Noctambulate

Testing, always testing

2011-09-27T17:45:00.000-05:00

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Again?

2011-01-29T10:17:00.001-06:00

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And?

2011-01-29T10:07:00.001-06:00

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Hello to you too

2011-01-29T10:01:00.001-06:00

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What about email?

2010-09-04T14:39:00.001-05:00

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All in order?

2010-09-04T09:51:00.001-05:00

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How are you this morning?

2010-08-27T10:20:00.001-05:00

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I'm looking too!

2010-07-14T06:18:00.000-05:00

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An apprenticeship to power: Balzac's prologue to "About Catherine De Medici"

2010-01-30T13:32:00.000-06:00

Balzac's "About Catherine De Medici" (first titled "Catherine De Medici Explained") -- a passionately-argued defense of the widely villified Queen -- begins with a political philosophic essay in defense of Royal and Church authority. An interesting starting-point for considering the social politics of the "Comedie Humaine" as a whole and also Balzac's relation to Dumas and the attitude of both toward the Revoutionary and Napoleonic periods. Dumas' own novel of Catherine and her daughter Marie ("Queen Margot") appeared just two years later and did not partake of Balzac's revisionist royalism.

"Historians are privileged liars, who lend their pen to popular beliefs, exactly as most of the newspapers of the day express nothing but the opinions of their readers."

Balzac's Torryism:

-- "Liberty -- no, but liberties -- yes; well-defined and circumscribed liberties. This is in the nature of things."

-- On the Calvinist agenda for reform: "The outcome of free-will, religious liberty, and political liberty (note, this does not mean civil liberty) is France as we now see it. And what is France in 1840? A country exclusively absorbed in material interests, devoid of patriotism; where authority is powerless; where electoral rights, the fruit of freewill and political liberty, raise none but mediocrities; where brute force is necessary to oppose the violence of the populace; where discussion, brought to bear on the smallest matter, checks every action of the body politic; and where individualism -- the odious result of the infinite subdivision of property, which destroys family cohesion -- will devour everything, even the nation."

-- "Every power, whether legitimate or illegitimate, must defend itself when it is attacked; but strange to say, while the people is heroic when it is triumphs over the nobility, the authorities are murderers when they oppose the people! . . . The massacres of the Revolution are the reply to the massacre of Saint-Bartholomew."

-- "No one suspects how greatly printing has helped to give body both to the envy which attends persons in high places, and to the popular irony which sums up the converse view of every great historical fact." [Balzac goes on to complain here of Shakespeare's comic portrait of the apparently heroic and quite continent Sir John Falstaff]

-- "The power of the masses is accountable to no one; the power of one is obliged to account to its subjects, great and small alike."

-- "Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established."

[Reading all the above, one sees it is not by whim that Balzac added the "de" to his name as part of his self-creation as a writer]

Catherine De Medici, Balzac writes, weilded "the most dangerous but surest of political weapons -- Craft."

Catherine's chilling "Italian" political philosophy in story of her response to her son Henry III's announcement of his execution of a member of the rival House of Lorraine: "Well cut, my son. Now you must sew-up again" [that is: buy the Lorraine back into the political system]

Among the methods used by Catherine to counteract Henry III's homosexuality is "a supper to nude women" given in a royal banquet hall when he is being welcomed back from Poland to assume the French throne. Balzac, who admiringly assesses Catherine's reign as a "manly rule" states that her attempts to reform her son failed and that, politically speaking, the Valois dynasty died with her.

Balzac backtracks to discuss Catherine's formative years in Medici Florence and as a royal wife in the Valois court:

Balzac suggests one highly formative experience of Catherine was being caught-up, as a 9 year old orphan, in a siege by Florentine republicans and threatened, by Castiglione, no less, with being turned-over to the soldiers. "All revolutions of the populace," Balzac notes dryly, "are alike."

A side-effect of Renaissance Italy's surfeit of talent and genius: "When men are so great, they are not afraid to confess their weakness; hence, no doubt, this golden age for bastards."

Establishing the political parameters of Catherine's era, Balzac sketches a time when the murder of nobles and Popes alike was commonplace. Poisoning was a daily threat: "royal personages had their meals served to them in padlocked boxes of which they had the key."

Balzac approvingly quotes Spinoza on political succession: a new King "must confirm the maxims of him whose place he fills, and walk in the same ways of government."

Upon her unfaithful husband's (Henry II) death, Catherine begins a power struggle on behalf of her son and also takes a lover. Her political rivals contest both attempts to establish herself, seizing the army and leadership of the clergy and forcing her to send her lover to the Bastille.

"Such," Balzac writes, "was this woman's apprenticeship to the exercise of power."
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2010-01-11T12:30:00.000-06:00

The orphan boy "Wart," who will become King Arthur grows up in the shadow of Sir Ector's legitimate son and heir, the easily-bored and prematurely pompous, but essentially good-hearted Kay. The boys are "educated" in the ways of rural gentry: "Mondays and Fridays, tilting and horsemanship; Tuesdays, hawking; Wednesdays, fencing; Thursdays, archery; Saturdays, the theory of chivalry, with the proper measures to be blown on all occasions, terminology of the chase and hunting etiquette." Sir Ector is concerned that the boys will soon need a more formal tutor.

After a night on his own in the forest (seeking to recover the goshawk Cully lost by Kay's carelessness) Wart encounters his first questing knight, Sir Pellinore, and then finds his own peculiar tutor -- the magician Merlyn, who stares at the boy "with a kind of unwinking and benevolent curiosity." Merlyn is living backwards in time and his rustic home includes everything from taxidermied and live animals to weapons that "would not be invented for half a thousand years" to a set of the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. An owl, Archimedes by name, perches in Merlyn's conical hat, dropping its feces onto the magician's zodiac-embroidered robe.

[In Wart's easy acceptance of Merlyn's disheveled eccentricity, one sees perhaps a self-portrait of the White of "The Goshawk," whose Medieval hawking piqued the curiosity of local boys].

Merlyn gives Wart breakfast -- among his tableware is a walking mustard pot that, the magician complains, "is inclined to give itself airs" -- and the dazzled boy asks: "Would you mind if I asked you a question?" To which Merlyn, foreshadowing the teacher/student relationship to come, replies: "It is what I am for."

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A political conspiracy of women

2009-12-19T12:06:00.000-06:00

Phineas is damaged politically by the scandal-mongering of the journalist Slide and by his own thin-skinned quarreling with the junior leader Bonteen. Thus falling out of position for an office in the new Government, he is informed by Mrs. Goesler that she is conspiring with Lady Glencora, and with other political spouses, to improve his chances.

Throughout his career, Phineas has gained advancement by the attentions of women who worked in his interest. Phineas stiffly and pridefully objects to this latest campaign on his behalf, to which Mrs. Goesler responds "If you have enemies behind your back, you must have friends behind your back also."

Laura Kennedy's aged and worried father, Lord Brentford, on the need to come to terms with his daughter's mad husband: "Mad people never do die. That's a well known fact. They've nothing to trouble them, and they live forever."

Brentford on the change in political culture that has enabled the rise of such as Bonteen: "There used to be a kind of honor in these things, but that's all old fashioned now. Ministers used to think of their political friends; but in these days they only regard their political enemies. If you can make a Minister afraid of you, then it becomes worth his while to buy you up. Most of the young men rise now by making themselves thoroughly disagreeable."

Finn privately disparages and underestimates Glencora, but she uses her considerable domestic political skills to attempt to advance his case -- largely in order to spite Bonteen, who she loathes but also in support of her friend Mrs. Goesler and in revenge upon those who have brought scandal upon her friend Laura Kennedy. Glencora helps to defeat Bonteen by giving him a social opportunity to make an ass of himself.

The Duke of St. Bungay is unknowingly enlisted in the anti-Bonteen cause. He, too, is drawn to the fading hereditary nature of Parliamentary politics: "Bonteens must creep into the holy places. The faces he loved to see, -- born chiefly of other faces he had loved when young, -- could not cluster around the sacred table without others who were much less welcome to him. . . . There must be Bonteens; -- but when any Bonteen came up, who loomed before his eyes as specially disagreeable, it seemed to be his duty to close the door."

Glencora's campaign succeeds in spiking Bonteen's ambitions but, as her manipulations become public in the form of rumors, not in elevating Finn -- the incoming Prime Minister, Gresham, being determined that "no woman's fingers should have anything to do with his pie."

Phineas despairs, believing the women's conspiracy on his behalf will be forever held against him, but Marie Goesler is not entirely sympathetic, judging "the thing lost is too small, too mean to justify unhappiness."

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A paragon of nobility and idleness dies

2009-12-18T22:54:00.001-06:00

The idle suitor Gerald Maule's father is introduced -- a man equally lazy and, what's more, has an ideology of laziness. An aesthete with little income, Mr. Maule Senior is also vain and determined to hold onto what is left of his youth. "No one kenw better than Mr. Maule that the continuing bloom of lasting summer which he affected requires great accuracy in living. Late hours, nocturnal cigars, and midnight drinkings, pleasurable though they may be, consume too quickly the free-flowing lamps of youth, and are fatal at once to the husbanded candle-ends of age."

Now 55, Maule, in his boyhood, "he had been one of those show boys of which two or three are generally to be found at our great schools . . . Winning prizes, spouting speeches on Speech Days, playing in Elevens, and looking always handsome."

At his club, Maule apostrophizes the dying Duke of Omnium, who hour area as a paragon of aristocratic idleness, as opposed to the younger generation of working nobles, whom he detests: "they all go in for something now . . . They are politicians or gamblers, or, by heaven tradesmen. The Earl of Tydvil and Lord Merthyr are in partnership together working their own mines, -- by the Lord, with a regular deed of partnership, just like two cheesemongers." Omnium, however, is a paragon of nobility: "perhaps no man who had lived during the same period, or any portion of the period, had done less, or had devoted himself more entirely to to the consumption of good things without the slightest idea of producing anything in return!"

Parliament as a matter of families and heredity in the view of the Whighish Barrington Earl: "I do believe in the patriotism of certain families. I believe that the Mildmays, FitzHowards, and Pallisers have for some centuries brought up their children to regard the well-being of their country as their highest personal interest. . . . Of course there have been failures. But the school in which good
training is practiced will, as a rule, turn out the best scholars."

The yellow-journalist Quintus Slide of "The People's Banner" has
switched sides to the Conservatives, his duty to "speak of men as
heaven-born patriots whom he had designated a month or two before as
bloated aristocrats and leeches fattened on the blood of the people."

The staunch and honest radical Bunce mockingly says to Slide "I
suppose an editor's about the same as a Cabinet Minister, you've got to keep your place -- that's about it."

Trollope indicates Bunce's limitations: "Mr. Bunce was an outspoken, eager, and honest politician, -- with very little accurate knowledge
of the political conditions by which he was surrounded, but with a strong belief in the merits of his own class. He was a sober, hardworking man, and he hated all men who were not sober and
hardworking. He was quite clear in his mind that all nobility should
be put down, and that all property in land should be taken away from men who were enabled by such property to live in idleness. What
should be done with the land so taken away was a question which he
had not yet learned to answer." [Earlier, the good Mrs. Bunce had
confided to Phineas that she would rather her husband use his money
on drink rather than waste it on union dues].

Slide proposes to expose the marital rift between Robert Kennedy and Laura in "The People's Banner." Phineas objects that Kennedy is
clearly mad, to which Slide replies sanctimoniously "There is nothing easier in the world than calling a man mad. It's what we do to dogs when we want to hang them."

To Phineas' further objection that such a private affair is not of
public interest, Slide counters snidely that "private quarrels between gentlemen and ladies have been public affairs for a long time past" and that "the morals of our aristocracy would be at a low ebb indeed if the public press didn't act as their guardians . . . It's my belief that there isn't a peer among 'em all as would live with his wife constant, if it were not for the Press. . . . We go in for morals and purity of life, and we mean to do our duty by the public without fear or favor."

Phineas confronts the increasingly deranged Kennedy, who is staying at a dilapadated Scottish-owned hotel. Kennedy fires a shot at Phineas, who he believes to be his estranged wife's lover and the cause of all his agonies.

Omnium on his deathbed: "He was wan and worn and pale, -- a man evidently dying, the oil of whose lamp was all burned out. . . . He had never done any good, but he had always carried himself like a duke, and like a duke he carried himself to the end."

Omnium dies with the beloved of his years dotage, Mrs. Max Goesler, at his bedside. Mrs. Goesler reassures him that he lived life as a noble should, but Trollope opines that "her nature was much nobler than his: and she knew that no man should live as idly as the Duke had lived."

Omnium's successor as Duke, Plantagenet Palliser, has no interest in rank -- his passions are political and economic and his elevation of the House of Lords appalls him as it will make him ineligible to serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer when the Liberals return to power in the lower house.

Mr. Maule Senior sees Omnium's death as an opportunity to court the wealthy Mrs. Goesler. Lamenting Omnium's recent death and the political ambitions of his successor, the effete ner-do-well says to the Duke's companion of his fading years "I dare say that Mr. Palliser, as Mr. Palliser, has been a useful man. But so is a coal heaver a useful man. The grace and beauty of life will be clean gone when we all become useful men."

Of the Duke's great achievement in life, Maule says by way of epitaph that "a great fortune had been entrusted to him, and he knew it was his duty to spend it. He did spend it, and all the world looked up to him."

Of Maule, the canny Marie Goesler assesses him to Phineas as "a battered old beau about London, selfish and civil, pleasant and penniless, and I should think utterly without a principle."

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"Cutting-up the Whitehall Cake": "Phineas Redux" begins

2009-12-13T11:56:00.001-06:00

"Phineas Redux" begins with its hero called back from his Irish retreat by the Liberal Party and seemlessly renewing the relationships from two years earlier described in "Phineas Finn." His Irish retreat is seen as perhaps just a parenthesis in his social and political career in London -- a parenthesis that includes the death in childbirth of his wife.

Until Finn's , there had been no contact with his former associates, which Trollope treats as part of the normal order of things: "Distance in time and place, but especially in time, will diminish friendship. It is a rule of nature that it should be so and the friendships which a man most fosters are those which he can beat enjoy. If your friend leave you, and seek a residence in Patagonia, make a niche for him in your memory, and keep him there as warm as you may. Perchance, he may return from Patagonia and the old joys repeated. But never think that those joys can be maintained by the assistance of ocean postage, let it be at never so cheap a rate."

Finn has been recruited to run for parliament from an industrial district called Tankerville for which neither he nor Trollope see much appeal: "Tankerville was a dirty, prosperous, ungainly town, which seemed to exude coal-dust or coal-mud at every pore. It was so well recognized as being dirty that people did not expect to meet each other with clean hands and faces. Linen was never white at Tankerville, and even ladies who sat in drawing rooms were accustomed to the feel and taste of soot in all their dantiest recesses. . . . At Tankerville, coal was much loved and was not thought to be dirty."

The reader is duly reassured that it would not be part of Phineas' duty to actually reside in the be-grimed district he proposes to represent.

Finn had been recruited by the Liberals as part of their plan to regain the Parliamentary majority. They are irritated that the Conservatives, in their brief time in power, have so effectively taken advantage of the spoils system: "For to them, Liberals, this cutting up of the Whitehall cake by the Conservatives was spoilation when the priviledge of cutting was found to have so much exceeded what had been expected. . . . Was it to be borne that an unprincipled so-called Conservative Prime Minister should go on slicing the cake after such a fashion as so lately adopted?"

Trollope introduces the determinedly idle Gerald Maule, a guest at the home Phineas's old friends Oswald and Violet Chilterns, where he indifferently foxhunts and courts Adelaide Palliser.

Maule is wary of Oswald's foxhunting zeal, opining that he goes about it "as if his soul depended on it." Adelaide counters that Oswald is "very energetic," to which Maule responds: "a bull in a china shop is not a useful animal, nor is he ornamental, but there can be no doubt of his energy. . . . The man who stands still is the man who keeps his ground."

Adelaide is foolishly courted by a member of the gentry -- Trollope signals the mockery to be accorded such a venture by dubbing him Spooner of Spoon Hall and identifying his mother as one of the Platters of Platter House. Spooner believes he should be taken seriously by the distant, and near-peniless Adelside, as he is both more wealthy and a better foxhunter than the lackadaisical Maule.

Adelaide is appalled and insulted by Spooner's lack of recognition of the class divide between them. He says, fumbling: "You seem to think I'm something, -- something altogether beneath you." regarding which Trollope comments: "And so in truth she did. Miss Palliser had never analyzed her own feelings and emotions about the Spooners whom she met in society; but she probably conceived that there were people in thhe world who, from certain accidents, were accustomed to sit at dinner with her, but who were no more fitted for her intimacy than were the servants who waited upon her. Such people were to her little more than the tables and chairs with which she was brought into contact."

At the Chilterns, Phineas becomes reacquainted with the fascinating and masterly Mrs. Goesler, whose European wealth allow her to maneuver through and around the English class system. She continues to be devoted to care of the now-addled Duke of Omnium, with whom she began a flirtation after Phineas rejected her.

The parliamentary session, and the electoral battle between Liberals and Conservatives, turns on religion -- on the state establishment of the Church of England. But there is no true ideological battle as the real maneuvering is over power and spoils.

Lady Laura's spurned husband Robert Kennedy is truly animated by fierce religion and has converted his estate into a kind of hermit's retreat -- unlit fireplaces, empty candlesticks, scant food -- while he homicidally fumes over his wife's desertion. He wants her back not as a matter of happiness but to join him in godfearing misery: "Happy? What right had she to expect to be happy here? Are we not told that we are to look for happiness there, and to hope for none below? . . . I do not want her to make her to make me happy. I do not want to be made happy. I wanted her to do her duty."

Laura Kennedy in her German exile lamenting the briefness of Phineas, visit: "But when the lamp for a while burns with special brightness, there always comes afterwards a corresponding dullness."

Trollope's sense of love and passion (in Phineas' retrospection of his failed suit for Laura): "He knew now, or thought he knew, -- that the continued indulgence of a hopeless passion was a folly opposed to the very instincts of man and woman, -- a weakness showing want of fiber and muscle in the character."

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Dr. Jenkins and the Innocents

2009-11-25T17:44:00.001-06:00

Daudet develops his portrait of Parisian society as sapped of vigor, both physical and financial. For physical vigor, the elite rely on the arsenic pills of the Irish physician Jenkins: for capital, they rely on the North African based wealth of the feuding financers Jansoulet and Hemerlingue.

Hemerlingue's employee M. Joyeuse, a widower with four devoted daughters, is introduced. He is subject to Walter Mittyesque daydreams of great bravery. Summoned by speaking tube by Hemerlingue's "oily and gelatinous voice," Joyeuse is informed that he is being discharged, after ten years service, due to having been overheard criticizing a shady deal.

Hemmerlingue: "obese, ill-shaped, and so yellow that his round face with its hooked nose, the head of a fat and sick owl, suggested as it were a light at the end of a solemn and gloomy tunnel. A rich Moorish merchant grown mouldy in the damp of his little courtyard."

Joyeuse is offered a position at the corrupt Territorial Bank of Corsica, now flush with money due to the Nabob, but refuses out of a sense of probity (for which he second-guesses himself).
Another figure in the Nabob's circuit is the sculptress Felicia Ruys. Her father, a renown sculptor and center of a Bohemian artistic circle, was a friend and patient of the ubiquitous Jenkins. Felicia taunts Jenkins by stating that it is artists who are now respectable and nobles, such as his clients, who live tenuous financial existences. "Ah! If we knew how much terpitude, what fantastic or abomidable stories, a black evening-coat, the most correct of your hideous modern garments can mask."

Felicia, born of one of her father Sebastian's many mistresses, grew up in a corner of his studio, from which she observed the Bohemian life. Some regularity is brought into her life -- she is "noisy, turbulent, ill-behaved -- by summers with a retired dancer, Constance Cremnitz, who adoringly refers to the motherless girl as "the little demon."

When her father becomes ill, the doctor Jenkins becomes her "friend, confidant, a vigilant and kind guardian." That kindness turns out to be a mask -- one of several worn by the hypocritical Irishman -- when the doctor attempts to violently seduce the 15 year old girl. He warns her not to tell her father as "it would kill him."

When the sculptor dies asking Jenkins to "look after my daughter," she is fortunate they the old dancer intervenes, taking the girl under her wing. As she comes into her young maturity, Felicia nurses a secret loathing for the hypocritical doctor.

Jenkins pet project, funded by the Nabob, is "The Bethlehem Society for the Suckling of Infants," a "mournful place" within the grounds of which orphans are given over to goats ("magnificent goats, Thibetan goats, silky, swollen with milk") for feeding. Except that the obstinate infants refuse to do so, "they did not suck them, they preferred to die one after another rather then suck them."

The director of the institution, Pondevez, sees the flaw: "Was Jesus of Bethlehem in his stable suckled by a goat? On the contrary, did he not press a woman's soft breast on which he could go to sleep when he was satisfied? Who ever saw a host between the ox and the ass of the story on that night when the beasts spoke to each other? Then why lie about it, why call the place Bethlehem?"

But when Pondevez tries to save the infants in his charge by bringing in wet nurses, Jenkins is outraged: "Are you out of your mind? Well! Why then have we goats at all, and meadows to pasture them; what becomes of my idea, and the pamphlets upon my idea? What happens to all that? You are going against my system!" of the fate of the starving, goat-resistant infants, the physician concludes: "let them go without, but let the principle of artifical lactation be respected! We are here for the demonstration of a philanthropic idea. It must be made to triumph, even at the price of some sacrifices."

As the death toll of infants increases, Pondevez wryly refers to himself no longer as "Monsieur the Director Pondevez" but rather as "Monsieur the Grantor-of-Certificates-of-Death Pondevez."

Journalists paid by the Nabob write articles praising the Bethlehem Society, with the result that Jenkins receives a government decoration, frustrating the Nabob, who continues to fund the misbegotten philanthropic scheme in the hope that his "cross and brevet" will come next.

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Infusions of poison and gold: "The Nabob" opens

2009-11-21T12:43:00.002-06:00

Alphonse Daudet, The Nabob: Reading Notes, Part I

Daudet's "The Nabob" opens with scenes of the society physician Dr. Jenkins, a native of Ireland, who has built a wealthy clientel on the basis of miraculous arsenic-based pills that lend an unnatural energy and glow to the eyes of those who take them. Jenkins patients are described as "worn out, debilitated" and "exhausted by an absurd life" to the extent that it is only his miraculous pills that give "the lash of the whip to their jaded existances."

Jenkins also has a scheme for the establishment of a hygenic nursery, "The Bethlehem Society for the Suckling of Infants," for which he seeks to extract funding from M. Jansoulet, a wealthy and generous foreigner whom Paris has nicknamed "The Nabob."

Despite the 1001 Nights monicker, the Nabob is in reality the poor son of a nail-vendor from the south of France who made his fortune in the service of the Bey of Tunis. Having left Tunis and the Bey's service, Jansoulet has determined to make his way in Parisian society. What he most desires is friendship with the First Minister, the Duc de Mora, another of Jenkins' patients.

Daudet describes the wealthy precincts of Paris that contain Jenkins' patients as comfortably shrouded in a morning fog, whereas in the poorer districts of the city, the fog is dissipated, cut-up and absorbed by the masses.

On his rounds, Jenkins visits the Duc, whose waiting room is full, even as he gives his attention to a costumer preparing a dress for the Duchess to wear at an upcoming Ball, "giving his directions with the same gravity with which he would have dictated the draft of a new law."

The Duc's residence has its own radiant warmth and environment into which the enveloping fog does not penetrate. In the entrance hallway "the staircase of shining marble [was] laid with a carpet as thick as the turf of a lawn" and the two blazing fires generate "a factutious sun of wealth."

Jenkins reluctantly leaves the wealthy precincts where his patients reside to visit, at his wife's behest, his stepson, Andre, who has left their home to pursue life as a writer, living on an upper floor of a tenement and seeking to support himself as a portrait photographer. The stepson refuses to accept a proferred position at the nascent Bethlehem Society.

Jenkins' next call is lunch at the recently-taken apartments of the Nabob, which is thronged with aristocrats and schemers seeking funds for their pet enterprises. The guests are noticably bored with the Nabob's conversation and the reading of the press announcement celebrating his charitable funding of the Bethlehem Society -- lauding its reversal of "the long matyrology of childhood" and "the sordid traffic of the breast" -- and only await with anxiety the moment of coffee, which is when the Nabob dispenses his investments, blue paper checques flying. "To sign a check on his knee for two hundred thousand francs troubles Jansoulet no more than to draw a louis from his pocket."

Among the investments the Nabob funds is the near-worthless Territorial Bank of Corsica, which continues to exist only so its principles can continue to try to recoup their losses, in the process cheating others into investing. An interpollated narrative by the Territorial Bank's porter, M. Passajon, who is writing his memoirs, describes a glorious trading floor where only lunch provicions are kept in the empty vaults and another member of the impoverished staff, which has not been paid in four years, crafts shirts from paper to keep-up appearances ("in this he has attained very great skill, and his ever-dazzling linen would deceive, if it were not that at the least movement, when he walks, when he sits down, the stuff crackles upon him as though he had a cardboard box under his waistcoat. Unfortunately, all this paper does not feed him; and he is so thin, he has such a mein, that you ask yourself on what he lives"). The desperate employees of the fraud-ridden bank greet news of new investors such as the Nabob with "dancing, weeping for joy" . . . "men would embrace each other like shipwrecked sailors discovering a sail."

The Minister, the Duc de Mora, arrives at a fete hosted by Jenkins where the eager Nabob is to be presented to his noble idol. Of Mora: "None better than he knew how to bear himself in society, to walk across a drawing room with gravity, to endow futile things with an air of seriousness, and to treat serious things lightly."

The Duke, like all those medicated with Dr. Jenkins arsenical pills, has a fire to his glance: "Oh, this man was a true client of Jenkins; and this princely visit, he owed to the inventor of those mysterious pills which have that fire to his glance, to his whole being that energy so vibrating and extraordinary."

The coy sculptress Felicia taunts the Duke with a fable from Rabelais of the meeting of the fox created by Bacchus "impossible to capture" and the dog of Vulcan with "the power to catch every animal that he should pursue."

The meeting of the wealthy but rough-hewn Nabob with the effete. Minister, whose power comes "from the deep comtempt which he had for man and women." The Nabob looks at him with "the beseeching, submissive eyes of a big, good-tempered mastiff." Daudet notes that "in an American drawing-room the antithesis would have been less violent. The Nabob's millions would have re-established the balance and even made the scale lean to his side. But Paris does not yet place money above every other force . . . ." The Nabob eagerly proceeds to lose money to the Minister at ecart.

The drawing room resounds with whispers of how the Nabob -- formerly a French iron worker -- made his fortune in service of the Bey of Tunis. The scurrulous rumors which have been spread by the Nabob's enemy Hemerlingue, describe both financial chicanery and procurement of European women for the Tunisian harem.

Having heard these rumors, the Nabob's young clerk de Gery looks at his master differently: "Yes, he was indeed the adventurer from the South, moulded of the slimy clay that covers the quays of Marseilles, trodden down by all the nomads and wanderers of the seaport. Kind, generous, foresooth! As harlots are, or thieves. And the gold, flowing in torrents through that tainted and luxurious world, splashing the very walls, seemed to him now to be loaded with all the dross, all the filth of its impure and muddy source."

Other rumors in virulent circulation at the fete suggest that Dr. Jenkins' elegant wife is in reality a courtesan and their marriage a sham.

When de Gery hears from the Nabob the story of his bitter feud with the rival financier Hemerlingue, he warms again to his master and his naive dreams of social success in Paris. De Gery sees the Nabob's passage into Parisian society as akin to "a man on foot laden with gold passing through some evil-haunted wood, in the dark and unarmed."

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Abductions, Insurrection, and Destiny's scythed car

2009-10-18T14:32:00.002-05:00

Walter Scott, The Black Dwarf: Reading Notes, Part II

Elshie's misanthropy challenged when a brigand informs him that he intends to raid Hobbie Eliot's homestead. Elshie considers whether to try to warn Hobbie but concludes that his war against humanity cannot allow such mercy: "I will not be the fool I have been, to swerve from my principles whenever there is an appeal, foresooth, to my feelings; as if I, toward whom none hold sympathy, ought to have sympathy with any one. Let Destiny drive forth her scythed car through the overwhelmed and trembling mass of humanity. Shall I be the idiot to throw this decrepit form, this mis-shapen lump of mortality, under her wheels?"

The brigand spurs his reluctant horse to the deed and Elshie reflects "that villain, that cool-blooded, hardened, unrelenting ruffian -- that wretch whose every thought is infected with crimes -- has thews and sinews, limbs, strength, and activity enough to compel a nobler animal than himself to carry him to the place where he is to perpetrate his wickedness."

Any chance that Elshie will intervene for Hobbie is dashed when the yeoman's hunting hound instinctively slaughters one of the gentle goats the hermit had been given by Earnscliff -- a beast whom the hunchback Elshie had noted treated him with a kindness and gratitude few humans had extended.

Hobbie defends his hound's act as part of his nature. Elshie too sees the attack as "natural": "yes! It is indeed in the usual beaten path of Nature. The strong gripe and throttle the weak; the rich depress and despoil the needy; the happy (those who are idiots enough to think themselves happy) insult the misery and diminish the consolation of the wretched."

Elshie curses Hobbie, which sends a bolt of fear through the superstitious yeoman.

When the brigand returns to Elshie's hut to report he and his gang have destroyed Hobbie's farmstead and kidnapped his fiance, the hermit intervenes with a bribe (one of several recent indications that he is of the gentry) to save the maiden from being sent in bondage to the colonies.

Hobbie's vengefulness somewhat held in check, first by his grandmother's insistence that he say the words "God's will be done" to indicate his acceptance of whatever ill-fate confronts him, then by the oath sworn by Earnscliff -- "Hand and faith! Troth and glove!" -- against attacking the brigand once he surrenders. Hobbie returns glowering from his martial adventures to find that his fiance has been returned through peaceful means -- his grandmother's prayers realized (but really Elshie's bribe of the brigand).

The expedition to free Hobbie's betrothed instead freed Isabella Vere, whose abduction had been planned by her calculating father Laird Ellieslaw, a reformed rake with animus against Earnscliff. Ellieslaw's intent to foment antagonism and thus inflame revolt along the Border in favor of the Catholic cause and the exiled Stewarts.

A more moderate Jacobite speaks of the reformed rake Ellieslaw's rashness: "I am not of so indifferent a mould as my cousin Ellieslaw, who speaks treason as if it were a child's nursery rhymes and loses and recovers that sweet girl, his daughter, with a good deal less emotion on both occasions, than would have effected me had I lost and recovered a greyhound puppy. My temper is not quite so inflexible, nor my hate against government so inveterate, as to blind me to the full danger of the attempt."

A gathering of Jacobites at Ellieslaw castle also includes "many subordinate malcontents, whom difficulty of circumstances, love of change, resentment against England, or any of the numerous causes which inflamed men's passions at the time, rendered apt to join in perilous enterprise."

The insurgent party is anxious rather than ardent, finding themselves in circumstances "where it is alike difficult to advance or recede. The precipice looked deeped and more dangerous as they approached the brink, and each waited with an inward emotion of awe, expecting which of his confederates would set the example by plunging himself down."

The bold Mareschal tries to raise the spirits of the insurgents: "If we have gone forward like fools, do not let us go back like cowards. We have done enough to draw upon us both the suspicion and vengeance of the government; do not let us give up before we have done something to deserve it."

Mareschal succeeds in emboldening the conspirtors, who Scott has respond with a hilarious series of self-interested toasts. Mareschal "seemed to take a mischievious delight in precipitating the movements of the enthusiasm which he had excited, like a rougish boy, who, having lifted the sliuce of the mill-dam, enjoys the clatter of the wheels which he has put into motion, without thinking of the mischief he may have occasioned."

Mareschal's rousing of the crowd revealed as all the more reckless when it is revealed that he had private knowledge that the revolt is already falling apart. He explains to his agast fellow conspirators: "I am tired of a party that does nothing but form bold resolutions over night, and sleep them away with their wine before morning."

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"Why should not the whole human herd butt, gore, and gorge upon each other?": Walter Scott's "The Black Dwarf" Begins

2009-10-17T14:07:00.003-05:00

Walter Scott, The Black Dwarf: Reading Notes, Part I

The titular character of Scott's "The Black Dwarf" a misanthropic individual who erects a stone hut on Mucklerstane Moor, a rock strewn area long rumored to be the preserve of witches and their master The Devil.

The dwarf is first espied by two acquaintances coming back from hunting, a somewhat superstitious yeoman, Hobbie Elliot, and Earnscliff, a young Laird of liberal tendencies. The book is set as separatist political tensions are rising along the Scots Border.

Earnscliff's family has long been engaged in a feud with a rival family, the Ellieslaws. Hobie taunts his companion's "newfangled notions of peace and quietness" even as his dead father's "blood is beneath the nails" of the rival Laird of Ellieslaw.

Encountering the dwarf in the wild, before he has begun construction of his hut, Ellieslaw offers to take him to shelter out of a sense of "common humanity." To which the dwarf replies: "Common humanity. Where got ye that catchword -- that noose for woodcocks -- that common disguise for mantraps -- the bait which the wretched idiot who swallows, will soon find covers a hook with barbs ten times sharper than those you lay for the animals which you murder for your luxury?"

The dwarf threatens Hobbie and Earnscliff with violence and they retreat.

At Hobbie's home, his grandmother good-humoredly chides him for coming home without meat from his expedition into what have become highly over-hunted woods. "'In my young days,' said the old lady, 'a man wad hae been ashamed to come back frae the hills without a buck hanging on each side o' his horse'" To which Hobbie replies: "'I wish they had left some for us then Grannie. They've cleared the country of them, they auld friends of yours, I'm thinking.'"

Earnscliff insists on engaging the dwarf, who is building his hut of massive stones, laboring "day after day, with an assiduity so incredible as to appear almost supernatural" and at the same time transporting dirt and mold for a garden."

The truculent dwarf gains a reputation for divination and household magic and cures. He announces his name as Elshender the Recluse and becomes popularly known as Canny Elshie. He shuns money and lives as a vegetarian from his garden but accepts a pair of milk-goats from Earnscliff. As a local seer and homeopath, Elsie has also become party to many secrets of the local populace.

People asking advice or seeking medicines from the dwarf "usually left some offering on a stone, at a distance from his dwelling; if it was money, or any article that it did not suit him to accept, he either threw it away, or suffered it to remain where it was without making use of it."

