Yet more recent readings

[Here’s a picture of what some company plans to do to this area – it’s from a local publication where such proposals are discussed.]

Knowing other people is intelligence, 
knowing yourself is wisdom. 
Overcoming others takes strength, 
overcoming yourself takes greatness. 
Contentment is wealth.

—from the TAO TE CHING (#33)
translated by Ursula K. Le Guin

Dear diary,

I can’t think of anything else to say, so I guess I’ll just tell you more about what I’ve been reading.

For novels, I just finished Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy and loved it. This was my first time thru it. I’ve loved all of Hardy’s novels that I’ve sought out – I think you’d love them too.

And I read The Adventures of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. I loved it less than Tess, but I still worship Dickens; everything he writes is delightful, central, universal.

I jump at any reason, however small or casual, to return to Shakespeare; so recently my sweetheart & I read thru Macbeth together; because we tried to watch a movie version, which was so bad that we turned it off partway thru.

Then I read Antony and Cleopatra, because I happened to get a copy of Harold Bloom’s brief book about Cleopatra whose subtitle is I Am Fire and Air. Bloom never fails to amaze me – what he says is lucid and helpful, yet somehow it also feels thrillingly heterodox; like one is being made privy to secret knowledge that proves truer than the timeworn traditions. Among the most genuine Shakesperean scholars, Bloom is one who seems to have lived the advice that Emerson articulates in his early journals:

Let no man flatter himself with the hope of true good or solid enjoyment from the study of Shakspeare or Scott. Enjoy them as recreation. You cannot please yourself by going to stare at the moon; ’tis beautiful when in your course it comes.

Bloom notes how Cleopatra identifies with Isis, seeing herself as that goddess’s incarnation; and he highlights how, to gain advantages, she is always staging events and instinctively yet consciously acting her part in them. For her, real life is a series of roles to play. Let me share a couple quotes – here’s Bloom on the titular couple:

One way to begin apprehending Cleopatra and Antony is to appreciate that they are the first celebrities in our debased sense. Charismatics, the lovers confer shreds of their glory on both their followers and their enemies. Their bounty is boundless. Antony is generous, Cleopatra something else. Hers is a giving that famishes the taker. She beguiles and she devastates.

& here’s one more passage from Bloom’s same book, concerning an audience’s perspectives on the play in general:

In Antony and Cleopatra how you see is who you are. If you think Antony a ruffian in decline and Cleopatra an aging whore, then you know better how you feel but the greatness has evaded you. Should you find Antony the Herculean hero, still glorious as he wanes, and Cleopatra the sublime of erotic womanhood, burning to a final kindling, you are far closer to joining in the sad yet wonderfully comic celebration.

I also recently finished Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and was won over by it while also wanting to fight it. It’s the kind of book that goads you to write a counter-book. Every question about dreams that Freud claims to answer only causes more questions to arise in its wake. But it’s good to be provoked like this – it inflames the imagination.

Why do dreams need to be interpreted, anyway? Why not just let them be? Or, at least, if one must give dreams a meaning, then why must it be so staid and tame? Are there no meanings that possess a hearty spirit? Why is poetic abundance treated as if it requires amendment? I like William Blake’s Proverb of Hell: “Exuberance is Beauty.” Also Walt Whitman’s lines from “Song of Myself”:

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; / How could I answer the child? . . . . I do not know what it is any more than he.

Freud’s charm and his obnoxiousness both stem from the fact that he will never admit that he does not know. Yet it’s a compliment to Freud that I must call on the best of the poets to strike back – Whitman says later:

What is known I strip away . . . . I launch all men and women forward with me into the unknown.

Freud labors to make known secret meanings. But I prefer Walt to strip away the interpretation and let the dream flourish. Moses says, “would God that all the LORD’s people were prophets”! [Numbers 11:29] – I say: Let us dream richer dreams. Or if we must refine and align our visions with something, let it be the heart of humankind; let it be harmoniousness with all life: Bring science into alignment with these things, rather than dreams into alignment with science.

Anyway, now that I’ve finished Freud’s Interpretation, I plan on continuing to read through his other works; but, first, I decided to check out a work by Alexander Welsh called Freud’s Wishful Dream Book. That’s what I’m reading right now. It’s short – I’ll finish it today – and it’s refreshing. It’s like attending a conversation whose participants are thankfully not fanatical adherents to psychoanalysis but rather unprejudiced newcomers who have all just completed a first reading of Freud’s masterpiece. Hearing the opinions of others pleases and stirs me, which is why I seek out literary criticism; it also fortifies me, which in this case is more than usually appreciated, since Freud is such a slippery salesman.

§

I’ll end with this footnote taken at random from Dreams, Illusions, and Other Realities by Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, who cites as her source Milton Rokeach’s The Three Christs of Ypsilanti:

Rokeach tells of a schizophrenic who claimed to be both the governor of Illinois and our world’s Creator; he justified the former role by pointing out, “I have to earn my living, you know,” and the latter by walking into a Public Services office and announcing, “I am God. I would like to apply for Social Security.”