1. SOLITUDE (First entry in Henry David Thoreau's Journal, Oct. 22, 1937)
To be alone I find it necessary to escape the present, — I avoid myself. How could I be alone in the Roman emperor’s chamber of mirrors? I seek a garret. The spiders must not be disturbed, nor the floor swept, nor the lumber arranged.
The Germans say, “Es ist ailes wahr wodurch du besser wirst.”
(Translation of the German: All is true through which you become better.)
Meum Mihi
What makes us 'better' is, of course, problematic. It is not necessarily what makes us happier or wiser or less at odds with the world or more productive or whatever is yet more better (stet). As the Romans say, suum cuique, to which I would add tuum tibi, ergo meum mihi. For me, happiness is overrated. As for wisdom, I am with Socrates: he is wisest who knows he is a fool. If it were the case that I knew something worth knowing, it would still be of no use to you. Happily, for all of us, Henry lives now only as stale prase on the lips of his admirers. I would rather be elsewhere. Nor does work make me a better person. I put no stock in the Protestant work ethic. Doing nothing at all suits me quite well. What is better than dillydallying all day? When I am doing nothing I feel more a part of whatever all of this is, itself without purpose, ever in se sibi. Of course, what I have said puts me at odds with worldly ambitions and with those who would win applause. What a waste! I would rather not even be myself if I could not go dark. Henry David, my Henry David, wrote his first journal entry in the autumnal bloom of 1837. As for me, I am writing during the plague of 2020. It's spring.
2. Spring
Oct. 25 (1837) She appears, and we are once more children; we commence again our course with the new year. Let the maiden no more return, and men will become poets for very grief. No sooner has winter left us time to regret her smiles, than we yield to the advances of poetic frenzy. “The flowers look kindly at us from the beds with their child eyes, and in the horizon the snow of the far mountains dissolves into light vapor.” GOETHE, Torquato Tasso.
Spring before spring
Henry David wrote this journal entry in late October. It must be that the autumnal bloom of leaves, the chill air, crisp and aromatic, the silvery breath escaping his lips, makes him think of a spring before spring, which to the poet’s eye is always arriving in all times and places. It is the poet’s gift to us who might otherwise forget that we are always beginning, recreating the world for ourselves and others. Feel the wind on your skin like a kiss. Spring is here.
3. Virgil
Nov. 18 (1837) “Pulsae referunt ad sidera valles” is such a line as would save an epic; and how finely he concludes his “agrestem musam,” now that Silenus has done, and the stars have heard his story, — “Cogere donee oves stabulis, numerumque referre Jussit, et invito processit Vesper Olympo.”
Vesper
The line that would save an epic is from Virgil’s Sixth Ecologue, Pulsae referent ad sidera valles: the struck valleys echo to the stars. The trees, the rivers, the valleys, and stars are the musical instruments upon which the poet strikes his song. Yet, significantly, Virgil’s words are not from his Aeneid. He elevates the "agrestem musam" to the heavens. When all the epic clatter of arms and shouts of heroes have passed away, the pastoral poem reasserts the prior authority of nature’s rhythms: Evening rules even unwilling Olympus and the stars remain as they always are, night and day.
From Eclogue 6
ille canit: pulsae referunt ad sidera ualles:
cogere donec ovis stabulis numerumque referre 85
iussit et invito processit Vesper Olympo.
he (Silenus) sings: the struck valleys echo to the stars:
until to gather the sheep in the stables and to tally their number
he bid and, Olympus unwilling, Vesper advanced.
agrestem musam: rustic muse
4. NAWSHAWTUCT
Nov. 21, (1837) One must needs climb a hill to know what a world he inhabits. In the midst of this Indian summer I am perched on the topmost rock of Nawshawtuct, a velvet wind blowing from the southwest. I seem to feel the atoms as they strike my cheek. Hills, mountains, steeples stand out in bold relief in the horizon, while I am resting on the rounded boss of an enormous shield, the river like a vein of silver encircling its edge, and thence the shield gradually rises to its rim, the horizon. Not a cloud is to be seen, but villages, villas, forests, mountains, one above another, till they are swallowed up in the heavens. The atmosphere is such that, as I look abroad upon the length and breadth of the land, it recedes from my eye, and I seem to be looking for the threads of the velvet. Thus I admire the grandeur of my emerald carriage, with its border of blue, in which I am rolling through space.