Earnscliff, on his way back from fishing, stops by the hut and observes the hard work the dwarf has undertaken. The dwarf replies: "labor is the mildest evil of a lot so miserable as that of mankind; better to labor like me than sport like you."

The misanthropic dwarf continues to the creel-carrying fisher of trout: "And yet ... it is better to execute idle and wanton cruelty on mute fishes than on your fellow-creatures. Yet why should I say so? Why should not the whole human herd butt, gore, and gorge upon each other, till all are extirpated but one huge and over-fed behemoth and he, when he has throttled and gored the bones of all his fellows -- he, when his prey failed him, to be roaring whole days for lack of food, and finally to die, inch by inch, of famine -- it were a consummation worthy of that race."

The dwarf continues to explain -- bitterly, but not entirely convincingly -- to Earnscliff that the medical cures he provides are for the purpose of preserving the destructive humans who will eventually immolate each other -- "prolonging the lives of those who can serve the purpose of destruction as effectively" as poision.

Earnscliff argues that the dwarf's curing of the good-natured Hobbie puts the lie to his malign intent. Elshie counters: "He is at present tame, quiet and domesticated, for lack of opportunity to exercise his inborn propensities; but let the trumpet of war sound -- let the young blood-hound snuff blood, he will be as ferocious as the wildest of his Border ancestors that even fired a helpless peasant's abode. . . . The trumpet will blow, the young blood hound will lap blood, and I will laugh and say, 'For this I have preserved thee!"

Generously, Elshie suggests that, due to Earncliff's peaceable nature, he would compassionately offer him a cup of poision to spare him the brutal human holocaust to come.

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Description: The warehousing of Anasazi culture

2009-09-16T18:51:00.008-05:00

From Craig Childs, House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization across the American Southwest

1.

"When archaeological crews began digging in the ruins of Chaco Canyon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they dumped unsalvageable rubble into the wash for flash floods to carry off. From one excavation alone, led by the National Geographic Society in the 1920s, more than 100,000 tons of archaeological debris -- splintered ceiling timbers and unseated wall stones -- were hauled out in ore carts and fed to the wash, as if the workers thermselves were agents of erosion. Everything else was packed into crates and shipped in boxcars to distant museums and private collections. A startling wealth of objects left Chaco Canyon during those excavations: colorful flutes and planks of richly painted wood that once hung in rooms like banners; beautifully decorated bowls and jars found stacked neatly to the ceilings of these rooms; masses of bear paws and mountain lion claws and bird wings uncovered in ceremonial contexts." (page 19)

"Looking for the artifacts removed from Pueblo Bonito, I had wandered the long halls of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, its treasures sealed in seemingly never-ending rows of gray metal cabinets. In the Peabody Museum at Harvard, I found three stories of ceramics. In a small Federal repository in Albuquerque, I went through thousands of beads in plastic cases, and painted seed jars crowded on metal shelves. In these modern storehouses I packed my journals with annotations, telling which of Pueblo Bonito's rooms contained which artifacts. This morning I put the pieces back, restocking these rooms from my imagination. I filled spaces with thousands of nested bowls, their severe geometric designs flowing from one to the next. Exotic birds went back into their burials under the floors, along with a necklace made of two thousand flawlessly graduated turquoise discs, with jet black finger rings and painted flutes. I fit ceiling beams back into position, first setting turquoise into their sockets, the hanging feathered sashes from their heights." (page 47)

"One soul in two tormented halves": "In a Shallow Grave" closes

2009-09-13T09:25:00.004-05:00

James Purdy, In a Shallow Grave: Reading Notes, Second Part

Garnet's ideal applicant, Daventry, appears suddenly -- "I thought he was a will-o'-the-wisp" -- and has a warm, soft hand "like that of a goat." Indeed, he'd grown up in Utah as a shepard. Garnet has taken to dismantling clocks for a hobby, and notes that Daventry "shakes his head like the old half-broken pendulum of the clock when I am dickering with it."

Up until now, Purdy has successfully evaded any indication of the time frame of "In a Shallow Grave" -- including what war Garnet was injured in -- but now divulges as Vietnam with one word at the end of a long paragraph in which the veteran defends his flowery way of speaking: "I don't take any pleasure anymore in reading the newspapers, and anyhow they are about the living, Daventry, and writ in living language, no, I have got firmly habituated to these old books . . . and so gradually you are these old books have seeped or trickled into my speech and have took over from the way people talk today. But until you spoke just now I didn't know I had this peculiarity even. So that explains how I call you a courtly young man, dig?"

He dispatches Daventry with a letter to the Widow Rance. Predictably, she finds the youthful applicant, Garnet's physcal surrogate, to be sexually irresistible -- making him strip off his clothes so she can see every inch of his flesh. Garnet is horribly jealous, but it also brings the two of them closer together.

In the meantime, Quintus continues his reading of the old books -- "which I don't think either of us enjoyed" -- snatches of which stick in Garnet's memory. "It is a remarkable fact," Quintus reads, seemingly at random, "that the three chief natural elements, water, air, and fire, have neither taste, smell, nor any flavor whatsoever."

Later, browsing through a "Guide to Phrenology," Garnet reads the following under a heading "MAN IS A GLYPH": "Man is little more than a glyph which punctuates space, but once gone is as unrecollectable as smoke or clouds."

Daventry begs not to be sent any further to the Widow Rance, but Garnet is insistent, even as he knows what the result will be.

The widow becomes sexually obsessed with Daventry -- he is tortured with her voraciousness -- and he spends less and less time with Garnet and Quintus in the old house.

While Daventry is away, Garnet is served with eviction papers for non-payment of back taxes. In a pseudo-Christian ceremony -- fueled, perhaps, by the powerful pills and dope they have been ingesting -- Daventry makes a communion from his own fresh-spilled blood. A hurricane arises and prevents the eviction and, as part of his further sacrifice, Daventry agrees to wed the Widow Rance. With this, Garnet's physical self begins to regenerate.

Garnet, fearful he will lose Daventry forever is told by the former teen runaway, now-Christlike savior: "'Hear me Garnet,' he was going on, looking at me like he was in search of my soul, 'I will never leave you even though the firmament part, because we are one, one soul in two tormented halves.'"

Daventry is killed, crucified on a tree in a freak wind storm -- "his arms stretched out as if he would enfold me" -- with his scalp circled by a ring of blood. Sacrifice complete, Garnet is united for a brief moment with the Widow Rance. But he walks away; "the droll thing about getting what you long for is the longing was better, longing pains more, but it's more what you want."

The Widow Rance, her new love for Garnet now unrequited, begins recruiting her own applicants -- sending handsome young men to Garnet with love letters based on those Daventry brought to her.

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The Applicants: Purdy's "In a Shallow Grave" opens

2009-09-12T11:39:00.001-05:00

James Purdy, In a Shallow Grave: Reading Notes, First Part

Purdy's "In a Shallow Grave": a half-dead and physically shattered, monstrous veteran, released from the hospital and returned to his family's mansion in Virginia, seeks hired men, "applicants," boys really, to act as his intermediaries -- his prostheses to the living world.

Characters in "In a Shallow Grave" variously divided, contradictory: simultaneously healthy/sick, beautiful/defiled, male/female, young/old, ignorant/refined.

The veteran, Garnet Melrose, is basically inside-out. His doctor tells him: "Well, Garnet, you look like an open anatomy chart, one can see all your veins and arteries moving with the blood." As a kind of living corpse, the healthiest part of him is his bones; again the doctor speaks:
"although your skin bears a total disfigurement, you ought to bear in mind, despite your outward appearance you have a wonderful fine and strong bone structure, and it is the bones that are the real measure of a man's bearing and good looks."

The doctor advises: "it is your memory which keeps you in pain, learn to forget and you will be well again."

At first, Garnet has difficulty finding "applicants" to be his servant: "all the young men acted the same way, that is they took one look, and their gorge started to rise, and they would strain and cough, wanting to vomit."

The primary duty of the applicants is to take messages to Garnet's childhood sweetheart, the "Widow Rance" who is herself an odd mixture of death and life -- only 28, she has lost two husbands (brothers) to the same war in which Garnet was disfigured. She also lost to early death the infants she bore to each.

"The Widow Rance is twenty-eight but sometimes acts like some old rich woman of sixty." It also becomes clear that while she has forbidden Garnet to approach her, that he spies on her at night.

Garnet's questions for each of the applicants: "Can you prepare simple food? Like say heat already prepared soup, boil coffee, rub my feet when my attack comes on and the flesh above my heart, and can you take letters to the Widow Rance?"

Few white boys are willing to perform such service -- particularly, it seems, the foot rubbing: "the human foot is the real nigger of the human body" -- and it is clear that the black boys he hires are not satisfactory in the primary duty of communicating with the Widow Rance -- for the applicants are clearly physical proxies for the once handsome Garnet who, despite his doctor's advice, refuses to forget his past, his youth (he went to war when he was 17).

Garnet, who was a devoted dancer before going into the war, relives his youth by sneaking into an abandoned dancehall at night and recreating in his mind the time when he was sought after by all the young women of the town.

Garnet's divisions suggested by his name: "people stumble on hearing my name, the first name doesn't fit with the second, the first name, they feel, sounds like a girl's, and the second to them sounds too historical." His nicknames in the Army are indicative of his mood swings: Garnet Melrose = "Granite" and "Morose." The girlish side of his nature embodied in his still flowing hair: "I remember my first-grade teacher had said, "You have hair a girl would die for," and whilst everything else turned the color of mulberries, my hair was untouched by when I was blown up in the war, and so it made me look even more outlandish."

One of the black applicants, Quintus, becomes Garnet's reader. Reading to Garnet seemingly at random -- but maybe not so randomly -- from the old, dusty volumes, he appears to combine learning and ignorance. He fails as the physical applicant Garnet desires; becoming instead a kind of intellectual prosthesis.

Then the ideal physical applicant arrives: Daventry. He is a mixture of beauty and defilement: handsome but with his front teeth missing. And a mixture of innocence and brutality: he suffers from guilt at having, in self-defence, murdered two Mexican men. His beauty being on the outside, he is the perfect emissary for the inside-out Garnet.

Garnet says of his arrival: "I do not believe he was from this world. I believe he was sent by the Maker of All Things perhaps if such exists. I do not say that he brougt me total joy, but he was the ideal applicant."

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Pitch, the boy-hating Missourian

2009-09-07T09:46:00.002-05:00

Herman Melville, The Confidence Man: Reading Notes, Part the Third

The confidence man continues his tour of the steamship. He taunts a miser traveling in Emigrant class with a get-rich-quick scheme, teasing him as insufficiently "confident" until finally the greedy of man relents ("I confide. I confide") and invests $100 in gold coins.

Changing guise to that of a herbalist (purveying the "Omni-Balsamic Rejuvenator"), he inveigles a sick man into purchasing his cures. "Then you give me hope?" the "juiceless, joyless" man asks. "Hope is proportionate to confidence," he responds, "how much confidence you give me, so much hope do I give you."

The sick man's plea: "only make me so I can walk about in the sun and not draw flies to me, as lured by the coming of decay."

The herbalist encounters a fellow deceiver: a man whose health has been destroyed by the New York legal system but -- as the real cause of his infirmity would earn no charity -- begs as a casuality of the Mexican war.

Introduction of the gun-toting, animal-skin clad Missourian Pitch, a "hard case" who will dispute with three avatars of the confidence man in a row

Pitch suspicious of nature and a hater of humanity -- and boys in particular. He is seeking a machine that can replace the boys (thirty to date) he has been hiring to do his farm work.

"I'm now on the road to get me made some sort of machine to do my work. Machines for me. My cider mill -- does that ever steal my cider? My mowing machine -- does that ever lay a-bed mornings? My corn husker -- does that ever give my insolence? No: cider-mill, mowing-machine, corn-husker -- all faithfully attend to their business. Disinterested too; no board, no wages; yet doing good all their lives long; shining examples that virtue is its own reward -- the only practical Christians I know."

"What a difference in a moral point of view between a corn-husker and a boy. . . . A corn- husker, for its patient continuance in well doing, might not unfairly go to heaven. Do you suppose a boy will?"

Seeking to counter this anti-boy argument, the confidence man posits that a boy always has the potential to be good ("boys outgrow what is amiss in them") and that one must wait for the good to emerge. To which Pitch responds: "The butterfly is the caterpillar in a gaudy cloak; stripped of which, there lies the impostor's long spindle of a body, pretty much worm-shaped as before."

When the confidence man seeks to argue the benefits of natural cures, Pitch counters by saying that his cough was "natural" in the first place, as is cholera, deadly-nightshade, and killing winters. To which the herbalist replies: "you would seem to have little confidence in nature; which really, in my way of thinking, looks like carrying the spirit of distrust pretty far."

Pitch: "Look you nature! I don't deny but your clover is sweet, and your dandelions don't roar; but whose hailstones smashed my window?"

Further: "I have confidence in nature? I? I say again there is nothing I am more suspicious of. I once lost ten thousand dollars by nature. Nature embezzled that amount from me; absconded with ten thousand dollars' worth of my property; a plantation on this stream, swept clean away by one of those sudden shiftings of the banks in a freshet; ten thousand dollars' of alluvion thrown broad off upon the waters."

The confidence man, as the herbalist, asks what Pitch has confidence in if he has "no confidence in boys, no confidence in men, no confidence in Nature." Pitch replies: "I have confidence in distrust."

Pitch sees in the confidence man's studied neutrality on the question of abolition an offensive moderation: "Pickled and prudent sentiments. You are the moderate man, the invaluable understrapper of the wicked man. You, the moderate man, may be used for wrong, but are useless for right."

Pitch: "Boy or man, the human animal is, for most work purposes, a losing animal. Can't be trusted; less trustworthy than oxen. . . . Hence these thousand new inventions -- carding machines, horse-shoe machines, tunnel-boring machines, reaping machines, apple-paring machines, boot-blacking machines, sewing machines, shaving machines, run-of-errand machines, dumb-waiter machines, and the Lord-only-knows-what machines; all of which announce the era when that refractory animal, the working or serving man, shall be a buried bygone, a superseded fossil. Shortly prior to which glorious time, I doubt not that a price will be out upon their peltries as upon the knavish 'possums, especially the boys. Yes, sir (ringing his rifle down on the deck), I rejoice to think that the day is at hand, when, prompted to it by law, I shall shoulder this gun and go out a boy-shooting."

Observes the confidence man (now in the guise of the man with the brass plate, an officer of the Philosophical Intellgence Office, which seems to also conduct a kind of orphan-placement service): "Shocking, shocking. . . . You seem to have very little confidence in boys."

Pitch, objecting to the confidence man's politeness: "Don't try to oil me."

Again, Pitch who finds machines more worthy of entry into heaven than humans: "Truth is like a thrashing-machine; tender sensibilities must keep out of the way."

Upon completion of the deal with Pitch to send him a thirty-first boy: "Thank you. Confidence is the indispensable basis of all sorts of business transactions. Without it, commerce between man and man, as between country and country, would, like a watch, run down and stop."

When the confidence man in his latest guise purportedly disembarks at Cairo, his influence on Pitch is dispelled as well "like one beginning to rouse himself from a dose of chloroform treacherously given."

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Spreading the ideology of "Confidence"

2009-09-06T12:47:00.001-05:00

Herman Melville, The Confidence Man: Reading Notes, Part the Second

The confidence man advises an effete young scholar to abandon reading the Greek and Roman Classics as heretical and injurious in their lack of "confidence" and thus undermining of God and Christendom.

The scholar overhears the confidence man in one of his incarnations promoting investment in the Black Rapids Coal Company and greedily seeks to buy shares when he appears in different disguise.

The confidence man denounces the Wall Street "bears": "The depression of our stock was solely owing to the growling, the hypocritical growling, of the bears. . . . The most monstrous of all hypocrites are these bears: hypocrites by inversion; hypocrites in the simulation of things dark instead of bright; souls that thrive, less upon depression, than the fiction of depression; professors of the wicked set of manufacturing depressions. . . . Fellows who, whether in stocks, politics, bread-stuffs, morals, metaphysics, religion -- be it what it may -- trump up their black panics in the naturally-quiet brightness."

The confidence man suggests that the bears get their "sulk" not from life but from plays and books. "Ten to one, he has lugged home from auction a musty old Seneca, and sets about stuffing himself with that stale old hay; and thereupon, thinks it looks wise and antique to be a croaker, thinks it's taking a stand 'way above his kind."

The scholar having gullibly invested in the mining concern, the confidence man seeks to lure him to a further speculation in New Jerusalem, "a new and thriving city, so called, in northern Minnesota."

Next, disguised as a Quaker, the confidence man scatters handbills about the Fidele's saloon containing an "Ode of the Intimations of Distrust in Man, Unwillingly Inferred from Repeated Repulses in Disinterested Endeavors to Procure his Confidence."

Observing a card game in the company of a new target, the confidence man poo-poos the idea that card sharpers may be at work, suggesting that "a fresh and liberal construction would teach us to regard those four players -- indeed this whole cabin of players -- as playing at games in which every player plays fair, and not a player but shall win."

Discussion of humanity from story of "anomalously vicious woman," that calls into question whether the "human form be, in all cases, conclusive evidence of humanity." Suggestion that perhaps "only the good are human" in refutation of Roman Senator Thrasea who, as related by Pliny, posited 'he who hates vice, hates humanity.'"
Woman in story is unpromisingly named Goneril; described as having a hardened and baked complexion "like that of the glazed colors on stoneware" and as "rather beautiful, though of a style of beauty rather peculiar and cactus-like."

Considering the dismal fate of the unfortunate husband (supposedly one of the confidence man's earlier avatars) of this inhuman Goneril, the current edition of the confidence man proposes that the real question is whether the spouse bore his misfortune despondently or "with confidence."

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"Where the wolves are killed off, the foxes increase": Melville's "The Confidence Man" commences

2009-09-06T10:59:00.003-05:00

Herman Melville, The Confidence Man: Reading Notes, Part the First

As pasengers embark on the steamship Fidele at the wharf in St Louis, a placard offers a reward for the capture of "a mysterious impostor, supposed to have recently come from the East."

Crowds gather about the sign, vendors sell money-belts and hawk handbills describing the exploits of captured violent thugs, "creatures, with others of the sort, one and all exterminated at the time, and for the most part, like the hunted generations of wolves in the same region, leaving comparatively few successors; which would seem cause for unalloyed gratulation, and is such to all except those who think that in new countries, where the wolves are killed off, the foxes increase."

Into this scene a stranger "in the extremest sense of the word" arrives and, working his way to the place where the placard is posted, mutely holds up a slate on which he writes a series of messages about "charity." Those in the crowd variously ignore and ridicule him.

By way of contrast to the mute stranger, the ship's barber, opening his shop, hangs a sign reading "No Trust" (that is: No Credit), thus establishing the polarity of "The Confidence Man" between faith and skepticism, gullibility and suspicion.

That polarity further explored with appearance of legless negro beggar who is denounced as fake by an embittered peg-legged man, "a limping, gimlet-eyed, sour faced person -- it may be some discharged custom house officer, who suddenly stripped of convenient means of support, had concluded to be avenged on government and humanity. . . . hating or suspecting everything and everybody."

The crippled Negro begs by creepily imitating a dog and catching pennies in his mouth. When the peg-legged man continues to denounce him, the beggar is asked by the crowd for people who can attest to his honesty. He describes several, all of whom, it becomes clear, are disguises of the "confidence" man at loose among the ship's population.

Later, the peg-legged man, challenged as to why anyone would perform such a massive deception for mere pennies, jeers "you greenhorns! Money, you think, is the sole motive to pains and hazard, deception and deviltry in this world. How much money did the devil make by gulling Eve?"

The Fidele's passengers representative of all America, indeed all humanity: "As among Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims . . . there was no lack of variety. Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; man of business and men of pleasure; parlor men and backwoodsmen; farm-hunters and fame-hunters; heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters, truth-hunters, and still keener hunters after all these hunters. Fine ladies in slippers and mocassined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes; Santa Fe traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatmen, and Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; Quakers in full drab, and United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto, quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and old fashioned French Jews; Mormons and Papists; Dives and Lazarus; jesters and mourners, teetotalers and convivialists, deacons and blacklegs; hard-shell Baptists and clay-eaters; grinning negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests. In short, a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man."

Episodes that follow describe various disguises of the Confidence Man, extracting charity (the Seminole Widow and Orphans Asylum) or investment (the Black Rapids Coal Company) from the ship's passengers -- pleading, sometimes querilously for their "confidence," soliciting their "trust." As each new incarnation of the confidence man emerges, queries regarding the prior ones are answered by saying he has just disembarked.

Among the confidence man's targets is a "good" man whose suit is lined in white and who wears a white glove (though his ungloved hand is just as white); the bills in his wallet are "crisp with newness, fresh from the bank, no muckworm's grime upon them" and all manual activity needed of him is performed by a black servant who "did most of the handling for him; having to do with dirt on his account."

To this visibly "good" man, the confidence man proposes a "World's Charity" that by taxing all the globe's population at a rate of a dollar a year would efficiently eliminate all poverty and heathenism by letting out charitable projects for bidding "in the Wall Street spirit."

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The War of Fat against Thin ("The Belly of Paris" concludes)

2009-08-30T23:01:00.001-05:00

Emile Zola, The Belly of Paris: Reading Notes, part 3

Observing how the church of Saint Eustache can be seemed framed through the massive arches of Les Halles, the painter Claude Lantier observes to Florent: “Since the beginning of the century, only one original building has been erected, only one that is not a copy from somewhere else but has sprung naturally out of the soil of our times, and that is Les Halles. Do you see it Florent? A brilliant work that is a shy foretaste of the twentieth century. That is why it frames Saint Eustache. There stands the church with its roseate window, empty of the faithful, while Les Halles spreads out around it, buzzing with life.”

Lantier and Florent go on an excursion into the countryside, where they smell thyme in the air and see produce growing in rich soil. Florent finds himself “deeply contented in the wholesome and peaceful earth. For about a year now, the only vegetables he had seen were bruised from bouncing in wagons, yanked from the earth the night before and still bleeding. . . . The Les Halles they had left that morning seemed to him a sprawling mortuary, a place for the dead scattered with the corpses of the once living, a charnel house with the stench of decomposition.”

Lantier tells Florent of a series of subversive prints entitled “The Battle of the Fat and the Thin” that depicts several episodes in the conflict throughout the history of mankind of “two opposing groups, one devouring the other to grow fat and jolly.” [Very strong resonance to Eugene Sue’s “History of the People” here]. “The Fat, bursting from their enormity, prepare for the evening glut, while the Thin, doubled over from hunger, look in from the street, stick figures filled with envy.”

Lantier classes both himself and Florent as clearly among the Thin and notes that Florent is surrounded by the Fat where he lives at the charcuterie and where he works among the fishmongers. The “large bosoms”of the Fat, he warns, have it in for Florent as naturally as a cat chases a mouse.”

The radical group of which Florent has become the leader draws the attention of the master gossip of Les Halles, the aged and thin Mademoiselle Saget, who goes rom stall to stall in Les Halles, trading gossip for morsels of food. From one of her observation points of a park bench she “seemed to stretch taller and glide along each story, right up to the round flaring eyes of the attic windows. She gawked at the curtains. She could develop an entire drama from a head that appeared between two curtains.” When she extracts the secret of Florent’s past, “her little feet barely touched the ground. She was carried by her delight as though caressed by a breeze. . . . Now the whole Les Halles neighborhood belonged to her. There was no longer a missing piece.”

Claude Lantier perceives the impractical nature of Florent’s detailed plans for the uprising. He tells his friend: “you approach politics exactly the way I approach painting. . . . You’re an artist in your own field. You dream politics. I imagine you spend entire evenings here, gazing at the stars, interpreting them as infinity’s ballots. Then you tickle yourself with your ideas of justice and truth. It’s also true that your ideas, like my paintings, strike terrible fear into the hearts of the bourgeoisie.”

Florent’s dreaming of revolution extends to his designing banners for each nonexistent cadre. When Lisa discovers the red armbands and flags in his room, she resolves to denounce him to the police. When she does so, she discovers that Florent has already been denounced, anonymously, by nearly everyone she knows. The police have been aware of the movements of the “dangerous” revolutionary since he landed back in France.

When Florent witnesses Marjolin beheading fattened pigeons for market, he nearly faints – revealing his ill-suitedness to the role of revolutionary leader. He is arrested at a politically useful time and led off like a lamb. As the novel ends, he is sentenced to return to Devil’s Island.

The thin idealist expelled, The Beautiful Lisa stands in the doorway of the once again thriving charcuterie, “taking up its entire width. Her linens had never been so white. Her rosy cheeks had never been so refreshed or so perfectly framed in smooth waves of hair. . . .This was total tranquility, complete happiness, lifeless and unshakable, as she bathed in the warm air. Her tightly stretched bodice seemed to be still digesting yesterday’s happiness. Her chubby hands, lost in the folds of her apron, were not even outstretched to catch today’s happiness, for it was certain to fall into her hands.”

Abstemious Radicals

2009-08-30T19:00:00.004-05:00

Emile Zola, The Belly of Paris: Reading Notes, Part 2

At the fishmarket, Florent befriends Muche, the wild son of The Beautiful Norman. “The Beautiful Norman’s son was growing up wild in the fishmarket. He had been brought there when he was only three and spent his days squatting on a rag surrounded by fish. He slept as though he were a brother of the great tunas, and he woke up among mackerel and whiting. The ragamuffin smelled so fishy that people almost wondered if he hadn’t emerged from the belly of some giant fish. For a long time, his favorite game when his mother wasn’t looking was to build walls and houses of herring.”

The job at the market almost seduces Florent, making him forget Devil’s Island: “after seven years of suffering, he had fallen into such a state of calm, in a life so perfectly ordered, that he barely felt alive. He simply drifted mindlessly, each morning caught by surprise to find himself in the same armchair in his cramped office . . . in the ceaseless racket of the market that made him dream of a swelling sea surrounding him. ”

But “little by little, an uneasiness began to eat at him. He became dissatisfied, accusing himself of all sorts of indefinable faults, and began to rebel against both a physical and mental emptiness.”

“Florent was upset by the magnitude of food that he lived with. The sense of disgust he had felt at the charcuterie returned even more forcefully. . . . His own stomach, the small stomach of a thin man, was turned when he passed the heaps of wet fish.”

“As was his destiny, Florent returned to politics.” Florent falls in with a group of “radicals” who meet in a side room of a wine shop and debate revolution. All of them are thin and near-abstemious: having just one glass of wine or beer, or liquor each which they stretch-out over the course of hours of political posturing. “Florent took a sensual pleasure in these meetings.”

Florent tried to recruit the malleable Querau to the radical cell, but The Beautiful Lisa gets wind of it and tells her husband where their real interest, as prosperous business owners, lies: “To please those who have nothing we are supposed to give up earning a living? Of course I take advantage of every opportunity and I support a government that is good for business. If they commit acts of evil, I don’t want to know. As for me, I know I don’t commit them.”

Lisa is increasingly impatient of Florent, whose very thinness is a sign of his bad character. “He . . . . never skips a bite for all the good it does him. His bad instincts feed on him so that he can’t even gain a few pounds.” Troubled that Florent’s thin presence seems to be souring their once prosperous business and household, Lisa visits the Abbe Roustan at the nearly deserted Cathedral of Saint Eustace to ask his advice for whether she should denounce her radical brother-in-law.

In a perverse twist on the romantic tale of Paul et Virginie, Zola tells the story of the two foundlings -- the chubby boy Marjolin and the waif Cadine -- who grow-up together at the market, living lives of sylvan sensuousness amid the plenty and the rot of Les Halles. Taken in by an old vegetable seller, the two small children share a bed into which they smuggle stolen turnips and carrots as well as ”stones, leaves, apple cores, and dolls made of rags.”

Cadine is industrious from an early age; Marjolin lazy. Cadine is also sexually precocious, and when she and Marjolin are forbidden to share the same bed at home, they find numerous hiding places in the market to continue their intimacy. “It was in the basement of the poultry pavilion that they were able to sleep together. It was their special tradition, and finding a way to sleep against each other, the old way they had lost, made them feel warm. There by the slaughterhouse table and the big baskets of feathers, they could stretch out.”

“They lived like happy young animals, ruled by their instincts, satisfying their appetites in the midst of mountains of food, where they had grown like plants made of flesh and blood. . . . Neither of them ever left Les Halles for for more than a few moments. It was their perch, their stable, the colossal manger where they slept, loved, and lived on a huge bed of meat, butter, and vegetables.”

"A Whole World of Things that Lived on Fat" ("The Belly of Paris" begins)

2009-08-30T17:40:00.006-05:00

Emile Zola, The Belly of Paris: Reading Notes, Part 1

Zola’s “The Belly of Paris” shows consumerism’s –- and specifically food’s -– power as a kind of political soporific, drowning the middle class in prosperity and contentment.

An escapee from Devil’s Island, Florent Quenu, returns to Paris starving and, ironically, in the back of an overflowing cart of vegetables headed for Paris’ central market. He had been arrested as part of the popular uprising of 1851, though, in reality, he slept through the action, waking only when he was arrested. This presages Florent’s dreamy, impractical –- indeed, gentle -- side as a revolutionary.

In Florent’s absence, the modern market of Les Halles has been built, a vast cathedral of consumerism replacing the old medieval market. When Florent hears a “peal of bells,” it is from the market buildings, not from nearby St Eustace cathedral (which we later see is nearly deserted). “Florent looked at the huge market emerging from the shadows. . . . . [its buildings] seemed like some kind of oversize modern machine, a kind of steam engine with a cauldron.”

“These markets were like a huge central organ, furiously pulsating and pumping the blood of life though the city’s veins. The uproar from all the stocking and provisioning was like the chomping of the jaws of a colossus, at one end the cracking of whips of the big buyers driving their wagons to the local markets, at the other the plodding clogs of the poor women who sold lettuce door to door carrying off their baskets.’

The malnourished, bedraggled Florent takes refuge with the family of his half-brother Quenu, whom he raised as a boy. Quenu and his wife Lisa – known as “the Beautiful Lisa” have become highly prosperous – indeed, fantastically fat -- as proprietors of a charcutrerie located adjacent to the market. “They looked brimming with good health, solidly built. . . . . The two in their turn looked at Florent with that uneasiness that fleshy people always feel in the presence of someone who is extremely skinny. Even their cat was puffed-up with fat and stared at Florent suspiciously with dilated yellow eyes.”

The atmosphere of the kitchen behind the charcuterie: “A whole world of things that lived on fat. . . . Despite the excessive cleanliness, grease dominated; it oozed from the blue and white tiles, shone on the red floor tiles, gave a gray sheen to the stove, polished the chopping block to the glow of varnished oak. And in the vapor from the three continuously steaming pots of melting pork, the condensation, falling drop by drop, ensured that there was not, from floor to ceiling, so much as a nail that did not drip grease.”

One evening, in the kitchen, the morose Florent is urged to tell the story of his privation and escape from Devil’s Island as a kind of bedtime tale for Lisa and Quenu’s equally plump daughter. The little girl takes it as a fairy story, laughing at the idea one could like three days without eating.

Florent has befriended the artist Claude Lantier, who dreams and talks obsessively about the paintings he wishes to undertake, but never completes them. Lantier finds inspiration in the excess of the modern market but –- another thin man –- actually eats very little. “He found something extravagant, crazy, and sublime in all the vegetables.” But “it was obvious that it had not occured to Claude at that moment that all those beautiful objects were there for people to eat. He loved them for their colors.”

Florent is ill-suited to life in the environs of the market: “Florent felt out of place. He recognized the inept way in which he, a thin and artless man, had fallen into a world of fat people. He realized his presence was disturbing the entire neighborhood.” And he finds his principles fading in "the fatty repose of [their] sleepy kitchen."

Nevertheless, to please Lisa, he agrees to accept a job at the market as temporary inspector in the fish pavilion. Once introduced into the fish market, he falls in with The Beautiful Lisa's rival, the saltwater fish seller known as "The Beautiful Norman."

Prospero breaks his staff: "Endless Things" concludes

2009-08-01T15:40:00.000-05:00

John Crowley, Endless Things (Book Four of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part V

Last section of "Endless Things" centered on the moment when Prospero "has to drown his book and break his staff." Like Bruno, Dee, and Kraft before him, Pierce leaves magic behind as "when the world has gone on," when one world has ended, "you must live in it without magic." It seems clear at this pointh that both the pagan and the Christian world systems have been expelled, replaced by absence, spiritual remoteness -- a void.

Returning to the Faraway Hills from his European quest, Pierce meets and falls in love with yet another Rose -- Rosamund Corvino (Roo). Pierce, his questing days over, goes to work for a plastics factory and lives at a rundown motel: the Morpheus Arms.

At the wedding of Spofford and Rosie Rasmussen, the local band "The Orphics" have been renamed "The Rude Mechanicals." In a Shakespearean sense, the world now a place for low comedy rather than fairy stories. Spontaneously, Rosie's daughter Sam sings a wordless song "long and lilting, without shape or repeat, and endless melody" a song "not for human ears."

"Sam couldn't know that the song without words she sang was the last breath to be breathed, the last spirit exhalation of the previous age, or the first of the new, same thing."

It is revealed that the scholarly mage Frank Walker Barr -- Pierce's mentor -- has disappeared in Egypt, where he was on an archaeological expedition: another withdrawal of the fantastical from the now thoroughly quotidien world. [And one can't help imagining Beau Brachman's Olds 88 sweeping up through the desert to collect him].

Pierce and Roo travel together to Latin America. On a hike in the mountains, Piece confesses his perverse past loves for the masochist Rose Ryder and his imaginary son Robbie. Roo sees in Pierce's incestuous fantasy a desire for his own father's love; so Robbie as Eros, as magic, dispelled into the language of pop psychology, of recovery.

After Pierce and Roo are married, they travel to Rome, but it too has lost its mystery -- and terror -- for Pierce. In the Campo dei Fiori, site of Giordano Bruno's martyrdom, they come to the statue of the monk, at the base of which is a young couple spoon, sweetly oblivious to the history of the place. Wordlessly, Roo buys flowers, roses, for Pierce to place at the philosopher's feet: "Swallowing in embarrassment and grief, with the incurious eyes of the hylic youth in their beauty upon him, he laid them at the statue's base, and stepped away."

Roo and Pierce return to Latin America to adopt a child and end up becoming parents of twin sisters: Maria (Mary) and Jeusa (who they rename Vita). Washing dishes one night, Pierce, not unaffectionately, tells Roo that in an archetypal sense she is the "crone," the woman in the hero's life that comes after the mother and the beloved and who "humiliates and challenges the hero and charges him with interpreting her commands and unriddling her harsh riddles, to labor under her sanctions until liberated."

