botanizing

Frolic wind to sinuous slink

On a recent Saturday, I sat outside reading Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero.  Ondaatje’s mention of John Milton’s Paradise Lost sent me into the house to my bookshelves.  Returning outside with an old edition of The Norton Anthology of Poetry, I put Ondaatje aside to read Milton.

In the anthologized material from Milton’s poetry, I enjoyed his imagery and language, and I found this:  “The frolic wind that breathes the spring” in “L’Allegro.”  If one were to write about spring, Milton’s line would make a nice little epigraph.

It was a hot day, well past spring, and there was not so much as even a frolic breeze.  I wondered what line of verse about summer might provide an epigraph for this season and serve to complement “The frolic wind that breathes the spring.”  No verse came to mind, although a melody began to insinuate itself in my thinking.  George Gershwin’s “Summertime.”  Perhaps summer is less a season of poetry than of song. Gershwin’s “Summertime” repeated in my head.  It had the sinuous slink of summer.

Where life makes sense

Where life makes sense, I turn.  I stop in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, for a cup of tea, exiting Highway 1 just beyond the sign that proclaims the town’s motto ‘where life makes sense’ to pull into a Husky minimart. 

I peel open the white envelope that holds a bag of Red Rose tea and drop the bag in my thermos cup.  Very hot water makes sense, I think, but this reflects my narrow view.  It takes hot water to steep tea, bringing-out the flavors, fragrances, and colors.  I press downward the red lever for the water. 

‘Where life makes sense’ is epigraphic.  The phrase gives pause, leading me to consider life on the Canadian prairie.  My initial ‘feel good’ thoughts, as my tea steeps, give way to Camus’s sense of life as absurd.  It’s difficult to see life making sense when absurdities arise to bash us each day.  In Camus, I appreciate his sense that it’s possible to wend one’s way through those absurdities through creativity.  “Creating is living doubly,” Camus says.  He writes of Proust’s collecting flowers, wallpapers, and anxieties not as sensible in some given scheme of a proper life, but as acts that create life.  I wonder what Swift Current means to claim in its motto that here life makes sense.

There’s a line at the cashier. We wait for a man who wants more than he has brought to the till—he walks away from the cashier while we wait. The cashier mutters to another man behind the counter.

What would Camus do in Swift Current?  I think about him working here at the minimart as a cashier.  In his time-off, he reads Proust and Nietzsche and writes essays.  The locals, having a good sense of humour, make soft jokes about his pessimism. He talks too much about suicide and crime.  A few of the women like to chat with him about Proust, but Nietzsche . . . no, all they say in that regard is “Nietzsche, eh?”  Would Camus find some greater sense of life in Swift Current than in some other place?

At the edge of Swift Current, I pass a Walmart and begin to fear that life here has succumbed to bits of nonsense.

*  *  *
Quote from p. 70 of The Myth of Sisyphus (1955; Vintage paperback edition) by Albert Camus.

An Edifice in a Swamp

I have been reading—wading through, as one must with French intellectualization—Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (translated by Maria Jolas), and there are these pieces of grand epigraphic quality; that is, Bachelard presents seductive statements, each drawing-out my pen to mark for posterity, that draw one toward his ideas and impel their extension into one’s own surroundings.  They are edifices in a swamp, those bits that long to the epigraphic, for the rest is a muck of text. My thoughts drift as I read then wade, heavy step after heavy step, until my attention is caught again by another edifice in the swamp. My favorite of his statements could be chiseled in an architrave (but remember, there is a swamp behind the door); it’s this from near the beginning:

“One must be receptive to the image at the moment it appears:  if there be a philosophy of poetry, it must appear and re-appear through a significant verse, in total adherence to an isolated image; to be exact, in the very ecstasy of the newness of the image.”

This has the provocation one wants in an epigraph. Yes, it’s a tad long and has too many clauses, but it has the resound one wants for the architrave.  Ecstasy in an image is an idea that appeals. 

‘to unwrap the human package’

In the last hour of light I began to convert the marginalia of my reading of Lesley Chamberlain’s Nietzsche in Turin into electronic notes.   Her sentences could be zealous, but I grew enamoured of their feeling for Nietzsche as I read the book, and today, typing quotes and notes, I realized that she had created almost aphorisms on Nietzsche.  How appropriate that Nietzsche, with his tendency to render philosophy and world in aphorism, be played like a short melody, sweetened and simplified.

Out of context, as if held at arm’s length, Chamberlain’s almost aphorisms on Nietzsche have the art of epigraphs; that’s how I offer them here:

“He hated being stuck in himself.” (p. 75)

“Well, who knows, but certainly the problem of being effective in a life which rejected him hurt Nietzsche greatly.”  (p. 130)

“He listed his intentions to recover from crisis and they mainly consisted in living out his own fiction.”  (p. 141)

“Philosophy was for him a vital, charming and desperate business, in which he far preferred writing metaphors than concocting footnotes to Plato.” (p. 8)

“For, as he said, all great philosophies are disguised personal confessions.” (p. 106)

“Becoming a Wanderer, talking to his Shadow, gave him common experience with exiles from Diogenes to Dante.”  (p. 13)

“He was a philosophical troubadour who after the death of God found his vocation in singing of things near at hand; now he was to map the survival of the human individual, whom godlessness had locked inside his imagination; he was to unwrap the human package suspended between animal determinacy and the self-overcoming.”  (p. 159)

“The style leads to the man, even if he insists he is wearing mask.” (p. 8)

“He lay in bed in a white robe and recognized no one.”  (p. 218) [Weimar 1897]

[Each epigraphic quote is from Lesley Chamberlain, 1996, Nietzsche in Turin:  An Intimate Biography. Picador, New York]

Young Burckhardt Projects

“Everything about my study of history, like my passion for travel, mania for landscapes and my interest in art, springs from an enormous desire for attentive contemplation.”

This was the young Jakob Burckhardt writing in a letter of 14 June 1842 (found in Briefe 1:  204-205). Burckhardt at the time was just finishing his formal university studies in Berlin and would return in the next year to Basel, Switzerland, where he would ultimately gain renown as a historian and cultural critic  .

Baudelaire Finds a Mirror

“Painters, poets, philosophers, they’re all much of a muchness.” 
Charles Baudelaire in letter to Alphonse de Calonne, 10 November 1858

[This is from page 119 of  Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire:  The Conquest of Solitude, translated and edited by Rosemary Lloyd, 1986, University of Chicago Press.]