We belong to nature
It may be that Henry David is thinking here of the divinely-crafted shield of Achilles. There is, however, great irony between what Achilles' shield depicts and the hero's subsequent slaughter of Trojans. Certainly, strife and death are present in the scenes Hephaestus creates but these take place within a balanced cosmos: the shield’s rim is Oceanus, the sun and moon crown the heavens, there are two noble cities, one at war and another at peace, and there is a young boy plucking his lyre, his song “so clear it could break the heart with longing”:
and what he sang was a dirge for the dying year,
lovely ... his fine voice rising and falling low
as the rest followed, all together, frisking, singing,
shouting, their dancing footsteps beating out the time.
There is nothing depicted on the shield Hephaestus has made that even remotely approximates Achilles’ murderous rampage, against which the Scamander River protests:
“Stop. Achilles! Greater than any man on earth,
greater in outrage too—
for the gods themselves are always at your side!
But if Zeus allows you to kill off all the Trojans,
drive them out of my depths at least, I ask you,
out on the plain and do your butchery there.
All my lovely rapids are crammed with corpses now,
no channel in sight to sweep my currents out to sacred sea—
I’m choked with corpses and still you slaughter more,
you blot out more! Leave me alone, have done—
captain of armies, I am filled with horror!” (XVIII, Fagles)
There is no irony of any sort in Henry David’s description of his rustic shield, though one may wonder what protective purpose his may serve. We know he abhorred the intrusion of the ‘machine in the garden’ and the ‘discordant drumming’ of urban life. If this imagined shield is to provide any meaningful protection, it must be that the pastoral landscape he surveys serves to recall Henry David to himself and fortifies him as he engages in the necessary business of everyday life. Just so we may carry within ourselves Henry David’s rustic shield! It will protect us against all harm, not because we cannot be bruised or broken or put to death as Socrates was, but because we have within an inner resource that cannot be touched. We belong to nature.
It hit, which is another way of saying ‘it happened’, whatever the pull of gravity or the water rising over the banks into homes built on the flood plain or the constellations in their peculiar but inevitable configurations countenanced. It hit like a hot iron let stand too long and so became a sort of dark commentary de rerum natura, ironic, steaming with the smell and heat of compost, natura naturans. And so she left him and traveled near and far until she came to where all the trouble had begun, the yearning, pure and simple, without an object or home, without knowing, and there things stood as they had always been except now she was on her own for the first time and became somehow heedlessly clairvoyant, stirring up memories and desire and crosstalk among the young and the old, sounding more like the bleating of goats and howls of wolves, each on edge for what would happen next, though it be but more of the same. It hit, which is another way of saying, everything and nothing changed.
Follow the path
of leaf fall,
the short cut home
twixt sky and dream.
When you're there,
you'll be right here,
safe with me.
Download Final Note -- Part I Download Final Note - Part II- Trueblood's Jaybird
Resources for Study of Ellison's Invisible Man
Notes for Last Seminar on Ellison’s Invisible Man… Trueblood’s Jaybird
I. Epigraphs: Question and Answer
"You are saved," cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; "you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?"
--Herman Melville, Benito Cereno
Not here, but in Melville’s story, Cereno’s reply is: “The negro." -- an answer that could refer to Babo specifically but also generically to all ‘negroes’. My hypothesis is that Ellison supplies his own answer.
Perhaps there is a clue in the second epigraph:
HARRY: I tell you, it is not me you are looking at,
Not me you are grinning at, not me your confidential looks
Incriminate, but that other person, if person,
You thought I was: let your necrophily
Feed upon that carcase. . .
--T.S. Eliot, Family Reunion
"That other person" is more defined in the last line of Invisible Man:
. . . it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
II. The ending of Chapter 25, leading into the Epilogue
1. Trueblood’ jaybird:
At the end of Chapter 25, Our Man enters into a state he describes as being between dreaming and waking, liking his situation to that of Trueblood’s jaybird:
It was a state neither of dreaming nor of waking, but somewhere in between, in which I was caught like Trueblood's jaybird that yellow jackets had paralyzed in every part but his eyes. (456)
Here is Trueblood’s jaybird:
“ . . . It seems to me that all I can do is take my punishment. I tell myself, Maybe if you suffer for it, it will be best. Maybe you owe it to Kate to let her beat you. You ain't guilty, but she thinks you is. You don't want her to beat you, but she think she got to beat you. You want to git up, but you too weak to move.
