"All changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born."

I am rereading Yeats' "Easter 1916" along with a commentary on it, and thinking about how the words "terrible beauty" came to mind looking at the ruins of the Twin Towers and  video of 9/11. The fascination people ("we") feel, replaying the event mentally, our total recall years later of where we were when, the promptness with which pretty much everyone can remember and recount "their" 9/11. What's the compulsion to say "I was there'?

Here's what Langdon Hammer has to say about "Easter 1916" in a Yale University lecture I happened upon:

"How can something be changed utterly? [...] I said that Yeats looks on the modern with a sense of both horror and a fascination, a compulsion almost. Well, it's a "terrible beauty" he sees that draws him in this way. He sees, specifically, the passion of the revolutionary's act and he finds it beautiful. Yeats aestheticizes their political action. He finds beauty in it, it seems even or especially because it is terror-filled... ".

No one could write a poem like "Easter 1916" or even Auden's "September 1, 1939" today. Not using that tone. Many more layers of irony--and a different kind of irony from either Yeats's or Auden's--are required. You'd have to examine much more closely, and more skeptically, our fascination with the terror and the beauty, the passion of people ready to die for what they believe. Yeats believes in heroes, even as he questions his own admiration and their actions; Auden knowingly left his shield on the battlefield and writes about that, and then later, tellingly, about "The Shield of Achilles." Zbigniew Herbert, whose position and language I feel sympathy for, in "Five Men" shows us prisoners the night before they are to be shot, talking about "an escapade in a brothel / of automobile parts /...how vodka is best / after wine you get a headache...":

          five men 

          two of them very young 

          the others middle-aged

          nothing more

          can be said about them

Yeats and Auden, like Paul Muldoon, are virtuoso writers of verse. Herbert has another esthetic--Herbert couldn't have written the poems he wrote using the vision and highly-wrought language of Yeats, Auden or Muldoon. Beckett had to bar that language too. Where am I going with this? 

May 1 in the south of France

Strange how you can be here and there. Here, California, where my neighbour's tree is casting large shadows on the back of his very blue house (I've only ever seen a man about). There, the Vaucluse, where my daughter is spending a few days, and sends another picture of flowers, a rose and an iris. The scorched lampshade is a remnant of family history.

Wild flowers, the Vaucluse

Somewhere, recently, I read how John Cage, living in a cacaphonous place, decided to use the noise, not hate it.  

I think of this when I think of the differences between the sounds of living in a Bay Area suburb (commuter train whistle, leafblowers, birds, dogs, a bicycle swishing past) and living in downtown Paris (jackhammers, bells, honking cars, loud arguments, one-sided (cell phone) or two (homeless person with passerby). On the whole I prefer the multi-layered city noises...

My science writer daughter (@catBrahic) is in the south of France for a few days, picking field flowers, even if--I think--the weather has been wet and/or windy. Here's today's bouquet: 

Blanchot, The Book to Come

Reading vol. 3 of Beckett's letters, I come across an admiring reference to Blanchot's The Book to Come (1959, for the original French) and borrow it from the library. The due date sticker in the inside back cover--this sticker, which belongs to the glue-and-paper economy, is an astonishing remnant of childhood libraries, the due-date card, not glued in, but sitting in its manilla pocket--the due date stickers in Blanchot show that this book has been checked out and in many times. Often, when I check out a book, a poetry book, for instance, I  notice that I am the only person who has ever checked that particular book out, and I wonder how many writers go to libraries and surreptitiously see how often their books have been borrowed. 

Blanchot,  page 110 (English translation) :  "Each time that in some new book we grasp again the solitary and silent assertion of the novel understood as the exception...we experience the feeling of a promise and the exultant impression that a new writer, having touched a limit, has succeeded in displacing it and perhaps in fixing it further ahead. [...] These works are rare, fugitive. [...] Some are modest. But all, even the ones that efface themselves, have this strength that comes from a new contact with 'reality'."

