“degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation”

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Described as a sequel to his memoir, My Bright Abyss, I shall be reading backwards, getting to the prequel after He Held Radical Light, which I’ve just finished reading three times, back to back.

Wiman is a poet wrestling with spiritual matters yet nothing to him is more central and worthy of attention than the raw facts of living. His optimistic thesis is that no one is spiritually so out of reach as to be forever removed from communication with things infinite and mystical.

“I’m usually suspicious of claims that privilege one generation’s experience, always of some form of suffering, over another’s. (Why do we never compare our joys or our relative capacities for experiencing joy?) Contemporary culture is awash with anxiety over the disease of anxiety, the endless onslaught of technology, and the diminishment of individual attention our electronic immersion entails. It’s a genuine problem, no question, one I feel myself, but it’s not as new or as dependent upon contemporary technology as we make it out to be. Way back in 1790, in his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” Wordsworth decried the “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation” against which his poetry–interior, meditative, focussed on common people and things–was trying to find an audience. The argument is more eloquent and sophisticated than we’re used to, but the heart of his critique would make a fine tweet.”

Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light

That Feeling of Collusion With Eternity

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This is good. I couldn’t resist posting the opening of Christian Wiman’s latest memoir. I’ve been unable to sleep and stuck on this first page. Old oatmeal is near perfect. By coincidence, but unsurprisingly, Wiman is devoted and frustrated in equal parts by the work of Simone Weil.

“I stayed up late last night reading the letters of A. R. Ammons, who for years sowed and savored his loneliness in lonely Ithaca. “Keep Ithaka always in your mind,” wrote Constantin Cavafy, ‘Arriving there is what you’re destined for.” And he did, Ammons, keep that mythical Ithaka in his mind, which is to say in his poems, decade after decade of diaristic ramblings that are as flavorless as old oatmeal this morning, as null and undifferentiated as deep space—then lit up suddenly by a meteoric masterpiece that must have surprised the workaday writer as much as it does the fatigued reader. It is heroic and it is pathetic, like the life of any real writer, I suppose, all the waste space one fills as one can, some with silence, which is often excruciating for the writer, some with noise, which passes that agony along to the reader. And all for what? Those moments of mysterious intrusion, that feeling of collusion with eternity, of life and language riled to the one wild charge:

THE CITY LIMITS

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold

itself but pours its abundance without selection into every

nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds’ bones make no awful noise against the light but

lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider

the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,

not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider

the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped

guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no

way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,

each is accepted into as much light as it will take, thenk

the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark

work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes

and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.”

Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light

Ceridwen Dovey on J. M. Coetzee

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The works of J. M. Coetzee, whom Ceridwen Dovey would discover through her mother’s references to a “mysterious man whom she referred to only as ‘J.M.'”, are fully literature, but could without error be placed in many other sections of the library. He therefore presents a complex task for a critic. For Coetzee’s works are also replete with quasi-religious  and national myths, quasi-rhetorical speeches, fictionalised autobiography, ethics, metaphysics and psychology. The ideal critic must try to equal his breadth of concerns as well as his psychological depths. It isn’t surprising that most critics fail to write intelligently about Coetzee’s work. However many times you read his books, there is always more to question, more to try to understand.

For Ceridwen Dovey, in her beautifully presented book, part of a Writers on Writers series, interpretation is not her challenge. She does not ask us to believe anything. Her mother, who is truly the book’s subject, a Coetzee scholar, stops trying to unpick his work: “She now thinks that applying theory to his novels, using reasoned critical discourse to dismantle and decode them, may have been fundamentally against the grain of what the novels themselves ask for.” It is a perfect conclusion to a book Dovey has clearly enjoyed writing, in which readers are not bullied into taking a writer’s line and are instead encouraged to think for themselves.

A Dialogue of Sorts

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“Living reading . . . strikes me as a mysterious affair. It involves finding one’s way into the voice that speaks from the page, the voice of the Other, and inhabiting that voice, so that you speak to yourself (your self) from outside yourself. The process is thus a dialogue of sorts, though an interior one.”

–J. M. Coetzee, Arabella Kurtz, The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy

It is strange and satisfying when one comes across a passage in support of an earlier conversation, in this case with my daughter over breakfast this morning. She referred to an idea I once expressed that fiction is the only way to inhabit momentarily the filter of the Other, something I no longer believe. An act of deep empathy perhaps but still merely a dialogue with oneself.

Recent Arrivals: Notebooks, Copernicus and Research

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My attraction to Simone Weil’s work is deepening the more I read. I couldn’t resist the notebooks. Her reading of Plato is sending me back to his work, which I haven’t revisited much since my twenties. I’ve written a rather dodgy post on Weil and Plato. I may or may not post it here, but am fascinated by her argument that Plato was deeply influential on the medieval Christian mystics.

I am not especially religious (though not an atheist), but alongside Weil I am enjoying an exploration of much earlier Christian mystics (is Weil a mystic?) like St John of the Cross. So much we simply cannot know; as Heidegger said somewhere, it is quite possible that human thought is at only a rudimentary level.

The other two are continuations of my tumbling headlong down a rabbit-hole propelled by Maria Gabriela Llansol’s Book of Communities. Emily Dickinson’s influence on Llansol is clear.

Attachment: Flattery

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“Flattery, injurious as it is, can injure no one, except him who accepts it and is pleased with it. And so it happens that the man who flatters himself and is most highly pleased with himself, listens with the greatest eagerness to flatterers.”

— Cicero, De Amicitia, trans. Cyrus R. Edmonds, in Friendship: Marcus Tullius Cicero, Francis Bacon, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Recent Arrivals: Poets, Essays, Letters

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Carcanet is one of my favourite publishers, with the recent wonderful Carcanet Classics series, and these recent additions to my library.

With a taste for H.D.’s work sharpened by the first twenty pages of Bid Me to Live, her lightly fictional autobiography, these three books will form part of an immersive reading, probably in the early part of next year. H.D.’s engagement with mythology and Hellenic literature is extra compelling.

C.H. Sisson wrote a brilliant essay in the 4th edition of what was Poetry Nation (1975) magazine (now PN Review) on H.D.’s work. I am interested to read more of his literary essays.

W.S. Graham’s collection of letters was irresistibly reviewed on the Carcanet blog recently.

Ceridwen Dovey writing about one of my favourite writers, J.M. Coetzee, was equally compelling, despite having to have it shipped from Australia.