"I was too. I was frozen to where I was like a youngun what done stuck his lip to a pump handle in the wintertime. I was just like a jaybird that the yellow jackets done stung 'til he's paralyzed -- but still alive in his eyes and he's watchin' 'em sting his body to death.” (my italics) (54)
2. Free from Illusions?
After the above quotation there is a jump to the play of Our Man’s mind as it hovers between dreaming and waking. The description is all in italics, a technique Ellison has likely adopted from Faulkner. As Our Man, now a prisoner of those who have kept him on the run (Norton, Bledsoe, Jack, etc.), declares he has seen through all their illusions and lies, one-eyed Jack replies, “Not quite,” then seemingly castrates him, leaving his genitals hanging from a bridge, though it may otherwise be Our Man’s eyes, making the case all the more like that of Oedipus. Jack declares that now Our Man is free of illusions, but Our Man laughs, and Jack is curious:
"Why do you laugh?" he said.
"Because at a price I now see that which I couldn't see," I said.
"What does he think he sees?" they said.
And Jack came closer, threatening, and I laughed. "I'm not afraid now," I said. "But if you'll look, you'll see . . . It's not invisible . . ."
"See what?" they said.
"That there hang not only my generations wasting upon the water --" And now the pain welled up and I could no longer see them.
"But what? Go on," they said.
"But your sun . . ."
"Yes?"
"And your moon . . ."
"He's crazy!"
"Your world . . ."
"I knew he was a mystic idealist!" Tobitt said.
"Still," I said, "there's your universe, and that drip-drop upon the water you hear is all the history you've made, all you're going to make. Now laugh, you scientists. Let's hear you laugh!"
And now the bridge, from which his genitals or eyes are hanging, morphs into the threatening image of an “iron man”:
And high above me now the bridge seemed to move off to where I could not see, striding like a robot, an iron man, whose iron legs clanged doomfully as it moved. And then I struggled up, full of sorrow and pain, shouting, "No, no, we must stop him!" (457-457)
This is an image of the world as all outside with no inside. No ghost in the machine.
3. Fully Awake
Of course, this description of becoming free of illusion is itself but an illusion. It’s like Hume suggests, we can only correct impressions by another impression, which will require yet another impression to validate, etc. So it seems with illusions: the freeing from one illusion entangles us in yet another. How do we stop this whirligig? What would it mean to be illusion-free? Would the universe itself vanish? It seems we have no choice but to be illusion-bound. There appears to exist, however, a time and place in the Underground where we may yet stand between an old illusion and a new one, at least until we are chased out or ready to move ahead, knowing that we are each feeding upon illusion (i.e. Eliot’s “necrophily”), invisible to each other:
And I awoke in the blackness.
Fully awake now, I simply lay there as though paralyzed. I could think of nothing else to do. Later I would try to find my way out, but now I could only lie on the floor, reliving the dream. All their faces were so vivid that they seemed to stand before me beneath a spotlight. They were all up there somewhere, making a mess of the world. Well, let them. I was through and, in spite of the dream, I was whole.
And now I realized that I couldn't return to Mary's, or to any part of my old life. I could approach it only from the outside, and I had been as invisible to Mary as I had been to the Brotherhood. No, I couldn't return to Mary's, or to the campus, or to the Brotherhood, or home. I could only move ahead or stay here, underground. So I would stay here until I was chased out. Here, at least, I could try to think things out in peace, or, if not in peace, in quiet. I would take up residence underground. The end was in the beginning. (458)
Perhaps now at least we will be restrained by reminding ourselves that our truth is itself yet another illusion.