It occurs to me that Knaussgaard's My Struggle may be one of these books.

Sunday sounds

Sirens in the distance: I picture big red trucks racing somewhere. We hear them far less often now that we aren't living on the university campus, where they seemed to respond to several proto-emergencies a day in our neighbourhood of fraternity houses and eco-Franco-Italian-mitteleuropa residences. Figures, I guess. All those high-risk 20-year-olds.

Birds. Caltrain, whistling its way from San Francisco to San Jose, probably pretty empty on weekends, but full of commuters other days. It whooshes by two blocks west of us and there are level crossings everywhere with barriers that clang up and down. Every now and then a car gets stuck on the tracks in rush hour and, sadly, more often, someone jumps in front of the train, so the drivers are understandingly anxious. But at other times, the whistle sounds like an old time train whistle crossing the Canadian Prairies, then the Rocky Mountains and pulling into the old station in downtown Vancouver. When I was a student I used to work summers at a lodge in the Rockies and when we were off work we'd go into town and eat soft ice cream and watch the train go through. Steam. With porters.

Reading Le Monde this morning, I see that Saint Exupéry is the favourite author of French high school students, which reminds me of how much I loved his books when I was twenty and makes me wonder what it was about them. Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des hommes): the lyrical Sahara desert landscape, I think. Maybe the affinity with night skies and the flat prairie wheat fields of Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Making it last

I interrupt a reading of Michael Hofmann's TLS review of Brecht ("Rescuing Brecht," 14 August 2014) to think what a pleasure it is to read Hofmann when, rarely, he can be wholeheartedly enthusiastic. It's not so funny, maybe, but it is more moving, and he does praise as beautifully as he does disparagement and is convincing in both modes (worth mentioning because William Logan is not especially good at praise, as his article on Pound in this month's New Criterion demonstrates, again).

It rained the night before last. I had almost forgotten the sound. I had got up for a pee and I lay down on the living room floor with the door to the deck open a crack--it has turned cold--and listened to it for a while, then went back to bed and listened to it some more. When I was growing up in British Columbia, I don't think I would ever have thought that one day I would love the sound of rain--the rain that produced Emily Carr's dark, sun-filtered Douglas fir rain forests-- but I do.

Hiatus

Last week--no, make that last, last week--I was in Park City, Utah for five days, not shovelling snow--there's not been much precipitation in Utah this winter, any more than in California. I went for walks on the high desert hillsides near my daughter's home, hoping I might bump into a moose, but settling for scrub oak and sagebrush. The sagebrush is dusty grey-blue, the scrub oak still leafless, spiky, rough-barked and covered with orange lichen. It's only slightly taller than my head (I'm 5'6) when I'm walking and you wouldn't think it would provide cover for a moose, but it does, so I was keeping my eye on my daughter's two black labs when they darted off into the thickets. But no moose, only other dogs and humans running, walking, on dirt bikes. The sky was that incredibly solid blue that my mother always used to refer to as 'prairie sky' as she looked with some disdain at our west coast cloud cover, up in Vancouver.

Larkin

I've been reading bits of Larkin lately. A couple of years ago I left my thick, cumbersome Collected on the shelf in Paris and brought the thin individual books back to California, and it's a pleasure to take down The Whitsun Weddings with its old foxed, crumbly paper. The price tag, red, is in pounds, but I forget where and when I bought it. But I like the size of it, especially compared with increasingly thick books of contemporary poetry (including a couple doorstops I'm reviewing at the moment) with far too many poems.

But what I wanted to say is that I used to find Larkin condescending, and now I think that less. I see where the personal enters poems that once seemed to me to be looking critically at others: "Faith Healing," for instance, which I've just reread. It's a poem about gullibility, and desire, perhaps based on a tv broadcast, and Larkin, when I look close, is himself there is the sheepish crowd of desirers. I might not have seen that before.

          . . .  An immense slackening ache,

As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,

Spreads slowly through them--that, and the voice above

Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.