Weekly Readings #94 (11/20/23-11/26/23)
eternity is in love with the productions of time
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
This week I published “The Moon,” among the most hallucinatory of chapters in my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana. The chapter coming this Wednesday narrates the aftermath: we will go from high psychedelia to the low comedy1 of internet-influencer occultism.2 Please subscribe today!
Today, a double post, again based on prompts I receive in my Tumblr “ask” box. (You, too, can request a topic there, though I may refuse for whatever reason.) The first is exclusive to Substack, a reflection on the relation between literature and dreams, appropriate given what’s been going on in Major Arcana. The second is half an exclusive and half a repost in response to requests for my favorite poems by both Blake and Yeats, those two occult poets whose astral bodies, i.e., their poems, have haunted both Major Arcana and these Weekly Readings all year. I conclude with an amusing postscript on grammar and contemporary literature. Please enjoy!
Is All That We See or Seem but a Dream Within a Dream?: Literature and/of the Oneiric
An anonymous commenter asks, “Do you put much stock in your dreams, whether in your creative or everyday life?”
I do. I don’t remember my dreams every night, so when I remember one vividly, I take it as some kind of portent. What fascinates me as an artist is the authority of the dream: the way one trusts it absolutely even as it violates every canon of logic. One place becomes multiple places, one person multiple people—but all of it makes an emotional and therefore a symbolic sense.
The problem with many writers who try to write in a “dream-like” way is that they only get the illogic right. This is frustrating to read since we read with the waking mind. They therefore often fail to capture the mesmerizing, absorbing authority of the dream’s protean nature. We can’t reconstruct the dream’s plot upon awakening, but it feels like a plot of Aristotelian rigor while we’re experiencing it. “Of course my dead grandmother’s long-gone kitchen is a crowded airport terminal! How could it be anything else?” This is what separates Kafka from his imitators. Or Kafka at his best from Kafka at less than his best. Dreams are short, for one thing: “A Hunger Artist” is better than The Castle. (I never finished The Castle, but then neither did Kafka.) Above all, dreams make sense while you’re dreaming. One dreams, therefore, more readily as a reader of Dubliners than as a reader of Finnegans Wake, and as a reader of “Calypso” than as a reader of “Circe.” We dream more as a reader of Never Let Me Go than as a reader of The Unconsoled. I find Dickens more oneiric than Lewis Carroll, Hawthorne more hallucinatory than the willful Surrealists.
It’s a fascinating creative problem: getting this balance right. Fiction that doesn’t feel like a dream at all will in my view always belong to the second rank, mere social and psychological analysis. On the other hand, you don’t want to write gibberish, a private language. Gibberish paradoxically wakens the reason, makes the mind alert, rational to a fault, in anxious pattern-detecting mode. It’s the exact opposite of sleep, of the wondering quiescence the dream inspires. Dorothy Sayers’s critique of the aforementioned Finnegans Wake applies (it’s from a book I haven’t read; I screenshotted the relevant passage as seen on Tumblr or Twitter years ago):
Here, I think we must class the portmanteau-wordage of James Joyce, in which the use of verbal and syllabic association is carried so far that its power of unconscious persuasion is lost and the reader’s response is diverted by a conscious ecstasy of enigma-hunting, like a pig rooting for truffles.
Anne Livia Plurabelle is at once womankind and the river Liffey (amnis Livia in Latin) and the beauty made of many beauties, as the river is the confluence of many streams. As the two washerwomen—themselves semi-mythological figures—recount her story to their paddling of the dirty clothes on the stones, they bring the names of hundreds of rivers into their talk. One of them cannot hear well, for the cotton in her ears: “It’s that irrawaddy I’ve stoke in my aars. It all but husheth the lethest sound,” she says. This is not mere rendering into a lisping brogue of the words: “It’s this here wadding I’ve stuck in my ears. It all but hushes the least sound: it is the evocation of Lethe, the stream that flows through Hades, of the Aar river in Switzerland, of the Stoke, in England, and of an Indo-Chinese river, the Irawaddy.3
How clever, we admit; how ingenious and entertaining. Educative, too, like the more instructional kind of crossword, if one were to go conscientiously through the “hundreds of rivers” with a gazetteer and an atlas; it would make a good “spotting” competition for the schoolroom. But what will become of the mood which the evocation of Lethe should engender?
Often writing and revising for me are processes of dialing the oneirism up or down depending on what I feel is needed at any given moment. I do something in every novel, though, to put the narrative just out of waking reality’s frame.4 The goal is to dream with our eyes open.
Terrible Beauty: The Best of Blake and Yeats
Two authors who dreamed with their eyes open, arguable to a fault, were Blake and Yeats. Readers have asked for my favorite poems by both poets. We’ve been speaking much too casually and generally about poetry here at Grand Hotel Abyss lately, so I take this occasion to give a relatively close reading of a Yeats poem (though it is never close enough).