To which Roo replies, also not unaffectionately, "that is such bullshit."

At Roo's insistence, Pierce has isolated himself in a retreat house, an Abbey (but of recent construction) to finish the work of sorting through Kraft's final manuscript. "It reminded him of the welcoming and comforting structures of stone and timbers built in the wild places by the government just a few decades before, when labor was cheap and hopes were high, the lodges and the nature centers of state parks, the riparian works and dams, places Pierce loved to come upon as a boy."

While at the Abbey, Pierce once again confronts the Y-shaped moment of decision between salvation (which is also intolerant) and sinfulness (which is also innocent). He looks for counsel from the retreat coordinator, Brother Lewis, who is at first kindly but then sternly condemns his marriage to Roo as "a great wrong" due to her having been previously married. That night, Pierce wanders from the Abbey grounds and finds himself at the "Paradise Lounge," a strip club. His attention focuses on a lap dancer with shaved pubic hair ("Edenic," Pierce thinks). "When you get to hell," the lapdancer says seductively, "mention my name. You'll get a good deal."

Pierce feels exulted for a moment, but then empty. And he has the revelation of how distant creation is from everything we know as meaning.

The "realm in which all is contained" is beyond heaven and beyond meaning, both of which lie within. That realm "provided all that was needed for the world to be, but it touched nothing here. It made nothing, altered nothing, wanted nothing, asked nothing, urged nothing; the fact of its existence beyond existence had nothing to do with what went on here, didn't shine through it as a dome of many-colored glass. No. This world shone with its own light, and its light is all the light there is."

The Y-shaped decision between salvation and damnation has no greater meaning than the world that is becoming. "Here at this place, existence divided in two, before and after, though nothing, not an atom, had changed because of it, or would."

The book ends with a hike up the mountain over Blackbury Jambs to see the monument to one of the town's luminaries -- Hurd Hope Welkin, whose struggles with demons now appear to have been simple psychological delusion. Sam, who could once see spirits is now an anthropologist, who looks for clues to human behavior in evolutionary biology.

The Welkin monument includes a massive harp through which the wind plays in "perfect concord." It marks the closest Pierce and his loved ones can get to heaven.

"They had come up as far as it was possible to go."

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Words as magic; the writer as alchemist

2009-07-26T17:49:00.002-05:00

John Crowley, Endless Things (Book Four of The AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part IV

A wind rises -- a counter-wind to John Dee's -- that shifts the spirit of the age from the word-drunk relativist Giordano to the orthodox Rene Descartes. The young Decartes has a number of vivid dreams -- one of a "great deforming wind" that blows him toward a chapel and a school -- and determines to join the bloody siege of Prague.

The wind blows through the military ranks arrayed before Prague; a light wind at first, but finally one that "sweeps away" the "various unearthly powers" ranked behind Frederick's forces. Their heavenly supporters gone, the soldiers feel "their warm mammalian breath condensed on the cold damp air. They thought how short life is, and of how little worth is the promise of heaven."
The wind blows across the world hardly noticed, but neverethess "rattling the windows of the present and scattering the dealt cards of the past, pushing closed the doors of open books and scrambling the sense of their indexes and prolegomena. Finally its baby breath . . . separated the a from the e in every word where they were joined, or suppressed one and left only the other."

Walking through, but hardly noticing, the bloody devastastion of Prague, Decartes begins to formulate "a way to reduce all kinds of physical problems to mathematical equations." He seeks "a method for deciding what we can know with absolute certainty; how to strip thought of words entirely."

In the failure of Rosicrucianism as a political force, a lesson from the epigraph to the "Chemical Wedding," perhaps, Crowley half-suggests, one that only appeared there with the end of that old world: "Secrets told to all are spoiled, things made common have no power; therefore do not throw pearls before swine, nor proffer roses to an ass." [Thus, Bruno's metamorphosis into ass is philosophically undone as is the mythic transformation of Apuleus's "Golden Ass" returned to human form by eating roses].

Following Bruno, following Kraft, Pierce has the sense ("a dream-sure certainty") that the secret item, the surviving token of AEgypt, for which he is searching is still in Prague. He has a vivid dream in which his father, Axel, brings it to him, only to have it snatched away by spirits with "horripilating hands."

Fellowes Kraft's first book (one thinks here of the similarly dillitantish Ralph Roeder) was on Catherine de Medici and the St. Bartholemew's Day Massacre. His brand of whisky, inevitably, is Four Roses.

When traveling, Kraft prefers antique sepia postcards "as though he could not only see the colored present before him full of busy young people and shiny cars and advertising, but remember this old brown past as well, the cars few and black, the trees ungrown or uncut"

As Kraft feels death approaching, he consults Boney -- he addresses him, as habitually, "Mon Emperor" -- on how to keep his papers from falling into the wrong hands. Boney suggests that Kraft could burn the sensitive papers himself, to which the novelist replies: "It would be a little like putting an end to my own messy and overstuffed consciousness. I have a profound horror of suicide."

Kraft's lifelong quest is for what the Cabbalists call the "Shekhinah," the stone from the hollow of God's heart that transforms matter to spirit: "it is the lapis exulus, the gem of lost home, and gutters and ash heaps are as likely a place for it as any. When he was a boy walking those streets Kraft used to keep an eye out for it, going up the town and back again; looking for its telltale gleam in vacant lots, kicking cans that might conceal it. Once he kicked a can of yellow jackets, and was badly stung."

Kraft's trips to Prague are just prior to Hitler's invasion and during the Russian suppression of Czech freedom in 1968. He thinks of the Adamite sects that lived in Bohemia prior to the wars of religion and reflects that similar groups are said to exist in the Faraway Hills where he lives.

Revisiting Prague on the brink of the Russian invasion, Kraft meditates on the local tradition of political change through defeneatestion and thinks of how "the sources of certain events lay not in their antecedent causes but in mirror or shadow events that lay far in the past r future; as though by chance a secret lever on a clockwork could be pressed that made it go after being long still, or as though a wind blowing up in one age could tear leaves and being down steeples in another."

Similarly, he sees how one masters history in order to "impose [its] irrefutable Laws on Time's body . . . to eliminate or hide away anything that confounds or flouts them. It is thus in any age that the Archons rule; the rule of the Archons in heaven being contiguous with that of their epigones on earth."

Thus, the way to defeat power is to propose new laws of history: "laws of desire and hope, which are not fixed but endlessly mutible, and unimposible on anyone else. They are the laws of another history of the world, one's own."

Kraft finds not the magic relic that Boney sent him in search of but, perhaps inevitably, another novel. The unfinished manuscript Pierce has been charged with editing contains the secret of that departed world. It is, Kraft reflects, "a book that even if he finished it would be too long for anyone to read, and would still have to be read twice to be understood."

The writer is the true alchemist. Kraft thinks "give me the base stuff of the world, sadness and nightmare and things tortured in the black smithy of history, and I will turn it all to gold, sophic, wonderful, gold that can't be spent. . . . Transformation was what language could do. It was all it could do."

As death approaches, Kraft sees an unfamiliar car, an Olds 88, approaching (and in it, no doubt, Beau Brachman, who collects the souls of heroes and monsters to take them to the hereafter).

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Bruno's refusal

2009-07-26T10:26:00.002-05:00

John Crowley, Endless Things (Book Four of The AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part III

Forces gather in heaven and earth for the (or rather another) battle for the end of the world. Terestrially, it takes place in Prague where Frederick and Elizabeth -- the Winter King and Queen beloved of the Rosicrucians -- reign in Rudolf's mystical castle, in defiance of the Catholic order.

Dee's old skyrer Kelly is there, and sees the forces of heaven in array for battle: "the angel bands issuing from their watchtowers at the four corners of the universe: red as new-smitten blood, lily white, green and garlic-bladed like a dragon's skin, black as raven hair or bilberry juice, the four kinds of which the world is made, coming together in war. . . . In the lower heavens the souls of heroes, the great daemons, the tutelary spirits, the angels of the nations, were thereupon set upon one another. They couldn't know that what was being fought over in Heaven was the shape of the world to come, in which none of them would figure. Yet since the lowest of the rulers of the air are coterminous or contiguous with the highest rulers of the earth, the states and nations, princes and churches, were agitated too, and thought they were plotted against."

Inside the castle, Frederick and Elizabeth come to the tetradic chamber with Archimboldo's paintings. At its center, where Giordano had seen an absence, now lies "a humpbacked black iron trunk waiting to be opened."

In the terrestrial battle for Prague, Rabbi Lowe's Golem fights on the side of Frederick's doomed forces against the Catholics as do the werewolves who harry them at night -- Jews and pagans alike have an interest in preserving the spiritual pax of Rudolf's imaginitive reign.

In the midst of the raging battle a funeral takes place. The Rosicrucian play and tract-writer Philip a Gabella -- the transmigrated Giordano -- who no one had been able to find "to thank or burn" has, in his last sickness, reverted to Ass's form. "He had only hoped -- he had even expected -- that the atoms that composed his own soul might, in far centuries, be drawn again to one another, might seek for one another through the infinite spaces, and at length agglomerate somewhere, elsewhere, into another soul again, his own: and, in their coming together, know themselves as they had been."

In the battle, the Catholics -- the forces of repression -- are vanquished and a call goes out via astral messenger to gather "all those who had sought for the Brothers of the Rosy Cross" -- those who commune with angels, shapeshifters, nightwalkers, goldmakers, doctors of all sciences. They gather in the golden city of Prague, now transformed into the mystical capitol of AEgypt: Adocentyn. An age of learning, tolerance, and love is ushered in. The result is "a backwards revolution, a backflip of wonder performed to turn the progress of the world around like a galleon and head it again for the Age of Gold." [Which would be a defeat of Y-shaped time].

Except, in one of history's -- one of Crowley's -- reversals, none of that happens. Bruno refuses the chance proferred by his interlocutor Cardinal to escape the flames into four-legged freedom. "What happened next," Crowley writes, "was that, twenty years earlier, Giordano Bruno chose not to escape from the papal prison in Rome and go wandering forgetful on four legs into the world."

[In "Daemonomania," Bruno's escape from the stake was parallel with Sam's being freed from the Powerhouse Christian cult. End of the world events with opposite outcomes?]

Bruno refuses to recant because "were I to do that, then their small world would go on existing for centuries more, for no philosopher would dare to speak out and tell them otherwise, and in his telling make it so. If I show that they only have power over this aggregate of atoms, which they may render or discompose as they like or must, then another man may take heart. Finally they will cease. In time, men will laugh at their structures rules bulls anathemata."

Giordano sees the impossibility -- and the peril -- of attempts to remake the world, either by the forces of godly repression or by those of liberty seeking to usher in an age of "self, and ease, and peace, and complimentary love, and natural procreation." He has learned "it was not wisdom to try; ruin was far more likely than glory; give the great ball a kick and you can'th know where it will rebound, or how far it will roll."

In his cell, Bruno "sifts the days of his past and walks the roads of this future and that one" conjuring in his mind an image of the spirit (Sam?) glowing in Dee's seeing stone and of the English magus himself who "had surrendered his own magic, given it up, and by his own renunciation bade magic depart from this world. Because the time was past when even the strongest spirit could be sure he would draw only goodness out of the future for man's aid."

With Bruno's refusal to escape dissolution in the flames of the Inquisition "all the gods, angels, monsters, powers, and principalities of that age began their retreat into the subsidiary realms where they reside today, harmless and unmoving, most of them anyway, for most of us most of the time."

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Holy ass and rosy cross

2009-07-25T15:49:00.001-05:00

John Crowley, Endless Things (Book Four of The AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part II

"Endless Things" begins a Rosicrucian metaplot as Pierce traces Fellowes Kraft's pilgrimage through Europe decades before.

Pierce has, of course, been in the service of two Rose's -- the benevolent pagan Rosie Rasmussen and the destructive Christian Rose Ryder.

The revolutionary appearance of the first Rosicrucian texts, notably the romance "Chemical Wedding," linked to the doomed reign of the enlightened Winter King Frederick of Heidelberg and his bride Elisabeth Stuart, for whose betrothal Shakespeare's "Tempest" was staged.

"If all the world were made of letters and names, then a text out of nowhere could explode it, enter into its tissues like a germ or seed, working both ways at once, toward foreword, towards epilogue, and remake its sense. That's what happened in Europe in 1615 when the Rosicrucian texts appeared, with their fantastic provenances and alphabetical prophets: or would have, if the world really were made of letters and names and not of the stuff it's made of. No one can account for why these texts, unlike all the other wild prophecies, encoded romances, politico-chemical allegories, and religious polemics of the time, should have so taken the imagination."

Christian, the hero of the "Chemical Wedding," is fated, when all the other celebrants have departed, to be left behind to tend the gate of the castle -- punishment for having glimpsed the naked Venus. He replaces an aged gatekeeper who was sentenced to a similar fate before Christian came to replace him. [This succession a clear reference to that of PIerce for Fellowes Kraft].

Pierce's seemingly fated connection to Kraft: "He had always known Kraft. So it seemed now. He knew Bruno because of a book Kraft had written about him. . . . Would he have been surprised if, in that year 1952, some agent of Y-shaped Time had come to tell him that he would be allied with Kraft in life and death (Kraft's), repeating Kraft's journeys and his thoughts?"

Kraft's own autobiography, "Sit Down Sorrow," begins: "In 1930 I closed my childhood like a book, and took ship for the world." The fatherless Kraft, it is revealed, was brought up by his mother into in a small mystical cult." Kraft's mother refers to his absent father as "Guess Who?"

Kraft's novels, forgotten at the time the AEgypt Cycle opens, have now gained a cult following and have been reissued in uniform trade paperbacks "all of them reissued in numbered volumes so that you could remember which ones you'd read and which were yet to go (they were admittedly pretty similar). It could be seen then that they told a single story, the main branch of them anyway, unfolding over time and populated by a large cast that migrated from book to book with the turning years."

Kraft's first and last books were about Girodano and Pierce perceives that in the last, unfinished one, the novelist helps the cosmological monk escape, his soul fleeing the stake in (as we saw at the end of "Daemonomania") the body of an Ass. Now revealed that the cross on the Ass's back, which we knew was not that of the Savior, is the human cross of Dee's "monas" figure.

Pierce, apparently living in a kind of monastic retreat, has a moment of revealtion regarding Kraft's intentions for Bruno -- to save him from the stake -- and picks up again the work of editing or completing Krafts's final book about the monk. He follows, or projects, the Ass's travails until, invoking the Cabbalistic arts of metamorphosis, Giordano remakes himself into a man -- and conspires to launch a new philosophy, which turns out to be Rosicrucianism (the story once again spiraling back upon itself).

Bruno, for Kraft, was the first to see the universe as infinite and subjective, he proved "there was no Down, no Up, no Inside, no Outside"; his gods were "bumblers, and the history of the universe a record of their crimes, follies, and misfortunes."

Kraft makes the idea of "endless things" his own "small prayer and mantra": "to him it meant those things that roll on forever: travel, and the intoxications of thought and gaze and words, and possibility; sex, the sea, childhood and the view from there, the way ahead."

As Kraft works on his final manuscript, feeling death coming on, his thoughts turn to his mother and to his boyhood. Reading one of his mother's letters, memories of his solitary boyhood return: "He pocketed the letter in its envelope, disheartened suddenly, having glimpsed that eager receptive kid, and missing him: lost to him now, he alone left inside his flesh. Wonderful and terrible, how children love the world, and swallow it down daylong in spite of everything, everything."

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The Mystical Figure Y: "Endless Things" begins

2009-07-22T07:32:00.013-05:00

John Crowley, Endless Things (Book Four of The AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part I

"Endless Things" begins with a different, tangible view of new worlds emerging from old -- a visit to the 1939 World's Fair by Pierce's parents, Axel and Winnie, and his Uncle Sam and his wife. Crowley describes "there were a hundred maps of the World of Tomorrow, all of them a little different. At the AT&T pavilion, Sam's wife Opel is selected to make a phone call to anyone and picks the town clerk their rural home in Bondieu, Kentucky. When the call doesn't go through, Crowley reminds us that "The World of Tomorrow" arrives in different places at different moments.

The excursion to the 1939 World's Fair comes as Hitler is invading Poland, his tanks famously rolling through the Polish cavalry. The World's Fair pavilions for Poland and Czechoslovakia embody the temporary persistance of the old order as the new world is created -- in this case, violently.

Pregnant with Pierce in the era before airconditioning, Winnie often takes refuge during the day in the American Museum of Natural History. The war in the Pacific now raging and she ponders the difference between the news stories of devastation and death on the island battlefields and the dioramas of placid wildlife: "Empty. Before humans." She is tempted to wish "men or Man had never gone to those places, never found them and put them at risk so thoughtlessly. For there were no birds there, she bet, no blossoms. Which led to the thought that it would be better if men hadn't come to be at all, the peace and endlessness without them: and she drew away from that thought in a little awe."

"Endless Things" will apparently take its form from the mystical figure "Y" -- the crossroad, the forking path the divides salvation from damnation, fortune from bad luck. It can also represent the cross -- the Tree of Life -- in the division between the saved and the damned that came with Christ's coming. And its stem can be seen as representing youth: before the major choices of adulthoood are made. "Its mystic significance is Choice: the two branches signify the paths of Virtue and Vice, respectively, the narrow right way leading to virtue, the wider left to vice."

The Y is also known as the "Samian figure," a character said to have been invented by Pythagoras. And, expressed by "the hand with bent forefinger," it represents the male member. Axel's Quiz Show failure came from his inability to answer a question about the Samian figure.

The boy Pierce who, from an early age, has "his own secrets and unsayable things, things out of which a double life is made" dwells on the inability to trace life backwards in order to reverse an errant decision: a wrong fork taken. "The Y -- the crosroad, the forking path -- only allows for forward movement. "There's no provision for going back, is there, back over the thrown Y switches of our lives, the ones that shot our little handcar off its straight way and onto the way we took instead . . . no way to go back and fix the thing broken, or break the silence that later exploded. An infinite number of junctures lies between us and that crisis or crux, and passing back again across each one would generate by itself a further juncture."

Pierce nevertheless begins his new quest to retrace Fellowes Kraft's European expedition by retracing -- or revisiting anyway -- his past life: visiting his father and his lovers Julie and the gypsy Sphinx in New York and encountering his mentor Frank Walker Barr at JFK airport.

A Union of Souls: "Daemonomania" concludes

2009-07-19T12:52:00.002-05:00

John Crowley, Daemonomania (Book Three of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part IX

Beau Brachman begins retracing a route he took long ago in which he located and united a network of believers ("a union of souls") in the old world that was lost and the new age to come -- similar to the people Bruno finds throughout his journeyings who display the monus glyph.
The U.S. highways on which Beau made his original journey in his Olds 88 (double infinity; double worm; double ouroboros) are now overgrown, bypassed by the Interstates: "the older roads whose numbers in their white badges had once been codes for escape or pursuit" passing the "ruined shells" of places, "amoeba shapes whose lights were out and broad windows boarded."

One continuity: Beau picks up the Evangelical radio station WIAO he'd listened to many years before in seeking the Old Holiness, the uncorrupted "more perfect gospel bearer" amid the snake-handling religions of Appalachian Kentucky.

The holy man he finds explains the true meaning of Simon Magus's heresy: that not just Jesus but every soul on Earth contains the full power of God and that every woman, not just Mary, possesses the full wisdom of God.

Preparing for Rosie Rasmussen's solstice party -- the invitations read "come as you aren't" -- at the old tourist castle, Pierce tries to craft for his costume the head of a knight's charger but it comes off as an ass's head instead.

Giordano Bruno, in the dungeons of the Venetian Inquisition, tells his fellow prisoners the story of Onorio, the Universal Ass whose earthly foolishness causes it death on earth but whose soul is a brave servant of God in heaven.

The love-sick Pierce increasingly dissociative, living in several worlds, enacting several choices at once. At the solstice party, he unawarely speaks with the ghost of Fellowes Kraft, who laments his own failure to knit past and present together.

Kraft's ghost exhorts the befuddled Pierce: "It'll have to be you that does it. Somehow, I don't know how. If you don't make a contribution, haven't I labored in vain? Not to speak of your own sufferings."

Sam, now in the hands of Powerhouse, is to be cured of her seizures by Roy Honeybeare -- first by denying her medicine and then (inevitably) by helping her remember -- that is: inducing false memories of -- sexual abuse by her father.

Beau and Spofford launch a successful plot to help Rosie steal Sam from the Powerhouse cult. Beau warns the others that, once Sam is freed, he won't himself come back: "Beau said to go on. . . . He said he'll be all right, and don't look for him. He won't be coming back."

Crowley explicates: "When the world ends, it ends differently for each person then alive to see it, each person who chances to see it among the other things to be seen and felt and understood around us all the time; and then very soon it begins again. And almost everyone persists into the new world, which is exactly like the old in almost every respect, or seems to be in the brief moment when the old world can still be remembered.

"Almost everyone. The creatures of the passage time do not persist, who only came into existence for the length of time the world wavered undecided over what shape it would take next. . . .

"When the West was endless, a sea reaching into the sunset, that was where the beasts and heroes of an old age went at last, stepping aboard a ship restless at anchor. . . . So now too."

With that, Beau Brachman heads West to gather all those who will not be a part of the new age: "It may take long, it may be years still, but Beau will gather them all up, as leaves are gathered: as leaves, or pages."

Pierce, without awareness, agrees to take up the task Boney had proposed to him of retracing Kraft's journeys in Europe.

Spofford gives him a ride to Arcady, and Pierce brings up the shepherd's crook he had seen him with in the Spring. Spofford says he never had such a crook. Sam relates to the distracted Pierce that the "ode home" she used to see in Dee's seeing stone is gone. In such small absences, the old world's end is apparent.

In Kentucky, Sister Mary Philomel hears the old box (clearly, the one assembled by Rudolf's court magicians) whirr and clank.

At Solstice, finding Pierce awake in Boney's office at Arcady, Sam says she has been awakened by the snow. She asks him to sing "Silent Night," but he cannot. Then her "favorite," "We Three Kings" -- song of the Magi, patron saints of alchemists. They sing it together.

The date is "the twenty-second of December, 1979. When Sam was Pierce's age, it would be ten years into a new century, no a new millenium, and the world would be as it was coming to be: it would not be the way it had all along been, nor yet what we then thought it would become."

"Daemonomania" ends with Giordano Bruno being led to the stake to burn and his soul's escape into the body of a holy ass. "Now and then boys or shopkeepers chased after him, housewives tried to snatch his lead, but he kicked out and brayed, and they laughed and fell behind, none could catch him. Some noticed the sacred Cross on his shaggy back, the Cross that all asses still bear in honor of Our Lord, Whom one of their kind once carried; but this Cross was not the same, no not the same."

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Stay away, as from a chasm's lip or an exploding cigar

2009-07-18T16:17:00.003-05:00

John Crowley, Daemonomania (Book Three of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part VII

As Rosie Rasmussen glances idly at Kraft's final manuscript, Pierce "had an impulse to warn her, to warn her away, as from a chasm's lip or an exploding cigar."

Showing her father, Mike Mucho's, influence, Sam interrogates Pierce: "Do you believe in God? Are you a Christian or a Jew?" Pierce responds to the little girl: "Neither. There's not just the two."

Pierce, asked by Rosie to watch Sam while she meets with her lawyer, reflects that he will never have a flesh-and-blood child in his life. He thinks of his figment Robbie: "The only child of his person there would ever be he had constructed by himself in his workshop, like Gepetto; had prayed then to the smiling powers that he might be made into a real little boy. And -- like that lonely old puppeteer -- he had got a sort of conditional yes. Real to you: as real as unreal can be; as real as the god's gifts ever are. And what had he done with his new son then? What had he imagined he had done with him then? His heart struck loudly within him like a door slamming shut upon him. Did he really know of no other way of love except that, was it so?"

Pierce reads to Sam the Little Enosh comics he prized in his own childhood. Opposing that fantasy, Mike Mucho is driving with Ray Honeybeare, who is utilizing the resources of Powerhouse to back the battle against Rosie for custody of Sam. Honeybeare warns that Sam has been exposed to imagination (a form of magic) as part of her play at the daycare operated by Beau, and that it is the ill that if causing the girl's seizures. "We've been fighting magic for two thousand years" he states, using as his evidence the story of Peter's contending with Simon Magus who, among other things, said he could fly (the fantasy common to Beau, Rosie, and Pierce).

Dee, back in England, struggles to do good with his spiritual knowledge and despairs: "We must not call down the powers from their spheres, John Dee thought, lest they answer us. For they never will be comfortable to our wills, and their own wills are no more bent to helping us than is the sea's or the wind's. Job asked God, who had permitted his wife and children to be slain, for help and understanding: and in answer God showed him the greatness of his creatures, and the strength of his arm, and told him to be silent."

Dee's descent toward death a devolution. He sells his books, then his plate; removes from his house and "practically stops eating, as an old cat or dog does, seeming to live by consuming the last of his life itself, day by day, until it was all gone." Finally, he sells his seeing stone, knowing it is now just a piece of flawed crystal. "No one but those who had used those Arts great and small for so many decades knew that all true sorcerers, both the wicked and the wise, were dead, and what they had once done could be done no more."

Pierce notices the copy in the Blackbury Jambs library of the cyclopedia he pored-over in his boyhood: "Deities, Devils, and Daemons of Mankind." He "lifted it into the lamplight, knowing even as he opened it that it would ask something of him or offer him something. He could almost hear the whir of gears, the clicking of works long stopped."

Comparing his innocent childhood intimacies with the feral girl Bobby with his perverse pleasures with Rose, Pierce again thinks of the (Dantean; Bunyanean) spiral: it was "as though he had climbed a spiral track up a mountain, he saw that he had come to the same place where he had once stood, only one turn higher up. He could see himself now, down there on a former turn, in his own room in that house, bent over a book, this book or another; he could look with pity down upon himself, at the back of his big shorn head, the vulnerable tendons of his neck."

Mike Mucho gains custody of Sam to "raise in his religion. Rosie Rasmussen and Pierce, now having both lost their loved ones to the Powerhouse, comisserate late at night in the kitchen at Arcady. Pierce begins, somewhat reluctantly to reveal the nature of his sexual relations with Rose Ryder "laying down only low cards at first." In response, Rosie reveals that she too knows Rose's masochistic tendencies firsthand.

Rosie takes Pierce to bed. After, she advises him "You should get married. Have kids. . . . Get out of your head. Get down in the shit and the blood."

And as she drifts off to sleep: "Good night, you dope."

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"Too much reading, too much knowledge, not enough wisdom"

2009-07-18T11:16:00.002-05:00

John Crowley, Daemonomania (Book Three of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part VII

We finally are told the reason why Pierce is boarding the Greyhound Bus ("its blue and silver side marked with a fleeing or pursuing hound") at the beginning of "Daemonomania" -- it is not in an attempt to rescue Rose Ryder from Powerhouse International but because she has been sent, as a kind of Christian succubus, to try and recruit him into the group.

The Powerhouse conclave occurs at a bypass stripmall, including a dinner at a horrifying chain barbecue restaurant (the Powerhousers "their mouths open wide, baring their teeth and scrunching their eyes into a semblance of fury, lifted sandwiches as tall as they were broad and dripping with glossy gravy") and the meeting itself at a sterile motel with a phony Dickensian pub. "There is or was then a certain acrid smell to new motels, arising from the artificial woods and wools they are furnished with maybe, or the harsh cleaners used to scour away the traces of so many humans passing so constantly, or from all that and also another subtler stink of falsity and veneer."

Watching the Powerhouse evangelist Pitt Thurston "a new kind of despair entered Pierce. Long ago in Kentucky he and his cousins with a delicious sense of trespass had used to watch the preachers on TV, they had just begun use the new tool, they were clownish in every sense, they talked too loud and their haircuts were amazing, and their faith was so real and frank it was shaming. Pitt Thurston had learned not from such as they but from late-night talk-show hosts and corporate sales managers."

Pierce on Pitt Thurston: "Oh hateful man, a catalog of all that Pierce despised and feared . . . The suit of pale wintergreen, supressed at the waist, sculpted and tufted at shoulder and lapel. The horrid familiarity with the Deity, his boss man, his chum; the smug self-love, the violent energy directed against others; who could not see in him the smooth beast horned like a lamb who fronts for the Big Beast in Revelation, the top salesman, who marked the foreheads of everyone so they could buy and sell."

The "Big Beast" Honeybeare? "He was heavy, both large and fat; his pants taut around his loins, constricting the large lump of his privates."

Powerhouse a consumerist faith ("just ask"): prayer brings "health, wealth, new cars." Also promotes a belief in spiritual election, as members of Powerhouse are not responsible for any sins they commit -- Pierce recognizes the Carpocratian Heresy: "there is no sin for those who are saved" -- such sins being the work of the powerful demons who contend for their souls.

The ex-psychotherapist Mike Mucho, now an acolyte of Powerhouse, confronts Pierce on how he can explain existence without a belief in God. Pierce replies that "just because I rejected his or the Bible's explanation didn't mean I had to come up with one of my own."

Rose, also Mike Mucho's former lover, alludes to the upcoming custody battle between him and Rosie Rasmussen over their daughter Sam.

The Powerhouse cult as a new form of alchemy. Rose contemplates how "all the gifts she had been given (of the Spirit but not only those of the Spirit, other things too, amazing luck, finding yourself in the right time and the right place to get what you wanted or needed, a test grade, cash, a parking place even, a wake-up call, there wasn't anything too small that it couldn't be made to go right) that all of it was for the making of that new clarity and certainty and power"

The former feral girl Bobby -- now a physicians aide at the children's hospital where Sam is a patient -- had been drawn into Powerhouse International in the hope it could relieve her disturbing dreams of the dead -- manifestations of her nature as a witch. Powerhouse, inevitably, convinces her the dreams are the result of her having been a victim of child sexual abuse by her grandfather/stepfather and stokes her rage. Going back to Kentucky where her grandfather is dying, she begins to see the falsity of the memories implanted in her consciousness.

Pierce horrified, frantic, afraid at the love he conjured for Rose Ryder: "he had messed with magic for his own delight, to get for himself what he wanted but should not have had, and in consequence had harmed irretrievably the world, 'the world,' like a kid with a chemistry set who by chance learns to crystallize or liquify the bonds of space and time."

Beau Brachman goes to New York where he'd once lived. He is handed a flyer by a starveling boy who, when Beau looks back, has disappeared. The flyer, in tiny type, exhorts him to look for the universal goddess Sophia.

Beau recalls similar deliverances in his earlier life in New York in the 1970s: cards printed with the letters "MM" that led to an underground sex club that practiced the spirituality of "copulation without generation."

At "MM," Beau had met the literary agent Julie, who had been Pierce's lover. He goes to see her and they discuss the expected dawning of the new world, which Julie had expected to be a great rising of Atlantis. Beau suggests instead "it won't be a city from the sea, it will some small and unnoticed thing, apparently one of a million identical things but not identical, you will very likely miss it even if its in your own backyard."

Beau tells Julie that her role as a literary agent is important as "the world is made of stories" and that "at certain times" people hunger for stories "like food and shelter." Julie considers how the routine pulp fictions she agents -- the one before her begins, parodying Crowley's own production, "Something has happened in hell" -- all seem to have the mythic plot Beau suggests people are looking for.

[Per Beau's prophecy, Pierce's narrative, which Julie is agenting, may be the one among many seemingly similar things that reveals the coming of the new world].

After his return from the meeting of Powerhouse International in Conurbana, Pierce is psychologically undone. He wants to talk with Beau Brachman, but Beau is away (as we know, he is in New York). He calls the minister Rhea Rasmussen, who tries to counsel him to get over his grief at Rose growing away from him -- not realizing that Pierce's true fear is that the succubus Rose will come back to him, not give him up.

Casting her eyes over Pierce's collection of books on demonology and mysticism, Rhea wonders whether the demons are of his imagination. Explaining he is an historian not a believer, Pierce sees in Rhea's suspicious response "the Medieval answer . . . too much reading . . . too much knowledge, not enough wisdom."

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Bigoted religion and willed ignorance return in strength

2009-07-12T13:12:00.002-05:00

John Crowley, Daemonomania (Book Three of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part VI

Pierce begins to investigate Powerhouse International. He asks advice of a minister, Rhea Rasmussen, but finds her too tolerant for his purposes: she points out that Catholics were themselves an anti-government, mystical cult. He goes to the. Blackbury Jambs library to consult a reference book, but finds it unrevealing, feeling like "a voyeur at an inadequate keyhole." A sensationalist book on cults shelved nearby repells him.

The Vietnam Veteran and erstwhile shepherd Spofford's sense of cults is that they accost lost children, runaways, and make them "into junior wizards and witches themselves, some element of personhood extracted from them and replaced with a weird eye-light and a pasted-on smile. Hollowed out, Spofford had said. You could do it yourself. You could do it to yourself; or you could allow it -- you could ask for it -- to be done to you." Similarly, but from an opposite perspective, Rhea Rasmussen speaks to Pierce of how "religion seems to many people now to be a bondage not a freedom; and a deeper bondage than any political kind because it is voluntary" but that there is "an elation in giving up freedom."

Pierce taunts Rose that now that she is saved, that means he is damned. St. Thomas, he points out, "proved" that it is an entertainment for the souls in heaven to watch the torments of the comdemned in hell.

Rose, for a moment, speaks in tongues -- possession by the spirit or by a demon?

Pierce and Rose interrupted by Rosie Rasmussen. Pierce suggests that her cancelled plan for a Halloween party at the old tourist castle could be shifted to Christmas, a solstice: "Celtic ghosts appear at times and places that are neither here nor there . . . They appear at solstices, and at equinoxes, and on the nights when one of the two seasons of the Celtic year turn into the other -- those are the May Day feast and Halloween night. Christmas is the winter solstice; its a solstice feast."

Christmas/winter solstice as time when animals are allowed to speak; earlier, the young werewolf had spoken of The Three Kings as the patron saints of werewolves and of all those who fight the night battles against witches. The opposition of Rose and Rosie being defined as Christian/Pagan?

Drifting into sleep: "he lay alert listening to his brain run . . . until at a certain moment his thoughts turned to nonsense and he passed over."

In a letter, Rose guilelessly lets slip the anti-semitic ideology of the Powerhouse International cult. Pierce horrified at the return of Christianity's vengeful, score-settling god. "It was just like them, Christians, always their way, to transfer their own spleen and self-regard to the Maker and Sustainer of the Universe; to make the settling of their imaginary scores (settled in their favor a thousand times over, never enough though) the very last thing the Infinite is to concern himself with in this world -- hurting, whacking, flaying, causing pain. Your enemies your footstool. Maybe gather them all behind barbed wire, sure make them wear gray pyjamas and starve them to skeletons." He could add to this the holocaust against witches and heretics.

