Stephen McClurg's Blog, page 39

Cannot be ill, cannot be good: Bad Omens in Plutarch and Shakespeare

In one of the Shakespeare courses I took, we discussed The Great Chain of Being, a hierarchical organization of all life and matter that started with God at the top and went down through social classes to minerals. In many of the plays, particularly the tragedies, a disturbance to the order of things–which must be righted by the end– is felt throughout the organization of the social world, but then extends itself to the metaphysical and down into the psychological.

For example, in Macbeth, characters discuss the wild events in nature: storms, owls killing falcons, horses eating each other, etc. In Caesar, the owl sits in the marketplace at noon, men on fire walk through the streets, people are popping out of graves. These disturbances in the natural world are reflected in the social and political worlds of the plays. Macbeth is debating whether or not to kill the king, a total disruption of the natural order–Macbeth is usurping the power of a king, but also contemplating murdering a family member and guest in his own castle. In Caesar, there is the potential for an emperor to once again take over Rome, but there is also a conspiracy to kill him if he accepts. Shakespeare’s audience would likely watch this as as affront to the divine right of kings. Frequently, at the center of the plays is psychological disturbance. The Macbeths are driving themselves insane with greed and murder and power. Brutus broods on what he should do for himself, his friend, and for his country. 

Shakespeare read the Sir Thomas North translation of Plutarch, but I don’t know if the mirrorings of the natural, social, and psychological landscapes came from it or not. I did make the connection when reading Plutarch’s Life of Marcellus:

After assuming his office, he first quelled a great agitation for revolt in Etruria, and visited and pacified the cities there; next, he desired to dedicate to Honour and Virtue a temple that he had built out of his Sicilian spoils, but was prevented by the priests, who would not consent that two deities should occupy one temple; he therefore began to build another temple adjoining the first, although he resented the priests’ opposition and regarded it as ominous. And indeed many other portents disturbed him: sundry temples were struck by lightning, and in that of Jupiter, mice had gnawed the gold; it was reported also that an ox had uttered human speech, and that a boy had been born with an elephant’s head; moreover, in their expiatory rites and sacrifices, the seers received bad omens, and therefore detained him at Rome, though he was all on fire and impatient to be gone. For no man ever had such a passion for any thing as he had for fighting a decisive battle with Hannibal. This was his dream at night, his one subject for deliberation with friends and colleagues, his one appeal to the gods, namely, that he might find Hannibal drawn up to meet him. 

—————-

The mice gnawing the gold in the temple of Jupiter, an ox talking, a boy with an elephant head–fantastic images. The plays are full of bad omens and portents as well, statues spouting blood and animals with no hearts.

And since it is getting to Halloween, three of my favorites are the apparitions who give Macbeth duplicitous charms. I gravitate towards these images of the fantastic and grotesque, many times before narrative is even clear in my head.

I fall in love with the images first.

My Earliest Poetry Experiences + An Exercise + A Poem

Shel Silverstein wrote the first poems I remember reading and they were frequently silly, but it was a silliness that kept me reading all of his work, some of which, is not so silly. Between Silverstein and MAD Magazine, I cane to enjoy language that had a sense of humor, even if it came with gross-outs. While I was a teacher, I posted a poem every week in my room. Up until the last year, I still posted “Where the Sidewalk Ends” the first week of school. 

I loved horror movies and monsters, so Poe was naturally interesting for reading and research projects, especially after doing so many on sharks because if Jaws. I’m sure my teachers were happy to read something else, even if it involved sleeping in graveyards and drug addiction. I loved the sound and rhythm of his poems, something many Modern critics despised. He also wrote with a strong narrative, which I enjoy, but feel like I have never done.

Langston Hughes was important to me for his imagery and that he was writing about the real world. Besides Jim Henson, Hughes is the first author I knew with a social conscious. I could understand his words and I could understand his images, but I knew there was more to it. As young reader, I liked that he would write about festering sores and rotten meat, things that I had experienced, but didn’t know could be in poetry. 

I found Emily Dickinson later than the others, maybe even in high school. On first read, I was baffled. I’d never read anything like it, but I knew I liked it. I’ve gone back to the poems over and over again and they are still rewarding. 

When I get stuck in my writing, I will go back to writers like Dickinson for inspiration. It’s rare that I can use the poems I model on theirs, but it gets the muscles flexing. Below is one I wrote not too long before we had our first child. Besides watching Eraserhead and trying not to pay attention to all the Mayan calendar hoopla, I was prepping for fatherhood, by reading and writing poems. Feeling stuck one day, I decided to have Dickinson help me out of the rut. 