My favorite poem by Yeats is “Easter, 1916.” He does everything he could do there; it’s the greatest political poem in English of the 20th century. First, simply from a “craft” perspective, there is the unobtrusively propulsive accentual (yet not syllabic) meter, the pulsing but halting three-beat line. Then the deceptively simple abab rhyme scheme—except that the even lines only ever off-rhyme. Sound mimics sense in this mingling of the beautiful and the terrible: our march song is never in perfect rhythm. We can never quite get the steps right as we march toward our sublime end. This isn’t “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”
I have met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth-century houses. I have passed with a nod of the head Or polite meaningless words, Or have lingered awhile and said Polite meaningless words, And thought before I had done Of a mocking tale or a gibe To please a companion Around the fire at the club, Being certain that they and I But lived where motley is worn: All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.
For one thing, this is not public rhetoric, or not just public rhetoric. There is the quiet, personal opening of the first stanza, the “I” in its humble self-deprecatory historical setting, when we know what modern life and all its calculating mediocrity meant for Yeats. Then, enacting in language the transformation it proposes of public life, the first appearance of the refrain lifts the poem into epic.
That woman’s days were spent In ignorant good-will, Her nights in argument Until her voice grew shrill. What voice more sweet than hers When, young and beautiful, She rode to harriers? This man had kept a school And rode our wingèd horse; This other his helper and friend Was coming into his force; He might have won fame in the end, So sensitive his nature seemed, So daring and sweet his thought. This other man I had dreamed A drunken, vainglorious lout. He had done most bitter wrong To some who are near my heart, Yet I number him in the song; He, too, has resigned his part In the casual comedy; He, too, has been changed in his turn, Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.
In the second stanza, we find an epic catalogue of the flawed vessels of historical force, made more poignant by a knowledge of what it probably took for Yeats to praise MacBride (“a drunken, vainglorious lout”) who had, in his mind, robbed him of Maud Gonne. Small-nation politics lends itself to such gossip. “Great hatred, little room,” as he had it elsewhere. But that farce is past. Comedy has turned to tragedy in the national epic of the uprising.
Hearts with one purpose alone Through summer and winter seem Enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream. The horse that comes from the road, The rider, the birds that range From cloud to tumbling cloud, Minute by minute they change; A shadow of cloud on the stream Changes minute by minute; A horse-hoof slides on the brim, And a horse plashes within it; The long-legged moor-hens dive, And hens to moor-cocks call; Minute by minute they live: The stone’s in the midst of all.
But this, again, is poetry: not propaganda. You do not write the best political poem of the 20th century by celebrating emancipatory violence without subtlety, without nuance, without irony. Here we have the irony of a conservative revolution—again, recall the etymology of Tory—revolution not as the forward movement of history, which is what the benighted progressive thinks it is, but rather as the obdurate force that blocks history from engulfing the whole of the lifeworld. Yeats sounds oddly like Benjamin here, as well as like Eliot, showing how vain it is to explain the most serious art and thought by shallow labels like left and right. “Enchanted” as it is, though, the stone is also opposed to nature, to the “living stream” figured most vividly in the prospective mating of hen and cock. As in “Sailing to Byzantium,” another favorite, Yeats worries about the conflict between the art and the life, between raw life and the artifice of eternity. The refrain does not appear: the enchanted stone has broken the poem’s own living flow.
Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice? That is Heaven's part, our part To murmur name upon name, As a mother names her child When sleep at last has come On limbs that had run wild. What is it but nightfall? No, no, not night but death; Was it needless death after all? For England may keep faith For all that is done and said. We know their dream; enough To know they dreamed and are dead; And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died? I write it out in a verse— MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.
Our bard, who as a member of the Anglo-Irish Protestant upper classes favored negotiation with England rather than a violent revolt he associated with Catholics and leftists and the masses, expresses misgivings. Homer didn’t have misgivings,5 for all that Yeats would later want to model himself on Homer’s “unchristened heart.” Yeats has misgivings about more than just resistance tactics. He identifies with women, he fears for the nation’s children, for the nation’s very soul. The trope of the stone becomes itself disenchanted: no longer the Arthurian romance’s source of political power but the Old Testament’s hardness of heart, inviting divine chastisement. The cause of the revolutionaries itself comes under suspicion for a moment, as a mere attack of the “fanatic heart.” Was their violence part of the vanity, part of the “motley,” with which the poem began? Have we really ever left the comedy, the 18th-century farce? But the motive spiritualizes the event in the end: “excess of love.” We think of Antigone; we think of Lear. Tragic heroism is still heroism. And in conclusion, we hear the epic catalogue proper, a catalogue of proper nouns, before the refrain comes around again for our cyclic poet, itself changed utterly: “terrible beauty” is no longer a political slogan but the aesthetic credo that will guide the rest of the poet’s work out of the “bee-loud glade,” out of the “Celtic Twilight,” and into “the desolation of reality.” Gaiety will transfigure all that dread, but only the gaiety that come with the achievement of form in the midst of terror.