III. The Epilogue
We now return to where the Prologue ended, still underground. Our man has told us his story, and we are waiting for him either to be chased out or choose for himself to move ahead. In the Epilogue, he thinks again of his grandfather’s deathbed advice and arrives at a radically new interpretation:
-hell, he must have meant the principle, that we were to affirm the principle on which the country was built and not the men, or at least not the men who did the violence. (460)
It is striking that Our Man never actually tells us what that principle is, leaving it perhaps to readers to say or rather formulate for themselves, e.g. All men are created equal. It seems to be much the same situation in which we find ourselves with respect to the name of Our Man. Ellison waits for each reader to insert his own. Yet, we cannot help but wonder how it is that the words of the grandfather in Chapter 1 can possibly be so interpreted. It seems a leap beyond the words:
"Son, after I'm gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open." (13)
How does Our Man account for “death and destruction” in the new interpretation? Here’s the reasoning:
Hell, weren't they their own death and their own destruction except as the principle lived in them and in us? And here's the cream of the joke: Weren't we part of them as well as apart from them and subject to die when they died? I can't figure it out; it escapes me. But what do I really want, I've asked myself. Certainly not the freedom of a Rinehart or the power of a Jack, nor simply the freedom not to run. No, but the next step I couldn't make, so I've remained in the hole. (461)
Surely this is not the grandfather – it is too great a leap! (See note at III.4). This must be Ellison himself speaking through the mask of his Invisible Man, acknowledging his own evident “sickness” in what he has written:
The fact is that you carry part of your sickness within you, at least I do as an invisible man. I carried my sickness and though for a long time I tried to place it in the outside world, the attempt to write it down shows me that at least half of it lay within me. (461, my italics)
Ellison then adds a melancholy note, “None of us seems to know who he is or where he's going” (462).
2. The Underground Man Out and About
Strangely, Our Man tells us from his underground residence that “the other day” he met Mr. Norton on the subway. Norton fails to recognize him and grows apprehensive. Our Man gleefully mocks him:
"Don't be afraid, Mr. Norton," I said. "There's a guard down the platform there. You're safe. Take any train; they all go to the Golden D --"But now an express had rolled up and the old man was disappearing quite spryly inside one of its doors. I stood there laughing hysterically. I laughed all the way back to my hole. (464)
It may be with some surprise that we now know Our Man has been out and about. Though it must be true that Our Man has come out before to get supplies, this sole mention seems meant to drive home the point that the “hole” he lives in is a residence he carries within himself. Returning to “his hole” means returning to solitary thinking. This revelation is in step with the realization that it is now Ellison talking to the reader. (see III.A above) It allows us to see what we have implicitly understood all along the way: the underground is a metaphor for that "within that passeth show."
3. So why do I write?
After the encounter with Norton, Ellison again seems again to speak for himself through Our Man’s mask:
So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some things. Without thepossibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "file and forget," and I can neither file norforget. Nor will certain ideas forget me; they keep filing away at my lethargy,my complacency. Why should I be the one to dream this nightmare? Why should I be dedicated and set aside -- yes, if not to at least tell a few people about it? There seems to be no escape. Here I've set out to throw my anger into the world's face, but now that I've tried to put it all down the old fascination with playing a role returns, and I'm drawn upward again. So that even before I finish I've failed (maybe my anger is too heavy; perhaps, being a talker, I've used too many words). But I've failed. The very act of trying to put it all down has confused me and negated some of the anger and some of the bitterness. So it is that now I denounce and defend, or feel prepared to defend. I condemn and affirm, say no and say yes, say yes and say no. I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some of it down I have to love. I sell you no phony forgiveness, I'm a desperate man -but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love. (465)
4. The grandfather's humanity:
Immediately after the passage above, Ellison addresses the problem we noted above about the re-interpretation of the grandfather’s advice, speaking again in the voice of Our Man:
Once I thought my grandfather incapable of thoughts about humanity, but I was wrong. Why should an old slave use such a phrase as, "This and this or this has made me more human," as I did in my arena speech? Hell, he never had any doubts about his humanity -- that was left to his "free" offspring. He accepted his humanity just as he accepted the principle. It was his, and the principle lives on in all its human and absurd diversity. So now having tried to put it down I have disarmed myself in the process. You won't believe in my invisibility and you'll fail to see how any principle that applies to you could apply to me.(465)
Ellison has, as he says, disarmed or rather unmasked himself.