The Exercise:

Take a poem and pull a line from it to start your own.  It’s a way of giving you something to start with as inspiration. That’s what I initially did here, and then likely because of all that MAD reading, I decided to stick as close as I could to the original. I used similar rhythms and rhymes. Even if the poem doesn’t work, you can still learn about the model poet’s composition. I probably did this exercise in a workshop.

Here’s what resulted.

Dickinson:
Frequently the woods are pink —
Frequently are brown.
Frequently the hills undress
Behind my native town.
Oft a head is crested
I was wont to see —
And as oft a cranny
Where it used to be —
And the Earth — they tell me —
On its axis turned!
Wonderful Rotation!
By but twelve performed!

My exercise:

“And the Earth—they tell me”
(after Dickinson)

Sometimes the ale is white.
Sometimes the ale is brown.
Sometimes the men undress
before they swim and drown.
Maybe the unrested mind
revelates, burns, and screams.
Or maybe the unrested mind
is colder than it seems.
“And the Earth—they tell me”
in 2012 will burn.
I have bought new swim trunks.
Some men will never learn.

From the Eunoia Archives: An Interview with Writer Adam Vines

Originally published in 2014 at Eunoia Solstice. Since then he has co-authored Day Kink and According to Discretion, and a new poetry collection, Out of Speech. He gave me permission to publish “Mayflies” with this interview.

[image error]

When I think about “nature poets,” I often unfairly stereotype the idea into two camps: the contemporary Cassandras and their warmings and warnings or the Hallmark Thoreaus, full of simple awe and wonder. That’s unfortunate; it’s just as hard to write new, meaningful nature poetry as it is to write new, meaningful love poetry. The talented nature writer guides readers into looking at the world in a new way and in a culture that feels more and more separated from the world of earth and leaf, the nature writer may be more important than ever. For example, I know what “hashtags” are and what “hermeneutics” means, but I have no idea what kind of grass makes up my lawn. That’s embarrassing.

Adam Vines is the talented kind of nature poet. And while it would be too limiting to call him simply a “nature poet,” his first collection, The Coal Life, contains many fine examples of the genre. The book is full of loam, marshes, digging, and decay. And, besides a craftsmanlike command of sculpting sound and line, his work in the genre sends me to my own yard to learn the scientific and secret names of the natural world around me. What more could one ask from a book of poems?

Eunoia Solstice is grateful to Vines for giving us time out of a busy schedule of writing, teaching, and readings to answer a few questions.

First, I’d like to hear about your trip to Antarctica. What was that like? Has it inspired new writing or is it something that will be sitting with you before you write about it?

My trip to Antarctica was humbling. For two years, I served as Jim McClintock’s editor and writing coach for his book Lost Antarctica: Adventures in a Disappearing Land (Macmillan, 2012), which focuses on climate change and its impact on Antarctica. Jim is one of the foremost polar biologists in the world and a colleague of mine at UAB. However, none of the research I did and knowledge I acquired while working on the book could have adequately prepared me for the otherworldly landscape. Humans are the only terrestrial mammals, and we are such an invasive species there and so helpless in and ill-equipped for that environment. I didn’t see the color green in the natural world for nearly two weeks. Instead, I witnessed brilliant hues of blue and white from icebergs and glaciers and the darker blues watching me from blue-eyed shags, with the occasional safety-cone orange streaking the beaks of Gentoo penguins, rusty clouds of krill expelling from a surfacing humpback whale, and deep red research shacks that seemed so absurd in this bewildering, unaltered landscape. I watched skuas—predatory birds—pickpocket eggs from Adélie penguins by yanking their tail feathers on one side and skewering the eggs with their beaks on the other side when the penguins looked behind them. In a Zodiak—a rigid, inflatable raft with a 70 HP engine—I followed humpback whales tailing and bubble-feeding for over an hour. I climbed mountains; I stared into the eyes of a leopard seal; I went swimming in the Antarctic Ocean. The experience was life-changing.

I wrote in my journal and sketched what I saw while on the trip. I have a few drafts of poems, but I haven’t figured out the right approach for the poems yet. I do not want to merely write a penguin poem and a seal poem and an iceberg poem and a whale poem. The subtexts and underlayment for the poems are not revealing themselves yet. I still need to field-dress my experiences in my mind a bit.

Since teaching and writing are at least second careers for you, what led you to writing, particularly writing poetry?

I started a landscaping company after I graduated from high school and took classes at UAB part time, though I have always been a student of the natural world. I grew up camping, hiking, fishing, hunting, and paddling. Though I had never written poetry before, I decided to take a poetry writing workshop when I was in my mid-20s. Then I took another the next semester. Bob Collins and Jim Mersmann, professors and poets at UAB, encouraged me to continue writing and became my mentors. Writing was just an outgrowth of my intrigue with the natural world and the culture of the South. I would construct lines of poetry and form images while I cut grass or dug holes for plants or trimmed trees. Poetry occupied my mind while my body worked. An Old English professor and Beowulf translator told me once that he was hammering out half-lines, which made complete sense to me. The word poet comes from the Greek word for “maker.” This is labor—hard damn work, blue-collar work. I am much more comfortable with a fishing rod, shovel, pick, or brick hammer in my hand than a pen, so this idea of writing as blue-collar labor suits me.

