When I start on a project, process, garden, or trip, I tend to think of it as an endeavor. I have my own understanding of the word, but I thought it might be wise to see what its background is. According to Etymologyonline, endeavor appears in English in the 15th c:
early 15c., "pains taken to attain an object," literally "in duty," from phrase put (oneself) in dever "make it one's duty" (a partial translation of Old French mettre en deveir "put in duty"), from Old French dever "duty," from Latin debere "to owe," originally, "keep something away from someone," from de- "away" (see de-) + habere "to have" (from PIE root *ghabh- "to give or receive"). One's endeavors meaning one's "utmost effort" is from late 15c.
~
Okay, I tend to think of the word as meaning not so much a dutyas the effort, or “pains one takes,” needed to pursue an objective or result of some sort. It is currently my duty to act as executor for my mother’s modest estate; but what I’m endeavoring to do is come to terms with being an orphan so late in my life, and to allow myself some minor mood swings, and to continue my daily activities–including writing. Because writing is so valuable when one is grieving. This is true even for people who are not writers, as James Pennebaker’s (and others’) research shows. [Here is a podcast from the APA as an introduction, if you are curious: https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/expressive-writing]
This doesn’t mean that writing while grieving is easier for writers. It isn’t. We may be more disciplined about doing the writing. Or we may not.
And endeavoring differs slightly from trying. For me, trying is sort of experimental or exploratory. It need not have some sort of object, beyond the goal of gaining a new experience. I’m not trying to get over my sorrow or trying to get up and do what has to be done. There’s purpose to my activities around facing the day, weeding and watering the garden, and sitting down to think and write. Maybe the purpose is just to be a human in the world. Maybe writing is just part of my particular process.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this post. The object today is just to put words on the page, thoughts into my brain, and to write.
today’s light breeze I remember hearing her laughter ~
Many years ago, I drafted a poem that I worked on awhile and considered finished. I sent it out a few places, and then realized it wasn’t ready after all. I shelved it for a long while, then revised it, and I like it better now; but I don’t think I will submit it again. It feels like too personal a poem to me, and here’s why: when I felt more satisfied with it, I showed it to my mother (it’s about her). She was quiet for a fairly long time. Then she looked at me and asked, “How did you know this?”
Well, I’d imagined it. Guessed. But I felt floored that maybe I’d found words to say what she couldn’t say, and that she felt I had it right–her experience, I mean, her feelings. And now that feels important to me, because my mother died just a few days ago.
But this blog is sort of personal, after all, and so I am posting it here as a not-quite-finished, imperfect poem that nonetheless said enough to the person I wrote it about. My audience of one, in this case. Which is enough for me, and rare enough in the art of creative writing; and I really cannot come up with words this week given how I feel about my mom’s death. “Still processing,” as they say. Each of us does that differently, and each grief differs depending upon relationship and circumstances.
My mother’s passing was extremely peaceful, calm, accepting, about as uncomplicated as a death can be. Yet I will be holding onto the experience and my feelings about it for a long time to come.
~
Foreignness
1. 1955 Ten years after the war, my newlywed parents leave a small, Midwestern town. The lighted ball that marks its one-pump gas station usurps the moon en route to the city. At the railroad station, my father sets down luggage and takes my mother’s hand. She feels the platform tremble, sees one white light heading eastward and away. It takes all the silence out of darkness as they rattle through tunnels far from home.
2. Marburg My mother never learns to speak German. She lives a year without language while my father pursues his studies, relying on gesture and interpretation. She holds the hands of old women who’ve survived two wars, the hands of kindergartners too young to recognize the whining patterns of Allied bombers, navigating a country suturing itself partially- whole in the aftermath of its collision with fascism. It’s a nation spoiled and bleeding. For my mother, the first year of marriage is a foreign land my father tries to translate. She keeps her eyes open, never meets the enemy.
3. Harlem After Europe, her hometown becomes a thought she keeps at bay. In white uniform and cap, she tries to balance efficiency and compassion in the hospital’s pediatric ward with its infant rat-bite victims, steam-burned patients, malnutrition, poverty. There is so much to learn. Returning each night to the student apartment on 122nd Street, she weeps quietly. Too many reasons, no language to explain them. The floor trembles as the IRT passes. Each day wears a hard face. She can’t put it into words, and my father cannot interpret for her, not this time.