5. Necrophily (see discussion of epigraphs above):
Our man now tell us the “hibernation” is over, his nose full of a most literary stench:
The hibernation is over. I must shake off the old skin and come up for breath. There's a stench in the air, which, from this distance underground, might be the smell either of death or of spring -- I hope of spring. But don't let me trick you, there is a death in the smell of spring and in the smell of thee as in the smell of me. And if nothing more, invisibility has taught my nose to classify the stenches of death. (466)
It is a nose for ‘necrophily” that all writers of “true fiction” must cultivate. In the final lines of the novel, Ellison speaks on behalf of the brotherhood of writers of fiction:
Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
We are now back at the very beginning of the novel, prepared to answer Delano's question. (See discussion of the epigraphs above)
Final Word:
What I have read time and again in Ellison’s essays and interviews and then again in the words of Trueblood and echoed as well in the words of Ellison’s Invisible Man is, “I ain’t nobody but myself.” For Ellison, that means primarily a man among other men, who cannot be simply defined as an African American writier, but rather as one who uses the experiences and the resources available to him just as other writers have done in the long tradition of which he has his place right along side Joyce, Melville, Faulker and even Homer. Do we not all, as surely as we live in our own place and time, jump the gap of time and live in Yoknapatawpha, Dublin, Ithaca, Harlem, and on the high sea with Ishmael?
It yet may be understandable that Ellison’s novel has not received unmixed reviews, from black audiences in particular. Indeed, on one occasion at least he was called an Uncle Tom to his face. It may even be that Ellison anticipated this attack, though we should be careful not to simplistically identify the author with his character:
“Ignore his lying tongue,” Ras shouted. “Hang him up to teach the black people a lesson, and theer be no more traitors. No more Uncle Toms. Hang him up theer with them blahsted dummies!” (557)
Those who would use such a pejorative have likely never read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Still, it hurt Ellison deeply.
The following is Ellison’s reply to a West Point student who asked if Ellison considered Invisible Man to be a protest novel:
I would think that implicitly the novel protests. It protests the agonies of growing up. It protests the problem of trying to find a way into a complex, intricately structured society in a way which would allow this particular man to behave in a manly way, and which would allow him to seize some instrumentalities of political power. That is where the protest is on one level. On another level, the protest lies in my trying to make a story out of these elements without falling into the clichés which have marked and marred most fiction about American Negroes—that is, to write literature instead of political protest. Beyond this, I would say simply that in the very act of trying to create something, there is implicit a protest against the way things are, a protest against man’s vulnerability before the larger forces of society and the universe. We make fiction out of that kind of protest, which is similar to the kind of protest that is involved in your mastering your bodies; your mastering the physical, intellectual, military and legal disciplines which you are here for. All of this is a protest, a human protest against that which is, against the raw and unformed way that we come into the world. I don’t think you have to demand any more protest than that. I think, on the other hand, if the novelist tells the truth, if he writes eloquently and depicts believable human beings and believable human situations, then he has done more than simply protest. I think that his task is to present the human, to make it eloquent, and to provide some sense of transcendence over the given—that is, to make his protest meaningful, significant and eloquent of human value.
It is unlikely this “eloquent” reply would have satisfied Ellison’s detractors. For them, Ellison is trying too hard to be accepted by the white literary establishment. I am myself sensitive to the argument that Ellison's explanation gives comfort to his white readers when he perhaps should have made them "vomit and burst wide open" as the grandfather suggests. In fact, I believe Ellison does this. It is difficult to read scenes like the Battle Royal or Sibyl begging to be raped by a black "buck" without wanting to vomit. It may be that such a result is the hidden meaning behind the grandfather's advice which he actually gave not to the grandson, but rather to the father of Our Man, Ellison himself.
To ask more of Ellison seems unfair. Ellison grew up with what is sometimes called the western canon, reading Homer, Eliot and the rest. As Trueblood says, “I ain’t nobody but myself.”
May we all avoid the fate of Trueblood’s jaybird!
" . . . a jaybird that the yellow jackets done stung 'til he's paralyzed -- but still alive in his eyes and he's watchin' 'em sting his body to death."
