of King Lear, entitled: Cordelia's Portion. When touring the gallery, I like to save this painting until last and stand before it in awe for awhile, marveling at the understated intensity of Lear's sadly fractured family and needlessly divided kingdom.

Favorite Painting:
Cordelia's Portion (c. 1866)
by Ford Madox Brown (1821 - 1893)
English painter of moral and historical subjects
loosely connected to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
To the left are the malevolent sisters, Goneril & Regan, staring each other down; and kneeling at their feet, the Dukes of Cornwall & Albany, Lear's corrupt sons-in-law. To the right, are the fickle Duke of Burgandy; dear Cordelia, Pure of Heart, whose "love's more richer than her tongue," and the loyal King of France. In the center is King Lear, dejected, misguided; and at his feet, the Map of the Kingdom, divided. In this painting, the Fool is only a minor character. You can see his blue hood if you look closely behind the dark - haired sister.

However, in numerous other depictions of Lear's tragic demise, the Fool is a major player. Likewise, the Fool is central to the action of Shakespeare's play. Referring to himself as "Lear's shadow," Lear's Fool is a character of wisdom, loyalty, and comprehension, who grasps the mixed motivations of all the other characters. In this next painting, the artist dramatically captures the Fool's ability to mirror Lear’s flawed judgment:

King Lear and the Fool in the Storm (c. 1851)
by William Dyce (1806 - 1864)
distinguished Scottish artist
advocate of public art education
No study of the Fool would be complete without the following poem that my father shared with me when I was in high school. I wish I knew more of the story behind his giving it to me: when did he first learn it, did someone pass it on to him or where did he come across it -- in a book or a magazine or a class? My only reference now is the typed copy that has been stored in one of my high school notebooks since graduation. In turn, I passed this poem on to my son Ben during his junior high years at St. Peter's School, Philadelphia, where the students were required to memorize and recite a poem every month. Ben and Sam became quite adept at managing increasingly long works, and I often urged them to choose from among my old favorites. Ben won first place for this one:

THE FOOL'S PRAYER

The royal feast was done, the king
Sought some new sport to banish care,
And to his jester cried: "Sir Fool,
Kneel now, and make for us a prayer!"

The jester doffed his cap and bells,
And stood the mocking court before;
They could not see the bitter smile
Behind the painted grin he wore.

He bowed his head, and bent his knee
Upon the monarch's silken stool.
His pleading voice arose: "O, Lord,
Be merciful to me, a fool!

"No pity, Lord could change the heart
From red with wrong to white as wool,
The rod must heal the sin: but, Lord,
Be merciful to me a fool!

"Tis not by guilt the onward sweep
Of truth and right, O, Lord we stay;
Tis by our follies that so long
We hold the earth from heaven away.

"These clumsy feet, still in the mire,
Go crushing blossoms without end'
These hard, well-meaning hands we thrust
Among the heartstrings of a friend.

"The ill-timed truth we might have kept --
Who knows how sharp it pierced and stung?
The word we had not sense to say --
Who knows how grandly it had rung?

"Our faults no tenderness should ask,
The chastening stripes must cleanse them all;
But for our blunders -- oh, in shame
Before the eyes of heaven we fall.

"Earth bears no balsam for mistakes
Men crown the knave, and scourge the tool
That did his will; but Thou O, Lord,
Be merciful to me a fool!"

The room was hushed; in silence rose
The king, and sought his gardens cool,
And walked apart, and murmured low,
"Be merciful to me, a fool!"

by Edward Rowland Sill, 1841 - 1887
American Poet

Court Jester, by Dan Rosenbluth
"They could not see the bitter smile
Behind the painted grin he wore."

For more on the significance of foolishness,
see my recent blog post on the Quotidian Kit:
"What Shall He Tell That Son":

"Tell him to be a fool every so often
and to have no shame over having been a fool
yet learning something out of every folly
hoping to repeat none of the cheap follies
thus arriving at intimate understanding
of a world numbering many fools."

~Carl Sandburg

COME BACK FOR
Next Fortnightly Post
Monday, June 28, 2010

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com