Here again, parallel between the witch hunters of the Dee/Giordano story and the contemporary narrative.

The next morning, Pierce reads that the Liberal Arts college at which he used to teach in New York -- which had previously trendily adjusted from elite to experimental and back again -- has become a Christian college. AEgypt Cycle's narrative arc beginning to crystalize as cultural conflict between New Age mythos and spirituality on 70s and emergence in 80s of Fundamentalist Christianity.

Pierce again: "The one thing he could not have conceived, would not have believed if he heard it predicted: that bigoted religion and willed ignorance would return in strength, and not even in new and outlandishly intriguing forms, just the same old wine, the same old bottles, people believing impossible things in the manner of athletes inuring themselves to pain or soldiers to bloodshed."

Pierce writes Rose a horrified letter in return, perhaps (?) finally casting that Christian incubus from him.

"War in Heaven. A war of all against all; if you are not of one party the will make you of another."

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The modernity of Demon hunters

2009-07-12T09:57:00.003-05:00

John Crowley, Daemonomania (Book Three of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part V

The demon-hunters of the 16th century -- notably Jean Bodin, author of the treatise "Daemonomania" -- believe that Hell's mouth had opened due to the increased sinfulness of men and women: "Now it seemed [devils] walked or flew over the earth in legions, herding the wicked like cattle toward their pens, contracting with the desperate and the proud for their immortal souls, their signatures in blood smoking on the parchment; or in female form hovering oven men in the night to steal their seed as the men tossed in guilty dreams."

Bodin inveighs that "witches by the thousands are everywhere, multiplying upon the earth even as the worms in a garden" and warns they have formed a heretical church or sect of their own. Their rites, he insists, include the eating of children ("killed and eaten like fowl"). Crowley notes this is the same crime -- the very image of hell on Earth -- with which the Romans charged the early Christians and then the Christians charged their Gnostic rivals and then the Jews.

Dee is called by the Emperor Rudolf to cure a prized specimen in his collection -- a young werewolf (and, in fact, the same boy caught in a wolf trap on his way to the night battle that closes the previous volume). Dee cures the boy, who had been held chained in a narrow dungeon, by giving him doses of starlight and good food: wine, apples.

Madimi had warned Dee: "They will burn you too." In agreeing to take on the cure of the young werewolf, he thinks in response: "let me see what good I might do till then."

Dee and Giordano Bruno encounter each other at Rudolf's court and see the tetrad shaped room for which he commissioned Archimboldo to create human figures made from the elements of the world. Archimboldo's figures revealing a kind of heretical knowledge of how man is of the same matter as all other life.

Bruno looking at the paintings: "This is what we are ourselves. . . . For we are only composites of the elements of the world, held together while we live by our souls. This soul is perhaps nothing more than the form within matter, the form particular to us. It dissolves when we do, as those faces would vanish if the animals stirred and took themselves off, or when the flowers faded and the fuses and matches burned up."

In another part of Hradschin Castle, learned men in the employ of Rudolf secretly collaborate on a clockwork mechanism that would embody their hermetic knowledge and preserve it for the future, much as Hermes was buried clutching a tablet conveying his learning.

The nurse in the children's hospital (once nicknamed "Little Ones") where Sam goes for tests is Bobby, the feral girl from Pierce's boyhood. She is also a member of Powerhouse International and meets Rose Ryder there. Bobby suspects that Rose is another like her -- that is, a witch.

The nonsense song ("His head if a doughnut and his name is Aiken Drum") that Sam sings in the hospital has an Archimboldean resonance. Pierce, struggling with his manuscript, has a counter-Archimboldean sense of emptiness that "his head was a bread box, his heart was a birdcage."

Pierce sees the modernity of Bodin and the demon-hunters: "Jean Bodin, who wanted to find and burn all witches, all those who took animal form or believed they did -- all those who had illicit or unregulated dealings with the dead -- was in fact a modern man, a man of the time to come: he was fighting against the tendency to slip back into the older ways, the old world. . . . Clearheaded men like Bodin, Catholic and Protestant, antiphantasmic warriors, pushed back the dark together, rejecting the age-old truce between the Church and the pagans, both with their old philosophers and their old gods, with the small gods of everyday life, with the warning and helping dead. No more, said Bodin, Calvin, Mersenne."

"And it worked too. Frightened or ashamed, those who investigated Nature or nature drew in their researches, shut out the universal rays, narrowed their questions to those that had some promise of clear answers, and to whose formulations no power could object. If they hadn't done so the plain stepping stones of science couldn't have been uncovered, and swept."

Struggling to recover the "multilayered earth" in his manuscript, Pierce thinks of how "years before, when he had finally and wholeheartedly abjured the Church and all its pomps and works, had denied wholesale and at large all judgments it could make or had made on him, he had remembered the Sin Against the Holy Ghost, which no one could define but which Jesus was very clear in stating could not be forgiven, and that he had said in his mind 'All right, whatever it is I hereby commit it': and had felt a sudden chill nakedness, as though he had been taken notice of, and his statement recorded. Which was what he felt now too."

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Prophecy of a fallen angel

2009-07-11T12:04:00.001-05:00

John Crowley, Daemonomania (Book Three of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part IV

Perverseness of chapter named for the astrological house of the Wife: "Uxor." Dee's angels, speaking through the skyrer Kelly, demand the two men sexually swap wives. Pierce Moffat's relations with his incubus, Rose Ryder, fall deeper and deeper into sadomasochism.

Encountering his aged landlord, Mr. Winterhalter, who arrives in a large sedan, Pierce contemplates that "the more they shrink and shrivel, the larger their cars become."

Tucked in the pages of one of his books, Kraft had secreted a "getaway fund" -- five hundred dollars in old 50s. Rose Ryder too has a getaway fund that she uses to pay for an advanced course from the Christian healing cult, Powerhouse International, into which she is increasingly pulled.

As both Pierce and Rosie Rasmussen are deserted by their lovers, they separately contemplate an Early-Modern tract on autoeroticism from Fellowes Kraft's library.

In Bavaria, deserted by his skyrer Kelly, Dee laments that he himself has never seen or heard the angels who have directed their alchemical work. He wonders if the angels that speak to men "are ours alone, hidden inside" rather than heavenly. With that understanding, Dee for the first time looks past the surface of his seeing stone and speaks with Madimi.

Madimi confesses that she dictated Dee and Kelly share their wives in common for her own "amusement" and, responding to his horror at this, explains that "all angels are fallen angels." She warns that there is a battle in Heaven that "will have its mirror on Earth": a "war of all Christ's churches against their enemies: those who invoke the gods daemons and angels of heaven and earth from the places where they reside. They will burn all who do so. They will have them into the fire as paper."

Madimi prophesizes the new world soon to dawn: "She had said to them that a new age was to come, that many now alive would see it before their eyes were closed forever; it would steal upon many, and bewilder them. Much would be taken then, and much of value would be thrown away as trash; but nothing would be lost that would not be replaced by something of equal worth, somewhere, in some sphere, but far from here." She gives Dee a present of a wind he can control and, not long after, Kelly gives him his perfected means of making gold with the ease with which a baker makes bread.

Heralding the war in heaven, the Duke of Bavaria outlaws folk beliefs: "No longer were these beliefs and practices of country people to be allowed, for it had been determined that they had all along been worshipping the Devil -- perhaps without knowing it -- by their superstitions. Ghosts, manikins, ogres, mountain giants, will-o-the-wisps, the imps that combed sparks into cats fur and soured milk, all the small creatures of everyday and every-night life: either they had been suborned by the Enemy, or they had always been devils in disguise."

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The dispelling of Fellowes Kraft

2009-07-05T20:15:00.002-05:00

John Crowley, Daemonomania (Book Three of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part III

Pierce senses an inevitability in the events that link him from his boyhood to the present with the project of the writer Fellowes Kraft: "Pierce felt steal over him in the little room a species of dread. . . . This typescript, and his own book; the book's notes he had compiled, Kraft's old novels he had once read, these old books he was taking away from Kraft's shelves, the crystal ball Rosie said was still there in Boney's house, the letters Kraft had written to Boney from Prague and Vienna and Rome still piled on Boney's desk at Arcady, the Foundation's money awaiting him in the bank -- they all seemed for a moment to be items in a single list, compiled deliberately over the years; one of those huge and lengthy black-magic spells that can only be got out of by reversing them, step by step."

In Kraft's final manuscript, description of the wandering band of necromancers and alchemists who crisscross Europe in the 17th century recalls the "invisible college" imagined by the young Pierce.

On behalf of the Foundation, Pierce straightens and organises the chaotic contents of Kraft's cottege, in the process disturbing his wan ghost and helping to liberate his spirit: "Parts of his own disintegrating self remain behind after death, caught like dust or must [in accumulating papers and objects]. So pull it all out, full plastic bags with the worn shoes he had no reason to throw away, there being plenty of room in these closets; bang the old books together like erasers after school and watch the dust fly. You do him a favor: with every scrapbook opened, every ancient pile shifted, a little more of him is loosened, and gets away."

Pierce also finds an annotated copy of Marlowe's play "Dr. Faustus," which it had earlier been revealed Kraft sought to put on in the old tourist castle.

Pierce's removal of Kraft's uncomplete final manuscript and several of his rarest books for safekeeping an act of dispelling: "The load of old books was damn heavy, and heaviest of all, resistant perhaps, tugging him backwards toward its resting place, was the typescript. Scotty -- Fellowes Kraft's malamute-lab mutt, who was buried there in the swale -- relaxed at last at it passed by him in Pierce's arms; his great breast fell in and eased as though in a sigh, his duties to watch and ward now done at last, all done."

The epileptic fits (she calls them "jumps") suffered by Sam, Rosie Rasmussen's daughter, apparently start when the child finds the seeing stone (allegedly belonging to Dr. Dee) that Kraft found for Boney on one of his Foundation-funded European expeditions. In the stone, Sam sees her "ode house," which her parents think is imaginary, but is apparently Dr. Dee's library. Dee, in turn, appears to have seen Sam in that self-same glass.

The "Daemonomania" of the title is from a book in Fellowes Kraft's library -- a 16th Century tract by Jean Bodin against those who are obsessed with spirits, both the possessed and those intellectuals who study supernatural forces other than God . . . in essence, that wandering band of necromancers imagined by the young Pierce. [In the present-day story, Bodin's line-of-thought seems to be carried forward by the Christian therapeutic zealotry of. Roy Honeybeare].

Pearce explains that in the 16th century, people assumed you needed spirits to manage the world: "Nobody in Bodin's time believed [the world] could just go by itself, the way they would come to believe two hundred years later, and still do."

At home alone -- with Rose off at her "training session" for Honeybeare's therapeutic cult -- Pierce meditates on the susceptability for Demonism of people of his own Saturnine, melancholic frame of mind.

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The Daemons of Sexual Desire

2009-07-05T12:27:00.004-05:00

John Crowley, Daemonomania (Book Three of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part II

Destiny as a misnaming of "mighty Chance, which we call Destiny when it deals us, after a million so-so hands, one undeniable straight flush."

An antique store ("Persistence of Memory") has opened in the apartment building where Pierce until recently lived. He sees and buys an odd dog-related frame with embedded whips and collars. Significance only becomes clear when it is revealed that his romance with Rose Ryder is a sadomasochiatic one.

Considering Rose's masochism, Pierce (ever precocious) thinks of his boyhood reading of Krafft-Ebbing: "mostly it was about people (unimaginable to him, people named with just a job and a single capital letter, E, a butcher, G, a married woman) whose sexuality had become accidentally bound-up -- it seemed to Pierce that it happened easily and often -- with something different from the persons of others. Fetishes was the word the book used. . . . He had wondered, then, if such a thing might happen to him, that his own mighty feelings might get loose somehow and seize blindly on the wrong thing forever. . . . He hoped if it did, whatever it was he ended-up with would not be loathesome or operose, as some of these were, or at least be easily acquired."

After an intense sexual encounter with Rose, Pierce is tempted to leave Blackbury Jambs, and his manuscript, forever, but instead heads home, stopping to relieve his own pent-up "spirit" of desire.

Spirit, Crowley explains, is "finer than body yet not quite immortal soul . . . quicksilver stuff that enwraps the soul and fills the heart and takes the impressions of the sense organs." It is expressed outside the body in two ways: song and ejaculate ("thick white stuff, spirit double-distilled, cooked up by heat, clouded into visibility like an egg's white").

Science changes the metaphoric unity of the cosmos by introducing experiment, man-made causality: "once, a universal animating spirit pervaded the whole universe, the reason why everything was as it was and not a different thing," there was "a continuity of the spirit within us and this universal spirit."

Rosie thinks back to the wheelchair-bound Boney, watching jealously as she rakes leaves at Arcadia: "That's one think I'll never do again. I wish I'd done it more. I wish I'd done everything more."

The Christian healing cult leader Honeybeare launches a creepily subdued rant at the ex-psychotherapist Mike Mucho (Rosie's husband) on the harm modern parents inflict on their children: "Sexual behavior, blasphemy . . . Even if they aren't consciously worshiping the devil, I mean assenting to him, these parents are caught up in these behaviors, and it comes to the same thing. An implicit pact. And the children are the ones to suffer. All over this land. . . . We are going to find that a generation of devils was laid in the souls of our children like eggs of some kind of insect."

The epileptic fits that Sam, Rosie's daughter, is having turn out to be realted to the young girl's having discovered Boney's seeing stone, in the gray depth of which she can see the other house that her mother assumes is imaginary: her "ode home."

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"An irruption of the fearful uncanny into ordinary lives": "Daemonomania" begins

2009-07-05T08:44:00.002-05:00

John Crowley, Daemonomania (Book Three of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part I

"Daemonomania," the third volume of Crowley's "AEgypt Cycle" spans, we are told, the autumn houses of the Zodiac -- "it contains the middle of life, passages, friends and enemies, loss, dreams, dying, safety and danger. Its matter is the answering of calls, or the failure to answer them."

Traveling via bus to the declining factory city of Conurbania where Rose Ryder has become caught up in a Christian cult that overtook her workplace, Pierce Moffat reflects of the intrusion of the ineffable into the diurnal: "How often he had marvelled, when reading stories or watching movies about the sudden irruption of the fearful uncanny into ordinary lives -- the activation of an ancient curse, the devil in the flesh -- that the heroes seem to feel so little. They are surprised, they gasp, they deny it at first, but they gather their wits soon enough and begin to fight back; they don't faint from unsupportable dread, as Pierce believed he would."

Pierce perceives that "an awful slippage or instability had just lately come over things, or Pierce had just lately come to perceive it; he seemed to have discovered -- though he refused to assent to the discovery -- that he could make choices that would bring the present world to an end, and begin another, indeed that he was already helplessly making such choices."

Pierce's role in shaping the new world involuntary: "Like a man awaking from an earthquake trying to hold the pictures on the walls and the dishes on the shelf and thinking What is it? What if it?, Pierce wondered what he had done, and tried to make it stop."

The summer had brought strange, isolated dislocations and coincidences that signal the shift between the old order of things and the new. "When the world ends, it ends somewhat differently for each soul alive to see it . . . . But though the world ends sooner for some than for others, each one who passes through it -- or through whom it passes -- will be able to look back and know that it he has moved from the old world to the new, where willy-nilly he will die: will know it though all around him his neighbors are still living in the old world, amid its old comforts and fears."

Rosie plans a Hallows Eve party in the old resort castle in the river. Like Bo and Pierce, Rosie can fly in her dreams ("whyever had she forgotten she could do this"); her flight is that of a witch rather than Bo's magic carpet or Pierce's captain on the bridge.

Rosie, who still hasn't formally accepted the Secretaryship of the Rasmussen Foundation, recalls Boney's refusal to name an heir during the period of his "fast-approaching nonexistance."

Discussing with Rose Ryder the pop-psychological concept of "climacetrics" she has been involved in researching-- seven year cycles of life, a sine curve the up and down passage years surrounding each seventh year -- Pierce asks why they cannot be instead an always rising spiral (Dante, Bunyan): "as through climbing a mountain: every seven years arriving at the same places or stages, only one turn higher, all different."

Considering the account of Helvetius, in 1666, transmiting lead into gold, Pierce reasons one of three things occured; 1) Helvetius made gold, proving our current understanding of elementary science wrong; 2) Helvetius lied; 3) Helvetius could make gold but we cannot because "gold is not the same as it once was, earth is not the same, fire is not the same."

Pierce, proposing in the book he is writing that a. New Age is emerging, keeps a file of news clippings documenting "impossibilities that could not be accounted for, holes in Big Science's increasingly leaky roof."

Pierce's skepticism regarding his own inquiries: "Did he believe it himself? No, he didn't, not entirely, not yet. In the (actually rare) moments when he fully grasped what he was indeed saying, he would often stop writing and stand in mute awe before his own impertanence, or laugh hugely, or quit work for the day, wary and afraid. No, it actually seemed to him that those first shudders of the coming age that so many perceived had in fact passed and left the world the same; there had come no irreversible disasters really, no salvations either; the roads still ran where they had run; life was mostly hard work, and all the odds remained unchanged."

The Christian post-psychoanalytic cult, led by Ray Honeybeare, into which Rose Ryder is pulled, also sees the world as in a moment of transition, "a time full of possibility for good or evil. A time when God's kingdom comes very close to our old earth, maybe not to arrive for good, maybe just to give us a glimpse."

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A great wind rises: "Love & Sleep" concludes

2009-05-26T23:02:00.014-05:00

John Crowley, Love & Sleep (Book Two of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part VIII

Becomes clear that the near-naked, long-lashed, flute-playing Robbie is Eros and that his conjuring by Pierce is not an answer to his need for love but rather presages a love that will arrive -- a love sickness. Val, with the Encyclopedia of Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle, passes Pierce on the library steps after just reading Plato on Eros: “He is not to be confused with the beautiful beloved, though men often make this mistake; rather his appearance presages the appearance of the beloved. He is the spirit who inspires love, who makes love unrefusable.” Had Pierce recognized the book, the narrator speculates, he might have been able to escape the dangerous love that awaits him.

Egyptian resonances in Pierce's somewhat cursed romantic life: just as the second lover of Pierce in New York was called by him "The Sphinx," so his lover in the Faraway Hills, Rose Ryder, drives a car called "the Asp."

Pierce notes that a therapist would say that "in some sense Robbie was occasioned by enforced chastity and sexual tension" and that "gratifying release with a real other person ought to cause him to evaporate. But he hadn't. Every morning, it was true, he had to be re-created anew, Pierce working with Pygmalion's patience on the attenuated phantom until for an instant, a string of instants, he was present, a Real Presence that could be communed with. It grew no easier, but Pierce remained willing, and Robbie didn't cease coming."

Pierce's conjuring of Robbie paralleled in the alchemical work of Dr. Dee and Kelly, seeking to make a Philosopher's Stone in Rudolph II's Prague. As Dee manipulates a chamber, an athenor to simulate the passage of an astrological year, Kelly, in a trance, mythically finds, rescues, and then sacrifices a golden youth.

Giordano Bruno comes to the understanding that the true power in creation is simply love. "There is no power on earth found greater than love. . . . Eros is the great daemon, the little lord of this world; the strongest bond of the world is Venus's loose girdle. . . . Love drives old and young; it drives hot youths into one another's arms against every prohibition of priests and elders, kings and kin, drives them into love-sickness, madness, even death. Love surprises grave senators and abbesses, tormenting their own flesh with young heats, making them dance and caper to his tune." "Love is magic," Bruno expounds, and "magic is love."

The werewolf story from Kentucky in reprised in the 16th Century Bohemia -- where Dee and Bruni have both taken refuge -- with an episode of a youth transformed into wolf, learning to run with others of his kind in feasting on lambs and battling witches by night. The contemporary Kentucky and Renaissance Bohemia/Prague stories are further connected by the reintoduction of first the girl Bobby (now driving, wearing high-heels, and now apparently on the side of the witches) and then Sister Mary Philomel of the Infantine Sisters, still sharing quarters with a worm-eaten statue of Saint Wenceslaus.

Madimi had foretold to Dee that the old world would be swept away not in a fire -- that would be next time -- but in a great wind. The wind arrives in both stories, 1588 and 1978, and in it Eros/Robbie (finding no room in Pierce's bed, now occupied with Rose Ryder) departs wistfuly; Madimi retreats from Dee's sightstone as the Spanish Armada is routed; Rose Rasmussen's daughter Sam sleepwalks and wakes to a seizure; and Sister Mary Philomel is delivered of a key to an antique chest by the animate statue of Wenceslaus.

As Sister Mary Philomel turns the key in the aged chest, "she felt a stirring, as though with the turning of the one key, all the drawers and compartments within (which no one in her memory had ever seen) also opened one by one in sequence." So, a possibility that the relic Fellowes Kraft had sought in Prague on behalf of Boney had actually made its way to Kentucky and the convent where the cancer survivor Sister Mary Philomel abides.

Final chapter begins with a conversation between Pierce and his mentor Frank Walker Barr, seemingly set in an afterlife of palm trees and pyramids, but soon slyly revealed to be a resort in Florida, where he is visiting his mother. In dialogue with his former student, Barr establishes that heart is the one unchanging force in man -- essentially reiterating Giordano Bruno's point about Love and Eros. Pierce at this point is sick with love and, literally, suffering heart-break (coronary symptoms and all) over Rose Ryder, "the succubus that clung there, his own cunning work, made in the smithy of his own heart, which was now shut and could make no more."

Immobilized and dispirited as the volume ends, Pierce waits for a messenger, a goddess to speak into his ear the words "Wake up."

A son conjured from a gray ledger notebook

2009-05-25T19:26:00.003-05:00

John Crowley, Love & Sleep (Book Two of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part VII

Pierce considers the prospects of a quest for a surviving marvel of the earlier age, "when the laws of the universe were not as they are now but different; when such things as jewels and fire had properties they no longer have; when people witnessed, and carefully recorded, marvels we now know to be (and believe to have always been) impossible.

"A quest that would be for something real . . . A though in the next age of the world, a cooler and a duller she than this one, somebody were to come across a lump of radium, glowing eerily in the darkness, shedding particiles, decaying, showing just those properties that once upon a time, in Einstein's day or Fermi's, people actually believed it to have."

This section of "Love & Sleep" named after the fifth house of the zodiac, Nati, which Val explains is "the House of Children basically: it sort of includes sex, or at least procreation, but it's got to cover wills and legacies and inheritances too."

In keeping with this, the section concludes with a flurry of couplings and nurturings across gender lines. Rose imagines suckling, giving sustenance and begins, orally, an affair with Swofford. Beau imagines a cosmic coupling with the earth itself, returning to Adam. Val acts on her long suppressed knowledge that the bachelor Boney is her father. Pierce consummates his earlier intimacy with the other Rose (or does he?, given his succeptability to hypnerotomachia).

Most astounding by far is Pierce's creation, his drafting (in a gray ledger notebook) of a son and lover -- the twelve or thirteen year old Robbie, as his third of three wishes, the wishful result of an act of unprotected sex shortly after his graduation from college.

Robbie an act of imagination, of hypnerotomachia. "If we believe, or pretend, that the world is capable of being other than it is, alterable by our desires (as perhaps more people did then than we so now) then it is likely that we will spend a certain amount of our aimless mental time in imagining just how we might alter it. Pierce Moffat had never built model railroads, hadn't spent energy imagining himself into that small world, boarding the little cars at little stations, oiling the engine and driving it through the hills and over the bridges. He had never had a teddy bear who went on imaginary travels with him, or an imaginary friend, or even a dog he pretended could talk to him.

"But he had always, always imagined that wishes could come true [and] he had never quite quelled the habit. Though he had prepared himself with a couple of practical wishes for Health and Money, it was only that day, sitting on the steps of Fellowes Kraft's house as he once sat on the steps in Kentucky, twirling as he had then a long lock of hair, that he had discovered his deepest need and conflated it with desire."

"'Robbie,' Pierce explained the next morning to a tall gray ledger he had bought on arrival in the Faraways in the Spring, 'is my son.'"

The dying Boney's desires remain for immortality. Fellowes Kraft had jokingly addressed him as "Mon Emperor" (Boney being the nickname of Napoleon) and, in his convalescence, the "old monster" has adopted a regal silken kimono with a great dragon on the back. But Boney's Mages, first Fellowes and now Pierce, fail him in his hope to be brought the elixir of immortality. (To Val, he looks like "the person she had read about in the Dictionary, who got eternal life but forgot to ask for eternal youth"). Boney enters the afterlife still thinking of how he could retrace his steps to discover the secret.

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"Life is dreams checked by Physics"

2009-05-25T16:15:00.002-05:00

John Crowley, Love & Sleep (Book Two of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part VI

Val, the local astrologer, has been taking books out of the library to study up on love (there being, oddly, no house of love in the arcana). Rosie notices: "the distinctive white paint of the librarian who had long ago carefully lettered the call numbers on the spine, and was for a moment touched. Not many people took out books with such numbers on them." From the description of its contents and organization, the book would appear to be that of Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle, poured-over by Pierce in his boyhood.

One step backward from Val's Dewey-numbered book is the idiosyncratic order of Fellows Kraft's library, of which Pierce notes "Kraft's system of classifying his books was unknown to Dewey and other pedants. And yet it was, must have been, a system."

Boney in the cardiac unit at the hospital. Rosie feels responsible for him as nearly his last living relation: "almost everybody else he knew was dead already; there were far more ready to welcome him on the other side than to say goodbye."

The novel of Colona in Kraft's library, the Hypnerotomachia -- sleep, love, struggle. Recommended to Pierce, when a student, by his mentor Frank Barr. Also relates to Pierce's propensity toward wet dreams, the inevitable result of his curent chastity.

Pierce first dreams of, then receives a call asking for money from his old gypsy girlfriend who is twinned with the agent Julie just as the two Rose's are first conflated in the society of the Faraway Hills.

The Buddhist Beau draws his cosmology of concentric circles for Pierce. In a spiritual vision fueled by a Mahler symphony, he'd seen the original division of Adam in two, man and woman, waking and sleep.

Spofford: "wanting is life, Rosie. Dreams are life . . . Life is dreams checked by physics."

Pierce's revelation that an infinite God can actually be small. "You got no closer to God by imagining something huge, then something huger, then something hugest. . . . Infinitesimal is infinite too; infinite spark at the core or reality."

Pierce imagines God as a nine year old girl -- similar to the spirit that visits Dr. Dee and his skyrer Kelly (formerly Talbot) and warns them to flee England.

Dee's child spirit Madimi acts through books: "they had seen her first among books; she read to them out of books; she was a book angel somehow." She urges them across Europe, her grasp of knowledge sometimes inconsistent or erring (raising anew the question of whether the skyrer Kelly is a fraud).

Dee senses the great change in the universe: "If God meant now to roll up the heavens as a scroll, if He was now at work doing that, and a new heavens was to be revealed behind the old; if there was no longer to be lower and higher, up and down, no longer any measure by which a place in the universe could be found -- no more four corners to the world -- then men would have to be new too.

"Was God about to grant men new powers?. . . How would they use it? Please God they did no harm."

Dee's prayer: "O God let not sharp swords be put in the hands of children; let their hearts be made wise before their hands are made strong."

Dee and Kelly make their way to Prague and the court of Rudolph II.

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Beneath "the countless coverings of time and change"

2009-05-25T11:22:00.003-05:00

John Crowley, Love & Sleep (Book Two of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part V

Pierce's inquiries follow those of Kraft (which themselves follow Giordano and John Dee). In Kraft's study, Pierce is "alert as a dog's nose now to the traces of Kraft's track through these past woods.

The child Pierce had "invented" the same glyph -- of a man calling down the heavens -- by which Giordano is guided to sanctuary and Dee signs his "Hireoglyphica."

Fellows Kraft's final manuscript projects a meeting between Dr. Dee and Giordano that likely did not take place. Closer to the facts (the known ones anyway) it connects Girodano to one of Sir Philip Sidney's retainers, a young Scot, Alexander Dicson, who shares his interest in kingdoms made of memory. Giordano is hounded off the stage at Oxford for his heretical lampooning of Aristotelian cosmology and his postulation of an infinite, centerless world.

Dicson feels both cosmologies coexist within him: "His breast now contained two entire universes, and they kept replacing one another . . . the old one, great Earth lying under the wheeling heavensand the planets in their houses (mild or fierce or hot or cold) playing their lamps over her. The, hoop-la, the other: small quick earth, bearing all her seas mountains rivers cities states and men, taking her place in the dance amid the other great round beings, who smiled upon her." Dicson senses the first age, AEgypt, and its gods returning.

Connection of the "unsayable words" of AEgypt's hireoglyphs with the memory arts practiced by Giordano. The written word erased the power of memory and images. With Puritanism, images themselves become heretical. For Giordano "to think is to speculate with images."

Reading in Kraft's library a symbolic romance of Francisco Colonna (it's classic eroticism representing what the feral, illiterate Kentucky girl Bobbie quipped as "Bare Naked Land") Pierce senses the presence of a winged Venus, a Ker, who he attempts to call down. The Ker similar to the winged spirit (Madimi)called down by Dr. Dee and his skyrer who warns Dee to escape the coming wind of repression.

Pierce sees Kraft's library of works on the ineffible (itself reflecting Dee's great library) as the undistilled version of the book he is writing (just as such books are also the matter of Crowley's own AEgypt Cycle).

Boney reviews the jocular correspondence from Fellows Kraft's Rasmussen Foundation funded trips to Europe in search of relics from the past, hidden beneath "the countless coverings of time and change." Kraft had joked that Boney had despatched him to Europe in search of an elixir against death and, indeed, Boney mysteriously asks Pierce to be on the lookout for something else (he doesn't say what) in Kraft's library.

Kraft searches through relics of past Emperors, reflecting that even if they were genuine they may have lost their power "once the world worked differently from the way it works now, and what was then a powerful engine is now junk -- like a Model T left out in the rain due half a century."

In Prague, he visits the convent of the Infantine Sisters and the. Cathedral of Wenceslaus (linking back to Sister Mary Philomel in Kentucky). He also dwells on Rudolph II, who apparently met Giordano and abandoned his former devout Catholicism (he "had that characteristic ambivalence about his childhood that you see in people raised strict Catholics, a mixture of deep repugnance and unassuageable nostalgia." Rudolph apparently also sought an elixir of life.

Fellows' last communication from his trip is a telegram suggesting he has found what Boney is seeking.

Boney feels full of life on a summer day, subject to none of the psychic narrowing his physician describes: "He had heard his doctor say more than once that for the old and sick the world grows smaller and less dear, shrinking down to the compass of their sickrooms, its population reduced to a few or one or two (an heir, a nurse), all the rest forgotten. Which made it easier to leave."

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A jewel, an elixir, a cask, a sleeper

2009-05-24T19:41:00.002-05:00

John Crowley, Love & Sleep (Book Two of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part IV

Pierce's mother Winnie preoccupied with the problem of the forking path -- of the road not taken -- just as her son riddles through the optimal solution to the problem of the three wishes.

The now eleven year old Pierce receives in the mail, from his generally uncommunitive father in Brooklyn, a copy of a novel by Fellowes Kraft -- "The Werewolf of Prague."

As Pierce reads the epigraph, time's passing slows and the light brightens. "Holding the book in both hands before him, still standing in the same spot, as though rooted to it by a transmission of energy, a summoning beam coming from far away, from the future, passing through the transformer of the book into his being and out through his feet."

Pierce begins reading every book he can get by Fellowes Kraft: "read them one after another, lived within each for a week or two weeks, and forgot it when the next arrived."

"The Werewolf of Prague" begins Pierce's story: the one that will lead him, turning in upon itself, to it's author's library in Blackbury Jambs. In the book's power, he feels his adult self emerge: "the self he felt struggling to extrude itself from the strangling husk of his childhood."

The adult Pierce has forgotten much of his childhood adventures and thoughts. Visiting his mother in Florida, they hear a pelican smack into the water and both have a moment of recall, with Pierce remembering the name of "the wild Kentucky girl," Bobbie, and in that [and this is an unexpected morsel to say the least] "the name of his lost son."

At the insistence of Boney Rasmussen, Pierce has been reading the unfinished manuscript of Fellows Kraft. The ms. Projects that during one of the shifts in the earth's order, at the beginning of the Piscean era, wise men of Alexandria had sought to preserve evidence of the world they realized was extinguishing -- a jewel, an elixir, a cask, a personnage wrapped in changeless sleep.

These relics of AEgypt are again forgotten until in the Renaissance -- as the Piscean era itself fades -- "a new body of wise men" find references to the lost era "in stories and encoded in the obscurities of ancient sciences and the recipes of magic-books."

Seeing roses blooming on an early summer day where brambles had been the day before, Pierce has "a sudden conviction," "a clairvoyance distilled out of that June day" that "something entirely different is coming." Pierce postulates that in such times of change, individuals such as Giordano Bruno, Newton, Galileo have the chance to actually shape how the universe functions.

Going to New York to lunch with the agent and former girlfriend Julie, Pierce runs into his father Axel who, it becomes clear, has been frequenting the gay clubs of late 1970s New York such as The Ninth Circle.

The story is clearly moving toward a quest narrative, but Pierce continues to refuse, to be skeptical of, the role of hero. Panning up to the heavens, "Love & Sleep" listens in briefly on a colloquy of "the powers of that age" who lament Pierce's vascilating nature and predict he will need to pass through a refiner's fire before he has a hope of fulfilling the destiny laid out for him.

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Holy Spurt and Devil's Fiddle

2009-05-24T09:42:00.001-05:00

John Crowley, Love & Sleep (Book Two of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part III

The boy Pierce's link to Floyd Shaftoe, a seventh-son and the grandfather of the feral girl Bobby, whom Pierce and his cousins secretly take-in and baptize. Pierce and Floyd are both called out into the night on spiritual errands and each is also a witness to the starting of the same forest fire -- indeed, each believes he started it.

Floyd, when younger, looks for explanations of what he sees in the night in the Bible (discovering the Holy Spurt is what calls him out of his sleep) just as Pierce looks for knowledge in the pages of Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle's compendium. In later years, Pierce tries to recall why he gave Floyd the diamond from his dead aunt's wedding ring, but the reason eludes him.

When Floyd was a boy in Depression-era Kentucky, and shortly after his mother died in childbirth, he was called out of his sleep to witness the town's dead walking -- a silent nocturnal procession into a cleft of Hogback Mountain. Later, working for the Good Luck mines, he has the job of picking shale ("bone") from the coal extracted from the same mountain into which he'd seen the dead recede. During his time working for the mining company, Floyd is never called out into the night; he is born again into a congregation of "forty gallon Baptists who insist of full immersion" and "takes Jesus into his heart."

