A poem

Today brought this poem by Czeslaw Milosz. 

Secretaries

I am no more than a secretary of the invisible thing
That is dictated to me and a few others.
Secretaries, mutually unknown, we walk the earth
Without much comprehension. Beginning a phrase in the middle
Or ending it with a comma. And how it all looks when completed
Is not up to us to inquire, we won't read it anyway.

Another of his poem has this phrase :  if not I, then someone else/ Would be walking here, trying to understand his age.

My current read

Since I take weeks/months sometimes to read some books, and since I also wish to keep adding to this page here, I've thought I'll perhaps share a little bit more about what goes on in my reading space. 

I am currently reading Les Miserables. I began sometime in June after finishing Moby Dick, which still sits close, opened sometimes to just get back the flavor of that language and poetry. Les Miserables (I heard someone call it LesMis on a TV show), is a long book. It has 48 mini books in it. I am somewhere beyond midway. Yesterday, I happened on a beautiful page - a diary extract which a person leaves for another person to read. It is something worth noting from. Some passages here below. 

But before getting into that, a little bit more about the book. It has that similar high energy throughout which some long books have with a slowly building and unfolding narrative. And then there are those sections, won't call them detours but these essay like chapters or books which take you out of the story into something else - be it the June 18th battle of Waterloo, or the mechanisms of a convent, or just Paris of early 19th century. A lot of instances like that which help in making the book come alive - or the time and space it is set in come alive. I am enjoying reading it, and although part of me that keeps pace and looks at the bookmark against the closed book for progress wishes to read quickly, part of me wants to take the passages slowly, specially some chapters which revive the time and place, and just how people lived then. Still a few hundred pages to go. 

This book is a new translation by Julie Rose from 2008. 

Other few explorations include Margaret Atwood's Curious Pursuits. There are a few others, but more another time. Now to the passages from Les Miserables which I wish to copy, - echoes of Sufi thought:  

The reduction of the universe to one single being, the expansion of one single being into God: That is what love is.


Love is the angels' greeting to the stars.


God is behind all things, but all things hide God. Things are black, human beings opaque. To love someone is to make them transparent.


Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the body's position, the soul is on its knees.


Lovers who are separated cheat absence by a thousand chimeras that, nonetheless, have their reality. They are prevented from seeing each other, they can't write to each other, yet they find a whole host of mysterious ways of communicating. They send each other birdsong, the perfume of flowers, the laughter of children, the sun's rays, the wind's sighs, starlight, all of Creation. And why not? All God's works are made to serve love. Love is powerful enough to load the whole of nature with its messages.
O spring, you are the letter I write to her.


The future belongs even more to hearts than to minds. Loving is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. The infinite requires the inexhaustible.


Love partakes of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like the soul, it is a divine spark, like the soul, it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable. It is a point of fire that is inside us, that is everlasting and infinite, that nothing can limit and that nothing can extinguish. You feel it burn right to the marrow of your bones and you see it shine out to the back of the sky.


O love! Adoration! Sensual joy of two minds that understand each other, of two hearts that are exchanged, of two glances that pierce each other through!...I have sometimes dreamed that now and then the hours broke away from the life of the angels and came down here below to traverse the destiny of men.


...God is the fullness of heaven; love is the fullness of mankind.


When love has melted and blended two beings in an angelic and sacred unity, the secret of life is open to them; they are nothing more, then, than the two sides of a single destiny; they are nothing more than the two wings of a single spirit. Love, soar!


Deep hearts, wise spirits, take life the way God made it. It is a long ordeal, an unintelligible preparation for an unknown destiny. ...Try to love souls and you will find them again.


What a great thing, to be loved! What an even greater thing, to love! The heart becomes heroic through passion. It is no longer made up of anything but what is pure; it no longer relies on anything but what is elevated and grand. An unworthy thought can no more germinate in it than a nettle on a glacier. The lofty and serene soul, out of reach of vulgar passions and emotions, rises above the clouds and shadows of this world, the follies, the lies, the hatreds, the vanities, the miseries, and inhabits the endless skies and feels only the deep and subterranean rumblings of destiny, as the mountain peak feels earthquakes.


