Reading progress & little else

Dear diary,

It took me the entire summer of daily exercise to lose my fat belly; and it took only one single week of inactivity to gain it back—now I have a big fat belly again. Since Christmas day, it’s been so cold outside that I haven’t been able to ride my bike to the woods & take long walks. I might as well be hibernating.

Actually, I don’t have a fat belly. But the above seemed correct when I was writing it. I worry about eating and drinking the right foods. What is “right” in this context? Healthy. So I eat spinach leaves for a snack, instead of deep-fried liverwurst. ...Now when I tuck in my shirt at the waist, is there bellyfat visible? I don’t want my shirt to bulge out, because I think that makes me look sloppy, so that’s why I worry about my diet. ...But then I think of all those good people out there who keep telling everyone not to worry about your body shape, that everyone is beautiful: don’t shame anyone for the way that they look, and don’t shame yourself. I think that this non-shaming attitude is the best way to think. So I’ll keep trying.

Holy moly, I’m making good progress on the books in my reading stack. I hate to talk about literature in this way, as if it’s a chore that needs doing, like a big tower of dirty dishes that must be washed before I can punch out my time-card on the work-clock and go sleep till the next shift, but the truth is that I was worried whether I’d ever be able to finish a book again, after recently becoming so sad that the act of reading felt futile and thus unappealing…

But lately I’ve been humming right along! I finished the novel Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry. I really loved it. And I believe that my opinion about literature is extremely important, not only because I’m so pretty and slim, but because I’ve read SO many novels in my life. I’m like a plumber with fifteen years of experience, except with books not pipes. Now, to a reader who has read SO many billions of novels, how does a writer manage to make his novel STAND OUT? My guess is that if you, the novelist, throw all your rule-following tendency out the window, and abandon all the “thou shalt” aspects of your…

Magicians never give away their secrets.

I loved Lowry’s book because it seemed a perfect balance of personal things and communal things. It is not overgrown in either direction. If a book is too personal—I mean personal in an ugly way—it can seem selfish, or solipsistic, and I as a reader yearn for it to connect more with our shared general experience. And if a book is communal in an ugly way it feels boring dull predictable proper prudent – it abides by the tried-and-true timeworn expected ritual that is familiar even to the least perceptive among us, and there’s no wonder left, no spark, nothing bizarre strange weird to marvel over. But Lowry’s book is centered right where the most beautiful aspects of outer life and inner life reside. It’s sui generis, without a doubt, but it’s immensely concerned with society; it cares, even as a book, about its place among the other books of the world, just as its text cares about its character’s place among…

Why am I writing a book review? I hate reviews. Nobody’s paying me to write a nitpicking appraisal; and I wouldn’t accept the money or the job if they offered it. All I meant to say is that I finished the goddamned novel and loved it sincerely. Now leave me alone.

Also I told you earlier that Ralph Waldo Emerson’s English rendition of The New Life of Dante Alighieri made me want to check out Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s translation of the same work. Well I’m back to report that I finished that as well. Tho the Rossetti version was (long ago) highly recommended to me, I lacked (till now) the motivation to actually get my hands on a copy; the Emerson version I just happened upon while reading thru a collection of his manuscript translations. It seems obvious to say that the best path would simply be to learn Italian, but [insert excuse for inexcusable ignorance]...

As you know, Dante’s New Life alternates between verse and prose. My first impression, after recently reading these translations, is that Rossetti’s verse is by far the best, but, at least this instant, I favor Emerson’s renditions of Dante’s prose portions. So, if, say, my house were on fire and I had only a few moments to grab my most precious items and dash away to save them before all becomes ash, what I’d do is take a scissors and extract each verse section from the Rossetti book, and affix the poems, using wood glue, to their respective places in the Emerson book; this way, I’d have Emerson for the prose explanations and Rossetti for the sonnets, etc.

Also, when I recently mentioned reading the short stories of D.H. Lawrence, my distinguished colleague M.P. Powers revealed to me that he too is an admirer of Lawrence, and this happified me because I’ve loved Lawrence’s poems novels letters journals and even biblical criticism for a long time but never have I met another soul who agrees with my opinion. And Powers mentioned that, about a year ago, he read with great enjoyment Lawrence’s Twilight in Italy. Now I had never heard of this title—DHL wrote so much text that, no matter how much of him I’m familiar with, there’s always aspects out there that I’ve never set eyes on; it’s like the physical body of God: very hard to measure—so I got myself a copy via interlibrary loan, and I read a section per day aloud with my sweetheart, and we loved it with full hearts and already finished the text. My sweetheart is a Lawrence fan too, but I neglected to mention this when I said above, in this very paragraph, that I’ve never met another living soul who shares my love of D.H. Lawrence, because I don’t consider my sweetheart to be a separate entity from me myself; she and I are like the joined hemispheres of a single rotund aristophanic pre-human, or as Lawrence himself writes in Twilight in Italy, in the section “Il Duro” (which means something like “The tough guy”):

It is in the spirit that marriage takes place. In the flesh there is connection, but only in the spirit is there a new thing created out of two different antithetic things. In the body I am conjoined with the woman. But in the spirit my conjunction with her creates a third thing, an absolute, a Word, which is neither me nor her, nor of me nor of her, but which is absolute.