Later he calls on this internalized Jesus to help him with the transformations that allow him to do battle with a local witch. Pursuing her, he is led to a procession of the early dead, those called before their time, and discovers "there were those, like himself, called out by the Holy Spurt; and there were others who were called out by the Devil's Fiddle." This "feud" goes back generations.

[This section of "Love & Sleep" essentially transcribes Carlo Ginzburg's "The Night Battles" into Appalachian Kentucky].

The witches who "suck away the world's life, draining it's goodness" are akin to "the great devil Hoover, who had brought ruin on the country, only to be turned out in disgrace himself." The despoilation of the witches also linked to the coal industry: "They only hastened the coming-on of the world's end with their money-getting . . . They had ripped-out the womb of the hills; they took away too much, took away the unripe with the ripe, leaving no mother by which more could grow; they would end by leaving the mountains barren."

Floyd sees the world dying around him but also senses, knows there is a new world waiting to be born, "he could feel it beneath his feet, see it before him as the new moon can be seen held within the old moon's arms. He had come to the end of his Bible, the last pages, and he knew."

Pierce has a dream of Purgatory ("filled with that dread, at once hopeless and apprehensive, that Pierce had known in schoolyards and Little League tryouts and day camps") as "a burnt-over hillside under a night sky, burnt blackness and shriven trees, the ash still warm under foot" -- that landscape very similar to the mining-despoiled land around the cabin at Hogback where Floyd lives with the girl Bobby.

In seeing the failure of his magic (of the Invisible College) to prevent Bobby from going to Detroit with Floyd, Pierce arrives at adult consciousness: "Pierce Moffat, who had been all one until then, came invisibly, indetectably, in two: one part of him passing into an underground river like sleep, where for years it would remain; and another part left alive aboveground, grown-up and dry-eyed, where wishes did not come true, where he did not know how plans were made, or deeds done. Not until the earth at length shifted in its course, and the dark river broke from its bed, would the lost boy come forth to stand before Pierce, and claim his place: the hidden at length patent, and the inside out."

As they mature, Pierce and his cousins come to forget the details of their interaction with Bobby and their desperate attempt to baptize her and claim her soul for Catholicism. "They forgot more than that; they forgot their allegiances too, and their college; AEgypt. They just forgot, as an emigre ruthlessly forgets the Old World from which he came, expunging it by an effort he does not even admit to, so that the New World, which after all holds all his chances for happiness, can have his whole soul."

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Superb in his loneliness

2009-05-23T13:59:00.002-05:00

John Crowley, Love & Sleep (Book Two of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part II

Religious and social disparity of Bondieu/Good Luck: "nuns and hillbillies," not to mention bohemianism of Sam Oliphant's household.

Convent of the Infantine Sisters placed amid a half dozen Protestant sectarian churches, one of which broadcasts its services ("songs and hectoring and indeterminate cries and moaning") to the entire town via loudspeakers.

Odd paganism of Infantine Sisters as well via the active role of Saints in their lives and devotions, almost as demigods. Their morning prayer invokes the moon and Egypt as well as the Virgin. Sister Mary Philomel has a wooden statue of Saint Wenceslaus whom she invokes to help her find misplaces objects (when he fails, she punishes him by turning his face to the wall).

"In some ways, dealing with Sister Mary Philomel was like dealing with a smart and powerful child . . . Saints and angels, when compelled by the proper invocations, interceded on the petitioner's behalf with the remoted divine figures, who then altered the weather or the natural order, sped weathermen on their way, and of course healed the sick and saved the lost or the endangered."

Sam's children have the absolute faith of the young, though Sam himself, as a doctor, is something of a deist -- "heterodox, Pelagian." Sam sees religious faith as, essentially, an aspect of childhood.

Pagan aspect of Catholic religious devotion. The Oliphant children and Pierce tutored by Sister Mary Philomel: "Sister Mary Philomel was their daily instructress in such pieties; she was the great pythoness of their cult, the guardian of the gate into the land of the dead."

Caught up in the spell of Sister Mary Philomel, Pierce's ritualesque turn of mind draws him into the seductive mysteries of Catholic dogma. Still he worries that her constant presence in the household, her "fuss-budgeting," will disrupt the secret society he has built for himself had his cousins: "The Invisible College had business, Pierce had far-ranging researches to complete. He experienced an anxiety almost unendurable to know that the nun was nearby, even if not actively interfering; anxiety that she would put her black shod foot through the thin fabric he and the others had woven."

Pierce, reading Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle in the seclusion of the attic, empathises with werewolves, who feel their furry coats on the insider and, unbeknowst to mankind, protect the harvest by doing battle at night with witches: "he thought of their sufferings: to be one thing on the outside, another on the inside; to seem nothing and no one, to be despised and ignored, unseen, and yet to be somebody of whom the welfare of everybody depends, even though they don't know it."

The boy Pierce develops a sympathy, a secret allegiance for "the doomed side, the side history History would leave behind." Which opens the question of which side to root for in the battle of the angels.

The Oliphant boys and Pierce at the movie house in Bondieu: 'the picture was ten years old, but thry neither knew that nor cared; and after it came a cartoon, rapid rituals of destruction and revival." After the movie, they go to the variety store, Joe Boyd browsing "Guns and Ammo" and Pierce the horror comics.

In the dusk, Pierce walks home alone from town "superb in his loneliness" and, like a werewolf, "the black melancholy burden of his nature, turned outside-in" as "night was falling and the mild beings of the day hid themselves away."

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Boyhood and the pagan imaginary: "Love & Sleep" begins

2009-05-23T10:32:00.002-05:00

John Crowley, Love & Sleep (Book Two of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part I

The second book of John Crowley's AEgypt Cycle opens with a more detailed account of Pierce Moffat's boyhood in isolated Kentucky and his imagination of the Invisible College.

It becomes clear that Pierce's mother, Winnie, had separated from his father, Axel, on discovery of his homosexuality.
(Perhaps significant that Axel, like Fellows Kraft, is homosexual).

Winnie and the eight year old Pierce relocate from Brooklyn to deeply rural Bondieu, Kentucky -- so isolated that the library service is via strapped boxes despatched from the state capital.

One of the books that arrives provides the matter for Pierce's imaginary world of Adocentyn: a massive compendium of the ineffible entitled "A Dictionary of Dieties, Devils, and Daemons of Mankind" by one Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle. It's endpapers "showed a mass of ruins . . . broken antique torsos, huge headstones covered in clearly cut but unintelligible words, toppled pillars sunken in tufts of grass, arches, urns, capitals, obelisks . . . . One sad square of split marble half-engulfed in forgetful earth bore a single, deeply-incised word: AEgypt."

Hamlet of Bondieu reflects the usual geographic temporal/spiritual doubling: the next town over is Good Luck.

Winnie's brother, the widower Sam Oliphant, on young Pierce: "'Lives in a world of his own,' Sam said to Winnie; though the opposite always seemed as true to Winnie, who knew him better: that Pierce lived in a world not his at all."

Pierce's opposite is Sam's oldest son, the crude Joe Boyd, whose secret club -- in contradistinction to Pierce's mystical Invisible College -- is modeled on fraternal organizations such as the Elks. The primary activity of Joe Boyd's club, The Retrievers, is cleaning an old chicken coop of encrusted guano, whereas Pierce leads his cousins into imaginary, caped and robed adventures in the countryside. Joe Boyd relishes books with obscure facts (just as Pierce absorbs books on obscure demons) and his imaginitive play is drawing elaborate stick-figure panoramas of military battles.

Sam had thought that Joe Boyd would provide an alternate role model -- "mentor, guide, and friend" -- for Pierce from his father Axel. "To Pierce, though, Joe Boyd with his sad, minatory eyes and jailbird haircut remained just what he had always seemed, the viceroy or dark archangel of Sam, the one who brought him Sam's wishes and instructions moral or practical, lessons Pierce could never learn."

As opposed to the desultory service model of Joe Boyd's literally "chicken-shit" club, Pierce's Invisible College in some manner dictates to him that he play destructive pranks such as breaking storm windows and leaving Sam's tools out to rust.

In the secrecy of his room, Pierce reigns over the Imaginary College with boyish eroticism, dreaming: "In the past, once, somewhere, somewhen, kings and gods had gone naked: armed and crowned and shod sometimes, but naked where it mattered, filled maybe with the same grave elevation that filled Pierce when in private games he as liberator, as ancient king come home again, would order his people to throw off their garments, and be as they had been -- he leading the way, putting aside his (bath) robe and reclining in easeful nakedness, a Royal Crown in his hand and magnanimity in his heart, the world returned to antique gaiety. In the past there had been a Golden Age."

In childhood, one can see with clarity the lost, forgotten Golden Age: "In the past, in the Old World, there had been empires whose geographies were now lost, the maps no longer had room for them, filled up as they were with classroom countries; empires still somehow in existence, though beyond the demarcated globe, undersea or underground. Pierce committed to memory lists of their interchangeable gods and godlets, the air and water had been crowded with them, potent but not omnipotent -- a comfort somehow, they were strong friends or difficult enemies but not all-seeing, not everywhere at once; the wise could compel them, back them (or maybe that was sometime later, when they had grown smaller): could bring them to mirrors, draw them into statues, talk with them. Magi, said Alexis Payne de St.-Phalle."

The gods expulsion from the physical world, and consequent end of the Golden Age, perhaps presages Pierce's own descent from the pagan imaginary of childhood into Catholic religious instruction: "When Jesus came the gods had hidden or died, the air had emptied; and at that time too, though maybe not all at once, and not because of His coming but only because the existence of a new order somehow cancelled out the other even retroactively (a wind blowing backward through time that brought down the collonades and temples and the groves or oak), those empires had fallen."

The other lost world, lost skill is the realm of childhood imagination: "Pierce would forget, as all adults forget, the effort required of children making believe, the concentration, no, the expansion, of the will, the conscious effort to erase the conscious decision to pretend . . . . When those gardens were all shut up in him, those wells capped, Pierce would not remember how good he had been at it."

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" The world turns from what it had been into what it was to be" -- "The Solitudes" ends

2009-05-16T21:44:00.002-05:00

John Crowley, The Solitudes (Book One of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part VIII

At a balloon ascension in the hills above Blackbury Jambs, Pierce Moffat meets up with the would-be shepard Swofford and it becomes apparent that there are two Roses and, in certain ways, a Trinity of Roses: Rose, Rosie, and Rosalie.

After reading the incomplete last ms. of Fellows Kraft, Pierce reflects on whether the world "might just now be on the turn again: for it would only be in such moments of turning -- when not only all possible futures come into view but all possible pasts as well -- that the previous moments of turning become visible."

Finishing his reading of Fellows Kraft's ms., Pierce wonders (and the same could be ruefully said of the AEgypt Cycle itself) "what public, he wondered, had Kraft thought he was writing for . . . For it wasn't a good book at all, Pierce supposed, considered as a book, a novel; it was a philosophical romance, remote and extravagant, without much of the tang of life as it really must have gone on in the world."

Pierce considers whether he truly came to Blackbury Jambs to write a book or to read one: "his whole life up to this time, the religion he had been born into, the stories he had learned and made up and told, the education he had got or avoided, the books somehow chosen for him to read, his taste for history, and the colored dates he had fed it on, the drugs he had taken, the thoughts he had thought, had all prepared him not to write a book at all, as he had thought, but to read one. This one. This was what he had once upon a time expected and hoped of all books that he opened, that each be the one book he required, his own book."

Pierce imagines a Noah-like flood that ends the world as we know it, with the heroes of the age gathered up to sail to a distant refuge. Just as Giordano was "the harbinger, messenger to the future, sure that the age to come will bring more magic, not less" so another epoch is heralded "by those who cried the new age in Pierce's own time." ( the time of the current-day events in "The Solitudes" has been established as 1978).

Sense that the emerging world might actually lie in the lost world of childhood, "the sharp sense that their lives are in two halves, and that their childhoods, on the far side, lie not only in the past but in another world . . . that the things contained therein, the Nehi Orange and the soiled sneakers, the sung Mass, the geography book and the comic book, the cities and towns, the dogs, stars, stones, and roses, are not cognates of the ones the present world contains."

Pierce walks out of Fellows Kraft's study into the sunlight, sees Rose and her daughter Sam, and hears the the harmonica of the shepherd Swofford, in the role of Pan. And "continuously, unnoticeably, at the rate of one second per second, the world turns from what it had been into what it was to be."

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The universe replicated within Man

2009-05-16T17:19:00.002-05:00

John Crowley, The Solitudes (Book One of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part VII

Pierce discovers that Fellows Kraft was writing a book in many ways identical to his own (and to John Crowley's own book). Pierce describes the ms. as well as his own project to Boney, Kraft's executor and friend, and is engaged to edit the work.

Boney decribes Kraft's preoccupation, very similar to that of Pierce (who, of course, was influenced by Kraft's books during his boyhood): "'He said. He often used to say. What if once upon a time the world was a different place than it is now. The whole world. . . . 'And what if,' Boney went on, 'there remained somewhere in this new world we have here now, somehow, somewhere some little fragments of that lost world. Some fragments that retain something of the power they used to have, back when things were different. A jewel say. An elixir.'"

Pierce meditates again, more complexly yet, on this common project of his, Kraft's and Frank Barr's: "He thought: there is not only more than one history of the world, one for each of us who studies it; there is more than one for each of us, there are as many as we want or need, as many as our heads and wanting hearts can make."

In Kraft's manuscript, Girodano is brought to see the Pope in order to show off his prodigious memory skills. Allowed into the Vatican Cellars to have the chance to read from Hermes' works, his escort, a smiling boy, shows him a wealth of AEgyptian-themed mythical and symbolic art.

In the Hermes texts, man preexists the world, has a role in its making; the Fall comes when man falls in love with his own creation. Man strives to regain the godly powers he lost in his fall.

Giordano reads Hermes: "Unless you make yourself like God you cannot understand God . . . Therefore make yourself huge, beyond measuring; with one leap free yourself from your body. Lift yourself out of time and become Eternity."

The chief diety of Hermes' system is Pantomorph or "omniform."

Girodano reads of the withdrawal of the gods from the earth ("the great god Pan is dead!") with the coming of Jesus, who "banished them all, all but Himself and His Father." The Gods depart and only the evil angels remain on Earth.

Warned by the boy that he is a target of the Inquisition, Giordano flees into the Italian countryside: "Siena, Vitello, Cecino, to a weary walker seeming to be only the same town repeated over and over, like the single tiny woodcut that in geographies stands variously for Nuremberg, Wittenberg, Paris, Cologne: another steeple, a castle, a plume of smoke, a gate, a little traveler stunned and wondering."

Giordano takes refuge within a network of heretics, including one who has a statue of Pan secreted away in a grotto. As he wanders the countryside, avoiding the Inquisition, he carries in his head a second world: "even as he walked the old tracks and high roads of Europe he walked in AEgypt too."

In Geneva, hearing the lecture of a scholar who intends to build an automata that will mechanically replicate the action of the universe, Giordano laughs in the knowlege "that such a machine, such a model already existed. The name of the machine was Man."

Giordano moves to Paris, where his fame as a philosopher spreads. On an embassy for the French King to England, he boards a ship to make the channel crossing. As he does so, an angel points him out to Dr. John Dee and his skyrer Talbot as they gaze into a showstone.

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Giordano and the midden of manuscripts

2009-05-16T10:47:00.002-05:00

John Crowley, The Solitudes (Book One of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part VI

Pierce begins reading the unpublished manuscript of Fellows Kraft, a novel of Giordano Bruno, beginning with a discussion of how the coming of printed books destroyed the empires of memory through which Monkish minds could hold all creation.

The library of the Dominican monastery of which Giordano is a resident "was a midden of a thousand years' writing; no one knew all that the monastery contained, or what had become of all that the monks had copied, bought, written, commented on, given away, and collected over centuries."

Reflecting on the then dominant Aristotelian astrology, Girodano asks himself why the fixed, unchanging outer spheres of God are "perfect" as opposed to the changeable, living terrestrial spheres. "Why is changelessness better than change? Life is change, and life is better than death."

Giordano reads the commentary on the spheres by the heretic Cecco in secret, "shut up in the privvy, swallowing it like sweetened wine." The privy is the secret reading room, and library of the monastery.

Late Medieval Naples: "There were always riots; there were always the poor, crowded in the tall close houses of the port quarters, in narrow alleys piled with refuse, where the children grew like weeds, untended and wild and numerous."

The roots of Giordano's heresy that he incorporates the "twelve houses" of the heavens into his memory palace; he merges the heavens into the terrestrial.

The leaned mage Della Porta, who had run afoul of the religious authorities as a youth for casting his eyes "above the sphere of the moon" -- and now practices "only the whitest of magic" -- advises Giordano to utilize the secular hireoglyphs of AEgypt for his nmeonics rather than the heavens. He advises the young scholar to read Hermes.

In the privy one day, one of Giordano's followers -- a Giordanisti -- slips him a copy of a banned book: the Picatrix.

The heresy contained in the pages of the Picatrix: "Man is a little world, reflecting in himself the great world and the heavens: through his 'mens' the wise man can raise himself above the stars." The Picatrix lays out the form of the talismans by which a wise man can capture and guide the spirits.

The Picatrix tells of the lost twelve-mile, four gated city of AEgypt founded by Hermes. Pierce's heart beats fast when he reads that the name of that city is the same as that of the mythical kingdom he created in his boyhood imagination: Adocentyn.

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Croquet and the atomism of human life

2009-05-16T09:14:00.003-05:00

John Crowley, The Solitudes (Book One of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part V

Pierce's move from the city to Blackbury Jambs: "it was as though he had suddenly been returned to the common intercourse of earth and man from some stony planet, these nice people couldn't imagine how off it was for him, a city man, to be wished a good morning by strangers in the street. . . . There was so much to relearn' the names of plants and flowers and the order of their coming forth, the usual greetings to be offered between citzens and the usual replies to them; the streets and alleys of the town, its stores, customs, history."

Pierce discovers the local Variety store has more of his needs than he would have expected, including the Sunday New York Times: "For a long time Pierce had stopped taking that immense wad of newsprint; he had become convinced that what gave Sunday that particular character it had for him -- a character it retained in all seasons and every kind of weather, a headachy, dreary, dissipated quality -- was not Jehova claiming his own day and poisoning it even for unbelievers, not that at all but a sort of gas leaking out from that very Sunday Times, a gas with the acrid smell of printers ink, a narcotizing' sickening gas. And in fact the symptoms seemed to have been at least partly relieved when he began refusing to buy it. But out here its effect might be neutralized."

Again, the merging of the two rivers is tellingly described -- a figure of the two streams of history Pierce is seeking to distinguish: the broad, muddy Blackbury with its wide black iron bridge and the sparkling Shadow, crossed by a narrow stone bridge.

Pierce notes that astrology is common currency among many of the residents of Blackbury Jambs.

At a croquet tournament (croquet is apparently a pervasive passtime in Blackbury Jambs), Pierce meets Rose and discovers from her that Fellows Kraft was a local resident. Rose has been asked by her uncle Boney to take up duties at the diminished family foundation, which includes management of Kraft's literary estate and home (which has seldom been entered since his death).

Rose has been browsing in Fellows Kraft's unpublished memoir, and reads about his lifelong search for an "Ideal Friend" -- always a male one. She cannot determine if Kraft was being coy about his sexuality, or if he was truly a sexual innocent.

Kraft's idea of human relations expressed in terms of croquet: "We will be solitary, inevitably, like balls struck across a wide lawn, striking others now and then, and being struck by them. We must be glad of that striking; and keep up our courage and our cheer; and not forget the ones we have loved -- no, and pray that our remembrance will in turn earn us a place, however little visited, in their hearts."

She reflects that "nowadays everyone -- no, not everyone, but lots of people she knew -- lived the way gay men like Kraft had always lived; in brief collisions, restless."

Kraft described his artistic inspiration in the Baroque ceiling of a Venetian church. Painted by the elusive artist Fumiani, the ceiling shows "flights of angels ascend[ing] not to a Godhead but to an empty, white-clouded center of the sky."

Rose asks Pierce to accompany her into Kraft's long-shuttered house -- an erastz Tudor (appropriately enough for an historical novelist). Loaded with books and "darkened with smoke, like a Mohawk's lodge," the house "had the musty smell of a reclusive animal's den."

In a glass case, Pierce finds a Medieval ms. labelled "PICATRIX."

He also finds an incomplete manuscript that begins with an epigraph (apparently from Novalis) relating to Parsifal's search for the Grail.

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The angels hear footfalls

2009-05-11T12:21:00.007-05:00

John Crowley, The Solitudes (Book One of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part IV

The book agent, gypsy-blooded Julie, perceives that the new science is the one that is out of energy and that "the old, other stuff seem[s] right now actually more modern.". Among other things, the old knowledge recognizes planets as "living brings": "one big animal, and Man a part of it. A biosphere."

Of Pierce's reluctance to actually employ his studies, to embrace magic, Julie mulls: "One day he'll learn, she thought, if not in this lifetime, the next, or the next. It's the task set for him, even if he doesn't know it: he who knows so much.

Dee's decoding of the cypher text brought by Talbot also links the two prologues -- one possible solution refers to Pierce Moffat's fascination with the "three questions" conundrum and the other to Dee's own obsession with orders of angels.

Julie part of "a group that kept in touch coast-to-coast as much by an interlock of thought and feeling as by phone and letter." The group senses that Atlantis is about to rise.

Pierce leaves New York and moves to Blackbury Jambs to write his book, renting a second story apartment, and recommencing the imaginative journey of his boyhood: "And beyond, out there, he would sail the porch. Just as he had once used to sail a narrow second-story porch of the Oliphant house in Kentucky long ago. Vigilant; calm; his hand on the wheel; sailing at treetop level a sun porch windowed like a dirigible's gondola, or the bridge of a steamship headed east."

Pierce's imaginative sun porch voyage doubled in similar second story journey of the Buddhist child care giver Beau, who sits with folded legs on a carpet and soars over the surrounding countryside, then doubled again in John Dee's journey to Glastonbury with his son Arthur and the skyrer Talbot, when the Doctor ascends a hill and sees figures of the zodiac inscribed on the hills and valleys below.

Dee sees the multiplicities of meaning-systems and quests contained in the earth: "the grail sometimes a cup, sometimes a stone, sometimes a dish . . . there was not one Grail; there were, or will be, or have been, not one Grail but five, five Grails for five Percevals to find. There were grails of earth, water, fire, air; there was a stone, a cup, a crater or furnace, and the basin borne by Aquarius, who is a sign of air. And another, the Grail of the quintesence. . . . Doctor Dee raised his eyes to the heavens, whose stars were wept of cloud now, and Tell me, he said: Tell me: Is the universe one thing? Is it after all? The angels saw him, who manage those skies he put his quesstion to . . . They smiled, hearing his question; and then one by one turned away, tolook over their shoulders -- for they were disturbed by a noise, a noise as of footfalls far away and faint, the footfalls of someone coming through behind."

In the Carnegie library at Blackbury Jambs, Pierce browses and inwardly mocks a bestseller of the "ancient astronauts" variety, scowling at the questionable veracity of the very "lay lines" that have drawn Dr. Dee to Glastonbury along with the (it is now clear) fraudulent skyrer Talbot. Pierce remains an historian and it remains to be seen whether he will assume the role of reconstructing magical knowledge that Julie believes is his task.

Unpacking his own books, Pierce browses his copy of Dr. Dee's elusive metaphysical tract along with the four volume work of his mentor Frank Walker Barr (again, the Joseph Campbell resonance seems clear).

The broken machine of magical knowledge

2009-05-10T18:34:00.004-05:00

John Crowley, The Solitudes (Book One of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part III

Via Rose's reading of Fellowes Kraft's novel about Shakespeare, "Bitten Apples," the book detours into the future playwright's life, projecting a meeting with Dr. John Dee, who offers the youth access to his library: "there are books here a player might well study . . . If you like, you may come back, and look into them. Read what ones you like. There are many who come here to find this or that. Tales. History. Knowledge.

Pierce's rejected parallel course to History 101 is Mystery 101: "how history hungers for the shape of myth; how the plots and characters of fable and romance come to inhabit real courts and counting-houses and cathedrals; how old sciences die and bequeath their myths and magic to their successors; how the heroes of legend pass away, fall asleep, are resurrected, and enter ordinary daylit history, persisting as a dream persists into waking life, altering and transforming it even when the dream itself has been forgotten or repressed."

Dr. Dee's vision of angels as a great machine: "Nine choirs of angels fill up the universe, each choir meshing with the higher and lower ones like immense gears of different ratios, their meshing making for hierarchy throughout creation, making distinction, difference, this, that, and the other . . . if God were to withdraw them the universe would not only come to a halt and die, it would probably disappear altogether with a single indrawn breath."

Dee's angelic research resonates with Pierce's earlier classroom lampooning but then reconsideration of Dante's geography of hell, purgatory, and heaven.

At about the midpoint of the novel, the events of the two prologues are recapitulated, expanded -- Dr. Dee meets the earless skyrer Edward Talbot and Pierce narrates to his gypsy-blooded ex-girlfriend Julie, now a book agent, the story of Giordano Bruno. Both link back to writings by the novelist and polymath Fellowes Kraft.

Girodano Bruno "the first thinker of modern times, really, to postulate infinite space as a physical reality . . . What was it, Kraft was wondering, that compelled Bruno and Bruno alone to break out of the closed world of Aquinas and Dante, and find an infinite universe outside." Bruno's heresy, for which he was burned at the stake, was that man's mind contained all potentiality. The mind itself if infinite and contains all creation.

Giordano Bruno's revelation traced back by Pierce, himself following Kraft, to arrival in Italy of the spurious Greek works of Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes the Thrice Great) based on Egyptian texts. Purportedly, Hermes had transcribed Egyptian magical practices and conveyances of those texts to Europe "responsible for serious people taking up the practice of magic." But, in reality, the "Egyptian" texts were spurious: the work of a Hellenic mystery cult of the second or third centuries A.D.

The spurious Egyptian magic texts misled adepts from Roger Bacon all the way to Aleister Crowley.

Magic belongs not to Egypt but to AEgypt, a parallel place. Pierce explains: "You can trace the story of Egypt back, and back, and at a certain point (or at several different points) it will divide. And you can follow either one: the regular history book one, Egypt, or the other, the dream one. The Hermetic one. Not Egypt but AEgypt. Because there is more than one history of the world."

"It is as though there had once been a wholly different world, which worked in a way we can't imagine; a complete world with all its own histories, physical laws, sciences to describe it, eytmologies, corespondences. And then came a big change in all of them, bound up with printing and the discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and the Cartesian and Baconian ideals of mechanistic and experimental science. The new sciences were hugely succcessful, bit by bit they scrubbed away all the persisting structures of the old science. . . . The whole old world we once inhabited is like a dream, a dream we forgot on waking, even though, as dreams do, it lingered on into our all-awake thinking."

The lost knowledge of the pre-scientific system of knowledge "a drowned mountain," a broken machine."

Pierce: "We've forgotten the whole story. All we retain are details, impressions, bits and pieces scattered through our mental universe, like parts of a huge machine that's been smashed, and can never be put together again."

Pierce proposes to the book agent Julie "a kind of archaeology of everyday life" to recover the old knowledge. Julie, sensing a potential payoff ("lucrum" is the title of this section of the novel) counterproposes that Pierce actually reconstruct the lost system of magic.

Pierce's immediate response: "Nonononono"

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The history without time

2009-05-10T12:39:00.002-05:00

John Crowley, The Solitudes (Book One of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part II

Pierce circumvents work in his college career: "maintaining everyone's good opinion of him without exactly justifying it, and giving the impression of having acquired learning he had in fact only fingered lightly."

Born in a year with a low number of conceptions due to the war, "he was too young to be a beatnick; later he would find himself too old, and too strictly reared to be a hippie. He came to consciousness in a moment of uneasy stasis, between existential and communal, psychoanalytic and psychedelic."

Pierce's questions about alternative histories come to him from his mentor Frank Barr -- perhaps a Joseph Campbell figure? -- and occupy his thoughts unbidden. Re-reading one of Barr's books during his first year teaching at Barnabas College, he comes across the story from Plutarch of a Greek mariner in the reign of Tiberius (the era when Christ is born) passing an island and being commanded, amid loud lamentations, to tell his countrymen that "the Great God Pan is dead."

Pierce's loss of his vocation for history, his prodigality, in the trajectory of history from story and myth to fact and statistic -- the imperative as an adult "to put away childish things."

"His progress had always been outward, away from stories, from marvels; it had been a journey, as he saw it, away from childhood, the same journey outward that the human race had long been on, and which he, Pierce Moffett, was only recapitulating in his own ontogeny, joining up with it, at his maturity, at the place it had by then reached."

Acquiring of knowledge an act of "passing through the circles of history . . . outward through whole universes of thought, each growing somehow smaller the more he learned about it, until it was too small to live within, and he passed on outward, closing the door behind him."

Leaving college and returning to New York, Pierce discovers "reissues of books that had meant much to him in childhood, a childhood that had been largely spent between the covers of books, one way or another, a childhood he found he was able to taste again by cracking the same books, unseen since antiquity, since his own Age of Gold."

As the "Age of Reason" is assailed by the tummult of the 1960s, Pierce begins to look for the other path of history, the lost one of stories, the "history not made of time" that lies alongside the factual accounts of people, events, movements backward toward prehistory. The second path forks away, "just as long and just as mazy, only long since lost; and for some reason now, just now, it had suddenly become visible again, to him as to others."

This history is made of internal stories -- "the stories inside which the human race has never completely wakened from" -- that are closed off from consciousness as part of adulthood, as part of the Piscean (A.D.) era. As Pierce pursues them in old books, he feels the closed doors of abandoned knowledge opening.

He begins to dwell on the lost kingdom of the gypsies, AEgypt, a place of mystical knowedge which is not to be confused with the materialist Egypt of the Pharoahs. And he realizes this AEgypt is a country he knows, his own lost kingdom of childhood, when he formed as a secret society among his cousins an "Invisible College" in which stories, not facts, are the course of study. The college sessions, which take place when the cousins are supposed to be sleeping, "come to an abrupt end" when Pierce is sent away to a religious prep school.

AEgypt, "the country where all the magic arts are known," has fallen and its people are in exile, yet "they still carry with them, in however degraded a form, the skills their ancestors had." Similarly the AEgypt of childhood, the land of stories, exists locked within adults.

Similarly relativism, as perceived centuries before Einstein by Giordano Bruno, reveals that life has not one irreversible path but "extends out infinitely in every direction you can look in or think about, at every instant."

Walking along the dirt road from Spofford's cabin, Pierce "felt his childhood returned to him as he walked: not so much in concrete memories, though many of those too, as in a series of past selves, whose young being he could taste in the breaths of air he drew."

Spofford takes him to a party near the river at which Adamite, prelapsarian revels are underway and a piper , the Buddhist Beau, plays Pan flutes. There he meets Rose, who has been reading the historical novels of local writer Fellowes Kraft, who is also among the writers Pierce has been reading.

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"A runaway mood": John Crowley's "The Solitudes" begins

2009-05-09T13:12:00.002-05:00

John Crowley, The Solitudes (Book One of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part I

Two prologues: one with the 16th century magus John Dee being told of glimpsed angels in a showstone; the other of a boy in the 1950s, the birth of the age of Einstein and relativism,
perceiving the multiplicity of the world and saying to himself: "I'm not from here; I'm from someplace different than this."

The historian Pierce Moffett (apparently the the boy from the second prologue, now an adult) treats the three wishes of childhood fairy tales as a serious philosophical problem, critiquing various approaches (Midas' being obviously the worst of them).

Reflecting on wishes that have overarching, altruistic goals (e.g., world peace) and their potential negative consequences, he recalls a lesson taught him in religious school: "if you will the end you must axiomatically will the means."

On a bus journey from New York City into the "Faraway Hills," Pierce remembers childhood auto journeys from Kentucky to New York city where his father lived --along the new Pennsylvania Turnpike (the primeval illusion of first highways to bypass towns), across the hellish flats of eastern New Jersey and into the Holland tunnel, "like an endless dark bathroom" to New York.

Distinction between yearning and wishing.
Yearning: "a motion of the soul toward peace, resolution, restitution, or rest; a yen for happiness." Wishing, on the other hand, centers on "an object of desire."

Pierce had been teaching at a liberal New York City college where the students were part of "the searching young . . . forming into a colorful nomadic culture of their own, Bedouins camping within the bustle of the larger society, striking their tents and moving on when threatened with the encroachments of civilization."

He is enroute to interview at a more conservative upstate institution, the letterhead of which features an engraved, domed building. Pierce wonders what "new poured-concrete forms and labs it was now immured in."

"Buswrecked" in a small town, Pierce runs into an old student and friend -- Spofford -- who is now a shepard and impulsively decides to abandon the interview: "a runaway mood had been in him all day, all week; all summer for that matter."

Pierce concludes that the third wish -- after wealth and happiness -- should be for oblivion, for forgetting the whole wishing process. He thus imagines that the process of the first two "practical" wishes could already be in the process of fulfillment.

Trying not to be intrusive when interrupting a Buddhist in the Lotus position: "Don't unfold just for me."

Remarkable descriptions of a faded industrial town, Blackbury Jambs, gradually being transformed by the tourist economy.

Resort hotel transformed into sanitarium: two different eras of "rest." The sanitarium declining since the introduction of more powerful drugs: "even the profoundly troubled who cannot live in the world can stay at home now and still float on quiet seas far away."

Of Florida: "his mother had recently drifted with the aged to that land."

Circumstances of Pierce Moffat's departure from he faculty of the liberal college become clear. Invited to participate in an orgy scene for an arty pornography movie, he'd fallen in love with a younger woman in the cast who claims gypsy heritage and supports a champaign life style by trafficing cocaine.

Moffit's downward spiral into debt and addiction fuels composition of a proposed course syllabus to parallel History 101: one that incorporates his new knowledge of gypsy fortune-telling and proposes "there is more than one history of the world." shortly after its submission to the Dean, he is informed he is very unlikely to receive tenure.

In the pages of a Spanish translation that Pierce has been asked to review -- the "Soledades" of Luis de Gongora -- he finds precise echos of his recent history and current dilemma.

Spofford inquires of Pierce what he is reading. He responds: "Pastorals. Poems about sophisticates who leave the city for the country."

Spofford proposes that Pierce move to Blackbury and "set up shop as a historian."

"'Local history,' said Pierce, 'that's a good field. Not mine though,' he added, thinking of it: a field bounded by a low-piled stone wall, long grasses and lichened boulders, an old apple tree. Fireflies glimmering in the thistled darkness. Not his field: his field lay farther off, or closer in, beyond anyway, geometrical paths through emblematic arches, statuary, a dark topiary maze, a gray vista to an obelisk."

As Pierce ponders his plans "the owl, Athena's wisdom bird or obscene bird of night (these Gongorisms are catching, he thought) asked again its single question."

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The Replacements: "Sag Harbor" concludes

2009-05-03T18:03:00.002-05:00

Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor: Reading Notes, 4th Part

"Sag Harbor" begins to reach back to toddler games, to happiness as a lost estate, as Benji confesses that his "long lost love" is a house -- the Sag house in which he spent his youngest summers.

Recalling the black-and-white television at the Sag house: "It took five minutes to wake up, making all sorts of frantic sounds, like you'd startled the people inside from their dozing. A white dot finally materialized in the middle of the screen. A white dot in a sea of blackness. The first star in the universe on the first day. It grew and spread and the sound came on and eventually the comedian hit his punch line, the weatherman told the future, the monster stepped out of the fog."

Walking through the empty Sag house with the girl who seems to remember the past there better than he does: "This was my old house where all the good things still lived even though we had moved on. Everything as it was. Even the boy, the one who always seemed happy. He had to be there. This is where he lived."

"I was nostalgic for everything big and small. Nostalgic for what never happened and nostalgic about what will be."

Concluding at the annual Azurest Memorial Day picnic and bonfire, "Sag Harbor" returns to the idea of replacements: "We were all there. It was where we mingled with who we had been and who we would be. Sharing space with our echoes out in the sun. The shy kid we used to be and were growing away from, the confident or hard-luck men we would become in our impending seasons, the elderly survivors we'd grow into if we were lucky, with gray stubble and green sun visors. The generations replacing and replenishing each other. Every summer this shifting over took place in small degrees as you moved closer to the person who was waiting for you to catch-up and dome younger version of yourself elbowed you out of the way."

Benji scans the crowd of kids for his replacement: "Where was my replacement then? . . . Probably the knock-kneed creature in the green mesh t-shirt, with the scabbed knees and the telltale messed-up Afro."

For all the continuity there is also change, as in the destructive party
crasher, Barry David, who taunts the little kids and' after the adults wander off, commandeers new garden furniture to throw on the bonfire. Like the BB gun incident, Barry David is an indicator of violent forces at the perimeter of childhood.

Memorial Day: "The next day we'd close up our houses, pulling in the lawn furniture, winding hoses around forearms in messy loops, leaning on faucets with all our might for that extra bit that meant peace of mind for nine months. School work, autumn. As if autumn was not already here. Nights we zipped jackets to the neck, and data gooseflesh popped on our legs as we tried to squeeze one more use out of shorts we'd never wear again."

Thinking of his past and future self, Benji reasons that the summer, however brief, has changed him: "I had to be a bit smarter. Just a little. Look at the way I was last Labor Day. An idiot! Fifteen looks at fourteen and says, That guy was an idiot. And fifteen looks at eight and says, That guy knew so little. Why can't fifteen and three-quarters look back at fifteen and a half and say, That guy didn't know anything. Because it was true."

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The quality of dorkiness

2009-05-03T17:28:00.002-05:00

Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor: Reading Notes, 3rd Part

BB guns introduce new variable into time-killing of Benji and his pals. Rehearsal for shift of black manhood from "fighting" to "annihilation."

Benji relates how overhearing a black-consciousness TV show on the self-esteem impact of black kids playing with blond dolls causes him to shun human Star Wars action figurines in favor of aliens.

Benji's dork penchant for applying Dungeons & Dragons character attributes to classifying people around him: precursor to Whitehead's fascination with typology.
"Taken with the reassuring clarity of the [D&D] alignments, I didn't stop with people, proceeding to label inanimate objects, abstract systems, and states of being. . . D&D had few other real-life applications, except as a means of perpetuating virginity and in its depiction of existance as a never-ending series of grim adventures in dungeons. I rued the former, embraced the latter as an elegant metaphor."

Clinging to D&D an indicator of Benji's backwardness in grasping the "lame/not lame" divide. "The guy dropping off the weekly pamphlets outlining the shifting teenage codes and edicts skipped my house."

Benji's barbecue identified father when passers by encourage him to use alternate fire-making methods such as a chimney or kindling: "whitey made lighter fluid for a reason."

Domestic rage and bullying of Benji's father a counterpoint to then-dominant presence of Cosby on television. "The Road Warrior" a more apt model for how Benji navigates through household disruption.

Whitehead returns to the porn (secretive longings) parallel in describing his submission to the sentimental pop songs on WLNG, violating his own self-styling protocals: "WLNG was (one of) my secret shame(s), indulged when I had the house to myself. . . . The furtive way I scoped out the premises, slowly turning up the volume on the radio, wary of every increment, setting it a little higher and higher as I grew bolder, certainly echoed universal porn protocals. Sometimes I forgot to clean up after myself . . . ."

As with the sugar addicts who line up for mounds of ice cream at Jonni Waffle, Whitehead charts the varieties of "perversion" offered by consumer society, culturally authorized and unauthorized.

"Getting rid of your Sag house, that was unforgivable. Like selling your kids off to the circus for crack money."

Benji's sister Elena has self-styled into the club scene and Eurotrash boyfriends -- her way of escaping home just as Reggie has chosen street style and long work shifts at Burger King.

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Sag Harbor, Queequeg to Waffle Cones

2009-05-02T17:17:00.002-05:00

Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor: Reading Notes, 2nd Part

Whitehead charts the parameters of the black enclave at Sag Harbor -- "the Rock, the Creek, the Point: the increments of our existence. Earth, solar system, galaxy" -- the places that subtly define and divide it from the white zone.

The local fauna on the beach is dried-out sand sharks and voracious horseflies. Benji projects the wildlife past the Point in the white section of town: "Who knew what kind of fauna lurked around the bend of Barcelona Neck? Pterodactyls wearing ascots and sipping gin and tonics, trust-find duck-billed platypuses complaining about 'the help.' It was all hoity-toity over there."

Self-definition in Sag Harbor: "Everybody had their brands, black kids, white kids. Sperry, Girbaud, and Benneton, Lee jeans and Le Tigre polos, according to the plumage theory of social commerce."

The cultural contradiction of "black boys with beach houses." Defining yourself along the double consciousness divide, you can embrace either the "beach part" or the "black part." Benji's friends have available to them black modes including "bootstrapping striver," "proud pillar," "militant," and "street."

From his older sister, Benji had been given an eight-track tape player with just two cassettes: Kraftwerk and " The Best of the Commodores."

Benji ribbed by his friends for wearing a black Bauhaus t-shirt to the beach. He appreciates the Rap his sister and brother play, but he "spent his money on music for moping . . . The singers were faint, androgynous ghosts, dragging their too-heavy chains across the plains of misery, the gloomy moors of discontent, in search of relief. Let's just put it out there: I liked the Smiths."

Successon on Azurest Beach: "It was where Reggie and I and Marcus and Bobby had spent most of our sunny afternoons as children doing the standard kid-on-a-beach stuff, making things out of sand, throwing dead crabs at each other. Our replacements were there, reenacting our botched creations, our futile passtimes. And one day they'd be passing their own replacements as they tromped off to work in town."

Recalling failed swimming lessons: "Swimming Instructor, Prison Camp Guard. . . Guppy, Snapper, Shark -- I can't remember the specific benchmarks because I never reached them."

Whitehead reflects on how Sag Harbor was a whaling town and that, in "Moby Dick," Queequeg was transported from his home by a Sag Harbor ship: "perhaps you'll recall how that turned out for him."

Queequeg, he further notes, "had a bit of double consciousness about him as well."

Once lined by whale ships, Sag Harbor's Long Wharf now home to Jonni Waffle, the ice cream stand where Benji works. "The Long Wharf was the main drag during the whaling days. Now it served a different trade -- tourism and leisure, although given national statistics on obesity, blubber still had its niche."

Industrial aspects of work at a beachfront ice cream store: "The dust of the Belgian waffle cone mixture swirled in the air like asbestos in the guts of a condemned factory."

American sugar addiction from the perspective of behind the counter at
Jonni Waffle's: "you looked up from the vats during the evening rush to see a ferocious throng. . . at the end of the night the floor was tackier than the aisles of a porn theater."

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Double Consciousness on the Shore: "Sag Harbor" begins

2009-05-02T10:33:00.002-05:00

Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor: Reading Notes, 1st part

Whitehead introduces DuBois "double consciousness" early and with a light touch in his father's two track listening habits when driving to Sag Harbor -- either Easy Listening or black political radio. "When a song came on that he didn't like or stirred a feeling he didn't want to have, he switched over to the turbulent rhetoric of the call-in shows, and when some knucklehead came on advocating some idea he found too cowardly or too much of a sellout, he switched back to the music."

Easy Listening, as exemplified by the Carpenters "Top of the World" is "like the lid of a sugar bowl tinkling open and closed to expose deep dunes of whiteness."

Black Talk Radio's "playlist" is "headline after headline of outrage, in constant rotation were bloody images of Michael Stewart choked to death by cops, Grandma Eleanor Bumpers shot to death by cops, Yusef Hawkins shot to death by racist thugs."

Another kind of double introduced in the early pages is Benji's near twin (they were born 10 mos. apart) brother Reggie. Further doubling in the divide between city existence and Sag Harbor summers -- to be in Sag is to be "out."

The civil rights lawyers Mr. and Mrs. Finkelstein's race consciousness: they "respected all races, colors, and creeds unless that creed was their own." That their daughter has Benji, a black classmate in her private school, helps allay their guilt. "Sending their daughter to a fancy private school was a betrayal of core values, paying tuition when you were supposed to support public schools being in traitorous equivalence with eating grapes when you were supposed to boycott grapes. Those days, every nonunionized grape was a tear squeezed out of the eye of a migrant worker's eyes."

Generic snack foods circa 1985: "Mini Hot Dogs, La Choy, Egg Rolls, and other lovelies of the Preheat to 350 school."

Pop songs such as "Betty Davis Eyes," "Xanadu," and "Big Shot": "they were merely there and always underfoot, the insistent gray muck that was pop culture."

Arrival in Sag Harbor after "nine months banishment in the city"; sense the the place comes back into being with return, "the illusion that the town was switched off when we weren't around."

Black/White reversals in Benji's and Reggie's sneakers. Reggie has new B-boy style Filas, "a little further out into the street than we ever ventured," that he meticulously keeps white. Benji recently switched to punk-style black Chuck Taylors that have become dilapidated -- "the black canvas had sickened to an uneven gray, and the toe bumpers a jaundiced yellow" -- from their passage across "whole marathons of Manhattan pavement."

Suggestion this will be the last summer of Benji's and Reggie's "twinhood."

Arrival in the summer town. "No matter the size of make of the house, the early arrivals were tormented by the same questions. Did the roof keep through the winter, did the pipes hold, did a townie or local bad kid break in and steal the television, or was it just the raccoons and squirrels who had given the place the once-over? Is it still here or did I dream it?

Benji and Reggie come across their soul-centric pal NP ("Nigger Please") who also has new Filas, kept meticulously white. Also like Reggie he's abandoned bike riding.

Benji's own act of self-styling is to declare his name as Ben.

Being "out" for the season. Whitehead glosses: "there was also the language of the prison in there, in how long are you out for. Time on the East End was furlough, a day pass, a brief visit with the old faces and names before the inevitable moment when you were locked-up again. That hard time that defined the majority of our days. You did something wrong, why else would something like the city happen to you."

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"This happiness could not have lasted": "Tess of the D'urbervilles" concludes

2009-04-19T18:30:00.001-05:00

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'urbervilles: Reading Notes, Part Eight

Tess writes to Angel in Brazil in care of his parents, begging him to return to her and save her from temptation.

Hearing that her mother is very ill, Tess breaks her engagament at Flintcomb Ash and returns home. Laboring in her family's kitchen garden in the twilight, she discovers a stranger hoeing the soil next to her -- D'urberville.

The rake turned ranter turned would-be samaritan greets her breezily, not to say sacriligiously: "A jester might say this is just like paradise. You are Eve, and I am the old Other One come to tempt you in the form of an inferior animal." Tess spurns him once again.

Tess's mother rallies but her father suddenly dies -- a catastrophe for the Derbyfields as the leasehold is in his name. The disgraced Tess's return makes the family seem all the more morally problematic to the village landlord, so no pity is extended to the now headless household.

Old Lady Day. The common day on which farm laborers throughout England begin new contracts and thus are in transit from one farmstead to another. It is also the day upon which leases end, and thus on which Tess, her mother, and her six siblings find themselves dispossessed.

Alec D'urberville again comes to Tess offering to care for her and her family, saying with apparent sincerity "though I have been your enemy I am now your friend, even if you do not believe it."

With no place to live, Tess and her family camp in the graveyard that contains the decrepit ancestral tomb of the great D'urbervilles. Alec follows them and once again tempts Tess.

Angel returns a near-skeleton. He traces Tess's wanderings while he was away and finally finds her, dressed in expensive clothes, in an upscale resort lodging where Alec D'urberville has taken her.

The owner of the lodging house is said by Hardy to be in "enforced bondage to that arithmetical demon, Profit-and-Loss."

Tess, insane with sorrow that her giving-in to D'urberville has once again lost her the chance to be Angel's true wife, murders the rake in his bed. She flees the house, runs until she overtakes Angel, and confesses her deed. He vows to protect her and they go off together. Hardy reports that "their every idea was temporary and unforefending, like the plans of two chldren."

Tess and Angel finally find married bliss, first in an abandoned manor house and then, for a night, at a moonlit Stonehenge. When the police come to apprehend her, Tess is happy as all life has taught her is that "this happiness could not have lasted."

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The transfigurations of Alec D'urberville

2009-04-19T15:17:00.001-05:00

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'urbervilles: Reading Notes, Part Seven

Alec D'urberville's conversion; like Tess, he is the same person even as he appears to be totally another.

"It was less a reform than a transfiguration. The former curves of sensuousness were now modulated to lines of devotional passion. The lip-shapes that had meant seductiveness were now made to express divine supplication; the glow on the cheek that yesterday could be translated as riotousness was evangelized today into the splendor of pious enthusiasm; animalism had become fanaticism; Paganism, Paulism; the bold rolling eye that had flashed upon her shrinking form in the old time now beamed with the rude energy of a theolatry that was almost ferocious. Those hard, black angularities which his face had used to put on when his wishes were thwarted by her modesty now did duty in picturing the incorrigible backslider who would insist upon turning again to his wallowing in the mire."

Pursued by the reformed Alec as she returns to Flintcomb Ash, Tess comes to the bleak site known as Cross-in-Hand. "Of all the spots on this bleak and desolate upland, this was the most forlorn. It was so far removed from the charm which is sought in landscape by artists and view-seekers as to reach a new kind of beauty, a negative beauty of tragical blankness."

Cross-in-Hand marked by a stone post, which Alec pronounces to Tess as the remaining upright of a holy cross -- a sacred relic. He makes her swear on it before he leaves her to return to his preaching.

Tess asks a local shepherd about the history of the cross. "Cross -- no; 'twere not a Cross! 'Tis a thing of ill omen, miss. It was put up by the relations of a malefactor who was tortured there by nailing his hand to a post, and afterwards hung. The bones lie underneath. They say he sold his soul to the devil, and that he walks at times."

Alec comes to Tess again to ask him to be his wife -- which she knows she cannot, being already married -- and then again to confess that she has tempted him away from his new vocation as a ranter.

Alec's third visit to Tess is again in the guise of the rake. He announces his fall from grace and this time demands rather than begs her company, saying he will free her from her endless toil for Farmer Groby. He caustically asks whether her husband is more than a myth and proposes that "even if you have one, I think I am nearer to you than he is. I, at any rate, try to help you out of trouble, but he does not, bless his invisible face!"

With the haughtiness of a D'urberville of the old line, Tess slaps him across the face with her farm gauntlet, drawing blood. She then demands to be punished.

On Alec's fifth visit, Tess is exhausted after a day and an evening feeding sheaves to an insatiable mechanical thresher, and she finds herself weakening in the face of his professed kindnesses.

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Obliterating her identity at every step

2009-04-19T11:36:00.003-05:00

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'urbervilles: Reading Notes, Part Six

Deserted by Angel, Tess wanders the stony plain that stretches between "the valley of her birth and the valley of her love" in search of subsistance.

In keeping with the terrain, her heart "had learnt of the dust and ashes of things, of the cruelty of lust and the fragility of love."

Angel, meanwhile, briefly dallies with one of the other milkmaids, Izz Huett, inviting her to join him on his journey to Brazil, while warning that she "is not to trust me in morals now." He rescinds the invitation when Izz reminds him of how much Tess adored him.

Wandering alone, Tess exhibits "something of the habilitude of the wild animal in the unreflecting automatism with which she rambled on -- disconnecting herself little by little from her eventful past at every step, obliterating her identity."

On the road, Tess meets the man Angel had fought on her behalf and escapes from him by running into a preserve and making a "nest."

She sleeps overnight on the bare ground, disturbed by a sound of fluttering. On awakening, she finds that she is surrounded by wounded pheasants.

"Under the trees, several pheasants lay about, their rich plumage dabbled with blood; some were dead, some feebly moving their wings, some staring up at the sky, some pulsating feebly, some contorted, some stretched out -- all of them writhing in agony, except the fortunate ones whose tortures had ended during the night by the inability of Nature to bear more.

"Tess guessed at the meaning of this. The birds had been driven down into this corner the day before by some shooting party" . . . "She had occasionally caught sight of these men in girlhood, looking over hedges or peering through bushes, and pointing their guns, strangely accoutred, a bloodthisty light in their eyes. She had been told that, rough and brutal as they seemed just then, they were not like this all the year around, but were, in fact, quite civil persons save during certain weeks of autumn and winter . . . when [they] made it their purpose to destroy life."

Hoping to avoid further run-ins with men -- and perhaps drawing a lesson from the fate of the richly-plumaged pheasants -- Tess wears her worst clothes and cuts away her lush eyebrows.

Tess finds lowly work at a dismal farm at the aptly named Flintcomb Ash. She digs the lower halves of swede (turnips) from the ground, the tops and leaves having already been chewed away by livestock. The farm turns out to be owned by the same man who chased her into the park: Farmer Groby.

Increasingly distraught, Tess determines to visit Angel's parents, but after a long cross-country trek shrinks from her goal after overhearing a conversation among his brothers that, she believes, indicates how the family thinks of her.

Heading back to the turnip farm, Tess encounters a Ranter preaching a sermon. The Ranter is the reformed rake Alec D'urberville and in his audience is the man who paints biblical slogans along the roadside.

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"You were one person; now you are another"

2009-04-18T18:38:00.001-05:00

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'urbervilles: Reading Notes, Part Five

The scene of Tess's confession strange, with ancient portraits of past D'urbervilles to whom she has a more than passing resemblance. Angel gives her family diamonds to wear and adjusts her dress so it approximates a ball dress. He is, it is clear, more fascinated by her romantic family heritage than he admits.

Tess forgives Angel his indiscretion and begs desperately that he, in turn, forgive hers. To which the stunned Angel replies: "O Tess, forgiveness does not apply in this case! You were one person; now you are another. My God -- can forgiveness meet such a grotesque -- prestidigitation as that!"

As with the obvious fascination with the D'urbervilles despite his professed contempt for noble families, Angel's response to Tess's heartfelt plea shows he is far more conventional than he styles himself.

As Tess pleads her case, the increasingly sardonic Angel says she is thinking like "an unappreciative peasant girl who has never been initiated into the proportions of things." [So much for the simple milkmaid of his romantic dreams].

Hardy notes that Angel's sarcasm has the same impact on Tess that it would on a cat or dog -- it is the tone of anger that she hears.

Angel reverts to his radical pose in denouncing Tess for not living up to his sentimental view of nature: "Here I was thinking you a new-sprung child of Nature; there were you, the exhausted seed of an effete aristocracy."

Angel determines they must part, but comes to Tess in the night as a sleepwalker and carrys her to a stone tomb where he lays her beside him.

The next day, when they part, Hardy advises is that Angel "did not know that he loved her still."

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The marriage -- A cock crows in the afternoon

2009-04-18T11:34:00.002-05:00

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'urbervilles: Reading Notes, Part Four

On the advice of her mother, Tess continues to conceal the truth of her past from her betrothed. Basking in the luminous glow of her love for Angel, she knew that the "gloomy specters" of "doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame" were "waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing light."

"It was no mature woman with a long dark vista of intrigue behind her who was tormented thus by her past; but a girl of simple life, not yet one and twenty, who had been caught during her days of immaturity like a bird in a springe."

When Tess's engagement to Angel is revealed, her fellow milkmaids jealously confront her: "each girl was sitting up in her bed, awaiting Tess, the whole like a row of avenging ghosts." Yet, when she collapses in years, the milkmaids find they cannot hate Tess.

When Tess is spotted by a Tantridge man who knows her past, Angel defends her honor with his fists. With their wedding day approaching, she determines to write him a letter telling the truth and slips it under his door.

On their wedding morn, wondering at Angel's continued lack of concern, Tess discovers that the letter went awry -- that it slipped under the carpet. All the stress returning, she destroys the letter.

Multiple registers of ill-omens follow immediately upon Tess and Angel's wedding. Legendary: They ride off in an ancient coach resembling the infamous "coach and four" of the D'urbervilles, in which an unspeakable crime was said to have occured (and which D'urbervilles are said to see in their dreams at moments of ill-fortune). Mythic: Tess's three fellow milkmaids are aligned along a wall like the Fates; on the departure of the couple, Angel gives each a kiss at Tess's urging. Natural: an "afternoon crow" as a white cock loudly crows at the couple as they drive off.

Angel, with a truly deaf ear for the workings of fate, books their wedding night at a farmhouse that was formerly a mansion of the D'urbervilles.

He confesses, and asks Tess's forgiveness, for a sexual indiscretion earlier in his youth. And then Tess, in the light of a fire that has "a Last-Day luridness," begins to tell her story.

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Tess and Angel

2009-04-18T09:30:00.001-05:00

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'urbervilles: Reading Notes, Part Three

At Talbothays, Tess reencounters the youngest of the journeying brothers from the May dance -- Angel Clare. Angel has abjured the ecclesiasitical path of his older brothers, choosing instead to study and gain experience in various forms of farming.

Angel's sojourn among the various farms of Wessex gives him an appreciation for the variety of rural Englishmen, usually thought of collectively, and dismissively, as "Hodge."

"The typical and unvarying 'Hodge' ceased to exist. He had disintegrated into a number of varied fellow-creatures -- some happy, many serene, a few depressed, one here and there bright even to genius, some stupid, others wanton, others austere . . . men every one of whom walked in his own individual way the dusty road to death."

Angel and Tess begin to be drawn to one another. Thinking, no doubt, of her disasterous encounter with Alec D'urberville, "Tess was trying to lead a repressed life, but she little reckoned the intensity of her own vitality."

Tess wondering whether her "noble" D'urberville heritage might earn her the honest attention of Angel Clare, inquires of the young man's opinions with the master dairyman Crick, and learns from him that such "noble blood" is common among the local poor -- several locals, including one of her fellow milkmaids, are descended from once great families. Angel, Crick expounds, "is one of the most rebellest rozums you ever knowed . . . And if there's one thing he hate more than another 'tis the notion of what's called an old family. He says that it stands to reason that old families have done their spurt of work in past days, and can't have anything left in 'em now."

Angel finds himself falling in love with Tess and they have their first kiss in a pasture. He goes to visit his family to sort through his conflicted thoughts and confesses his intent to propose.

As Angel Clare returns to the farm from the sanctimonious atmosphere of his family home it is like "throwing off splints and bandages" to him."

Angel proposes to Tess and she is alarmed due to the secret of her lost maidenhood. Telling Tess of his father, Angel mentions that the Reverend recently expostulated against a young rake-hell, whom Tess immediately recognizes as D'urberville, making her sense of doom even deeper.

Hardy describes Tess and her fellow milkmaids going out into the fields as "advancing with the bold grace of wid animals -- the reckless, unchastened motion of women accustomed to unlimited space."

Angel presses his suit: "But you will make me happy."

Tess responds: "Ah -- you think so, but you don't know!"

Tess begins to reconsider her cautious refusal of Angel's declaration of love: "In reality, she was drifting into acquiescense. Every see-saw of her breath, every wave of her blood, every pulse singing in her ears, was a voice that joined with Nature in revolt against her scrupulousness."

Together alone on an errand for the dairy, Angel points out a fragment of a manor house, formerly a seat of the extinct D'urbervilles. Arriving at the railway, Hardy speaks of Tess's unmechanized (pre-modern) nature: "The light of the engine flashed for a moment on Tess Durbeyfield's figure, motionless under the great holly tree. No object could have looked as foreign to the gleaming cranks and wheels than this unsophisticated girl . . . [with] the suspended attitude of a friendly leopard at pause."

As Tess gives in to Angel, she abandons trying to control "the 'appetite for joy' which stimulates all creation; that tremendous force which sways humanity to its purpose."

[In certain ways, Tess' animalistic, premodern nature, conflicting with Victorian social morays, actually prefigures postmodern morality].

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The birth and death of Sorrow

2009-04-18T09:29:00.002-05:00

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'urbervilles: Reading Notes, Part Two

Tess returns to her native village, pregnant with Alec D'urberville's child. En-route, she encounters a fanatical wanderer who paints biblical imprecations on fences and farm structures. Tess refuses to believe that such curses are truly the words of God.

Nevertheless Tess is beset by moral regrets: "a cloud of moral hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason. It was they who were out of harmony with the actual world, not she. Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence . . . She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly."

Tess divided between a moral, grieving side and a natural, passionate one.

She gives birth to a sickly infant whom she names Sorrow. On the child's death, she buries it in the corner of the village graveyard reserved for those souls that will never see heaven.

On Sorrow's death, Tess begins to wonder if it would be impossible for her to reclaim her maidenhood. An opportunity arises for her to leave her parents' home to work at a large dairy farm, Talbothays, in another valley.

Leaving her home "some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpended youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with it hope, and the invincible instinct towards self-delight."

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"Fine skellingtons": "Tess of the D'urbervilles" begins

2009-04-12T13:25:00.004-05:00

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'urbervilles: Reading Notes, Part One

The fateful meeting of Durbeyfield with the Antiquarian parson Tringham, who informs him of his heritage as descended from the once powerful, now "extinct" D'Urbervilles.

The D'Urberville legacy consists of things that are dead and buried -- like the "fine skellingtons" and lead coffins of which the drunken Durbeyfield brags.

Similarly, traditions in Wessex have decayed -- the wan May celebration at which Tess dances; the dogeared copy of the "Complete Fortune-Teller" that her mother won't allow in the house overnight -- without modernity having taken grip. In Wessex, "the Elizabethan and Victorian ages stood juxtaposed."

The Durbeyfield brood of six. Hardy punctures the Victorian equivalent of family values rhetoric, in which the family is said to represent "Nature's holy plan": "All these young souls were passengers in the Durbeyfield ship -- entirely dependent on the judgment of the two Durbeyfield adults . . . If the heads of the Durbeyfield household chose to sail into difficulty, disaster, starvation, disease, degradation, death, thither were these half-dozen little captives under hatches compelled to sail with them."

In the darkness, Tess and her young brother Abraham take the bee hives to market in place of the drunken Durbeyfield ("Sir John"). Abraham "with upturned face made observations on the stars, whose cold pulses were beating amid the black hollows above, in serene disassociation from those two wisps of human life."

This description of the remoteness of the heavens counters the reading ("A Counterblast at Agnosticism") of the oldest of the wandering brothers at the dance.

Tess, from the national
curriculum and her "Sixth Standard" education is aware there are other planets and worlds and imagines them to be better ones. Pondering alternate suns in the stars above, she tells Abraham that they live on a "blighted" star, not a sound one.

Tess' education also results in her having "quite a Malthusian towards her mother for thoughtlessly giving her so many little sisters and brothers."

Tess sent by her parents as emissary to their rich relations -- the Stoke-D'urbervilles -- who in reality are not relations at all. A newly rich tradesman, Simon Stoke, had picked the disused D'urberville name out of old heraldry books at the British Museum.

She meets the young heir Alec D'urberville whom Hardy foreshadows as "potentially the 'tragic mischief' of her drama -- one who stood fair to be the blood-red ray in the spectrum of her young life."

Tess pricked by a thorn from one of the roses Alec D'urberville had placed in her bosom, which she sees as an ill portent. Hardy notes drily that it is the first bad omen she had noted that day.

After the bourgeous Stoke-D'urbervilles erected their new home, they converted the previous house to the poultry shed over which Tess presides: "the rooms in which dozens of infants had wailed at their nursing now resounded with the tapping of nascent chicks. Distracted hens in coops occupied spots where formerly stood chairs supporting sedate agriculturists. The chimney corner and once blazing hearth was now filled with inverted beehives, in which the hens laid their eggs; while oui-of-doors the plots that each succeeding householder had carefully shaped with his spade were torn by cocks in wildest fashion."

The blind Mrs. D'urberville holds tender feelings for her fowl and the bullfinches that fly free in her bedroom, but less for her son whom she neverthelss loves "scornfully."

Alec rescues Tess from the revels, turned ugly, of her fellow farm maids. But as he rides off with her, the peasant women laugh, knowing she faces a greater danger under his care than from their fists.

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Reading notes on "In the Lake of the Woods"

2009-04-11T22:27:00.003-05:00

Reading Notes: Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods
April 11, 2009

"In the Lake of the Woods" is a mystery novel of sorts, but one in which the mystery gets deeper as secrets are revealed.

As a boy, the rising politician John Wade takes refuge in magic tricks, practicing illusions before a mirror in the basement of his house. As he grows up, he internalizes the mirror and lives by illusion.

In Vietnam, where he is part of the company led by Lieutenant Calley that massacred civilians at My Lai (a secret he tries to hide from the public as well as himself) he is known as "Sorcerer."

Structure of the book is multifold: 1) chapters that describe "What" happened after Kathy's disappearance; 2) retrospective chapters on the "Nature" of John Wade's experiences as son, lover, soldier, politician, and suspect; 3) chapters that assemble "Evidence" in the form of passages from histories, public documents, quotes from characters in the novel, professional texts, literary works, lists of the contents of "John Wade's Box of Tricks"; and 4) "Hypothesis" chapters on what might have happened to Kathy.

John's repressed rage: "All that rage. Like an infection it seemed -- some terrible virus that kept multiplying within him." The night of Kathy's disappearance, his poltical career in tatters, he mutters again and again "Kill Jesus," pours boiling-hot water on houseplants (an act of deforestation?).

John lives by magic; Kathy by order and logic: "And then, for fifteen minutes over a second cup of coffee, she sat at the kitchen table with her book of crossword puzzles. She liked to start each day with a sense of accomplishment, solving what could be solved."

John, when his external success, his guise in the world has been demolished: "The mental scaffolding was gone, all the dreams for himself, all the fine illusions and ambitions."

John's coping mechanism: "Long ago, as a kid, he'd learned the secret of making his mind into a blackboard. Erase the bad stuff. Draw in pretty new pictures."

John deploys "tricks," mental and social, to repress the atrocities in which he was involved in Vietnam and the trauma of his father's suicide.

From his early youth, John perfects the skill of hiding behind the "mirrors" in his head -- illusions of normality. He is aware of the fakery, saying to himself that "his whole life had been managed with mirrors."

John's heroism and battle wounds, his political career, his marriage all a form of "apology" of atonement, for what he did in Vietnam.

John's ideal of love is a kind of disappearance. He speaks of wanting to disappear within Kathy and, observing in Vietnam two snakes eating each others' tails, he imagines the ultimate magic of 1 + 1 equalling zero. Later, after Kathy's disappearance -- and contemplating a suicide like his father's -- he sees nature as a place where that same math could prevail.

John irked by Kathy's gambling in Vegas; as a magician, John has no tolerance of chance.

Novel of secrets: the ones that you don't tell others (the abortion) and, more dire, the ones you repress -- the ones you don't tell to yourself (My Lai).

Dostoyevsky's "Notes from the Underground" quoted as "Evidence": "Every man has some reminiscenses which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away . . . Man is bound to lie about himself."

In the "Evidence" sections, O'Brien connects politics to war, Vietnam to eradication of Native American populations, magic to denial, repression of memory to performance.

Notable (too easy?) that the Native American in Calley's company, Thinbill, is the only character who doesn't participate in the massacre.

In reference to John Wade's "Sorcerer" identity, Justin Kaplan quoted as "Evidence": "By taking a new name . . . an unfinished person may hope to enter into more dynamic -- but not necessarily more intimate -- transactions, both with the world outside and with his or her 'true soul,' the naked self." [An intersting thought in our age of avatars].

Assigned to administrative duty toward the end of his tour, "Sorcerer" makes his involvement in My Lai disappear by altering company records.

The failure of John's political "trick" of trying to make his past vanish: "He'd tried to pull off a trick that couldn't be done, which was to remake himself, to vanish what was past and replace it with things good and new. He should've known better. Should've lifted it out of the act. Never given the fucking show in the first place."

Intentionally or not, living or dead, Kathy has pulled a vanishing act -- her own feat of magic.

The final "Nature" chapter has Kathy dead (accident? murder? there are "Hypotheses" to cover both) at the bottom of "Lake of the Woods." So Kathy, and her death are now part of John's past along with the other incidents in the "Nature" chapters.

Yet the last "Hypothesis" chapter provides, perversely, a happy ending."

The narrator reflects: "Our own children, our fathers' our wives and husbands: Do we truly know them? How much is camoflage? How much is guessed at? How many lies get told and when, and about what? . . . How often do we lie awake speculating -- seeking some hidden truth? Oh yes, it gnaws at me. I have my own secrets, my own trapdoors. I know something about deceit. Far too much. How it coreodes and corrupts"

As for John Wade: "Can we believe he was not a monster but a man? That he was innocent of everything except his life? Could the truth be so simple? So terrible?"

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From coddled prodigy to beast of burden

2009-04-05T21:36:00.002-05:00

William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner: Reading Notes, Part 4

Pampered in his role as the pet of the Turner plantation, Nat tells how it was the pious Miss Nell who innocently reads to him the bloodthirsty Old Testament passages that will inspire his future plans for revolt.

[The whites in "The Confessions of Nat Turner" read the bible and quote from it, but seem to have no sense at all of what it is saying].

Nat describes his early sexual fantasies, which are of a faceless white girl with curly blond hair.