Are there particular writers who have been important or inspirational for you?

Poetry: Bishop, Marianne Moore, Amy Clampitt, Whitman, Gary Snyder, Yeats, Lowell, Kunitz, Jeffers, Heaney, James Wright, Merwin, Stafford, David Bottoms, Andrew Hudgins, Rodney Jones, Betty Adcock, Claudia Emerson, Alicia Stallings, Caki Wilkinson, Carrie Jerrell, Linda Gregerson, Pimone Triplett, Greg Williamson, Michael Hofmann, Hecht, Wilbur, Justice, Hollander, Snodgrass, Larkin, Louise Bogan, Schnackenberg, George Herbert, Edward Taylor, Donne, Milton, Shakespeare.

Prose fiction: Padgett Powell, William Gay, Barry Hannah, Flannery O’Connor, Kevin Wilson, Carver, Cheever, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Hemingway, Chopin, Orwell, Kafka, Bulgakov, to name a few.

Drama: Shakespeare, Jonson, Ibsen, Beaumont, August Wilson.

As a husband, father, professor, editor, and avid fisherman, when are you finding time to write? Do you follow a daily schedule or ritual?

I do not have a ritual. I still tinker with images and construct lines in my head as I did when I was a landscaper, so, in some ways, I am constantly prewriting and revising. I usually have a solid chunk in my head when I sit down and pick up the pen. I write when I am compelled to write, which means that I have to make time for writing when it comes on and move everything else, except my family, aside.  I have never been one to try to force the action with a writing schedule.

What are you currently working on? Any new publications? A new book forthcoming?

I have a collaborative manuscript I wrote with Allen Jih, a friend from graduate school who is an aerialist and yoga instructor in Las Vegas, that I am shopping around to presses. We send lines back and forth over the Internet until one of us decides the poem is finished or becomes bored with it and writes “Cooked.” Then we start another. We started writing collaboratively to challenge ourselves to truly write to the unknown, to surprise ourselves, to challenge our preconceived aesthetic notions. We are currently working on our second manuscript. We have the same rules, but we also added that every poem will be constructed with trimeter tercets.

I am also at work on a new manuscript of ekphrastic poems. I buried myself in New York museums for eight days over the Christmas break of 2012 (Guggenheim, MOMA, Frick, Whitney, and The Met), and I have visits to The National Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago planned for late spring of this year. I am interested in how audiences interact with art at museums, from the docent who does not know how to talk to children about art and ruins their experience with it, to the dilettante on a date who “explains” the paintings so everyone in the room can hear, to the person who stands for hours in front of a Picasso he or she knows well but is obviously seeing live for the first time. I am allowing the poems to stretch the canvas to encompass whatever context surrounds it. I have a draft of a poem where a real staircase extends into the staircase in a painting. I allow my interactions with people in the museums to commingle with the drama encapsulated within the paintings. I have published some of these ekphrastic poems in 32 Poems, Gulf Coast, The Southwest Review, among others.

Maybe one of the easiest ways of getting into The Coal Life is through the recurring topics such as childhood, the relationship between father and son, the relationship between humans and the earth, but before that, I was wondering about the language of the book itself. It feels like the book is dominated by an Old and Middle English vocabulary. Do you think that’s true or am I making too much of the mood or atmosphere created by the nature terminology throughout the book (“slough,” “whelks,” “coal,” etc.)?

I am attracted to language/jargon from industry and disciplines outside of what we commonly associate with the arts. My first poetry mentor told me that attentive poets know the names of things and the names of the working components of things and their pragmatic relationships, which always leads to figurative notions. Furthermore, I love the syntactical and phonetic gaits that poets can create by comingling or isolating and loosely segregating Latinate and Germanic language, which can also have lovely effects on the rhetorical and narrative viscosity.

One of the topics of the book seems to be cycles, or if not cycles, at least the past in all its myriad meanings, including our mythic past. I read that in the “coal” of the title, “Prologue and Return” and “Epilogue and Return,” the men going and coming from the mines and quarries, and the mother in church. Many of the speakers seem to be “haunted” by a past that has been shut away, but keeps returning. The past comes back, exhumes itself, like the toy soldiers in “Burying the Dead.” This imagery in the book, makes me think “ashes to ashes, mud to mud.” And then you also play a few times on your own name and its connection to that mythic “Adam” and the clay he is often said to have been made of.