The mist on the mountains lifts
ghostly greens glimmer
and a new day darkens the valley
far below—your fingers tracing
a line across the high ridge
that runs just above my eyes:
I hold my breath—a sudden
swoop of wind and wing
He saw the child in the woman, wild, innocent, mischievous, vulnerable and a nuisance to herself and others, not unlike how he had been when he was six, but try as he might, posing before his nemesis the mirror, he could barely conjure up the feeling of what it was like to be so young. Then one day, seeing his students for the first time after cataract surgery, he became unaccountably double or rather blind-sighted, seeing each of them as younger and older than they actually were, side-stepping reality, if you like, but yet somehow getting it all right. There was Sally, for instance, with flowing red hair, freckles, of course, and a smile that betrayed her awareness of how beautiful she was. Now, however, he saw her crying for papa when he would leave for work and crying again for papa when he departed this earth. She would in time become the sort of smartass, assertive woman, ever and anon unsparing of her smile, who would one day become his boss, if he were to live so long. And then there was Leo, a tortured face hopelessly entangled in his own arms and legs that would flop about like Udon noodles, his hands and feet dangling precariously at the extremities. Now, however, he saw Leo as an infant, well-composed in his mother’s arms, being rocked to sleep to Ariel's own sweet music in his mother's lilting voice, Where the bee sucks, there suck I and Come unto these yellow sands and Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies, complete with all the dings and dongs of the bells and the strangely soft crowing of roosters, and it seemed to him like riding on a bat's wing, and then, at almost the same moment, he saw Leo as a father, impeccably dressed in a three-piece suit, having finally realized the benefit of his mother's theatrical training, with one daughter clinging to his leg as if it were the trunk of a tree, complaining that it was her turn, and another, younger, smaller daughter whom he was dangerously throwing up in the air and having to lurch to catch in the nick of time, dragging along the first daughter who refused to let go of his leg, and miraculously not a trace of fear in the eyes of the at-risk child. After all, papa was strong and now he could dance. He could even feel Leo's future strength and grace in his own arms and legs, and, naturally enough, found himself, the teacher, 73 years of age, intending on his next visit to ask his doctor to approve a disabled parking permit, now waiting like the other students for class to begin. He heard himself announce an in-class writing assignment: they were to write about a childhood memory and then trace how that memory was like an oracle -- you know, like at the Oracle of Delphi that we all learned about in the sixth grade. So embarrassing, his student-self was thinking, surely the old man can do better than that. All that Greek mythology was just a boatload of malarkey. Still, he knew he could hit that assignment out of the park just as he had actually hit a home run when he was thirteen, his team losing by three runs in the championship game for interstellar glory. It had been the bottom of the ninth inning, two outs, bases loaded, etc. He had even been disciplined enough not to allow his minuscule batting average of .023 or that he was leading the league in strikeouts to shake his resolve. The coach, not wishing to tempt fate, gave his butt a good smack, keeping his exhortation brief:: “It’s just another at-bat, son.” Of course, he was totally making all this up, but on the other hand, he had imagined this moment so often that the fantasy had come to substitute for any known facts. Indeed, everything he wrote for that assignment was a shameless fabrication, yet he knew that, like Odysseus, who was himself a skilled and inveterate liar, he could find within himself the resourcefulness to take on any Polyphemus he was likely to meet and prevail. He noted with satisfaction how he had worked words from their class vocabulary list into his essay -- stellar words like nemesis, precarious, anon, inveterate, and malarkey and, coming soon in lines yet to be written, peripherality, baptize, and charlatan -- and was confident that he had hit yet another home run, though he was also aware that his teacher-self, spying on him with annoyingly persistent peripherality, was laughing at his student-self who had just previously sneered at mythology. Nevertheless, despite this handicap, he believed he had in fact become like his students or, as matters stood, like his fellow students, fearing as they did that he would finally be discovered to be a charlatan, a nobody, and so consequently baptized himself a true student of the game, always striving to learn new tricks to beat the system that, despite all his best efforts and those of his classmates, would still win out in the end and beat the crap out of each and every one of them.
One apology
begets another.
You were there,
I was not. We’re
a sorry pair.
There is no fault
you can own
that does not double
mine. Worse yet,
I am smiling.
Sometimes a lie is so big that even after it explodes
It yet infects everything we do and say,
Ready to blossom again and spread its poison.
To defeat the lie requires we repeat the lie,
And so it lives on, happy just to hang around.
We become like liars who tell us they are lying.
Give me words that go from truth to Truth
Like a stone thrown to Heaven
That returns to earth
As Rain.
If you will not dance with me
I’ll sing for the stars and the trees
And there where lovers should be
I’ll gather the flowers for thee
Then buzz with the buzz of the bees
And offer their honey to please
And if you don’t dance with me
Then a waltz with the sea it shall be.
(..)
"Lumière juste érigée
En chemins, en collines,
En cyprès...choses lointaines
Ou proches que jamais
Nous n'avons révélées,
Faute de mots exacts
Et d'un cœur transparent."