He has a more worshipful regard for the youngest daughter of the Turner family, Emmeline. But then, one night, he spies her and a cousin fornicating. In the midst of their coupling, Emmeline blasphemes fervently. Nat's sense of Emmeline's purity, her untouchability is permanently destroyed and soon her image replaces the faceless blond as the subject of Nat's solitary, guilt- ridden pleasures.

On a trip into town, Marse Joseph tells Nat of his plans to emancipate him upon his reaching his majority. But the spell of that eventual gift is clouded when they pass a gang of slaves in chains, enroute to a plantation in Georgia to which they have been sold.

Nat develops a friendship with another slave boy, Willis, and begins to school him in letters and numbers. One day when the two are fishing, and after Willis casually takes the Lord's name in vain (see Emmeline above) for which Nat slaps him, the two boys fall into a carnal embrace -- which Willis enjoys (Man, I sho liked dat. Want to do it agin?) and which Nat justifies to himself via the biblical story of David and Jonathan. Gulity nevertheless, Nat takes it upon himself to baptize Willis and then himself in the stream. Willis becomes his first disciple as a self-proclaimed "minister."

As the economic status of the Turner plantation erodes through the environmental degredation wracking the Tidewater, Marse Joseph secretly sells four slave boys for ready cash. Willis is one of them, which angers Nat, though the master explains that soon all the slaves -- the only true capital available to him -- will need to be sold to pay debts.

Nat is loaned out by Marse Turner to a minister, the Reverend Epps, who tries to molest him and, failing, makes the boy the servant of the entire congregation. The previously pampered Nat discovers for the first time what it is to be a Negro: "It seemed to me that I had been plunged into a hallucination in which I had parted from all familiar existence and was suddenly transformed into a different living creature alltogether -- half man, half mule, exhausted and without speech, given over to dumb and reasonless toil from the hours before dawn until the dead of night." Nat endures it thinking of the freedom he has been promised when he turns 21.

Marse Turner apparently having forgotten, or repudiated, his promise to free Nat, he is sold by the Reverend Epps at a slave auction, the former favorite locked "in a crowded, noisy pen with fifty strange negroes" experiencing "a kind of disbelief which verged close upon madness, then a sense of betrayal, then fury such as I had never known before, then finally, to my dismay, hatred so bitter that I grew dizzy and thought I might get sick on the floor."

Nat's new master, an illiterate, is stunned that his new possession can read. Brooding, the owner Thomas Moore tells his equally uneducated cousin Wallace about a "free nigger" he'd heard about in Smithfield who could read: "when he died they cut open his head and looked at his brain and it had wrinkles just like a white man's. And you know, they was a story 'bout how some of the niggers got holt of a part of the brain and actual et some of it, hopin' they'd git smart too."

Fearing the new slave will inevitably get "uppity," Moore is not pleased at having bought a "nigger" who can read. When Nat asks for food, he is whipped -- physically punished for the first time. It is then, as he feels the wet blood on his neck, Nat first hears God's voice booming through the trees, saying the words: "I abide."

In the future when God speaks to Nat, urging him to "bloodshed of baptism or preaching or charity" it will always be with those same two words: "I abide."

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Nat's education: a half-loaf of learning

2009-04-05T11:02:00.002-05:00

William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner: Reading Notes, Part 3

While awaiting execution, Nat recalls his earliest days. He is a "house nigger," brought up hearing (and imitating) the voices of the white owner. His best friend Wash, was "moulded by different sounds . . . nigger voices striving clumsily to grapple with a language never taught, never really learned, still alien and unknown.

In the library of the boy Nat's master, Samuel Turner, the books "had been locked up behind wire, row after row of lustrous leather-swaddled volumes imprisoned in a cage."
Nat steels himself to take one of two tracts by John Bunyan he sees left out on the library table: "The Life and Death of Mr. Badman" (the other is "Grace Abounding").

Nat witnesses the rape of his mother, the cook Lou-Ann by the Irish overseer McBride ("There, God damn, you'll have a taste of me big greasy"); rape turning to seduction as he sees them couple in a rhythym he thought, from earlier spyings, amid the slave cabins, was peculiar to negroes and as the overseer exclaims to Lou-Ann that she shall have earrings from him.

Discovered in his theft of the book, Nat's desire to learn how to read fascinates his master. Musing over this event in his cell, Nat reflects that "the most futile thing a man can do is to ponder the alternatives, to stew and fret over the life that might have been lived if circumstances had not pointed his future in a certain direction." He nevertheless wonders what would have been his fate had he not become "the beneficiary (or perhaps the victim) of my owner's zeal to tamper with a nigger's destiny."

From the day his desire to learn is discovered, Nat's education becomes a family project. Nat reflects that his master, Marse Turner, "could not have realized, in his innocence and decency, in his awesome goodness and softness of heart, what sorrow he was guilty of creating in feeding me that half-loaf of learning."

Wonderful passage where Nat imagines, from youth to dotage, what would have been his life had he not learned to read -- happier, he suspects, for being ignorant.

The boy Nat a kind of agricultural experiment. He overhears Marse Samuel exclaim on the evils of slavery, opining that education is needed before slaves can be freed to live on their own.

Samuel Turner's brother Benjamin disagrees, finding his brother "sentimental as an old hound" in believing "you can take a bunch of darkies and turn them into shopowners and sea captains and opera impressarios and generals." Benjamin sees negroes as "animals with the brains of a human child." His desire is to replace Negro slaves with machines both for fieldwork and then, sardonically, in the form of "another grand machine to come chugging through the house, lighting the lamps and setting the rooms in order." He drunkenly expands upon the conceit to say that such a machine would not steal or be given to laziness and that, upon such a wondrous machine being invented "I will say a happy adieu to slavery."

Singling out Nat's accomplishments in reading, numbers, and Bible-study, Benjamin opines that whatever learning can be achieved by a darky, he will still be "an animal with the brain of a human child" incapable of wisdom, honesty, or an understanding of human ethics and thus needful of the "benevolent subjection" that enlightened slave owners can provide. A darky, he concludes, "is basically as unteachable as a chicken."

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"The plain ordinary evil of your dad-burned Bible"

2009-04-04T18:31:00.002-05:00

William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner: Reading Notes, Part 2

Nat's second dream comes while he is chained to the bench in court. He dreams of black chldren being sucked down into a fetid swamp. But he has misplaced his Bible and can do nothing to save them.

In court, he tries to pray, but feels his prayers falling to the ground rather than rising up to heaven. He feels he has been abandoned by God and that makes him fear death for the first time.

Listening to the prosecutor, Nat feels the denunciations of the closing arguments flow directly, naturally from his own confessions. He accepts the savagery of his actions.

Nat notes ruefully that Gray has a different speaking manner in front of whites in court: "I had grown only mildly surprised by his voice, filled as it was with eloquence and authority, free of the sloppy patronizing half-literate white-man-to-a-nigger tones he had used in jail.

In Gray's summation, another version of the "cloak" Nat cites as necessary to cloak a Negro's true thoughts. Gray sees it as cloaking baseness, deviance, speaking of: "the evasiveness the Negro uses to cloak and disguise the base quality of his nature."

Nat also winces as Gray speaks with reverance of the slaves who stayed loyal to their masters and defended them from the insurrectionists.

Gray's argument becomes a eugenic pereoration as he explains that what separates Napoleon from Nat is the inadequate cranial capacity of the Negro race.

Nat refers to his first recruits to his conspiracy (Hark, Henry, Nelson, Sam) as "men of God, and messengers of His vengence."

Nat hopes to exclude from his cadre the ungovernable Will who has "the frenzied, mindless quality of a wild boar cornered hopelessly in a thicket, snarling and snapping its brutish and unavailing wrath."

The issue for Nat with Will if clearly that he is unrepressed; he speaks of Will the same way whites speak of "niggers" as a whole. But Will shares, in uncontrolled form, all Nat's mingled hatreds and passions; Nat represses his desire for the white girl Catherine Whitehead (and hates her for her easy intimacy and trust) while Will mutters obsessively under his breath "get me some of that white stuff" and more derisively "old white cunt." Nat excludes Will from his recruitment because it is well known that he "broods upon rape," which Nat has forbidden to his followers.

Nat sentenced to death by Judge Cobb, who summarizes the enormity of his crimes while nevertheless referring to his sympathy for the criminal.

Later, back in jail, Hark relates to Nat from the next cell the vigilante riots that followed the capture of the insurrectionists and the many innocent blacks who were murdered by whites seeking retribution.

Gray comes to Nat's cell to tell him he's been denied access to a Bible.

He then lectures Nat that "Christianity is finished" chiding Nat that "the message contained in Holy Scripture was the cause, the prime mover of the entire miserable catastrophe" -- causing the deaths of Nat's followers, of their 55 white victims, and of the innocent blacks killed in the ensuing mob violence.

"Don't you see,". Gray asks, "the plain ordinary evil of your dad-burned Bible?"

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"Most blessed or cursed of God's creatures": "The Confessions of Nat Turner" begins

2009-04-04T11:27:00.002-05:00

William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner: Reading Notes, Part 1

Styron's "The Confessions of Nat Turner" a double confession. The slave revolt leader Nat Turner, chained and in prison awaiting trial and execution, tells his story to the lawyer Gray but it is a surface account -- one that doesn't reveal his motives. But the reader hears Nat's inner thoughts, his private confession.

Nat's dream of an ocean voyage (he has never seen the ocean) at the end of which lies a doorless marble structure on a bluff. A tomb?

Through chained and hungry, the one thing Nat cannot bear is that the Christian God who spoke to him, who daily inspired him to slaughter the enslaving white race has withdrawn from him, no longer speaks in his thoughts.

In prison, Nat meditates on whether the fly that buzzes around his head is the most blessed or cursed of creatures: "In many ways, I thought, a fly must be one of the most fortunate of God's creatures. Brainless born, brainlessly seeking its sustenance from anything wet and warm, it found its brainless mate, reproduced, and died brainless, unacquainted with misery or grief. But then I asked myself: how could I be sure? Who could say that flies were not instead God's supreme outcasts, buzzing eternally between heaven and oblivion in a pure agony of mindless twitching, forced by instinct to dine off sweat and slime and offal, their very brainlessness an everlasting torment?"

A g(Nat) = a fly? Nat clearly placed between fellow slaves Hark (who hears) and Will (who acts).

The chained Nat bargains with the garrolous lawyer Gray: "There is no doubt about it. White people often undo themselves by such running off at the mouth, and only God knows how many nigger triumphs have been won in total silence."

In drawing out Nat's confession, Gray complains that the prisoner is not forthcoming about why the insurrectionists killed the kindly (including his "humane" master Joseph Travis) as well as the brutal and were unsparing of innocent children. He also is incredulous that Nat himself slew so few; that he attributes much of the carnage to the slave Will. In these external confessions, dictated to Gray, Nat refuses to address either of these questions of motivation or reluctance.

Gray's legal disquisition on the different kinds of chattel: animate (like Nat) and inanimate (the example he gives is that of a wagon). The court has condemned to death only the intelligent slaves -- a minority of the insurrectionists -- returning the "inanimate" ones to their masters. Gray gives this as evidence of Virginia's superior sense of justice and mercy.

Internally narrating the story of his youth, Nat recalls how his fellow slave Hark (now in an adjacent cell) "always declared he could distinguish between good white people and bad white people -- and even white people who lay between good and bad -- by their smell alone."

We already know that Nat's bloody, biblical vengeance, in accordance with the strictures expressed by the prophet Ezekiel, will make no distinction between good and bad oppressors.

Hark also theorizes the condition of being "black-assed" -- "the numbness and dread which dwells in every Negro's heart" and that comes from contact with every white, whether evil or kind, that inevitably reminds the slave of his blackness. Hark expects a similar result to come from meeting God in heaven.

Hark has gained the enmity of the master's stepson Putnam (who is actually Nat's owner, though as a minor not yet his "master") from having, while out hunting hickory nuts, "innocently but clumsily ambushed Putnam and Joel Westbrook in some tangled carnal union by the swimming pond, both of the boys as naked as catfish on the muddy bank, writhing about and skylarking with each other in the most oblivious way." Putnam's consequent anger at Hark's "spying" is to Nate an "uncorrectable situation: white people really see nothing of a Negro in his private activity, while a Negro . . . must walk miles out of his path to avoid seeing everything white people do."

Styron's evocative description of Nat's pastoral existence (the warm shed he shares with Hark, his daily trapping of rabbits in the surrounding woods) under the kind master Joseph Travis is remarkably intersperced with brief, matter-of-fact, dispassionate references by Nat to the carnage he is planning.

Nat recalls first meeting Judge Cobb, the magistrate who will shortly be presiding over his trial. The judge, visiting the wheelwright shop of Nat's master, identifies Nat as the intelligent, bible-reading slave he has heard rumor of and taunts him with all the contradictory verses which demand of slaves either bloodthirsty revolt or meek obedience.

The drunken Judge Cobb taunts Nat to spell the word cat -- to show his learning -- and Nat rages internally that he will have to murder the man, and thus lose the opportunity for the revolt he is meditating, if he is forced to reveal the secret of his intelligence.

Nat, as Cobb attempts to taunt him into revealing his intelligence: "A Negro's most cherished possession is the drab, neutral cloak of anonymity he can manage to gather around himself, allowing him to merge faceless and nameless with the common swarm: impudence and misbehavior are, for obvious reasons, unwise, but equally so is the display of an uncommon distinction, for if the former attributes can get you starved, whipped, chained, the latter may subject you to such curiosity and hostile suspicion as to ruinously impair the minute amount of freedom you possess."

Cobb repeatedly quotes an aphorism that Nat cannot place in the Bible: "As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly."

Nat, in more learned fashion, reiterates Hark's notion of black-assed-ness: "even when they care, even when they are somehow on your side, they cannot help but taunt and torment you."

Cobb's drunken rant on the degeneration of Virginia from "plump and virginal principality," fecund with a variety of crops, to "withering, defeated hag," despoiled to provide tobacco for English pipes, and now breeding ground for slaves ("little black infants by the score, the hundreds, the thousands, the tens of thousands") required by the cotton states: "a nursery for Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas . . . A monstrous breeding farm to supply the sinew to gratify the maw of Eli Whitney's infernal machine."

The drunken and grotesque Judge Cobb wails: "Oh Virginia, woe
betide thee! Woe thrice woe, and ever damned be the day when poor black men in chains first trod upon thy sacred strand."

Nat, who has been plotting his bloody insurrection, feels a momentary "thrill of hope" in hearing Cobb's crazed pronouncements, but it quickly gives way to a sense of danger, suspicion and mistrust.

Cobb further laments loudly when Nat tells him of how the "kind" master Joseph Travis, who doesn't allow beating of his slaves, nevertheless had no choice but to sell Hark's wife and young son to work in the Mississippi cotton fields.

In accordance with the passage from Exekiel that guides Nat's plan and that calls for the protection of those who sigh for justice even as the innocent children are to be slain, he determines that Cobb will be "spared the sword."

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Reading Notes on "Clock without Hands"

2009-03-29T16:08:00.005-05:00

Reading Notes: Carson McCullers, Clock without Hands
March 28-29, 2009

Though not a major participant in the action of the novel, the pharmacist J.T. Moran is the pivot point for "Clock without Hands." Diagnosed with leukemia, he is awakened to the world around him. But this awakening brings mostly loathing and resentment that he will be outlived by family, people in the streets, even trees. Moran resentful as well of his wife using money she has saved from packaging sandwiches and cakes to buy Coca-Cola stock -- sees it as a sign of economic independence that calls into question the necessity of his own life. His days are numbered, but he does not know the extent of the span still ahead of him: "what would happen in those months -- how long? -- that glared upon his numbered days. He was a man watching a clock without hands."

Moran is rapidly losing weight. His physical opposite is the "corpulent nor fat" 300 lb. judge, segregationist, and former congressman Fox Clain. Judge Clain, in his 80s, still shows the effects of a stroke 10 years earlier. Hearing from Moran of his fatal and incurable blood illness, the Judge authoritatively encourages him to simply eat a lot of liver.

The Judge's beloved son Johnny committed suicide years earlier after losing a case in his father's court in which he defended a black man accused of murder of a white man and rape of his wife. Judge Clain's family now reduced to Johnny's son, John Jester Clain, just now discovering his own "passions" -- flying, music, and racial justice.

Opposing the bitterness bloodlessness of Moran and the corpulence and decay of the Judge, Jester is full of life, light: "Jester Clain stood in the room with the sunlight from the street behind him. He was a slight, limber boy of seventeen with auburn hair and a complexion so fair that the freckles on his upturned nose were like cinnamon sprinked over cream. The glare brightened his red hair but his face was shadowed and he shielded his wine-dark eyes against the glare. He wore blue jeans and a striped jersey, the sleeves of which were pushed back to his delicate elbows." Jester ardently, romantically believes that all humans should be required to fly.

Jester's opposite is the blue-eyed "nigra" foundling Sherman Pew (Sherman being' of course, the ultimate charged name in Georgia), an inveterate liar, divided between a feckless black radicalism and a dandyish devotion to European high culture.

Jester begins to challenge his grandfather the Judge's segregationist rhetoric and to mock the old man's master plan to introduce legislation to redeem the value of Confederate money. Simultaneously, he develops a passion for Sherman Pew that is anything but requited. In imitation of Sherman's showy high cuture, Jester abandons boyish attire and begins to dress stylishlessly and practice classical piano. All of which infuriates Sherman, both his blue-eyed ambitions and his dark-skinned anger.

Ten years earlier, Sherman, then a boy and working as a golf caddy, had along with Jester saved the life of the Judge. when he collapsed with a seizure into a water trap -- the two thin boys dragging the massive old man out of the pond and onto the fairway. The Judge also knows the secret of Sherman's parentage: that he is the son of the black man Johnny Clain had tried to defend in his court and his lover, the white child bride he was accused of raping.

Johnny Clain's defense of Sherman's father had been a disaster because he had tried to make a constitutional argument before a jury made up of illiterate whites -- or, as the Judge calls them "twelve men good and true."

The Judge's behavior constantly undercuts his behavior, whether it be derived from great oratory of the past, Shakespeare, or diet books. There are also repeated references to similarity of Clain family and mules. Jester sees in amateurish painting (by the Judge's sister) of a plantation scene a cloud that looks like a pink mule. Moran notices in portrait of Judge's late beloved wife (by same artist) that her left foot looks like a tail. The Judge speaks of getting dental attention from a relative, a vetrinarian who speaks of the tenderness of mule mouths.

The Judge tries out inflammatory rhetoric on Jester -- "'How would you like to see a hulking Nigra boy sharing a [school] desk with a delicate little white girl?' The Judge could not believe in the possibility of this; he wanted to shock Jester to the gravity of the situation. His eyes challenged his grandson to react in the spirit of Southern gentlemen." Jester responds: "How about a hulking white girl sharing a desk with a delicate little Negro boy?"

Having challenged his grandfather's racial ideology, Jester (who is repulsed by the "gummy smeary" lipstick worn by most women and girls in the town) attacks his moral bombast. Uncomfortably seeing his attraction to Sherman reflected in the pages of the Kinsey report but triumphant in having just proved his normality in a whore house, Jester attacks the Judge for not having read the book and, indeed for having it banned from the Public Library. McCullers reveals that, in truth, Fox Clain had been an avid reader of Kinsey, hiding it behind the dust wrapper of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."

In the meantime, Moran undertakers a liver cure: "After his conversation with the Judge, he had filled the freezing compartment of the refridgerator with calf liver and beef liver. So morning after morning, while the electric light fought with the dawn, he fried a slice of the terrible liver. He had always loathed liver. . . . After it was cooked, smelling up the whole house like a stink bomb, Malone ate it, every loathesome bite. Just the fact that it was so losthsome comforted him a little. He swallowed even the gristly pieces that other people removed from their mouths and put on the sides of their plates."

Warned against "digging his grave with his teeth," the Judge's follows a different kind of diet. Unbelievably narcissistic, he becomes fascinated with his own bodily functions, gleefully reading his diet book, a recipe for "Lemon Crustless Pie," while defecating. "When the odor in the bathroom rose, he was not annoyed by this; on the contrary, since he was pleased by anything that belonged to him, and his feces were no exception, the smell rather soothed him."

Just as the corpulent Judge has a surfeit of ego and identity, so the withering Moran has a deficit. Moran sees his incorporeality expressed in the pages of a pop psychology book' "Sickness unto Death," he selects from the hospital book cart: "The greatest danger, that of losing one's own self, may pass off quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wide, etc., is sure to be noticed."

Disappointed by his beloved grandson's disapproval of his Old South rhetoric, the Judge engages the Europhilic Sherman as his amaneunsus and companion. But the more Sherman discovers of the racial prejudice underlying the corpulent old man's bombastic rhetoric, the more he sees he cannot stay in that role, however comfortable. In the Judge's papers, Sherman discovers the story of his birth, dashing his fantasy that he is the son of the opera singer Marian Anderson.

Sherman tries to fuse his black rage with his European aspirations, renting and furnishing in high-style a house in a rickety white neighborhood.

In response to Sherman's provocation, the Judge revives in miniature his former Klan chapter. Lots are drawn as to who will firebomb the offending "nigra." Moran's number comes up but, despite his lionization of the Judge, he refuses the duty, explaining that his impending death puts him in fear of his mortal soul."

Jester, who spies on the meeting. tries and fails to convince Sherman to flee. He then tries and fails to take revenge on Sherman's assasin.

Jester senses a kind of schizophrenia in the rages of both Sherman and his Grandfather, a gap between lofty desire and bigotry. He asks himself if his grandfather is "acting crisscrossed in his old age, laughing fit to kill when he ought to be crying?"Hearing of the Supreme Court decision on Brown vs. Board of Education, Judge Clain is so disoriented that he begins reciting the Gettysburg Address on the radio to the horror of the station's management -- a last crisis of the gap between rhetoric and reality.

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Mauled and Devalued: "The Eustace Diamonds" Concludes

2009-03-24T14:42:00.006-05:00

Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds: Reading Notes, Part X

A detective calls on Lizzie to tell her that her role in the disappearance of the diamonds is now known and will be revealed in open court, to which she is to be summoned as a witness (but not as a defendant). She is advised to make a clean breast of the entire story to Camperdown.

As her wedding to the egregious Sir Griffin approaches, Lucinda continues to make clear that if she is forced to the altar, the only possible outcome will be murder. Lucinda descends into madness; the marriage is called off; and Trollope (avoidant as always of extremity) hustles the bridegroom off to Japan and out of the story.

Lord Fawn uses the occasion of Lizzie's public testimony of her duplicity to finally break off the engagement. And Frank, who accompanies Lizzie to the courtroom, finds his own attraction to Lizzie waning. Frank reconciles with Lucy (who has, in the meantime, located the hitherto unknown soft heart of the Vulturess) and both of them exit the story (Frank's political career and finances no longer a narrative concern once Lizzie's spell is broken.

Lizzie retreats to Portray Castle, followed by yet another suitor -- the conniving preacher Mr. Emilius. Emilius would have had no chance at a match with someone of Lizzie's station and wealth, but her "devaluing" and "mauling" by the "fowlers" who have hunted her puts her within his reach. "She had been maimed fearfully in her late contests with the world, and was now lame and soiled and impotent." And of Emilius: "The boy with none of the equipments of the skilled sportsman can make himself master of a wounded bird. Mr. Emilius was seeking her inamoment of her weaknes, fearing that all chance os succes might be over for him should she ever again recover the full use of her wings."

Antisemitic undercurrents. The rumors that Emilius is a Jew allows Trollope to reinforce a racial line he had already drawn by having her deal with the crooked, and also Jewish, jeweler Mr. Benjamin.

The story concludes with the gossiping Lords and Ladies at the Palliser retreat at matching Priory -- reminiscent of the Gods on Olympus looking down on the lives of the Greek mortals. Trollope, however, has spoken of a world where heroes and heroines, absolute good and absolute evil no longer exist.

The moral order in "The Eustace Diamonds" is one where men and women are bound by their own fate and status. Marriage in "The Eustace Diamonds" is like a species barrier, where wealth should marry wealth, those of modest means (Frank and Lucy) flock together, and even liars wed liars (Lizzie and Emilius).

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Lizzie's Suitors

2009-03-22T17:07:00.002-05:00

Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds: Reading Notes, Part IX

The putative "corsair" Lord George de Bruce Carruthers, the only one of Lizzie's suitors who knows her role in the thefts, considers whether he should force her into marrying him. "He had been careful to reduce her to a condition of despair, that she would have undoubtedly have accepted him . . ." but "she was such a mass of deceit, that he was afraid of her."

He makes his decision: "in spite of her beauty, his judgement went against her. He did not dare to share even his boat with such a dangerous fellow-passenger."

Lizzie begins maneuvering to cut the last bond between Lucy and Frank.

Without even knowing of Lizzie's complicity in the theft of the diamonds, Frank knows her to be false: "she was affected, unreal,-- and, in fact a liar in every word and look and motion." Yet "he loved her after a fashion and was prone to sit near her, and was fool enough to be flattered by her caresses."

Lizzie knows the truth of her value vis-a-vis Lucy. "Lucy could hold her ground because she was real. You may knock about a diamond and not even scratch it; whereas paste in rough usage betrays itself. Lizzie, with all her self-assuring protestations, knew that she was paste, and knew that Lucy was real stone."

Lucinda Roanoke tries everything she can to shake her irascible suitor Sir Griffin Trewitt: "he knows that I detest him, and tee he goes on with it. I have told him a score of times, but nothing will make him give it up. It is not that he loves me, but he thinks that that will be his triumph." With a "ghastly smile," she suggests to Lizzie that the only hope is that either she or Sir Griffin murders the other.

The Eustace family, including Camperdown, begins to exert pressure on Lord Fawn to honor his commitment to Lizzie, concluding "it would be a good thing to get the widow married and placed under some decent control."

Fawn writes Lizzie a letter expressing his dislike for the idea of marrying her but says he will honor his vow if she so demands.

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Diamonds and Farthings

2009-03-22T12:42:00.002-05:00

Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds: Reading Notes, Part VIII

Diamonds truly stolen in robbery at Mrs. Carbuncle's residence, in which Lizzie's maid Patience Crabstick is implicated.

Woven with story of diamonds is droll account of Plantagenet Palliser's titanic struggle to pass a bill in Parliament for the five farthing penny -- to move British coinage to a decimal system.

Glencora takes Lizzie's part and helps engineer social pressure on Lord Fawn to make good his commitment.

Wisdom from the thief Billie Cann: "pleasures should never be made necessities."

Billy Cann opines to Detective Gager on the police profession: "You guess. You're always a-guessing. And because you know how to guess, they pays you for guessing. But guessing ain't knowing."

The highly practical (and vulgar) Mrs. Hittaway explains to her mother Lady Fawn that her beliefs in virtue, constancy, and honesty are "antedeluvian."

Mrs. Hittaway arranges for the groundskeeper at Portray Castle to testify to Lord Fawn of Lizzie's indiscretions with Frank. But Fawn cannot bear to ask the questions required to extract the story. "He was weak and foolish and, in many respects, ignorant, -- but he was a gentleman.

Deserted by Frank, the "good as gold" Lucy looks in the mirror to view her plain clothes and admits she has been "utterly ignorant of her own value." Lucy realizes her love for Frank has been a "luxury."

Lizzie's great skills as an actress: " In the ordinary scenes of ordinary life she could not acquit herself well. There was no reality about her, and the want of it was strangely plain to most unobservant eyes. But give her a part to play that required exaggerated strong action, and she hardly ever failed."

In her confrontation with Fawn, Lizzie boldly invokes the interest in her case of the Duke of Omnium. Fawn reflects on this: "he knew that the Duke of Omnium was a worn-out old debauchee, with one foot in the grave, who was looked after by two or three women who were only anxious that he should not disgrace himself by some absurdity before he dies. Nevertheless, the Duke of Omnium, or the Duke's name, was a power in the nation."

Ironically, the loss of the diamonds has been a boon to Lizzie's fortunes and status. Learning that Patience Crabstick has been apprehended, Lizzie again worries that her duplicity will be revealed.
Frank confesses his insolvency to the sympathetic Mrs. Carbuncle: "the fact is I live in that detestable no-man's land between respectability and insolvency, which has none of the pleasures of either . . . I have all the recklessness, but none of the carelessness, of the hopelessly insolvent man."

Lizzie contemplates the renewal of her engagement to Lord Fawn with an incredulous Frank: "A woman can marry without consulting her heart. Women do so every day. The man is a Lord, and has a position."

Frank defends Lucy to Lizzie as "perfect." To which Lizzie responds acidly "can you marry this perfection without a sixpence?"

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Lizzieites and Anti-Lizzieites

2009-03-21T13:05:00.001-05:00

Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds: Reading Notes, Part VII

The iron box for the diamonds stolen by professional thieves at a railway inn while Lizzie sleeps. In reality, the diamonds are safe beneath Lizzie's pillow, but she instinctively allows the police to believe the theft was successful.

Lizzie maintains her falsehood with Frank, whom she enlists in advising her how to deal with the "theft."

Neglected by her putative betrothed, Lucy Morris is outwardly confident but "there grew at her heart a little weed of care, which from week to week spread its noxious, heavy-scented leaves, and robbed her of her joyousness."

Lucy's dreary life with the Vultureress has few duties. Lady Linlithgow "simply chose to have some one sitting with her to whom she could speak and make little cross-grained, sarcastic, and ill-natured remarks."

Society divides into "Lizzieites and Anti-Lizzieites," with the Conservatives, led by Frank Greystock, holding Lizzie as an innocent victim and mistreated and the Liberals defending Lord Fawn and finding much to suspect in the robbery.

At a gathering of the Pallisers and their circle at Matching Priory -- including the Grey's of "Can You Forgive Her?" and the Chilterns and Madame Goesler of "Phineas Finn" -- all the latest rumors of the Eustace Diamonds' fate arrive by telegraph. Uncomfortably for him, Lord Fawn is among the guests. The aged, increasingly childlike Duke of Omnium obsessed with the scandal.

Glencora archly proclaims she is "quite envious" of "that little purring cat, Lady Eustace, having been so very--very clever" finding

It "delightful to think that a woman has stolen her own property and put all the police into a state of ferment."

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Lucinda Roanoke, the reluctant fortune hunter

2009-03-21T11:43:00.002-05:00

Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds: Reading Notes, Part VI

Lizzie's houseguests are almost entirely comprised of fortune hunters, including the adventuress Mrs. Carbuncle, her ally Lord George de Bruce Carruthers, and her icy neice Miss Lucinda Roanoke.

Odd courtship of the impatient Sir Griffin Tewitt and Lucinda. On his second proposal, when she inquires if he is quite sure of his intentions, he sputters "I'm not a man who does things without thinking; and when I've thought, I don't want to think again."

Having accepted Sir Griffin, the reluctant fortune huntress Lucinda remarks to her aunt "I hate a good many people; but of all the people in the world I hate Sir Griffin Tewitt the worst. . . . I shall have to lie to him, -- but there shall be no lying to you, however you may wish it."

Mrs. Carbuncle on marital realities: "not that girls ever really care about men now. They've got to be married, and they make the best of it."

Lucinda accepts a kiss from Sir Griffin, though "she would sooner have leaped at the blackest, darkest, dirtiest river in the county."

And then, when Lucinda is by herself: "She burst into tears. Never before had she been this polluted. The embrace had disgusted her. And if this, the beginning of it, were so bad, how was she to drink the cup to the bitter dregs?"

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An interrogation by the Vulturess

2009-03-20T23:07:00.002-05:00

Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds: Reading Notes, Part V

Trollope on the expense of rising in society: "let nobody dream that he can be somebody without having to pay for that honor."

Lady Linlithgow's welcome to Lucy is a chilly one. Under questioning, Lucy describes her mirthful life among Lady Fawn and her daughters, to which the Vultureress responds: "you won't find anything to laugh at here; at least, I don't. If you want to laugh, you can laugh upstairs."

Though Lucy hopes to keep private the identity of her betrothed, Lady Linlithgow performs a remarkable crossexamination, not only extracting that information but adding to it a merciless -- and quite accurate -- assessment of the motivations at play.

Addressing his readers, Trollope defends his writing of a book with an unheroic hero such as Frank Greystock. "With whom are we to sympathize? says the reader . . . Oh my reader, when you have called the dearest of your friends round you to your hospitable table, how many heroes are there sitting at the board? . . . We cannot have heroes to dine with us. There are none. But neither are our friends villians, -- whose every aspiration is for evil."

Trollope severely disapproves of the then fashionable ponytail as "a dorsal excresence."

Tempted by Lizzie's rank, wealth, and beauty, Frank continues to postpone answering the love letters from his betrothed. "A man does not write a love letter easily when he is in doubt himself whether he does or does not mean to be a scoundrel."

Lizzie's son, the heir, makes a brief appearance -- though he is not described nor does he speak -- in order to be flaunted at the childless John Eustace (much as the diamonds were flaunted before Frank Greylock). The appearance made "the boy was done and carried away. Lizzie had played that card and had turned her trick."

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The "good as gold" Lucy Morris

2009-03-20T09:42:00.002-05:00

Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds: Reading Notes, Part IV

Frank's seduction by Lizzie continues. Lizzie playfully -- but pointedly -- belittles her rival Lucy: "she is tame and quiet,-- a cat that will sleep on the rug before the fire, and you think she will never scratch."

Lucy continually spoken of as being "as good as gold," but that kind of intrinsic value has little worth in exchange, as her economic status makes her unworthy in people's eyes of marriage to a rising young man such as Frank Greystock and also unworthy to voice her opinions to those above her station, as in her contretemps with the status-obsessed Lord Fawn.

Phrase from a Tennyson poem summarizes, in phony Scots dialect, the "proper" way to pursue a mercenary marriage: "Doan't thou marry for munny, but goa where munny is."

Frank's mother hopes to derail her son's marriage to Lucy, who she blames for allowing herself to be loved: "Lucy had behaved badly in allowing herself to be loved by a man who ought to have loved money."

Frank's mother acknowledges to herself that their wealthy cousin is not "good as gold" the way Lucy is, but excuses her: "Of course, Lizzie Eustace was not just all that she should be; -- but then who is?"

Frank's mother sees signs that her son is willing to abandon his "very imprudent match" and reflects: "there was no doubt about Lucy being as good as gold; -- only that real gold, vile as it was, was the one thing Frank so much needed."

Wordlessly acceding to his mother's maneuver to delay formalizing his commitment to Lucy, Frank sends his "beloved" to live as unpaid companion to the vulturess Lady Lithlingow.

Frank returns to Lizzie at Portray Castle. Seeing a ring he was given by Lucy on his hand, she unlocks and flaunts the famous diamonds at him.

Frank: "I am so poor a man that this string of stones, which you throw about the room like a child's toy, would be the making of me."

Lucy: "Take it and be made."

Frank advises Lizzie to release Lord Fawn from his commitment. But Lizzie is revenge minded: "men have become so soft themselves, that they no longer think even of punishing those who behave badly, and they expect women to be softer and more faineant than themselves."

Lizzie, who dreams of being swept up by a Byronic corsair, on Fawn: "Is he not a poor social stick; -- a bit of half-dead wood, good to make a post of, if one wants a post?" While certainly livlier than Fawn, one could hardly consider Frank byronic.

Lizzie renews her sarcastic attack on Frank's betrothed, "that prim morsel of feminine propriety who has been clever enough to make you believe that her morality would suffice to make you happy."

Lizzie enacts a passionate declaration of love to the befuddled Frank, who is entranced by her even as he also recalls that her wealth would be useful.

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"Like a beautiful animal you are afraid to caress for fear it should bite"

2009-03-15T16:52:00.002-05:00

Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds: Reading Notes, Part III

Fawn consults with Camperdown, whose word he takes as "gospel," and becomes even more disquieted: Fawn "could not unravel truth quickly, but he could grasp it when it came to him. She was certainly greedy, false, and dishonest . . . Nevertheless he was engaged to marry her!"

Adding to his misery, Fawn's married sister, Mrs. Hittaway, briefs her slow-witted brother on Lizzie's status as the greatest vixen in London.

Uneasyness of Lizzie's visit to her prospective relations: "The Fawn ladies were not good hypocrites . . . and there was a general conviction in the dovecote that an evil thing had fallen upon them."

Lucy Morris confides to Frank her sense of the kind of beauty her childhood friend has become: "she looks like a beautiful animal that you are afraid to careess for fear it should bite you; -- an animal that would be beautiful if its eyes were not so restless, and its teeth so sharp and white."

John Eustace tells Frank of his sense of what Lizzie's marriage to Fawn will bring: "Fawn will be always afraid of her, -- and won't be in the least afraid of us. We shall have to fight him, and he won't fight her."

Frank Greystock debates within himself between marrying for passion -- his love of Lucy -- and marrying for ambition. [The same decision faced by Phineas Finn when he rejects the wealthy Mdm. Gensler]

Lizzie's constitutional falseness: "True love, true friendship, true benevolence, true tenderness, were beautiful to her, -- qualities on which she could descant almost with eloquence; and therefore she was always shamming love and friendship and benevolence and tenderness. She could tell you, with words most appropriate to the subject, how horrible were all shams, and in saying so would not be altogether insincere; -- yet she knew that she herself was ever shamming, and she satisfied herself with shams."

Fawn presents an ultimatum to Lizzie that she either give up the diamonds or he will break-off their marriage. Lizzie spurns both variables, determined to hold Fawn to his promise and, of course, keep the necklace. "She walked on full of fierce courage, -- despising him, but determined that she would marry him." Fawn returns to London, leaving negotiations in his mother's hands.

Fawn lost in perplexity. Trollope speaks of "the short, straight grooves of Lord Fawn's intellect."

Lizzie begins to wear the diamonds regularly in public. At one such fete, Glencora Palliser and her friend Mdm. Max Gensler debate the prospects of the pending marriage of Fawn and Lizzie.

Frank and Lucy are engaged, but he still finds himself torn -- visaulizing the domestic bliss of his marriage to the governess but drawn to his glamorous, wealthy, and dangerous cousin Lizzie.

One of the peculiarities of "The Eustace Diamonds" that Lizzie's son by the late Sir Florian, though fairly often referred to, is never seen -- at least through the first 200 pages. On her railway trip to Scotland and her home at Portray Castle, the iron case bearing the necklace is at center stage, but the heir is never glimpsed.

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Legal dueling and matrimonial speculation

2009-03-15T09:41:00.001-05:00

Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds: Reading Notes, Part II

The duel begins between the Eustace family lawyer, Mr. Camperdown, and Lizzie over the possession of the diamond necklace, with Lizzie advised by her not entirely scrupulous attorneys Messrs. Mobray and Mopus.

Definition: appaneges = dependent possessions

Camperdown incensed at Lizzie's willful retention of the necklace: "£10,000 my dear John! And she is to be allowed to filch it as other widows filch china cups and a silver teaspoon or two!"

In her face-off with Camperdown, Lizzie desperately wishes sage advice, but hesitates as all those from whom she would seek it would be likely to advise her to return the diamonds -- which, of course, she is determined not to do.

The "vulturess" Lady Linlithgow comes to Lizzie on an embassy from Camperdown. Though old, she has great resilience: "she was one of those old women . . . on whom old age appears to have no debilitating effects. If the hand of Lady Lithlingow ever trembled, it trembled from anger; -- if her foot ever faltered, it faltered for effect. . . . She was as hard as an oak post, -- but then she was also as reliable."

Of Lucy's charitable but domineering employer Lady Fawn (who has forbidden her to receive visits by Frank Greylock): "Lady Fawn was a tower of strength to Lucy. But then a tower of strength may at any moment become a dungeon."

Lizzie, desperate for support, accepts Lord Fawn's proposal of marriage. Fawn, meanwhile, is in straightened circumstances and has his eyes fixed on Lizzie's income.

His proposal very much an act of "matrimonial speculation," Lord Fawn has investigated Lizzie's finances -- and appreciates her beauty -- but has no idea of her character whatsoever. "For aught he knew, she might be afflicted by every vice to which a woman can be subject. In truth, she was afflicted by so many, that the addition of all the others could hardly have made her worse than she was."

In their marital negotiations, Fawn is slow but practical and Lizzie "quick as a lizard" but ill-informed. Lizzie is shocked to hear that Fawn's lawyer is Mr. Camperdown; Fawn equally disquieted to learn that the Eustace family is threatening legal action for recovery of the diamond necklace.

To lock the discomfited Lord Fawn into the marriage, Lizzie quickly broadcasts news of the engagement throughout society.

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The jewel-bedecked girl: "The Eustace Diamonds" begins

2009-03-14T09:44:00.002-05:00

Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds: Reading Notes, Part I

Trollope introduces Lizzie Greylock -- who will become Lady Eustace -- as a girl who, though her father has no particular fortune "went about everywhere with jewels on her fingers, and red gems hanging around her neck, and yellow gems pendent from her ears, and white gems shining in her black hair."

Her father's interests to his very deathbed are limited to "whist, wine, and wickedness in general." On his death, Lizzie goes to live with her horrid aunt Lady Linlithgow, who she calls, with good reason, "the old vulturess."

Lizzie cuts a deal with her father's debtors to retain her jewels until she can finalize her match with the wealthy Sir Florian Eustace.

One additional apparent appeal of Sir Florian for Lizzie is that he is dying. Sir Florian combines selfless nobility and thoughtless vice: "he was one who denied himself no pleasure, let the cost be what it might in health, pocket, or morals."

"Blear-eyed in his ways around town," Sir Florian mistakes the calculating Lizzie for the "the purest, the truest, and the noblest" of women.

Lizzie: "As she was utterly devoid of true tenderness, so she was also devoid of conscience."

Lizzie engineers her marriage to Sir Florian quickly, and he dies of his lingering infirmity less than a year later. "She had so far played her game well, and had won her stakes."

Lizzie's reptilian allure: "her figure was lithe and soft and slim and slender . .. She was almost snake-like in her rapid bendings and the almost too easy gestures of her body."

Lizzie's eyes: "blue and clear, bright as cerulian waters. They were long, large eyes -- but very dangerous. To those who knew how to read a face, there was danger plainly written in them. Poor Sir Florian had not known."

After Sir Florian's death, Lizzie gives birth to an heir and, of seemingly just as much concern to the family, makes claim to a family heirloom -- a massive diamond necklace valued at £10,000.

Lizzie's childhood friend, the governess Lucy Morris, is her opposite in both temperment and approach to life. Straightforward and accepting of her status -- she envies no one. Yet "to herself, no one was her superior." However admirable, she is, Trollope informs us, not a heroine.

The Tory temperment to see all change, even that which benefits them, as ill and feel "well-assured that all good things are gradually being brought to an end by the voice of the people."

Lizzie's cousin -- and Lucy's beloved -- Frank Graystock is a Tory M.P. not from ideology but from opportunity.

Lizzie's brother-in-law, John Eustace, hopes to induce Frank to marry his brother's troublesome widow -- "she is making herself queer . . . she doesn't know know what she ought to be at, and what she ought not. You could tell her."

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Gulliver travels homeward

2009-02-15T21:38:00.004-06:00

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels: Reading Notes, Part V (final)

The totalitarian streak in the Houyhnhnm society becomes clearer and clearer.

One aspect of the "natural" society of the Houyhnhnm is apparently racial stratification: "He made me observe that, among the Houyhnhnms, the white, the sorrel, and the iron-grey, were not so exactly shaped as the bay, the dapple-grey, and the black; nor born with equal talents of the mind, or a capacity to improve them; and therefore continued always in the condition of servants, without ever aspiring to match out of their own race, which in that country would be reckoned monstrous and unnatural."

From his dialogue with the master horse, Gulliver comes to see the superiority of the "rational" -- and unlettered -- Houyhnhnm, with their "general disposition to all virtues" compared with his own debased race and society.

Clearly said virtues do not include liberty: the Houyhnhnm practice birth control (through the social regulation of copulation) and also eugenics in the form of careful breeding so as "to preserve the race from degenerating." There is no romance: marriages are arranged. Nor is there love or pride of parents for their offspring, as the colts and foals are brought up collectively with the young distributed as necessary to maintain social equity.

The master horse reports to Gulliver on a debate at the Houyhnhnm grand council on whether to forceably annihilate the troublesome and inferior Yahoo population that has "infested" the nation. Finding that an extreme measure, the master horse himself counterproposes that the Houyhnhnm adopt a practice Gulliver described to him and simply castrate the Yahoo males.

At the grand council, it is further revealed that the first Yahoo came to Houyhnhnm after a shipwreck -- from their physiognomies, Gulliver believes they may be of English descent -- and propagated without control from then.

Yahoos are scapegoats for all ills of Houyhnhnm society. "The Houyhnhnm have no word in their language to express anything that is evil, except what they borrow from the deformaties and ill qualities of the Yahoos. Thus they denote the folly of a servant, an omission of a child, a stone that cuts their feet, a continuance of foul or unseasonable weather, and the like, by adding to each the epithet of Yahoo."

Gulliver describes his great contentment in the pre-modern Houyhnhnm society. In a first hint of collaborationism, his list of household arrangements mentions without note that the replacement leather for his shoes comes from Yahoo skin.

Gulliver becomes an assimilationist. He looks with horror on his reflection when he sees it in a pond and begins imitating the gait, gesture, and diction of his noble hosts.

The master horse reluctantly discloses to Gulliver that at the same great council at which the eradication of the Yahoos was discussed, it was "exhorted" that Gulliver should be expelled from the country.

Despondently, Gulliver begins building a canoe from the scrubby wood available in that land, "covering it with the skins of Yahoos" with a sail "composed of the skins of the same animals" sealed with pitch from "Yahoo's tallow" and, when completed, hauled down to the sea by Yahoo labor.

The grateful Gulliver bids farewell to his benevolent master: "as I was going to prostrate myself to kiss his hoof, he did me the honor to raise it gently to my mouth. I am not ignorant how much I have been censured for mentioning this last particular."

When Gulliver is discovered by others of his kind, Portuguese sailors, he is horrified to hear such "Yahoos" speak ("as monstrous as if a cow or dog would speak in England"). For their part, they laugh at the neighing pronounciation Gulliver has adopted.

Returning to England, Gulliver is repelled by his Yahoo wife and children ("the sight of them filled me with hatred, disgust, and contempt"), prefering the company of two young stone horses with whom he converses at least four hours each day.

Writing from a distance of several years from exile in England from his beloved Houyhnhnm, Gulliver is still not reconciled to Yahoo-kind, though he can now countenance all the vile sins he sees around him with one exception -- human pride.

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Gulliver in the land of Houyhnhnms and Yahoos

2009-02-15T18:09:00.006-06:00

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels: Reading Notes, Part IV

"Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World: Part 4, A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms"

Gulliver's ship taken over by mutineers and he is set adrift near an unknown island, likely near Madagascar. He has with him the kinds of trading goods one employs in dealing with "savages" -- knives, bracelets of false pearl, small mirrors, and beads.

He encounters the Yahoos and is disgusted by their physical appearance, even as his description makes it apparent they are humanoid.

He next finds the Houyhnhnms, civilized horses, who are astounded to be confronted by a Yahoo with clothing -- "whereof they had no conception" -- and the faculty of speech.

The Yahoos are meat eaters; the Houyhnhnms vegetarians. Of necessity, Gulliver adopts a vegetarian, salt-free diet and "cannot but observe, that I never had one hour's sickness while I stayed in this island."

A dinner guest arrives at the home of the "master horse" in a sleigh drawn by four Yahoos.

Upon closer inspection, Gulliver realizes Yahoos are "savage" humans, but he refuses to see them as of his kind.

Gulliver avoids being seen without clothes in order to "distinguish myself as much as possible from the cursed race of Yahoos."

He relates that "the word Houyhnhnm in their tongue signifies a horse, and in its eytmology, the perfection of nature." In keeping with that perfection, the Houyhnhnm have no shame of "any parts of their bodies" and their language has no word for lying or, thus, for doubt or disbelief.

Gulliver describes to the master horse the life of servitude of his kind in England -- and of methods of training including bridles, saddles, whips, and spurs and the castrating of working horses to make them more docile -- drawing similar outrage as to when he told the Brobdingnag King about European munitions.

As Gulliver describes the variety of human behavior to the master horse -- lawsuits, drunkenness, whoring, gaming, sodomy, treason, murder, theft, poisoning, coining false money, rape, etc. etc. -- he needs to stop to explain every one of those vices as none exist among the Houyhnhnm. "This labor took up several days conversation before he was able to comprehend me."

Gulliver then embarks on an encyclopedic yet matter-of-fact enumeration of all the reasons why the princes of his own land go to war and a brief overview of the carnage of battle. To which the master horse responds that "whoever understood the nature of Yahoos might easily believe it possible for so vile an animal to be capable of every action I had named, if their strength and cunning equalled their malice."

Then, Gulliver describes the profession of law, again unknown to the Houyhnhnm: "I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves."

The use of money, the extremes of Yahoo wealth and poverty, and global trade are expoused. England, Gulliver explains, exports the food that could easily feed its masses: "sending away the greatest part of our necessary things to other countries, from whence in return we brought the materials of diseases, folly, and vice, to spread among ourselves. Hence it follows of necessity that vast numbers of our people are compelled to seek their livelihood by begging, robbing, stealing, cheating, pimping, foreswearing, flattering, suborning, forging, gaming, lying, fawning, hectoring, voting, scribbling, star-gazing, poisoning, whoring, canting, libelling, freethinking, and the like occupations; every one of which terms, I was at much pains to make him understand."

Gulliver then describes the diseases caused by the Yahoo's tendencies toward excess and then the medical profession with its love of purgatives and emetics. He further relates: "Besides real diseases we are subject to many that are only imaginary, for which physicians have invented imaginary cures."

The master horse contemplates the odiousness of the human form compared to other creatures and concludes it not unwise that those of Gulliver's homeland choose to cover their bodies "and by that invention conceal many of our own deformaties from each other."

Gulliver takes trips to observe the Yahoos in the wild and more and more sees the similarities in his species behavior in its natural state with that of civilized Europe. These field trips culminate in his nearly being raped by an 11 year old Yahoo girl when he his nakedness is revealed while swimming in a pond.

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Gulliver among the Laputans and nearby states

2009-02-15T11:19:00.002-06:00

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels: Reading Notes, Part III

"Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World: Part 3, A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg, and Japan."

Laputa a floating island that contains the royal court, hovering over the vassal lands below.

The entire principality impoverished by abstract science -- mathematics is the only topic of learning, astronomy the only subject of court discourse, and music the only art form. Those in the floating city detached from the reality below; those below live in rags, victims of a public policy focused on future projections -- the scientists are called "projectors" -- rather than present.

Laputans live with their heads tilted so that one eye is always looking at the stars. They are so lost in their own thoughts that servants are equipped with small baldders with which they gently hit their masters' eyes, ears, and mouths in order to remind them to look at, listen, and respond to their interlocutors.

Gulliver's tailor in Laputa measures him, inaccurately, with a sextant. Not surprisingly, then, ill-fitting clothes are common in Laputa.

Dining in Laputa: "shoulder of mutton cut into an equilateral triangle, a piece of beef into a rhomboid, and a pudding into a cycloid ... the servents cut our bread into cones, cylinders, parallelograms, and several other mathematical figures."

Among the experiments at the Academy of Science in the city below the floating island are projects to extract sun-beams from cucumbers; to return human excrement to its original food matter; to build houses from the roof downward to the foundation; and to prevent the growth of wool on young lambs in order to create a race of naked sheep.

The Academy also houses a primitive computer -- a twenty foot wooden frame with bits of wood strung along wires on which are written all the words of their language. By pulling all the wires simultaneously, the words are shuffled into a new order, with the sentences thus created scrutinized for meaning. In time, of course, all possible sentences and meanings would of necessity occur along the wires of the frame. The scientist ("projector") proposes to hasten his work by constructing fifty such frames (a network!)across the kingdom.

Gulliver finds equally dubious ideas under consideration at the Academy of Political Science, including proposals that princes choose ministers based on merit, make policy decisions based on the public good, "and many other wild impossible chimeras that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive."

Another Laputan political scientist proposes that the heads of political opponents be surgically opened and hemispheres of their brains swapped so that each legislator holds both perspectives.

Leaving Laputan possessions, Gulliver visits Glubbdubdrib, a land of the dead where he interviews great personages of the past and discovers the falsity of official histories and the prevalence of corruption, vice, cowardice, ingratitude, and dishonesty among the powerful and noble.

He next ventures to Luggnagg, where a small number of individuals each generation are born into immortality -- a miserable condition, Gulliver discovers, as those "struldbrug" experience life as a continuing process of decrepitude; an eternity of enfeeblement.

He returns via Japan which, interestingly, is in commerce with both the mythic lands of Gulliver's most recent voyages and with Europe.

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Gulliver in Brobdingnag

2009-02-14T23:39:00.002-06:00

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels: Reading Notes, Part II

"Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World: Part 2, A Voyage to Brobdingnag."

Brobdingnag situated by Gulliver and by map in first edition as a peninsula on west coast of North America, well above known California settlements of Monterrey and Mendocino (and thus, it is fun to imagine, quite possibly the Long Beach peninsula of Washington State).

Encountering giant Brobdingnags, Gulliver muses on changes in status brought by size and power alone: "in this terrible agitation of mind, I could not forebear thinking of Lilliput . . . Where I was able to draw an Imperial Fleet in my hand, and perform those other actions which will be recorded forever in the chronicles of that empire, while posterity shall hardly believe them, although attested by millions. I reflected what a mortification it must prove to me to appear as inconsiderable in this nation as one single Lillupitian would be among us."

From living myth in Lilliput to insignificant morsel, Gulliver's initial status in Brobdingnag that of an animal; the farmer plucks him from amid the furrows and examines him as he would a weasel. "What could I expect but to be a morsel in the mouth of the first among these enormous barbarians that should happen to seize me."

Immediate reaction of farm family is to treat Gulliver like an animal or plaything despite his human characteristics and behavior -- the mother shrieks as if he were a toad or shrew; the son dangles and plucks at him the way all children are mischievous "toward sparrows, rabbits, young kittens, and puppy dogs"; and the infant sticks the tiny Gulliver in her mouth.

It is the young daughter who sees Gulliver's personhood (though she seems to enjoy dressing and undressing him as if he were a doll) and he comes into her care until the plan arises to exhibit him at the town fair for money arises. The daughter realizes Gulliver is to be taken away from her just as "last year, when they pretended to give her a lamb, and yet, as soon as it was day, sold it to a butcher."

Gulliver exhibited by the farmer far-and-wide, performing English mannerisms such as flourishing his sword and doffing his hat for the eager crowds. Resonance here with how natives were brought back to Europe by explorers as curiosities.

Gulliver's name in Brobdingnag is Grildrig (Little Man).

Gulliver sold to Queen, who finds him appealing. King at first cannot decide if he is an animal or clever clockwork. He becomes a part of the royal household, quickly earning the resentment of the Royal Dwarf, now supplanted as a curiosity.

Gulliver's size allows him to see how disguisting household flies are with their feces and secretions. He is horrified to see Queen devour entire birds, bones and all, though he devoured Lilliput's tiny viands in similar fashion.

Magnitude of Brobdingnagians makes apparent the imperfections of their flesh -- mottled, pitted -- just as miniature Lilliputians seemed physically perfect and charming.

Equivalent to looking through a microscope, Gulliver sees true nature of the world: "the most hateful sight of all was the lice crawling on their clothes. I could see distinctly the limbs of these vermin with my naked eye, much better than a European loise through a microscope, and their snouts with which they rooted like swine."

"Gulliver's Travels" as an ocular adventure. His great size in Lilliput allows him to see the pettiness of human society; his tiny size in Brobdingnag reveals the grossness and beastliness of human existence.

More disgust, this time ofalcatory: "The Maids of Honor . . . would often strip me naked from top to toe, and lay me at full length in their bosoms; wherewith I was much disgusted; because to say the truth a very offensive odor came from their skins."

Pre-Darwinian moment: a monkey at the Castle mistakes Gulliver for "a young one of his own species," runs off with him and rocks him like a baby while feeding him from his own provender.

The king interrogates Gulliver on the affairs of England. Gulliver provides a panygeric, but after close questioning the King states: "from the answers I have with much pains wringed and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."

Attempting again to assert superiority of English society, Gulliver describes his world's munitions and offers to construct such devices for Brobdingnag. The king is horrified that such murderous, inhuman machines could be viewed as a sign of a nation's greatness and finds Gulliver's offer repellent, calling him an "impotent and groveling insect."

Regarding such denunciation, Gulliver opines to his reader that the King has "narrow principles and short views" in his rejection of a technology which would make him "absolute master of the lives, the liberties, and the fortunes of his people."

The Brobdingnag King's political philosophy: "he gave it for his opinion that whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together."

Gulliver reads a work of Brobdingnag philosophy that suggests humans must have once been of greater stature. A devolution from Brobdingnagians (x10)through Europeans to Lilliputians (-10)?

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Gulliver in Lilliput

2009-02-14T11:03:00.002-06:00

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels: Reading Notes, Part I

True title of this first volume of work now popularly known as "Gulliver's Travels" is: "Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World: Part 1, A Voyage to Lilliput."

Lilliput situated by Gulliver and by map in first edition as near Tasmania (Van Diemen's Land).

Gulliver a common man brought into Court. The "foreigness" of his Lilliputian sojurn as much a matter of contact with Princes and ministers as experience of the 1/10th scale world.

Indication of gulf in manners between the sailor Gulliver and his noble patrons in his act of successfully extinguishing an uncontrollable blaze in the royal palace by urinating on it.

Gulliver's name among the Lilliputians is Quinbus Flestrin (the Man Mountain).

Lilliput on first glance seems harmonious, but is soon revealed as riven by faction -- the high-heeled Tramecksans vs. the low-heeled Slamecksans -- and, more bitterly still, by the heresy of those who eat soft-boiled eggs from the larger end (Big-endians) rather than the small-end.

Lillupitians and Blefuscuans separated by language and by sect (Small-endian Lilliputians vs. Big-endian Blefuscuans). As with Europeans prior to Age of Discovery, scepticism among learned men that other lands and peoples can exist despite overwhelming evidence, in Gulliver's testimony that they must.

Though Gulliver rises to nobility by aiding the Lillupitian Emperor in foiling the invasion plans of the Blefuscuans -- in gratitude, he is made a "Nardac" -- he earns the enmity of that monarch by not participating in the proposed eradication of the Big-endian heretics. From which, Gulliver draws lesson that: "Of so little weight are the greatest services to princes, when put into balance with a refusal to gratify their passions."

Matter of factness of ministerial accusations and factional plots against Gulliver, from secret poisonings to legal sentences of blinding or starvation. Ministerial denunciations of Gulliver are military (threat of his strength), economic (burden of his feeding), political (suspicion he is a crypto- Big-endian) and moral (his act of urinating on the Royal residence, even if to save it from the flames).

Gulliver's experience as a courtier in Lilliput of the vagaries of princely favor causes him to resolve "never more to put any confidence in Princes or Ministers, where I could possibly avoid it."

Gulliver takes refuge in Blefuscu and arranges for his departure in the salvaged longboat. He nurtures a small herd of Lillupitian livestock as testmony of his adventure, though one of the sheep is eaten by a rat on the English ship that rescues him.

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"Micah Clarke" Concludes: Honorable mercenaries and thieves

2009-02-08T22:30:00.004-06:00

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke: Reading Notes, Part Ten

Just as Micah saved Decimus from the Dutch slaver at the book's opening, so Decimus appears on the scene to free Micah from his bondage and to set him up as a soldier-of-fortune in Europe -- welcoming him to the brotherhood of "the old and honorable guild." Thus, Decimus becomes yet another of Micah's several father figures.

Decimus further establishes the honorable highwayman Hector Marot on board the slaver with the plan that he will incite a mutiny among the Barbadoes-bound enslaved Puritans.

"If I were captain," chortles Decimus, "I would rather have the Devil himself, horns, hoof, and tail, for my first mate than have that man aboard my ship."

For his own part, Decimus has blackmailed Beaufort into arranging for him a commission to fight Indians in the New England colony of Virginia.

Micah relates that Decimus "did so out-ambush their ambushes and out-trick their most cunning warriors," that the Indians gave him a name meaning "the long-legged wily one with the eye of a rat."

At night, Micah still has visions of Decimus' face with its "shifting, blinky eyes turned toward me in his sidelong fashion."

He was, Micah concludes, "a bad man in many ways . . . cunning and wily, with little scruple of conscience; and yet so strange a thing is human nature, and so difficult it is to control our feelings, that my heart warms when I think of him, and that fifty years have increased rather than weakened the kindliness which I bear to him."

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The Taunton Assizes: The work of legal slaughter

2009-02-08T21:43:00.004-06:00

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke: Reading Notes, Part Nine

Micah betrayed and arrested. He is warned by soldiers that his fate will be determined by civil rather than military law. "They have a lawyer coming from London whose wig is more to be feared than our helmets. He will slay more men in a day than a troop in a ten mile chase."

The Taunton Assizes: trials merely formalities where prisoners were "hauled before a judge and insulted before being dragged to the gibbet."

Chief Justice Jeffreys: "he raved like a demoniac and his black eyes shown with a vivid vindictive brightness that was scarce human. The jury shrank from him as from a venomous thing when be turned his baleful glance upon them. At times, as I have been told, his sternness have way to an even more terrible merriment, and he would lean back in his seat of justice until the tears hopped down upon his ermine. Nearly a hundred were either executed or condemned to death on that opening day."

The streets of Taunton lined with the rotting corpses of rebels. Micah sees "the limbs of former companions dangling in the wind, and their heads grinning at us from the tops of poles and pikes."

Use of kettledrums at military executions "to drown out any last words that would fall from the sufferers and bear fruit in the breasts of those who heard them."

Rather than facing execution, Micah and fifty other prisoners sold as slaves for overseas Plantations as James' way of rewarding his loyalists.

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The Battle of Sedgemoor: The work of military slaughter

2009-02-08T18:31:00.004-06:00

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke: Reading Notes, Part Eight

Eve of the battle of Sedgemoor: "nothing less than a miracle could preserve us from defeat, and most of us were of the opinion that the days of miracles were past. Others, however, thought otherwise. I believe that many of our Puritans, had they seen the heavens open that night, and the armies of the Seraphim and the Cherubim descending to our aid, would have looked upon it as by no means a wonderful or unexpected occurance."

"The whole town was loud with the preaching. Every troop or company had its own chosen orator and sometimes more than one . . . Men were drunk with religion as with wine. Their faces were flush, their speech thick, their gestures wild."

The somber Micah: "win who will, English blood must soak the soil of England this night."

The devil-may-care Sir Gervas: "The more room for those who are left."

Micah: "The chances are that few of us will ever see tomorrow's sun-rise."

Sir Gervas: "I have no great curiosity to see it. It will be much as yesterday's."

When it becomes apparent that the battle is lost, Monmouth rides off with his entourage: "There, far away, showing up against the dark peat-colored soil, rode a gaily-dressed cavalier, followed by a knot of attendants, galloping as fast as his horse would carry him from the field of battle. There was no mistaking the fugitive. It was the recreant Monmouth."

Sir Gervas, who dies bravely among his men, initially mistaken by Royal troops for Monmouth. Clear that Monmouth can only act the part of nobility and bravery.

Of the carnage, Micah reflects: "men must either give up war or they must confess that the words of the Redeemer are too lofty for them, and that there is no longer any use in pretending that His teaching can be reduced to practice."

While escaping after the rout, Micah prevents Decimus from finishing off a helpless Royal officer, earning the dangerous enmity of the soldier-of-fortune.

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Fickle leaders, barbarous soldiers, and noble highwaymen

2009-02-08T18:03:00.003-06:00

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke: Reading Notes, Part Seven

As the military tide turns against him, Monmouth's failings become manifest: "Swinging from the heights of confidence to the depths of despair, choosing his future council of state one day and proposing to fly from his army the next, he appeared from the start to be possessed by the very spirit of fickleness."

The vain but generous and brave dandy Sir Gervas is inspired by his sojurn among the "clodhoppers" and rural tradesmen: "Truth to tell, I have lived more and learned more during these few weeks that we have been sliding about in the rain with our ragged lads than ever I did [at court]. It is a sorry thing for a man's mind to have nothing higher to dwell upon than the turning of a compliment or the dancing of a corranto."

Royal troops portrayed as given to plunder and torture, the latter a set of skills learned in service in North Africa and Russia -- a byproduct of Imperial activity and, so, not native to England. Smugglers and highwaymen, such as Captain Murgatroyd and Hector Marrot, are possessed with a sense of English due process and fair play.

The highwayman Hector Marrot on his trade: "there is no road that is not familiar to me, nor as much as a break of the hedge I could not find in blackest midnight. It is my calling. But the trade is not what it was [with the introduction of paper bills of exchange]. If I had a son, I would not bring him up in it."

Marrot's story of retired highwayman who becomes a great landlord and sits in judgement of others -- "condemning some poor devil for stealing a dozen eggs" -- reminiscent of Defoe.

Marrot characterizes thieving as "hunting, save that your quarry may at any time turn round upon you, and become in turn the hunter. It is, as you say, a dangerous game, but two can play at it, and each has an equal chance."

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"The voices of preachers rose up like the drone of insects"

2009-02-08T10:40:00.004-06:00

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke: Reading Notes, Part Six

Beaufort publicly imprisons and condemns Micah as a traitor but then privately and secretly releases him.

During Micah's public condemnation by Beaufort -- before his covert release by the same noble -- debate over whether he should be tortured to reveal details of Monmouth's forces. Again recalling Scott's "Old Mortality" mention is made of placing "a lighted match between the fingers."

When Micah reports on his experiences and Beaufort's divided loyalty, Monmouth muses: "He would fain stand upon both sides of the hedge at once . . . Such a man is very like to find himself on neither side, but in the very heart of the briars."

In the meantime, Monmouth's camp has become religiously divided: "the voices of preachers rose up like the drone of insects" with "every wagon or barrel or chance provision case converted into a pulpit, each with its own orator and little knot of eager hearkeners."

As the courtiers and professional military men worry about the lack or ordinance, the zealots rail that the Lord will provide as he did at the walls of Jerico.

Decimus pleased at this outbreak of dissention and fervor: "the leaven is working. Something will come of all this ferment."

Monmouth's sympathy with these rough-clad zealots a dubious one. When military events begin to turn against him, he is described as "moodily tapping his jeweled riding-whip against his high boots."

Then, the "leaven" truly begins to boil over as one of the extreme sectarian preachers urges his followers to (Taliban like) demolish Wells cathedral in order to regain God's favor. Cathedrals "altars of Baal . . . built for man-worship rather than God-worship . . . the old dish of Popery served under a new cover."

The sectaries literally commence to tear-down religion. Shouts the Cathedral verger: "they have pulled down Saint Peter and will have Paul down too unless help comes. There will not be an Apostle left."

Soon the zealots are joined by looters and drunken rioters taking advantage of the disarray and destruction. Micah, Sexton et al. try to calm the affray and soon "a Civil War within a Civil War breaks out."

Micah, speaking now as an old man, concludes that he never saw a more brutal battle than the religious fight within the cathedral.

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"I see the threads that are used in the weaving of you"

2009-02-08T08:30:00.005-06:00

Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke: Reading Notes, Part Five

Foreshadowing of Decimus' ambitions: "from this time onward, the cunning man framed his whole life and actions in such a way to make friends of the sectaries and to cause them to look upon him as their leader. For he had a firm belief that in all such outbreaks as that in which we were engaged, the most extreme party is sure in the end to gain the upper hand. 'Fanatics,' he said to me one day, 'mean fervor, and fervor means hard work, and hard work means power.' That was the center point of all his plotting and scheming."

Seeing only blacks and whites -- "This England of ours is divided into two camps, that of God and that of the Antichrist" -- the Puritans are unable to evaluate as subtle a character as Decimus.

Decimus describes quite directly the changing loyalties of his career as a soldier of fortune and, in response, the Puritan mayor of Taunton states how clear it is that Decimus has unswerving principles.

Monmouth arrives, bringing with him another soldier of fortune, a Brandenburger, whom Decimus has often fought against and sometimes with.

Decimus verbally fences with a member of Monmouth's retinue: "'I studied sword-play under Signor Contarini of Paris' said Lord Grey, 'Who was your master?'" Decimus replies: "'I have studied, my lord, under Signor Stern Necessity of Europe.'"

Micah volunteers for a solo mission to try to recruit Lord Beaufort to Monmouth's banner. On eve of departure he shares letters from home -- from the philosophical carpenter, the amorous sailor, and his stern father -- with Sir Gervas, who has become his confidant.

Hearing the seemingly irreconcilable advice contained in the three letters, Sir Gervas says fondly: "I now begin to understand your manufacture Clarke. I see the threads that are used in the weaving of you."

The carpenter, Zachariah Palmer, urges Micah to hold to "the beautiful, often professed, and seldom practiced doctrine" of love for one's fellow man, but seeing fervor of both parties concludes: "Church and Dissent are at each other's throats as ever. Truly, the stern law of Moses is more enduring than the sweet words of Christ."

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