~
The haibun below is much newer, but also still a draft. And also perhaps not a piece to send out for publication, but rather to share with my readers, some of whom were acquainted with my mother.
Baptism by Sea
She never lived sea-side, the nearest she came was that square white house sixty miles west of the Atlantic. She’d grown up far away amid oceans of corn but loved the shore. She learned sand varies from place to place by walking on Baltic beaches, on Galway’s strands, the coasts—Amalfi, Cyprus, Cairns—Puerto Rico’s wavelets curling over her feet, but she was only ever a visitor, tourist to the locals whose neighbor was the ocean. It never was her familiar though she loved to stand and watch for signs of its vast unity, the way it touches every ragged cove, its calm beneficence in Virgin Gorda’s inlets, the salt clarity of those horizons she could reach but not imagine until she felt Bali’s fine-grained silt underfoot, went clamming near Maine’s slick-sided rocks. As a girl all these were unimaginable. She entered the sea as a woman, and what broke around her body with each wave was tactile, thrilling: an initiation.
I recently read a New Yorker article about misophonia that referred to the sound of “fingernails on a chalkboard.” Chalkboards. They were in every classroom throughout my schooling, but by the time my own children were in sixth grade, a middle-school remodeling push had replaced them with whiteboards. The college where I taught had whiteboards, as do most boardrooms, meeting places, etc. An occasional squeak of a too-dry marker is about as aurally annoying as it gets. Who uses chalkboards anymore? Maybe the occasional cafe for daily specials?
And therefore, why do we still use “fingernails on a chalkboard” when we want to describe something extremely irritating? Like many other phrases and images, that phrase is frozen into our language–there are hosts of them if you stop and think about it. 33rpm albums may be back for some niche music listeners, but most people under 20 have never actually heard “a broken record.” Pop culture moves so quickly; what do young people think it means when Blondie’s Debbie Harry says she’s in a phone booth ringing the telephone off the wall? (If they even happen to hear that song.) I think of these as ghost similes or metaphors, still haunting our language long after the origins have gone out of date. Some of them hang around for decades, maybe centuries; others fade like last year’s popular lingo.
I consider these things when I’m working on a poem. What will the words mean decades from now, or to a person in another culture, or to a very elderly reader? It’s not that I think my poems will be read decades from now–heck, they don’t have a lot of readers even today–but, because poems convey information and imagery in order to evoke interpretation and to create pleasurable sound and rhythm, poets need to think about the words we employ and why we use them. Allusions, metaphors, the lively sounds of slang or dialect, popular culture or political references, scientific terms, various kinds of jargon, words from languages other than English: they are all words, the writer’s main tools. And it can be harder than you’d think to get the right tool for the job.
At the same time, I don’t want to overthink. It gets in the way of writing poetry. I seriously doubt that Emily Dickinson gave a second thought about being picked up in a carriage by Death; horse-drawn carriages were a part of everyday life. When Whitman wrote of fishermen seining for menhaden on the Long Island shores (“A Paumanok Picture”), it’s unlikely he thought the word “mossbonkers” would send readers running to a dictionary. If we have to look up some words today to get a clear idea of what’s happening in a poem, I see no problem with that. Besides, the Whitman poem is so clear in its description, we don’t really need to.
~
An aside: I just read a curated selection of Ursula Le Guin’s blog posts, No Time to Spare, written mostly between 2010 and 2015. I find her clear-eyed and curious view of being “really old” pragmatic and refreshing…something to emulate, should I live so long. And her continuing interest in reading and writing and thinking about the world–I definitely want to emulate that approach!
And now, back to the garden. We got some rain–hooray–but it made the weeds as happy as it made the tomatoes.
I’ve been thinking about creativity in the sense of inventiveness, spurred by two recent visits to two very different places. The first place is the Hagley Museum, an industrial museum, site of the original DuPont de Nemours gunpowder works in Delaware, along the quiet Brandywine. The area was not so placid from 1803 to 1920 when the factories were active and a town’s-worth of people lived and labored here doing a dangerous job. The historic non-profit has created a “museum of invention” at the works, in what was once a textile mill, and it features a large number of mostly 19th-century patent models. Also some of the mechanical drawings that accompanied them. Inventors from all walks of life are represented, and I was impressed by the usually-anonymous craftspeople who made the 3-D models for the Patent Office. So cool!