The only thing that pissed me off about my sweetheart’s reaction, while we were reading Lawrence’s text, is that, when we reached the part called “The Dance,” I remarked to her: “Do you notice which of the characters in this piece I AM?” And my sweetheart said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “Don’t you, when reading any account, find that you yourself ARE this or that character?—don’t you look out over all the people that Lawrence is describing in the dance and say: That’s me, that one right there!” And my sweetheart said, “Well of course; I’m not stupid—but none of them stands out as being more like YOU than any other. So which one did you mean?” And I said, “Isn’t it obvious? I AM the wood-cutter!” And my sweetheart had an expression on her face like someone who is waiting for more to be said. So I repeated, “Isn’t it obvious!?” And she said, “I don’t know.” Now, although there is much more characterization in the full chapter, here is one excerpt that tells about this man who my sweetheart is not entirely convinced that I am right to say I AM:

The wood-cutter from the mountain is of medium height, dark, thin, and hard as a hatchet, with eyes that are black like the very flaming thrust of night. He is quite a savage. There is something strange about his dancing, the violent way he works one shoulder. He has a wooden leg, from the knee-joint. Yet he dances well, and is inordinately proud. He is fierce as a bird, and hard with energy as a thunderbolt. He will dance with the blonde Signora. But he never speaks. He is like some violent natural phenomenon rather than a person. . . .

Also just now, as I was typing those last three dots above (I replaced the final sentence of the paragraph with an ellipsis, so as to present myself in the finest light; for it ended with “The woman begins to wilt a little in his possession,” and I don’t think that I have that effect: rather I make you blossom), I say, just as I was typing those dots, the postman gave our house-bell two firm yanks and then tossed a large parcel through our glass door, shattering the pane. (We live in a mansion with a glass-paneled French sliding door in the front porch area.) So, from amid the glittering shards on the floor of our antechamber, I retrieved the package and opened it and sang hallelujah: for it contained both volumes of The Complete Poems of A.R. Ammons, which I ordered last Wednesday. They are huge and very heavy, like two big bricks.

Why would one want to write a poem, now, in the year 2018? Maybe I myself should begin writing poetry. It would be interesting to see what kind of stuff I come up with. Even if the poems I compose are ugly, at least I’d have given it a shot. For if I continue to avoid writing poems, I’ll never fill two volumes. And, once I’m dead, it’ll be too late for writing, because the soul needs to be quick in order to tell the brain to move the pen on the page, or the fingers over the keyboard, which makes the poem appear in the book that you buy.

And I’d have to decide, as a poet, if I wanted to make sense or not. And whether or not to abolish all talk of politics. And to focus on love, hate, ennui, indifference, or malaise... To care or not to care about syllables and rhymes, and all those other formal decisions. To battle or befriend my culture’s God. Is a poem like a painting, or does it have to be like a verse from the Bible? I think I’d throw perfection out the window. I’d put things in or leave them out, on a whim. But I don’t want to say “Who cares!” about absolutely everything, because a reader might say…

No, who cares what a reader might say. I’m not concerned with the type of reader who demands that a poet resemble what makes the tribe comfortable. Yet I’d not try to shock anyone; I’ve always said I dislike shock art. But…

—and so on and so forth. If it strikes me as pretty, I guess I’ll keep it.

P.S.

I should tell you what my boss said, before I go. Yesterday I met with my boss, and we talked about what we did with our respective families over the holidays; because we skipped last weekend’s work-meeting, so we felt like we hadn’t seen each other since the Iron Age. I told my boss about how my mother and sister chained me to the pillars of their church and forced me to listen to the whole Christmas sermon; & I pressed with all my might against the pillars, and tried to topple the church down just like Samson did, but I wasn’t evil enough (Judges 16:29-30)…

And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood, and on which it was borne up, of the one with his right hand, and of the other with his left. And Samson said, “Let me die with the Philistines!” And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the priests, and upon all the churchgoers that were therein.

Yeah, like I said, this did not happen for me: OUR church building stubbornly maintained its integrity. So I told my boss how, after we arrived home that evening, I blew my cork: I raised up my voice in anger against my mother and sister, and berated them for their false sham dead faith which stinks.

Then, out of curiosity, I asked my boss if he had ever ascended into histrionics against his own family. And he answered no, and explained that even at the point of his life when he dropped out of school and his father banished him from home, still the conversation that fomented this course of events was calm and civil:

My boss was not my boss back then but just a seventeen-year-old kid, the son of his papa. One morning, he was eating breakfast at the table with the old man, and the topic of school arose – papa said: “Your grades are low; why do you continue to attend school, if you hate it so much?” And his son answered, “Because if I drop out, I fear that you’ll evict me.” And papa said, “So the only reason you stay in school is that otherwise you’re afraid I’ll kick you out of the house?” And his son answered, “Yes.” So papa said, “Well then how about we clarify the situation so that you can make a decision: Why don’t we officially agree that I’m kicking you out at the end of this month?” And his son said, “Fine; then I’ll quit school now and not even finish this current trimester.” And then papa asked, “But how do you expect to survive in the world, without an education?” And his son rose from the table, and lifted his hand up to heaven, and said these words: “I will get a job and work very hard. Someday I’ll start my own company and become a successful businessman.”

Thus concludes my boss’s youthful memory. I told him that I was surprised how he and his father were able to talk so dispassionately about such troubling circumstances. I wondered if I should aim to conduct myself similarly, when talking to my mother, during any future religious disagreements. Then on second thought, I concluded that I was proud of my mad tirade, however reckless and hot-headed I seemed: that’s how the old Hebrew prophets used to do it. I think it’s better to speak from the heart. I didn’t insult my mother or sister directly, or say anything that could be hurtful to them personally: all my criticism was against the church and the traditions in which we were raised.

I don’t like sneaky, duplicitous people, who whisper and quietly plot against others. I like big robust loud confident souls who blast their opinions, but not with a force that’s unwilling to yield, no: a compassionate power that is not overpowering; that’s what I favor: a great voice of praise or indignation that listens carefully and responds with deference to the contents of other minds.

In conclusion: I myself am GOOD; my boss is OK; and my parents are BAD.