Am I way off here, this weaving of loam, cycles, and memory? Had you been working through these ideas for a while or were they something that came together as you were organizing the manuscript?

Whitman’s, Hegel’s, and Vico’s ideas on cyclicity and the great respect and attention I pay to the natural world’s cycles and recapitulations inform my poetic sensibility as much as anything, but I never overtly thought of trying to infuse these ideas into the poems or I would have ruined them. The coal mining industry and the disrupted and destroyed then reclaimed landscapes, the miners digging at the maw of the earth to extract the compressed, encapsulated energy of the past; the human anxieties that persisted in a cultural landscape where methane blasts and cave-ins and horrific injuries and disease and labor wars were so prevalent and the result of untenable working conditions and corporate apathy and greed are literal ideas with complexly layered subtexts. Many of my relatives were coal miners. My family has owned land on the Warrior River in Walker County, Alabama—coal-mining country—since the mid-1800s. The first log cabin still remains on the property, as do the remnants of a rock cabin my grandfather built in the 1930s, which was sadly torched by hunters I had to walk off of my land by gunpoint when we had a dispute. They said they would get me, and they did. The remains of old shine stills still hunker into the banks on the property; the ribs and spine of my kin’s old ferryboat slowly rots into soil beneath a large white oak. I grew up observing the landscape altered by coal mining: the undulating spoil piles with pulp pines jutting from them and the deep blue quarries. I would watch the coal barges’ spotlights fidget down the riverbanks at night, searching for the start of the great oxbow where our property sits, while my father and grandfather told me stories about the land and our kin and flirted with barred owls, calling them to within a couple dozen feet of us. So, yes, the soil, memory, and cycles organically fused in the poems, I hope, this fusing having its foundations in the endemic richness of the subject matter more than my intentions.

I didn’t notice the theme of Calvinist suffering, that “ashes to ashes, mud to mud”—a kind of backwoods Job—that return and return and return, that end without end, echoing the Nicene Creed, you mention until I started looking at the thematic ribbons in the poems when I ordered the manuscript. The theological and typological underbellies fit, I hope, considering the personae in the poems and the subject matter.

Several of these poems are about the complexities of the relationship between father and son, which parallels the relationship between “The Father” in the form of religion and the working community. “Burying the Dead” is one of my favorite poems in the book (as is “Brick Hammer and Broken Watch”) and is deceptively simple. I initially read it as a narrative about the boy mimicking his father that ends with the image of the toy soldiers and how “the arms of the buried rise again.” But the opening line (”It always happens like this:”) directs me to read this more in terms of memory or dreams, as if the speaker is recalling aspects of his life that he has tried to bury, but they keep coming back. The “storm” cuts the communication from the father and son and could be the natural complexity of the relationship or the natural separation at this point—the father’s death.

“Path” is another beautiful poem in the book. While expressing the reality of the difficult life and labor for the fathers of the poem, it also shows them in a semi-mythical sense, relating their lamps to stars and their paths to a “mutable zodiac.”

In “Almost Clean,” the father “wipes the ash” from the speaker’s forehead. To me, this feels like the father expressing his dismissal of “The Father.” Similarly, “The Baptist Steeple” has the line “The steeple never rose above the spoils.” 

Is there something to seeing these images or topics playing off of each other? If these poems mirror your own experience with your father, what was it like writing these poems? Do you care to speak toward your views on religion and social class?

Thanks for your kind words about those poems. The theme of the dislocated father is such an archetypal one; Christianity has its foundations in this tension. I lost my father when I was eighteen. “Burying the Dead” and “Brick Hammer and Broken Watch” are two of the most autobiographical poems in the collection. They both deal with memory and how one comes to terms with the death of the father, or if one every really can move beyond the sorrow, and how one prepares for fatherhood when the model is no longer around. “Burying the Dead” is based on a recurring dream I had for years. What I don’t include is the end of the dream, where I chase my father around the church, and he keeps getting farther and farther away. Then I come around a corner, and he has a new life. He is pushing another child in a swing and doesn’t know me. The dream haunted me. This separation of father and son comes up often in the persona poems set in the coal mining community.

My theoretical slant when I criticize Early modern English texts  is grounded in social class theory, specifically how people within a particular social class distinguish themselves, how and why stratification  occurs within a fixed class of supposed equals who are relegated because of blood and name. My father was a bricklayer by trade, who later became an unsuccessful insurance salesman when building declined in the ’70s. I was a blue-collar worker for over twenty years. I do not directly address class issues and class systems in poems, but my interest seeps in. How can one not evoke class struggles when referencing the coal mining industry?

The poems in The Coal Life question faith. The speakers want to believe in something so badly, but the empirical, practical world provides walls. My personal questioning and the brief moments of clarity I have had in my life inform the personae’s struggles and catharses.