François Cheng, poète sino-français né en 1929, in"Cantos toscans"
*
(Own work)
S'épanouir
Belamcanda chinensis (Blackberry lily)
"Trouver la joie dans le ciel, dans les arbres, dans les fleurs. Il y a des fleurs partout pour qui veut bien les voir."
Henri Matisse, peintre français (1869-1954) in "Jazz"
Molto vivace
♫♪ youtu.be/_xyl5UaB2SU (Beethoven - Symphony No. 9; Molto vivace-)
(own work)
Troubled sky over the glacier
We too wear the mask
But when we blush and smile
And tell our lies, our lies
Taste sweet all the while.
pleynly arcing wur
screethes and sciffs
erth chilly clumfs lern
© Leonora; all rights reserved
Living in a Bubble
© Leonora; all rights reserved
Le chemin de la découverte
© Leonora; all rights reserved
The old part of Jodhpur, near the Mehrangarh Fort (where this picture was taken) has buildings mainly painted in blue.
Some say the colour is associated closely with the Brahmins, India’s priestly caste, and the blue houses of the old city belong to families of that caste. Consequently, you might well hear the properties referred to as the ‘Brahmin Houses’.
There are those who believe that the blue colour help deter termites.
Some locals believe that the colour blue is a good reflector of sun rays, so painting the house like this will keep their house cool in warmer months.
~
Dans le vieux quartier de la ville de Jodhpur l'ensemble des maisons est peint en bleu.
On dit que les maisons bleues sont le résultat de l’étendue des croyances dirigées par les castes. Les brahmanes, autrement considérés comme les plus pures des castes indiennes, se seraient installés dans ces maisons bleues pour se différencier des membres des autres castes. Une tradition qui est restée.
On dit aussi que les maisons de Jodhpur sont peintes en bleu pour combattre la chaleur.., ou les termites,.
Et puis la présence de plantations d’indigo à Jodhpur et dans les régions voisines pourrait expliquer un choix économique.
"Laissez votre vie danser avec légèreté sur les bords du Temps"
("Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time")
Rabindranath Tagore, poète indien (1861-1941) in "Le Jardinier d’amour"
(Bob Dylan - Crossing the Rubicon-)
He was determined this time not to cut his fingers as he sliced the oranges. He would focus and keep his fingers well away from the blade. He remembered all too well how previously his blood had flowed onto the oranges and pooled on the plate. He knew it wasn’t just because he was getting old, fading into memory and the lure of the trees and his first kiss. She had been as nervous as he and had closed her eyes. Now all he could think of was feeding her oranges and the taste on her lips. And suddenly, she had bitten his lip, making it bleed. And then, more softly, she was feeding him. She was delicious and he . . . . he was lost in the trees. He put the knife down and wept.
Whitman in Section 6 of "Song of Myself" gives readers a way into their own expansive poetic consciousness. Whitman models for us how asking a childlike question, e.g. What is the grass? Where does the sound go? -- is able to stir the creative imagination. First, the question and then, rather than being the wise guy or gal, simply acknowledge what is true: I do not know, and continue, I guess . . . maybe . . . . .perhaps it is . . . and soon enough Whitman will greet you like the morning light:
What is this morning light? I do not know
Perhaps it is the song of my heart.
In the end, we know no more
Than the fall of rain upon dry land.
Where then come these flowers?
Perhaps they hear me calling
No one should die young
But they do
No one should die alone
But they do
No one will forget
Listen!
Wave upon wave
Breaking its heart
Like thunder
On a distant shore.
Niko, a student in my Humanities class back in 2010, died in a car accident in November 2020. He was a wonderfully creative young man and a joy to teach. For more information about Niko and how beloved he was: Niko Dellios.
The Syllabus: He arrived at school that day eager to teach his students the meaning of logos, not the Gospel Word, but the Heraclitean River in which no man can step twice -- or was it once? Whatever. He was blooming like a rose and was about to explain it all when he noticed he had in fact no students. Was it a holiday? He couldn’t remember. He then noticed a hammer on his desk and several 12-inch nails. Before he could think, he was running, though others would call it falling. The students arrived on schedule and found him lying on the floor like yesterday’s news, his eyes bugged out, mumbling over and over “All is lost.” When he recovered, he returned to teaching, but this time he stuck to the syllabus.