So much for Yeats. As for Blake, this is probably cheating, but I love “The Proverbs of Hell” more than any of his poems. I think the short lyrics, perfect and radiantly mysterious as they are, are simply over-familiar: I must have heard or read half of them coming from the mouths of onscreen serial killers or Batman villains in the comics before I turned 10. (Pop-culture evildoers need a new canonical poet. They should quote Wordsworth for a change: “Your heart is buried 'neath the daffodils...”) I have “read” all of the prophetic books except the unfinished Four Zoas, but I fear I have not yet understood them yet. They return us to the problem of the dreaming writer’s private language, as essayed above. One sometimes wishes that a man or two from Porlock had interrupted Blake from recording his entire visions.6 Of Blake and Yeats, Richard Ellmann observes, “Byzantium…is also Yeats’s holy city of the imagination, as Golgonooza was Blake’s.” But Florence was Dante’s holy city of imagination, and Dublin was Joyce’s, and Pittsburgh is mine. These are real cities—and all the more imaginative for it. (Byzantium is a real city, too, but Yeats doesn’t care for its reality.) Yeats did well, as Ellmann also points out, not to turn his poetry entirely into an allegory of his occult doctrines—one of the few times he didn’t follow Blake’s model: Blake, whom he construed as an Irishman displaced in London like himself. Anyway, as I have written elsewhere, the “Proverbs of Hell” anticipate in about two pages, and just as the Enlightenment was coming to its conclusion, the whole future course of modern thought. We hear Hegel:
Without contraries is no progression.
And Marx:
Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion.
And Nietzsche:
Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.
And Freud:
He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.
And Jung:
Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.
And, better than these, we find thoughts we still have not fully exhausted or even truly begun to think yet:
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
Postscriptum on Literary Grammar
I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.
—NietzscheA grimoire, for example, the book of spells, is simply a fancy way of saying “grammar.”
—Alan MooreIn my surveillance of the literary and cultural underground, I chanced upon some submission guidelines for a new literary journal edited by friend-of-a-friend-of-the-blog Ann Manov. Unlike any submission guidelines I’ve ever seen in my years of submitting to journals, this document mostly consists of grammatical rules. (I almost said “reminders of grammatical rules,” but I fear many people never learned them in the first place and need remedial tutelage rather than reminding.) I used to hand out such documents to my students, but then I gave it up as hopeless case. In my graduate teaching practicum, way back in 2007, they all but ordered us explicitly neither to instruct students about grammar nor to evaluate them on their own grammar, not even in composition classes. Especially not in composition classes. Grammatical instruction would leave no time for the students to write their little social-justice essays that mainly seem to be the goal of writing pedagogy today.
I myself never received grammatical instruction in English after the eighth grade; but from kindergarten through the eighth grade, I received strict grammatical instruction, sometimes by nuns, who presumably agreed with Nietzsche about the equation of God and grammar. In my college French class, the instructor taught us how to form adverbs with an analogy to English: to the end of a word, add not -ly but -ment. “But what’s an adverb?” the girl sitting next to me ingenuously wondered aloud, as if the question had never occurred to her before. I can’t claim superiority to anyone, though; my education in these matters has been as lacking as my peers’. If you’ve never studied Latin, you can’t look down on anyone.7
Manov’s rules are basic and uncontroversial. I follow most of them myself,8 unless verisimilitude in fiction demands otherwise. For example, I use comma splices extensively in dialogue—people do just ramble on and on without ever coming to a full stop—but not in objective narration. Some writers acclaimed for their long sentences are in fact not writing sentences at all but rather skeins of independent clauses loosely knitted together with commas.9
I introduce this mainly as a topic for discussion: how much grammar does the writer need? I also introduce it because I am amused to imagine writers who want to submit to the journal treating the rules of English grammar as some kind of OuLiPo-like constraint on their wild and reckless imaginations.10 Maybe I’ll try it myself.
This is an immodest aside, but Major Arcana is pretty funny, much the funniest of my novels. People who know me in real life have often expressed a certain dismay or disappointment that my fiction isn’t as funny as my conversation—that it isn’t even as funny as my nonfiction—and I’ve always self-righteously waved away the objection. Novels are no joke! But maybe they could be…
For an antidote to the internet-influencer occultism I about to satirize, see the astrological readings now offered for paid subscribers by friend-of-the-blog Emmalea Russo. I’ve found them uncannily prescient so far.