I think this is the west side of the house…
Then, a couple of days ago, we visited Luna Parc, which is quite an experience. It is a handmade house, sculpture garden, and studio that Ricky Boscarino has been working on for decades. A Rhode Island School of Design student fascinated by silver-smithing, Boscarino decided early on that he wanted to make a living doing art. He began by making unusual (and sometimes slightly alarming*) jewelry and creating art from found objects. He’s also a painter, ceramicist, welder, woodworker…and trying to make his housing needs, studio, and life as sustainable as possible in the wooded region near Stokes State Park in New Jersey. Now, the place is a non-profit that trains students, sponsors art interns, and continues to grow and morph into, well, who knows? He’s devoted his life to art-making. And the place is really fun to explore.
Talk about inventive!
It’s something people need to do, have an urge to do–invent stuff for some purpose, to solve a problem, for enjoyment, or out of a need to play around; we are, as Huizinga says, Homo Ludens (see this post!). Play leads to all kinds of things, piqued by curiosity and that urge to fiddle with things. The patent models at Hagley were behind glass, but I was itching to play with them, like a five-year-old.
That is what I like about writing poetry, too, the play and invention of it–using words, images, sounds, patterns. Earlier today I was messing around with quatrains that used rhyme/slant rhyme line endings, switching off between ABBA and ABAB by stanza. The poem’s content isn’t cheerful, yet puttering with possible patterns was fun and kept me thinking about the topic. Then I went inside and put Bach’s Inventions & Sinfonias on the stereo.
~
* One of Boscarino’s jewelry piecesInventive patternssome wild stairsteps
Well, I have been writing. But less about the current wintry days than I expected, because of the online poetry seminar I’m taking.
One recent prompt in Anita Skeen‘s workshop involves employing phrases from a text and using those words, or images, as a start to a poem that would not encompass or even relate to the original topic. I’ve written work that does that; but more commonly I continue the topic in some way, most notably with my long-poem/chapbook manuscript The Librarian of Pyok Dong. And what I notice is that I tend to choose “unlovely” texts, articles or essays that are historical, scientific, or academic, rather than to use the words of poets or novelists. Why that is, I can’t say for sure; it may simply be due to my deep-rooted nerdiness. But I think of poets like Martha Silano, Rebecca Elson, Muriel Ruykeyser, and others who have created amazing work, beautiful poems, from newspaper articles, scientific papers, academic texts, encyclopedias–so I feel encouraged. The result, for me, however, is often an unlovely draft.
Etching by or after J. Gamelin, 1778/1779. Created 1779. Contributors: Jacques Gamelin. Work ID: h3ybfzwe.
I have recently spent some time proofreading one of my brother’s papers that addresses the origins of some of the crania in Samuel George Morton’s collection, which resides at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia and is among the controversial holdings there of sacred/religious objects and human remains. The University has committed to “repatriating” such items in its collections that belong to indigenous peoples, for example, and to returning human bones to places of origin or to “respectful interment.” The challenge with Morton’s large collection is to ascertain where, in fact, these human beings came from. [Informational page is here.] My brother has been trying to track down the people, likely young Africans, who made up one set of about 55 skulls collected in Cuba around 1839-1840.
It’s a terrible history, of course. The Middle Passage, slavery, illness, misery, abandonment even in death. And it’s an academic paper, so the language–not to dismiss the author’s writing ability, since he’s keeping to the conventional style–does not lend itself to poetry.
Basically, I’ve given myself a difficult task. Yet we learn through difficulty, do we not? Often, too, the unlovely poems are those that deal with how rotten human beings can be, or illuminate the worst of times and offer us insight and information that we had not been taught, hidden horrors, trauma, all of the above. I have written many lovely poems about lovely things. The world, however, manages to be far more complicated than beautiful, a mixed bag of joys and miseries, and it seems to me that literature and art ought to reflect that fact sometimes.
What I’m posting below is not even a draft, just some notes I may decide to use as quotes or images. It’s one way to demonstrate how I begin a difficult poem, a poem based upon historical facts that I’m learning myself. It’s a completely different process from when I write from an image or observation of my own. For example, the “Librarian” poem, which is about 15 pages long, took me a couple of years and a visit to the United States Army Heritage and Education Center (USAHEC) at Carlisle Barracks, PA! First I pull some quotes, make a lot of notes, highlight images or place names that seem most resonant. Then I develop these into what I call “jottings” and fragments, and start setting them into an initial sequence–which I often change later.
Stanzas? Line breaks? Metaphors? Meter? All of that can wait; I like to work on structuring the narrative first when I try something in this vein, and I want to find images that might speak to a reader. So it is clear to me that this poem is not one I’ll have finished before the end of the 5-meetings-long workshop. Assuming I ever do finish it. Yes, poetry is hard work.
~
José Rodríguez y Cisneros, Havana Physician, Ships 55 Human Crania to Samuel George Morton, Anatomist (1840)
A Cuban journalist writes that by 1915 “The Vedado of my childhood was a sea rock over which the seagulls flew”
sandy, overgrown with Caleta sea grapes the nesting-place of rats, iguanas
but once a cemetery for paupers and bozales, the unbaptized, slaves, the suicides (define bozales?)
abandoned on this coast as carrion
where turkey vultures and wild dogs fed on corpses hastily interred
“el Pudridero” they called it— the rotting place— local people thought it cursed
for a more scientific-minded man, opportunity to harvest skulls for anatomic pursuits. Nameless, blameless nobodies
who were otherwise less than worthless:
the definition from a 19th century Spanish dictionary:
“bozales. A Negro recently removed from his [native] country— metaphorical and vernacular, one who is foolish or idiotic…
can be applied to wild horses.”
~~
*note~
“the Vedado Interment Site…originated as a sinkhole that came to be utilized as a mass grave…[the majority] of the Vedado Group likely consisted of enslaved people born in Africa during the early 19th century, most of whom died of infectious diseases soon after arriving in Cuba.” —John S. Michael
My freshman humanities professor, the brilliant, late Larry Fuchsberg, assigned Johan Huizinga‘s The Waning of the Middle Ages as one of the texts for our course…an unusual choice for American teens in 1975, as was another of our books, Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. At 17, I found Burckhardt rather slow going stylistically (it was published in 1860, after all); by comparison, Huizinga (circa 1919) was refreshingly clear. I really enjoyed it and learned a great deal. I kept meaning to read his 1938 book Homo Ludens, but for awhile it was difficult to find in libraries or bookstores. Also, I lacked the time to track it down or read it. The premise interested me, though–that we humans evolved our culture from the “pointless, imaginative” urge to play, and that play is fundamental to our learning and our social structures. Also, we are not mechanical beings–the messy frolicsome-ness of people is as necessary for our survival as food, water, and shelter.
“Animals play, so they must be more than merely mechanical things. We play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational.”
Finally, I’ve begun to read Homo Ludens, and it’s even on Amazon now; also I discovered that it exists online here thanks to Yale University. Fifty years after my initial encounter with the author, I find his thinking just as interesting as I did in college, and just as difficult. As in his other books, Huizinga uses etymology as one of his methods of examining the meaning and culture of play. He was writing for an audience that he assumed was well-educated in the classics, so there are passages in Greek, Latin, and French that neither he nor the English translator bothers to translate for less linguistically-adept readers like me. Fortunately, such passages are brief and are used as sources for his argument, and I’m not reading to find fault with his material. I’m interested in his argument and insights as a whole, and intrigued by his thinking. He apologizes for his lack of sources (ha! There are hundreds of them) because he was “working in haste.” He composed this book in the Netherlands as Germany began to be a serious threat to Europe, and he wanted to get his ideas in print before he was silenced. In fact, his last few years were difficult. He had used his standing as a well-known cultural historian to criticize the Nazis and was arrested in 1942, basically house arrest; he died in 1945 just before the war was over.
I’m only on Chapter 4 but am finding, in the etymological tracings of the words that intersect in meaning(s) for play–game, contest, gambol, gamble, dallying, tournament, match, riddle, performance, frolic, pretending, folly, fun, sport, etc.–fruitful stuff for poetry, for thinking about poems and about how poems work as craft, as poems, and as works of art and imagination. And also, what roles poems may play in culture today, and whether that differs at all from the role poetry played in ancient times. Huizinga writes:
“In the making of speech and language the spirit is continually ‘sparking’ between matter and mind, as it were, playing with this wondrous nominative faculty. Behind every abstract expression there lie the boldest of metaphors, and every metaphor is a play upon words. Thus in giving expression to life man creates second, poetic world alongside the world of nature.”
Language may not be necessary for play but can easily be incorporated into it, and language can become play. Or playful. I don’t know much about Wittgenstein, but I find myself thinking of his theory about words having “family resemblances” that often connect, overlap, shade meanings. So we get jokes, puns, flirting, mocking, and new “rules” for our language use that culture constantly shifts in all kinds of directions. Language is a game-changer, and poets make use of that.
I thank Larry Fuchsberg, musicologist, book-lover, and educator, for introducing me to Johan H. Teachers, you never know how much you may have influenced a student’s life, even decades later.
Qesra Îshaq Paşaor Ishak Pasha Palace, Ağrı Province, Turkey, Ottoman Empire, 17th c.
For a recent poem draft, I looked up the etymology of the word “magnificent” even though I was fairly sure I knew it. Like many words, its meaning has altered a bit over the centuries, but in this case less so than most: from the old French, from Latin, the root words for “great” and “make,” it formerly referred to great-mindedness, courage, nobility [per the Online Etymology Dictionary] and later gained the additional meaning of splendor or costliness; “Meaning ‘greatness of appearance or character, grandeur, glory’ in English is from late 14c.,” whereas later uses of the word carry connotations of architecture, expensive taste, grand works of a more human variety.
The draft I was working on was about Melville and whales, but of course thanks to stopping to look something up, I went down a research rabbit hole and ended up deciding that the magnificence whales possess would be more of the greatness of appearance sort and perhaps was not quite the way I want to describe whales. But the word did put me in mind of some of the monumental temples, mosaics, palaces, castles, and sculptures I saw in Turkey last month. Many of those are “magnificent,” but they act as reminders of how fleeting human magnificence is, in comparison to whales. Whales evolved into their modern form about 4 million years ago, long before humans were modern humans, let alone building palaces or temples to please the gods, intimidate their enemies or their subjects, or glorify and deify their kings.
The photo below is of the temple and perhaps the tomb of Antiochus I of Commagene (because archaeologists have so far discovered no actual tomb, the existence of said tomb is speculative, though the site is considered to be a hierothesion). The top of the hill is not natural but is a gravel tumulus. Human-made. Gravel hauled up the mountain to increase the size of the mountain and deter potential grave-robbers. Who else would do that work but slaves?
I know the theme’s been written into poetry before, but in these times it seems to bear repeating. Here’s an early draft I’ve been working on, in loose blank verse, in which I invoke a famous poet whose poem on the theme has lasted a mere two centuries. But that’s longer than many an empire has endured.
~
Hierothesion (Nemrut Dağ)
Tomb or temple, likely both, one king’s angling for a pantheon he’d crafted on his own, as kings will do when empire hardens in their veins. They turn to stone. Minions, memorize my name! (like Ozymandias, as Shelley can attest).
Tourists scale the tumulus and find, at sunrise, eagles, lions, and Apollo, gods of brokenness, unhumbled despite centuries of disregard. Extinct.
We know him not. And what has made us pause speaks not of his glory but of our dismay: how much purely human work, slaves’ toil and toll, it took, interring him this way, high up and rubble-laid, to raise him above all.
Where are those workers’ bones? We walk on them. This we know without a temple or a tomb.
Zeugma, an ancient city in what is now Türkiye’s Gaziantep Province, is near where we began our tour of a 2000-km section of the Silk Road trade route. The city’s name comes from the ancient Greek word for “bridge,” (it means to join or yoke together); the city was located on the Euphrates, where there was likely a floating bridge, like a barge or pontoon bridge, that enabled people, largely traders, to cross. Most of the ancient city is now left to underwater archeologists to examine, alas, since it lies beneath the new Biricek Dam.
Photo [Euphrates] by Fu0131rat Gedikou011flu on Pexels.com
Turkey itself is, and has ever been, a bridge–for trade, cultures, conquests, languages, religions: a place of shifting allegiances and changing empires. Arab traders brought Islam from the south, while Seljuk Turks brought their version of Islam from the northeast (Kyrgyzstan and the Turkic Khaganate, a region of Medieval-era Muslim nomadic groups with substantial dynasties and a loose empire that spanned into what is now China, hence the Uyghurs of today’s China). Earlier, the Christian gospel had arrived along the Mediterranean shores from Jerusalem and then probably through Syria to Ephesus, a Hellenic city south of Istanbul. St. Jude the Apostle/St. Thaddeus supposedly got as far as Şanlıurfa, then known as Edessa, where an early Armenian king converted to Christianity before 100 AD. So they say.
~~~
Our tour guide was excited when I told him that the word zeugma is used in poetry terminology. It’s a figure of speech in which words or images in a phrase are connected, often for humorous or ironic effect, as in a sentence such as: He lost his heart and his wallet at the stage door cafe. The word “lost” joins both heart and wallet. It acts as the bridge. It’s an intriguing little literary device that’s seldom the first thing I notice in a poem, but when I do identify it, I appreciate it. I like knowing the etymology, and I like knowing that I’ve been where the city was.
Joining and breaking apart and rejoining in new ways, Turkey spans cities, rivers, and eons.
At Şanlıurfa in the Urfa region, a Kurdish area in eastern Turkey, we stayed two nights after our visit to two amazing, ancient monuments that are really out in the middle of nowhere: Mt Nemrut Dağ (the tomb of Antiochus I) and Göbekli Tepe, a Neolithic site of the Stone Mound Culture, both Unesco World Heritage sites. I remember reading about the discovery of Göbekli Tepe in the early 1990s, when German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt began excavations there; the “buzz” at the time was that these megaliths mark the earliest temple or place of community worship ever recorded [ca. 9000 BC]. Since then, new discoveries unearthed at Göbekli Tepe, as well as discoveries of similar sites (such as Karahan Tepe, which we later visited) in the region, have somewhat altered Schmidt’s original speculations.
It appears now that people lived here at least part of the time, though until these discoveries, historians assumed humans in the pre-pottery Neolithic Era were hunter-gatherer nomads who did not build permanent structures. Our guide told us the current thinking is that the buildings here played some sort of role in preparing young men for adulthood–almost all of the reliefs and statuary portray male figures and male animals. But it is early yet to guess, and besides, we can never know for certain.
But there are cisterns, a system that distributed water through tunnels, containers that have traces of grains and, yes, beer. Back to the argument of which came first to humans: Bread or beer. My money is on beer. *
But to back up a few hours–first, we rose at 5 am so that we could take the circuitous drive up the mountainside to Nemrut Dağ, a relatively youthful site built around 60 BC, presumably by Antiochus I, who was connecting a slew of peoples and cultures together in a kind of Iranian-Hellenic-Armenian-etc. aggregation in a move toward empire at a time of Roman ascendancy. Commagene is the Romanized name used for this ancient region, which was a merger of Persian and Hellenic areas once Alexander the Great’s empire had disintegrated. Antiochus married a Cappadocian princess and had big plans, but his empire did not last long after his death; by 29 BC, his sons had died or been executed.
The path we walked up to get to the tumulus, 6:45am; my photo
And then over time, this huge tomb monument was forgotten until its rediscovery in the 1880s. The region feels deserted and surreal, and the climb up to the tumulus–though there is now a partially paved path–is long, the wind swirling around, full of dust. My sunhat blew off my head even though I had a neck strap. I guess that was my offering to the ancient king.
What an astonishing place it is, especially at dawn, and despite a fair but not overwhelming number of tourists.
~
Monuments are a step toward writing: they tell stories, written in stone with picture images, because the stories we tell or sing with our human voices don’t leave much of a record for cultures other than our own. I found myself wondering what the poets of these ancient places said or sang, and how their language sounded, and whether I would feel exhilarated or moved by those lays had I been there.
And at Göbekli Tepe, when I learned about the cisterns that contained beer, I thought of a poem I’d written some years ago after visiting a Mesopotamian exhibit at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. So with a bit of awe and a bit of tongue in cheek, I’ll post it here. [It initially appeared in Mezzo Cammin.]
~
*Porter, Stout, & Mesopotamian Deity
Sisters, let us raise a glass to agriculture, to dark brew made possible by wooden hoes, by seed-gatherers: me and you, our aunts, foremothers, those who stayed, patient, and grew grains, diverted rain, winnowed, boiled, fermented mash, who certainly invented ale. For we descend from goddess Ninkasi who nourished babies through breast milk fortified by beer and whose forgotten virtue we revive, consuming her.
~~
Thanks to copyright-free photos from Pexels since my own photos are snapshots taken with an out of date cell phone.
I’m embarrassed to note that the name of Proust evokes hilarity in my two (adult) children, since they immediately think of the Monty Python skit (see it here). Needless to say, neither of them has read Proust; but at least they have some familiarity with the famous writer, so I’m not a total failure as an educational model for my kids.
I read the novel(s) at age 19 or 20 and was entranced. Probably that indicates a kind of romantic nerdiness on my part as well as a love of words, of art and music, evocative sentences, descriptive prose, complex emotional situations, history, and confusion about the world of adults I was at that time entering. That I stuck it out through all seven volumes of the Scott Moncrieff translation says something about my persistence with literature and the beauty of that translation. [The Public Domain Review has a nice overview essay on Moncrieff here.] In the decades that followed, I kept meaning to re-read In Search of Lost Time; but it’s quite a commitment and, let’s face it, that is the sort of plan one tends to postpone.
But I began the task this summer with the Lydia Davis translation of Swann’s Way, though I may move on with the Moncrieff editions if that’s what I can find at the library. (Somewhere in my attic is the three-volume Mitchell edition, but I started that years ago and found I didn’t like his approach.) I suppose a first-time reader might want to experience the books all through the same translator, but even the Moncrieff doesn’t succeed in that since he died before he got to Time Regained. The new Penguin series, for example, has a different translator for each book.
Ah, the difficulties of translation. If only I could read French!
During the past decade, I have done a smattering of re-reading novels (and poetry collections) that I first read in my late teens or very early 20s: Tolstoy, Woolf, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Blake, Atwood, LeGuin, among others. It’s always interesting to re-read a book that I haven’t read in decades because, although the book has not changed, this reader has, to some extent at least. Fewer allusions and implications go over my head, for one thing. The motivations of mature characters make more sense now, and the yearnings and errors of youthful characters, while sentimental and familiar, seem distant; also, I have a better sense of the historical eras in which these novels were set or written. As a teenage girl in the USA in the late 1970s I had very little background in the social strata of fin desiècle France or of Russia during the Napoleonic Wars, or even of Victorian Britain, yet the authors swept me up in the petty striving and the political aspects of their worlds…and the difficulties involved in surmounting them, achieving them, or living outside of society’s expectations.
For all that I may be the wiser now, and can pick up more of the irony and humor, and more of the ‘adult themes’ (for example, until I was 17 or so I knew absolutely nothing about homosexuality), it is still the beauty of the prose and the rhythmic sweep of sentences and paragraphs that get me wrapped up in a book like this one. Besides, I love art and artists, architecture and music, and evocative descriptions of landscapes and gardens just as much now as I did then–possibly even more. Proust introduced me to so much when I was first reading these novels. Because of him, I read Racine, and Zola, and art criticism of the early 19th century, and looked at Impressionist painting in a new way, and recalled to mind the one trip I have ever taken to France (three years earlier, at age 16) as his novels described the Champs-Elysées, the Louvre, Versailles, the streets and parks of Paris’ arrondissements, and the villages in the countryside through which we had driven in a rented Opel.
Now, those recollections of France are dim. And the world has changed in 50 years. Proust knew: if I were to return, I would not be likely to reclaim my past–possibly not even remember it. France would be new to me, which is an idea I rather like. Possibly I’ll go back; in the meantime, I will relish the remembrance of reading what I have read in the past.
ann e michael 