Even though I’ve collapsed a lot of the book into particular categories, I should also say that I really like the variety of subject matter, tone, and form. Your sense of the line is almost perfect to me and I like how you work with the long lines of Whitman and late Dickey or the compact lines similar to some of the work of Ammons or Williams. Also, a reader can tell that there is a lot of thought put into the sound effects, including some wonderful slant rhymes a la Dickinson. With these formal ideas in mind, I have a couple of questions: 

Are there particular poets you have studied in terms of form or sound? What writers have been important in your development of formal skill?

I feel like the poem “Tracks” displays some of these devices and is a great poem to listen to. As far as form, in one sense, it’s obvious that the stanzas are lengthening, but in another sense, I can’t figure out if you used a particular syllabic or metrical count. Does the line just grow organically (which makes sense considering the subject of the poem) or did you develop a form for the poem? If you want, feel free to keep it a mystery—“magicians’ rules” and all that.

I learned most of what I know about prosody and poetics from studying early modern English poets and playwrights, which was my critical concentration in my first graduate degree before I turned almost exclusively to creative writing. I chose the U of Florida for my MFA in poetry because I wanted to study with William Logan, a talented critic/formalist, and I learned quite a bit from him. I continue to apprentice myself to the poems of Justice, Wilbur, Clampitt, Hollander, Merrill, Hecht, Hudgins, Bishop, Prunty, Larkin, among others, and a host of younger formalist poets, most of whom studied at Johns Hopkins, Arkansas, Ohio State, or Florida, which are programs with formalist leanings.

Though “Tracks” is held in quatrains, its rhyme scheme changes from stanza to stanza. I wanted to defy expectations of sound connections and placements, which I hoped would add to the ambiguous relationship of the two people taking a mysterious journey together. The lines evolve from stanza to stanza, I hope, from lyrical, image-driven shorter lines with loose syllabics, to longer more rhetorically-driven lines that have a loose iambic backbone. I hope that the protean form matches the nature of the unfolding human drama in the poem.

Several artists, including Magritte, Wyeth, and Gauguin, make appearances in the book as themselves or in their work. I even wonder if “Darwin Dreams of the Second Coming” is a sly form of an Arcimboldo portrait. Is art, and by this I mean drawing and painting, a continuing inspiration for your work? When did this start for you? What’s different, if anything, about composing work based on art from work based on other experiences?

I love the idea of my Darwin poem resembling an Arcimboldo portrait! I was not thinking consciously about his work, but I adore his portraits. Yes, visual art plays a huge role in the way I approach writing. My language is image-driven more than voice-driven. I study imagery in the way a visual artist looks at a still life.

Visual art has been and continues to be a huge influence on my work. At one time, I painted and sketched. I guess I still do, just now with language and lineation instead of paint and graphite. As I mentioned in an earlier response, my next collection will contain many ekphrastic poems. The Coal Life has quite a few poems that at the least mention visual artists or paintings; some are devoted to them. When writing about art, the moment in time and imagery are encased. The visual rhetoric is what I am interested in most: anxieties between objects, people, the natural world, colors, textures, etc. The painting may have a narrative embedded in it or fruitfully ambiguous tension or idea. My poems are essentially responses to the rhetoric.

———————

Mayflies

Ripples pinprick the surface.
It’s coming from below,
mayfly nymphs pipping,
twitching out of skins,
and fanning moist wings. A few
then tens of thousands
rise in frenzied clouds.
Males fall first,
drizzling back to the water’s face
like ash, then females light
the shining and spill their eggs
before night takes over.

Here I am at the quarry
again, thinking of stories to tell you:
the raccoon that made off
with the hotdog buns, the broken
tent pole, the cottonwoods someone
cut and hauled off to sell
for violin bridges in Japan or China,
the bald eagle nesting in a loblolly,
the gobbler strutting in a green field,
all of the things I didn’t see
yesterday or today, but instead
remember from when I was a kid,
the observations you say bring us closer.
I won’t tell you about the mayfly nymphs,
the urge for change, flight, and sex; how,
nonetheless, the nymphs wait patiently for years
in the dark cracks of riprap and sunken leaves
for the perfect day, temperature, clarity;
how nights with her make me love you more.

Adam Vines, “Mayflies” from The Coal Life. Copyright © 2012 by Adam Vines. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Source: The Coal Life (The University of Arkansas Press, 2012)

Little Billboards #88

[image error]

No surprise being uneasy
to approach self-approval,
the young man thread a soul.

Little Billboards #41

[image error]

writing to find
the rules not to be
to be

Good night. The day seems to be breaking. The sky is green.–Friday Love Letters

With my current job I travel more than I ever have. One way I stave off homesickness is by reading books my wife has given me (and rereading poems we’ve written for each other). The one I keep picking up for now is Letters to Véra, Vladimir Nabokov’s letters to Véra Slonim from their first meeting until the end of his life.

In one of the earliest letters, before their marriage, he writes:

Yes, I need you my fairy-tale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought–and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds.

Here’s to your weekend and to finding your fairy-tale, your tall sunflower.

Verbing Nicias and Other Sundry from Plutarch’s Lives

In the ancient world, being a fierce warrior wasn’t enough. Nicias was known as a strong soldier, but a careful general, which was not smiled upon at the time. In fact, it earned him scorn. Aristophanes, who also famously lampooned Socrates, made him a verb. It’s awkwardly translated sometimes as “shilly-shally-niciasize” and more simply as “nodding or for Niciasizing.”

One of my favorite parts of Plutarch’s Nicias is how battle plans are altered due to an eclipse, which gives Plutarch a segue to briefly discuss some philosophers, including the Pre-Socratics:

But just as everything was prepared for this and none of the enemy were on the watch, since they did not expect the move at all, there came an eclipse of the moon by night. This was a great terror to Nicias and all those who were ignorant or superstitious enough to quake at such a sight. The obscuration of the sun towards the end of the month was already understood, even by the common folk, as caused somehow or other by the moon; but what it was that the moon encountered, and how, being at the full, she should on a sudden lose her light and emit all sorts of colours, this was no easy thing to comprehend. Men thought it uncanny, — a sign sent from God in advance of divers great calamities.

 The first man to put in writing the clearest and boldest of all doctrines about the changing phases of the moon was Anaxagoras. But he was no ancient authority, nor was his doctrine in high repute. It was still under seal of secrecy, and made its way slowly among a few only, who received it with a certain caution rather than with implicit confidence. Men could not abide the natural philosophers and “visionaries,” as they were then called, for that they reduced the divine agency down to irrational causes, blind forces, and necessary incidents. Even Protagoras had to go into exile, Anaxagoras was with difficulty rescued from imprisonment by Pericles, and Socrates, though he had nothing whatever to do with such matters, nevertheless lost his life because of philosophy. It was not until later times that the radiant repute of Plato, because of the life the man led, and because he subjected the compulsions of the physical world to divine and more sovereign principles, took away the obloquy of such doctrines as these, and gave their science free course among all men. At any rate, his friend Dion, although the moon suffered an eclipse at the time when he was about to set out from Zacynthus on his voyage against Dionysius, was in no wise disturbed, but put to sea, landed at Syracuse, and drove out the tyrant.

However, it was the lot of Nicias at this time to be without even a soothsayer who was expert. The one who had been his associate, and who used to set him free from most of his superstition, Stilbides, had died a short time before. For indeed the sign from Heaven, as Philochorus observed, was not an obnoxious one to fugitives, but rather very propitious; concealment is just what deeds of fear need, whereas light is an enemy to them. And besides, men were wont to be on their guard against portents of sun and moon for three days only, as Autocleides has remarked in his “Exegetics”; but Nicias persuaded the Athenians to wait for another full period of the moon, as if, forsooth, he did not see that the planet was restored to purity and splendour just as soon as she had passed beyond the region which was darkened and obscured by the earth.

Other posts on Plutarch’s Lives are here and here.

All About That Broth and Indoor Bug Canopies

Twenty-First Century playtime:

5YO: I have to take care of this puppy because my mom got this puppy with her husband but then they broke up. They were married but they broke up and now I have this puppy because my mom’s on vacation and the puppy’s babysitter called in sick.

___________________

Last weekend the kids and I went to the library to do our thing, but instead there was an American Girl Doll birthday with a live-version of Blair, the farm girl. The 5YO taking care of puppies because of divorces and vacations and such was ecstatic. The 7YO wasn’t interested unless we went back home to get her doll. She settled right in on the iPads, since this is her only chance to play video games. She was happy to pause long enough to make a goat charm necklace. I was less than ecstatic because I was going to write, but the little one was so excited–so we farm-partied and had some amazing oranges and won some beautiful flowers from Hepzibah Farms. She loved winning them and couldn’t wait to show her mom.

I guess she didn’t want mom to see all the pretty water the flowers were in because she poured that onto backseat floorboard.

________________

One day I was gone and my wife was folding laundry in the bedroom. When she went out to the kitchen she found the kids had gotten thirsty and fixed their own drinks. They were sitting on opposite ends of the couch. One was drinking out of a large milk carton and the other preferred sipping from a carton of vegetable broth.

__________________

While I was fixing the 7YO’s camera, she sat on the bed next to me, not so subtly reminding me that she also wanted me to install her canopy.

[image error]

__________________

I mentioned watching The Dark Crystal saga recently. This week we also watched Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and we had a lot of fun with it. I hadn’t seen Spider-Ham since I was a kid, and that particular character cracked them up. I really like the Peni Parker/anime character, who I had never heard seen. It had enough substance and fun that I think the kids will like it even more if we watch it again. I know I missed some of it because I was also working as waiter and snack wrangler.

_______________

The 7YO woke up ill one morning and was going to stay home. The 5YO began a tantrum that ended with the 7YO’s vomit at her feet.

5YO: Maybe I will go to school.

And go she did–with her pants on backwards for only the whole day.

Somehow we missed it, but I’m not sure if this was on purpose or not because she has worn shirts backwards because she likes certain ones better that way. I have video of her running around the gym track in a princess gown.

She wants to be Morticia Addams for Halloween. She is certainly more bold in her fashion choices than I ever have been. We’re hoping to make a family outing to the new Addams Family movie soon.

Maybe I’ll bring down my old Charles Addams collection I bought when I was a kid so we can read that together.

The Angle of Eternity: Recent Viewing

On Dangerous Ground (1951)
A film noir directed by Nicholas Ray (and Ida Lupino, who stepped in when Ray became ill). Robert Ryan plays a cop known for getting criminals to talk by using brute force, which is even wearing down his police peers. He gets sent to literally cool down while investigating a murder in the snowy countryside. 

Ida Lupino, in a decent role, is amazing as always. 

Watching this, I realized how much I love crime and western movies in snowy settings. Pale Rider (1985) and Shoot the Piano Player (1960) come to mind, the latter likely influenced by this movie. 

Snow noir? 

I love me some Ethan Frome, too, a book that made me look at literary setting in a different way and one that made something like the endless Gothic descriptions of nature somehow enjoyable in The Castle of Otranto.

A Bernard Herrmann score at once enthralled and distracted me because I’ve listened to it and most of his work for fun, so it was like that feeling you get hearing a song tied to personal memories in a soap commercial.

“9 Variations on a Dance Theme” (1967)
An absolutely gorgeous short film by Hilary Harris with a few caveats: 

This is a dance/art film. If that already wrinkles your snout, don’t bother. If you have any questions about what critics mean when they write about the male gaze of the camera, compare this short to Maya Deren’s dance films. 

Where Deren wanted the body to have a dreamy weightlessness, Harris highlights the physicality of dancer Bettie de Jong.

Harris–I believe–benefits from lighter cameras which allow him to revolve completely around the dancer where Deren would often use edits. Harris benefits from both approaches. He can get extreme close-ups, move around the dancer, and play with the editing. He is able to get a kind of 3D experience of a dance and the dancer’s physicality. It’s exciting–considering that in real life, because of the distance to the stage, dancers tend to look two-dimensional.

McNeil Robinson’s music ebbs and flows like the variations of the dance and the editing. Harpsichord opens the score, sounding improvised and using silence similar to Gagaku court music that becomes denser as the harpsichord begins to accompany Bonnie Lichter on flute.

The Fireman’s Ball (1967)
Miloš Forman is one of those directors that I forget about and then freak out when I see his name on a film and remember what he’s done. He’s probably best known for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and Amadeus (1984). 

Ball was filmed in Forman’s native Czechoslovakia, and was banned for years because of its satire of the bureaucratic Communism. The movie is about the annual fireman’s ball in a small town and the arguments and thievery therein. It’s a slow film with most of the cast being older and I believe untrained. They’re great.  

It’s remarkable how easily the story could be transplanted to small-town America. 

The movie at once reminds me of another Czechoslovakian New Wave darling, Daisies (1966), but without the freneticism, and the Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) adaptation that nobody seems to like but me. 

The ending was perfect poetry with a dash of dark humor. 

The Dark Crystal (1982) The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (2019)
The original was a re-watch with the kids after we saw Resistance. Even though these are dark films, my kids loved them. The last I heard was that the new outing was going to be computer-generated and I wasn’t interested. I was pleasantly surprised at the amount and level of puppetry and in-camera work here that’s blended with the digital effects. These are spectacular movies.

Fantasy isn’t a genre I feel like I get into much, outside of dark fantasy like these. I really like Grimm’s fairy tales and the like, but I don’t read a lot of adventure fantasy. I’m sure there’s stuff out there for me, I just haven’t found it.

From the Eunoia Archives: The Terror Test: Test Prep #6

Originally written for The Terror Test episode grading The Fireman, Baskin, and Southbound.

Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas! or Repetition In Heaven and Hell

“I think this story is about Hell. A version where you are condemned to do the same thing over and over again. Existentialism, baby, what a concept: paging Albert Camus. There’s an idea that Hell is other people. My idea is that it might be repetition.” ~ Stephen King (author note to “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French.”)

I’m typing this listening to Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, an example of American minimalism. He’s a peer to the more famous Philip Glass. One of the key elements in minimalism is repetition—of rhythms, chords, tones, etc. For a time I didn’t like it, this obnoxiously repetitive music by Nyman (a Brit), Glass, Reich, Riley, et al. Slowly and one by one, I’ve been listening to these composers over the last seven years and have come to appreciate and even enjoy their work. I now love the repetition and slight variation, where it used to be annoying. Besides Nyman’s A Zed & Two Noughts score which was easy to love, and a few Glass pieces, it was Terry Riley’s In C that got me interested in this music as a larger movement. Then I heard Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, which is a personal favorite of any genre.

One of the things I like about this style is that I can listen to it and write. It’s a multi-purpose art that I use as a kind of white noise filter. I don’t mean that in a negative way. Repetition is often used to depict a type of Hell or damnation when it’s obviously part of what we love about music, particularly pop or dance music in their various forms. But this repetitive nature is also what can be so aggravating about certain songs. One person’s trash, etc.

The sense of repetition as a punishment has been with us since at least Ancient Greece, with the Classically Damned trio of Ixion, Tantalus, and Sisyphus. Ixion is strapped to a spinning wheel. Tantalus, gives us the English word “tantalize,” with his punishment of neither being able to reach food that hangs above him, nor is he able to reach the water below him which lowers as he does. Sisyphus rolls a boulder up a hill only to have it roll down. He must then roll it back up. Repeat. Forever.

Not too far from a Sisyphean torment is the use of time loops in movies and television. Both films for the next Terror Test, Baskin (2015) and Southbound (2015), use a time loop as part of the narrative.  Time loops are when a narrative folds in on itself, this often happens in time travel films. Time loops, as a device, attempt to vary traditional plotting but create their own problems. If a film ends where it begins, it’s not much different than the alligator-in-the-toilet ending. I call it that because so many films ended like this through the ‘70s and ‘80s, including Alligator (1980), a moderately entertaining Jaws knock-off. Presumably based on urban legends of the time, the film opens with an alligator getting flushed down a toilet, getting massive in a city sewer, wrecking havoc above ground and then being destroyed. Enter freshly flushed gator. Roll credits.

Sometimes there is something satisfying about ending where we began. Sometimes we can’t think of anything better. Sometimes we want to suggest a sequel. Much art attempts to bring the ending back to beginning to varying degrees of success. Even a work as surreally sublime as the Brothers Quay adaptation of Bruno Schulz’s “Street of Crocodiles” uses it. We see a contraption we come to understand is an automaton with a map. Spit goes into the automaton, things move, the energy from the saliva (acting as a type of coin maybe) expires, things run down and stop. We return to the exterior of the machine and the map. I probably watched the film ten times before I noticed this extremely basic structure. The time loop feels like it wants to be a fancy version of this, offering subtle variation. The thinking person’s alligator-in-the-toilet, if you will. Often it comes off as more like a Hell of having to watch all the sequels to your favorite horror film without watching the original.

King gets the aforementioned quote “Hell is other people” from Jean-Paul Sartre, who depicts an eternal punishment in his play No Exit, though how repetitive it will be is unclear. Albert Camus, in “The Myth of Sisyphus,” describes Sisyphus as the absurd hero, one whose “whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing.”

Camus writes:

At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go.

Camus sees life in this repetition, I think. It is absurd but is part of our consciousness. It is inherently part of our life and work and love. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” he writes,  in this universe “neither sterile nor futile.”

For me, Samuel Beckett, also referred to as an absurdist, depicts this in an entertaining way, particularly in Waiting for Godot and Endgame. But I’m always curious how unfavorable the reactions can be when I’ve often found Beckett quite funny and see him as much a realist as an absurdist. His characters repeat actions and words. Eating. Putting on boots. Salutations. Jogging. Sleeping. Peeing. Etc. But these are the cycles and conditions that we’re in and I think it’s the ontological verisimilitude of his work that often makes audiences uncomfortable. Or bored. His work often shows how our Being is attached to these rhythms of natural and social life: seasons, weeks, days, liquid brunches, Casual Fridays.

Even Sisyphus has been described as a variation of a solar deity. Rolling the rock up the hill becomes the sun rising. We wake, work, toil. The rock rolling down the hill is the sun descending. Night. Repose. Unless I’m misreading, which is entirely possible, this recognition seems very similar to Camus’s moment of Sisyphean meta-consciousness. Bestselling books like Outliers and its “10,000 Hour Rule” and more recently The Power of Habit also suggest that we don’t see all repetition as hellish, though we have to acknowledge that habits can be good and bad for us.

One may even feel most alive doing something one loves in regular patterns of time and behavior. So much of our lives is repetition.

If we’re lucky.