If there wasn't someone who loved, the sun would go out.

'Intrepid effort of the soul'

Over the last couple of years I have read a handful of books perhaps. Some of them were long books and took me long weeks, if not months. Most recent was Moby Dick. 

Moby Dick was a surprisingly rewarding reading experience. Surprising, because it is one of those books one has often heard about, but the reading of it was completely different from any of the heard instances. It was a refreshingly fun, some sort of live-wire energy flowing through it. 

Everything about the book was delightful - the language, its poetry, the tone, the intonations, the subject matter or the main preoccupation of the narrator, the world it describes. And then, add to it a series of essays interwoven in the narrative. I call it a series of essays because each one begins anew and afresh - and opens up a new world for you, again and again. Each one has that fresh energy. And then throughout the book are fabulous passages one wishes to share with the world, or take the people around you by hand and make them read those passages. Usually such fabuolous, deep writing tends to be about life and philosophy interwoven with the narrative or the story - layered and deep - what I perhaps mean to say is that the quality of the writing or the richness is because of the writer's thoughts interspersed throughout the book which shed a unique light on life and world, and in that, connect to something deep within the reader – to bring home to reader’s own life and world. 

In their keenness to share an entirety with you, a world with you, they provide a resting pace to the reader. There is no clamor for the reader's attention - there is just a giving, a sharing of the world of writer's mind. Here that mind is on the surface occupied with Moby Dick and whaling. But that is just the surface. All the talk about whales and people on the boat seems just like the top layer of some  deeper philosophical thought. I say philosophical – the word stands in for anything that connects deeply to the life and world of the reader irrespective of whales, boats or the life one leads. It addresses that deep wonder and question which as humanity we all share consciously or unconsciously at some level, about life, its meanings, its context in this universe, and just how to go about living well, if that provide some meaning. 

Books like these have a richness of a whole world in them, and seem to keep on giving on every reading.  Every encounter is a new encounter – the richness of language, the freshness, the depth. I’ll probably be surprised and delighted afresh on meeting those lines.  And I think of Infinite Jest and the generosity of DFW. I think of War and Peace. Or how I felt after closing Don Quixote. Joys of good writing! 

To anyone who has not read it, and who enjoys reading fiction, this is a book worth spending slow hours on. And to close this post, here sharing Chapter 23 in its brief entirety:

The Lee Shore.

Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.

When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ’gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!

Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

Tradition and the individual talent

Seamus Heaney in his 'Finders Keepers' talks lovingly and reverentially of T S Eliot. Reminded and inspired, I too spend my hours with Eliot's Collected Poems. And the desire and need to read more from and about Eliot. Looking up 'Joy of Reading', Charles Von Doren suggests reading certain poems and prose by Eliot, esp "Tradition and the Individual Talent". This can be found in 'The Sacred Wood'.Here. 

This essay prompts its own response. A simple one, that is noting this down some lines this post and perhaps reviving this blog.

Some lines from the essay:

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may 44call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; 45and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

Reading this, a tangential response. From my narrow point of view, this, that considering an artist or writer in a historical chain, is perhaps one way to consider the whole thing. Perhaps other way to look at it is that all great writing resonates with a few simple truths that shine through them in myriad details and complexities. Perhaps there are a few simple truths to begin with, and each great writer discovers again and again the same fountain that feeds all spirit. 

Eliot puts it beautifully in four quartets:

And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

The other problem or conundrum or curiosity or existential matter that he seems to grapple with which finds voice in his poems too is the intersection of temporal with the timeless. A beautiful poem seems to create a timeless space in our temporality. Perhaps the good fortune of finding timelessness in temporality - is the good fortune of any reader.

And again, from Four Quartets:

...But to apprehend

The point of intersection of the timeless

With time, is an occupation for the saint—

No occupation either, but something given

And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,

Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

For most of us, there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time,

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts. ...

 And further:

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from. And every phrase

And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,

Taking its place to support the others,

The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,

An easy commerce of the old and the new,

The common word exact without vulgarity,

The formal word precise but not pedantic,

The complete consort dancing together)

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,

Every poem an epitaph. And any action

Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat

Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.

We die with the dying:

See, they depart, and we go with them.

We are born with the dead:

See, they return, and bring us with them.

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree

Are of equal duration. A people without history

Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern

Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails

On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel

History is now and England.

**

Unrelated note. Some books, essays or poems are like verbs. While reading, they seem to create a space which one seems to enter, a state, just the way the words have been threaded together by the poet or the writer. After reading, I don’t seem to remember a lot from them except perhaps sharpening of a sense or some feeling stays which is enveloping. Like a verb then - it is in the act of reading them - the state of reading, rather than any retention of what is read. Perhaps one changes while reading them rather than carry away words from them. As Eliot would perhaps say, the husk of meaning, in changing, fulfilling. If some writings behave like verbs, perhaps Eliot's poems are an atmosphere of their own. 

**

Back to the blog. I hope to read with same verve the crumbs of great writing that come my way; my personal desires are still the same, to prolong my time with such crumbs, by reading on them, around them, about them: the joys and delights of good writing. And hopefully sharing it here. To any kindred with kindled.

Adam and Eve

I recently read Mark Twain's Extracts from Diaries of Adam and Eve, and it is a delightful and fun short read. I got nudged to the book from Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Wave in the mind"  - her book about herself, reading and writing. There is a foreword of sorts to these diaries and so glad that I found them online and read them through. Available here:  Eve's Diary, extracts from Adam's Diary

There are many tangents one can launch (for example, Eve considering herself an experiment), but something I remember it by, is the closing note, Adam at Eve's grave:

"ADAM: Wheresoever she was, THERE was Eden."

And then here's something that summarises the vein in which these diaries are written, how the author regards Adam and Eve, here's an extract from Adam's diary: 

Perhaps I ought to remember that she is very young, a mere girl and make allowances. She is all interest, eagerness, vivacity, the world is to her a charm, a wonder, a mystery, a joy; she can't speak for delight when she finds a new flower, she must pet it and caress it and smell it and talk to it, and pour out endearing names upon it. And she is color-mad: brown rocks, yellow sand, gray moss, green foliage, blue sky; the pearl of the dawn, the purple shadows on the mountains, the golden islands floating in crimson seas at sunset, the pallid moon sailing through the shredded cloud-rack, the star-jewels glittering in the wastes of space—none of them is of any practical value, so far as I can see, but because they have color and majesty, that is enough for her, and she loses her mind over them. If she could quiet down and keep still a couple minutes at a time, it would be a reposeful spectacle. In that case I think I could enjoy looking at her; indeed I am sure I could, for I am coming to realize that she is a quite remarkably comely creature—lithe, slender, trim, rounded, shapely, nimble, graceful; and once when she was standing marble-white and sun-drenched on a boulder, with her young head tilted back and her hand shading her eyes, watching the flight of a bird in the sky, I recognized that she was beautiful.

Both Adam and Eve change and grow in their diaries, and over time, their regard for each other grows as well culminating in that final quote by Adam on Eve and Eden. 

Reading this and thinking, that Adam and Eve, are quite singular characters with no precedents, no one to learn from but each other. They provide such a large imaginary ground to artists. 

That led me to think about where all I have read them referred to in books or poems. So here is opening a list of where I have come across them (this list is quite short at the moment :), will add to this as I come across/ remember more.

• Milton's Paradise Lost
• Diaries of Adam and Eve (links above)
• Robert Frost poem - Never again would birds' song be the same
• This poem on Eve and Serpent - Paul Valery 
• 
  

A wholly new start

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.