Sayers doesn’t take note of Joyce’s characteristically scatological humor in the quoted passage’s double entendres—to the effect that the washerwoman has stuck some wadding in her arse to hush its sounds—but I’m not sure this schoolboy punning is a better argument for the method of the Wake than is its encyclopedism.
Hence, in my current novel, the long but rather hazy historical timeline, anchored only by 9/11 and the onset of the pandemic but otherwise deliberately incalculable, and my frequent unwillingness, in all my books except The Class of 2000, to use real place-names, since no place in a dream is ever just one place. I wrote The Class of 2000, by contrast, with the precision of Joyce’s “Wandering Rocks.” Given a map of Pittsburgh and environs, I could put my finger on every single place in the narrative, though I did change the names of a few institutions for reasons of law and prudence. What’s hazy and dream-like in that book is not the setting but the mind of the narrator.
Critics always make these simplistic flourishes when bringing in another writer to contrast with the writer they’re commenting on. Of course Homer had misgivings, whomever “Homer” may have been. See my essay on the Iliad, for one thing, and, for another, ask Simone Weil if Homer’s heart was christened.
I here reprise an argument, perhaps too ungenerous an argument, I made in my essay on Blake’s Poetry and Designs:
In a cruel paradox illustrating the occult identity of opposites, Blake’s visionary poetry is so densely schematic that it fails even to be engaging prose. The radical who complained of the “charter’d Thames” in “London” requires all manner of charts and graphs even to begin to enjoy his largest works. […] His aim, stated in a letter: “Allegory addressed to the Intellectual powers while it is altogether hidden from the Corporeal Understanding is My Definition of the Most Sublime Poetry.” The poet who began by insisting that the body and the soul are indivisible in a generous celebration of human desire becomes a punitive prophet mortifying the flesh. There is an undeniable hostility in this non-communicative use of language that vitiates its claim to a universal vision of human emancipation.
I think the novel serves the purpose Blake was trying to accomplish better than does his encrypted latter-day narrative prophecies. (I don’t even like the books of the Prophets in the Bible itself, as I’ve indiscreetly admitted in these electronic pages. Even in holy scripture, the novelistic is preferable to prophecy. What are all the eye-wheeled chariots in the world compared to the laughter of Sarah?) Another of Blake’s poetic sons wrote what he could not: not Yeats; nor Joyce, who followed Blake’s Jerusalem down the blind alley of Finnegans Wake; but rather Lawrence. The Rainbow and Women in Love, not Milton and Jerusalem, follow on naturally from Visions of the Daughters of Albion.
For example, speaking of the close reading of poetry, when friend-of-the-blog Alice Gribbin addresses herself (or, in decorous New-Critic-speak, her speaker) to an “ablative god” in her NYRB-published poem “Rough Slabs of Jade,” I admit I had to do some research. In my defense, the Rilkean animals of this beguiling poem’s last line, who know we are not at home in our “interpreted world,” never studied Latin either. And having mentioned the poetic oneiric above, let me single out this among Alice’s enjambments: “Even after / they are picked, the fruits keep breathing.”
I usually write all numbers including and above 10 as numerals, however; that’s what the nuns told me to do back in Catholic school. The restrictive vs. unrestrictive that/which distinction also seems like a fake or meaningless rule to me, one whose application can’t always be decided with real precision. I try to follow this rule because I know violations will bother some people if I don’t, but I’m sure I’ve let a restrictive “which” slip from time to time, which I believe is customary usage in British English. Finally, I have enormous trouble with verb tenses. Please don’t scrutinize my fiction too closely with this in mind. The events of fiction are timeless. Because they never have happened, are not now happening, and never will happen, they have happened already, are ever happening, and will happen forever. (And this is without even getting into the pluperfect.) The verbs attached to fictional characters and worlds should, by rights, each occupy the superposition of all tenses—or so I excuse my indiscipline.
I noticed this, if translation can be trusted, when I read my first and last Marías novel, this as opposed to Henry James, to whom the late Spanish author was often compared. James, however, was in total control of his periods.
Manov’s thematic and formal constraints are also interesting, more interesting than the now customary bans on “hate” and the like. I’ve violated some or all of those rules in much of my fiction. I even once published a whole story about pornography and nothing but pornography. The exception might be my favorite of my own short stories, “Sweet Angry God.” Written and originally published in 2015, it anticipated the reactionary turn in avant-garde culture and therefore managed to depict this turn without instantly obsolete reference to 2020s Twitter memes. I somehow thought Calvinism, not Catholicism, would become the fashionable religion of neoreactionary art-school girls. There’s still time!
Great choice for Blake! I’ve loved The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ever since I heard Alan Watts quote the line: “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise”
Surely we need one more aphorism, this time from Yeats, to cap this off:
"You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence."