Comparatively Speaking

People surprised by the demand for literary command performance react in different ways. Chaucer’s Pardoner, called upon to tell a tale and at least affecting the need for inspiration, turns to alcohol to warm himself up for a splendid sermon on the evils of drink. The pub sign of the Middle Ages was often a large wreath or garland hung from a pole. It was called a “bush” or an “ale-stake”. Seeing one just ahead of them on the road, the Pardoner agrees to tell a tale.

Fourteenth-century English public house with "bush" or ale-stake

“But first,” quod he, “here at this ale-stake

I wol both drinke, and eten of a cake.

... I must thinke

Upon some honest thing, while that I drinke.

Fortunately or unfortunately I gave up drinking corny ale (the Pardoner’s poison of choice) long ago, but I tend to swallow a lot of water when swimming, and that turns out to be just as good for inspirational purposes. I’m sure you are following this effortlessly, but I shall nevertheless explain in more detail.

Let’s be frank. Your bloguiste is in some disarray. Joan is in the south of France at some kind of string quartet boot camp. I fly to France myself a week from today. I have been dealing with the aftermath of a cyclone and various other domestic matters. Mainly, though, I’ve been working like a dog, presumably a Labrador (get it?, get it?), to finish a book. Other matters have vacated my mind. One night I even forgot to eat—and for me, that’s serious distraction.

Early this morning I opened my email to find, among other things, a very nice note from an eminent former colleague and friend with whom I had been long out of touch. Her note was a delightful surprise, but it packed an unintended wallop. In it she kindly alluded to reading “Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche”. With a feeling akin to that of remembering, in the down time of the security line at Newark Airport, that you failed to turn the oven off before you rushed out your house, I realized that today is Wednesday. Wednesday is blog day. Oh, stercus.

All was not lost, however. My early morning swim still awaited me. In theory one could drown in the pool, but the more realistic lethal threat comes from the boredom. The boredom can be neutralized, however, by using the time to think, and especially to think about writing projects underway. One often glimpses through the fog of the goggles the word one has been searching for, or the perfect path to a troubling paragraph transition. I didn’t know how good it would be in providing an actual subject to write about, but I was willing to give it a try. I began by trying to reconstruct my thoughts where I left them after yesterday morning’s sixtieth lap.

There were two of them--thoughts, I mean. The first concerned some proof sheets in hand for an essay I had written about Louis Fischer. The second had to do with unlikely or inequitable literary comparison. In a very witty ode (III, 26) Horace compares an aging lover who is throwing in the erotic towel, so to speak, with a superannuated soldier who abandons his weapons. The old lover’s weapon has been his barbiton (lyre or guitar) used in the execution of his love poems. He hangs this up on the wall of a temple of Venus, the goddess he has served. In a most astonishing and brilliant way “my” poet of the moment, Luis de Camões, fuses this image with the psalmist’s famous lines about the Hebrew captives in Babylon: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows in the midst thereof we hung up our instruments…” (Psalm 136[7]: 1-2). I realized that in this odd collocation lay a blog topic, or at least an anecdote.

Louis Fischer (1896-1970)

Q: Who was Louis Fischer? A: a famous political journalist and Soviet expert who ended his career in Princeton, and whose papers are in the archives of the library. He is often regarded as a Great Man, though I tend to take a dim view of his decade-long useful idiocy as a Stalinist toady. In that regard he makes a few appearances in my Anti-Communist Manifestos. Useful idiocy, while not a requirement for appointment to our Woodrow Wilson School, has rarely proved to be an obstacle; and in the late Sixties Louis Fischer was a Great Man right here on the Princeton campus. He was also a friend of an unambiguously Great Man at the Institute for Advanced Study—George Kennan.

Svetlana Alliluyeva

In 1967 Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter, “defected” to the United States. Soon thereafter she came to Princeton, primarily under the sponsorship of Ambassador Kennan. She became friendly, briefly, with Fischer, thirty years her senior. This is not the Drudge Report, and I say no more. You need to be introduced to but one more character, and then we can move on to the anecdote. That person is the beautiful, colorful, wonderful and much lamented one-time mayor of Princeton, the late Barbara Sigmund. Mayor Sigmund came from a famous political family. Her father was Hale Boggs, Democrat of Louisiana, and majority leader of the House of Representatives. Her sister is Cokie Roberts, the eminent journalist and pundit.

Hale Boggs (1914-1972)

On Tuesday, August 27, 1968, in Chicago, the Democratic Party began what was probably the most disastrous political convention in history. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had both been murdered earlier in the year. Protest against the Vietnam War was widespread and often ferocious. Bearing the gavel for many of the televised parts of the event was the estimable Democratic leader of the House, Hale Boggs. Mayor Daley’s police and left-wing rioters battled in the streets.

The actual nomination of the heir presumptive, Hubert Humphrey, was to take place on Wednesday night, August 28. One of the Princeton Russia experts, of whom there were many, thought it would be a very good idea to have a party that night to watch the coronation on television. To it he invited many eminences and a couple of obscure assistant professors. The eminences included Fischer, Kennan, Barbara Sigmund and Svetlana Alliluyeva, the idea being that while sipping Chablis and munching carrot sticks Svetlana would be able to watch some real Democracy in Action.

Chicago: 28 August 1968, "The whole world is watching"

As the evening got going the television cameras divided their time more or less evenly between the interior and the exterior of the convention hall. In the interior the venerable Hale Boggs droned on in his folksy bayou tones, recognizing the delegate from the Great State of This, and complimenting the gentlelady from the Great State of That. Then the cameras would move to the street outside, where the storm troopers were beating the stercus out of an assortment of hippies, yippies, SDSers, and the inevitable unlucky people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This was what you might call bad press, a poor show for Democracy, and especially the Democratic part thereof. The demonstrators on the screen were screaming, "The whole world is watching!" Certainly our little part of it was. The sipping and nibbling ceased; all eyes turned to the television set. Barbara Sigmund began to complain in voluble tones that it was unfair of the newscasters to suggest by the alteration of their images that there was some connection between her innocent father and the mayhem in front of the Hilton.

“They’re going to blame it on daddy,” she said. She repeated the phrase a couple of times more. “Blame it on daddy….blame it on daddy…” Then, remembering the party’s distinguished guest, she turned to Svetlana and said, “But I guess you know all about that, huh, honey?” Svetlana said nothing, but her mien was eloquent. If lèse-majesté were still on the statute books, here was an open-and-shut case. Imagine comparing the crimes of the great Stalin with a little bit of police brutality in Chicago! It would be like comparing the Hebrew captives of Babylon with some over-the-hill Roman guitar plucker.

As Cicero once remarked when he found himself in a difficult blog-spot: "If I had had more time, this would have been a shorter letter."

The Tornado of Twenty Ten

The world-wide “extreme weather” events (Wimbledon heat waves, Pakistani floods, etc.) that some are quick to declare portents of a generalized Global Warming have manifested themselves in central Jersey in the qualities of hot and dry—the “choleric” temperament of the old humors theory, the one rather disgustingly ordered by the “yellow bile”. The summer heat, though more oppressive than usual, has been less remarkable than the drought. Lawns are dead, trees dying; even my impatiens are barely hanging on in a state of shriveled, minimalist exhaustion. It was almost thrilling, therefore, when about two in the afternoon on Monday my keen weather sense intuited the certainty of impending rain.

By about three forty-five the atmosphere was unpleasantly sultry, nearly dripping, and there began a modest rumbling of thunder. The sky, however, was ambiguous, not to say schizophrenic. In the north there was a bank of heavy clouds, darkening dramatically toward the horizon. To the south, however, the welcoming welkin was bright, and much of it actually blue. The air suddenly felt much fresher, drier. At about four I stepped out into the backyard, put my infallible weather nose in the air, assessed the ambiguities, and came to a sad conclusion that it was yet another instance of big wind-up, no delivery. I returned to the house and reported my definitive diagnosis to my wife. “Honey,” I said, “we’re not going to get a single drop of rain out of all this.”

My sentence was punctuated by a strange crackling sound and the immediate extinction of all electric light. (The sound was later identified by an eyewitness as a lightning bolt blasting an electrical transformer about a hundred and fifty yards down the road.) Then all hell broke loose. First came torrents of rain so heavy that despite the fact that the downspouts were all reasonably clear, cascades of water begin pouring over all the overwhelmed gutters, rather as though one had turned the full power of a fire hose into a bathroom sink. The trunk of the one oak tree close enough to the house for me to see became the bed of a vertical river that swelled and bubbled as it crashed to earth. Then came the wind, blowing due south into the no longer blue yonder and carrying with it twigs, limbs, and branches that clicked and clacked, and banged against our flat roof before flying, falling, tumbling into the lower garden. At the extreme end of the garden I saw the top of a tall conifer jerk and bend violently southward, never to right itself. Then there was a tiny bit of hail drumming against the skylights. Then, abruptly, wind and rain ceased; there was a preternatural calm. I stepped out to the front of the house and saw the spectacular wake of the Tornado of Twenty Ten.

Bloguiste as Joyce Kilmer contemplates nearly lethal linden (Photo credit: friend/neighbor Carolyn Guile)

About two hundred yards of Hartley Avenue was now a mini-Dunsinane of fallen trees. Two trees in my own front yard had lost significant parts, but that was as nothing to the vast linden that had just missed the house and had, in its uprooting, undermined one of my stone walls. Greater chaos still waited me behind the house. My last viable ornamental tree had been halved, and a huge pine in the compost compound lay splintered like a dry twig. My first sensation was of shock. It should have been of gratitude. Neither we nor our next-door neighbors the Browns had any damage to our dwellings.

The utilities were not just out. They were down and out. The utility pole that channels our electric main plus all the telephone and electronic stuff lay shattered in four pieces at the mouth of the driveway. I was pretty sure none of the wires was hot, but half the people accidentally electrocuted in this country share that comforting view almost to the end. So I didn’t mess. The little girls were just getting home from their day camps. It was a major palaver negotiating police barriers and blocked off roads, and we then faced the daunting task of an impromptu candlelight supper.

One hears a lot of rude comment concerning the quality of our utilities services, but you won’t hear much from me any more. Before nightfall the first PSEG crew had arrived. These guys couldn’t begin to work on the wires until they had cleared the trees. So literally all night long, from dusk to dawn, large men made grotesquely larger by their padded, brightly florescent safety gear, stalked up and down the arboreal highway with screaming chainsaws, the whole surreal tableau illuminated by powerful searchlights mounted on the cabs of trucks. At dawn a new set of trucks arrived, this time to begin hauling away the mountains of dismembered green. Less than twenty-four hours after the big blow, the electricity was up and running again. Telephones, internet, and all that--a different story. That's why I'm writing this blog post in the library.

I spent the years of my boyhood in places like Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Tornadoes were common. At least that's what everybody said. I never experienced one first hand. Not until I was happily retired in suburban New Jersey, that is.

The tree as it appeared yesterday (above) and in a previous blog (below)

The American Dream

Variations on a dream

The fancy word for today—for surely every blog post must have at least one--will be oneirocriticism, which means the evaluation or interpretation of dreams. Dreams are on my mind for a couple of reasons. Last week I had the rare experience of seeing a current movie--Inception. It's all about dreams--I think. I didn't like it very much, but that is probably because I didn't understand it. Had I understood it, I'm sure I would have hated it. The other reason is the very particular dream I have in mind: viz., the American Dream. For of late the American Dream seems to have been everywhere in the news and the columns of pundits, and usually in a pessimistic context. “The American Dream has soured,” writes one eminent pundit. When compared with his political ideas, his apparent belief that the verb to sour is an acceptable predicate for a sentence in which the subject is the noun “dream” seems nearly plausible. Dreams would seem also to be mobile. “The American Dream is increasingly moving out of reach for most Americans,” writes another. Finally a third says that “for people like these [unemployed citizens and real estate bankrupts] the American Dream has become a nightmare.” There is a minority report from an optimist. “Obama Care extends the American Dream for millions.”

From all this it is obvious at least that few agree as to what the American Dream is (or was), presenting us with a most difficult problem of oneirocriticism. In my work as a medievalist I soon discovered that the old ways of thinking about dreams were very different from those of Freud or Jung. To the ancients, including the biblical writers, dreams had a definite, concrete, objective meaning independent of the dreamer and decipherable by the wise, the inspired, or simply the properly educated. It was probably toward the end of the second century of the Christian era that the Greek Atemidorus of Daldis published his famous Oneirocritica, a hefty encyclopedia of dream meanings that drew on an already rich literature and wielded a large influence on dream experts well into the Renaissance. In the Latin sphere the great expert was the grammarian Macrobius whose commentary on the Dream of Scipio (a part of Cicero’s lost “version” of Plato’s Republic) was still regarded as authoritative in the eighteenth century. Macrobius had a much subtler sense of taxonomy than did Artemidorus, but the two were in basic agreement that to dream of an eagle meant one thing, to dream of blood another. The meanings were part of a sign system, like conventional language, not the manifestations of the unique psychology of an individual dreamer.

As Freudians or post-Freudians, we no longer believe that. Seven fat cows are a good sign, and seven skinny ones a bad sign (Genesis 41:17)? That primitive level of oneirocriticism wouldn’t get you a B in a freshman literature class, but in the Bible it’s enough to make you vizier of Egypt. And if dreams are as cut-and-dried as the folks who write about the American Dream seem to believe, why not? One pundit tells me that the 1950s “were the heyday of the American Dream.” If so, I must be one of the original American dreamers, as I graduated from high school in 1954 and from college in 1958. Among the meanings of the American Dream at that time were the following: (1) a detached house with a garage, with a Chevrolet car therein; (2) an abstract confidence that each new generation of Americans would have a “better life” than their parents, particularly with regard to detached houses and Chevrolet cars.

Here the wisdom of our founders once again shines through. They created a Constitution designed to give concrete expression to the abstractions of the Declaration of Independence. The “inalienable rights” specifically enumerated in that document are only three: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That last phrase, the “pursuit of happiness”, was a last-minute substitution for another more frequently used by the enlightened politicians of the eighteenth century: “the possession of property”. But though Jefferson and his friends knew that a citizen had a right to possess property, that was different from a guarantee that a citizen would have property. Actually owning property depended upon many variables, such as individual initiative, labor, thrift, and so forth—variables within the realm of what was called “moral philosophy” rather than the realm of governmental arrangement.

You have no right to happiness, but you do have a right to pursue happiness. That, in my view, is the “American Dream,” and it is just as real (or unreal) as it ever was. I know for a fact that my father never had an annual income in excess of $10,000. I am far less confident in claiming that I have had a “better life” than he. The American Dream has more to do with the quality of aspiration than the fact of achievement. The concept seems to hover between the subjectivity of suggestion and the objectivity of definition, which is to say between the Freudian and the Artemidorian. Nor does it have all that much to do with American exceptionalism. “Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?” Robert Browning, a Victorian Englishman, wrote that in the voice of an imagined Renaissance Italian. In the more modern idiom Oscar Hammerstein came pretty close in South Pacific (1949):

Happy talk, keep talkin' happy talk,
Talk about things you'd like to do.
You got to have a dream,
If you don't have a dream
How you gonna have a dream come true?

But Bloody Mary’s prerequisite for that is “No think about Philadelphia—it’s no good.”

In the political commentary of the moment I find a disturbing suggestion that the American Dream can be or should be guaranteed by acts of our Congress. Yes, the United States Congress, with its approval rating hovering around seventeen percent! It can’t even effect a self-respecting nightmare. But if the reality cannot achieve the dream, let the dream be defined in terms of the reality.

There is an anecdote about a Communist organizer orating to a group of exploited garment workers on the lower East Side in the early Thirties. “Come the revolution,” he said, “you will all be eating chocolate cake!”

“But what if you don’t happen to like chocolate cake?” asked a contrarian from the shop floor.

“Come the revolution,” said the organizer, “you will like chocolate cake.”

Blogger on the Roof

Luke and Melanie with flower-girl Lulu (Photo credit: Mother of the Groom)

Well, the previously undisclosed location was Greenville, South Carolina, and the significant event was the wedding of Melanie Allison Dean to Luke Owles Fleming on July 31, 2010. The pseudo-mystery was an indulgence granted to the groom by his bloguiste father. When I touched upon this blessed event in an earlier blog posting the nervous groom became a little skittish. As an anthropologist he was aware of numerous cultures in which such a blatant advertisement of future happiness might be considered rash; and without quite invoking the concept of taboo, he preferred that I exercise discretion. But now that the happiness is no longer potential and prospective but actual and operative, let me shout, or even fiddle it from the cybernetic rooftop.

The bride and groom are two of the finest and, in every sense of the word, the most beautiful young people I have been honored to know in a long career spent among fine young people; and that’s a judgment that can survive an obligatory parental-pride reduction of fifty percent. I can mention one quite objective criterion, and that is the quality of their close friends in attendance. Many of them were fellow Ph.D’s in anthropology or South Asian Studies. All of them were alert, morally engaged, fascinating conversationalists. If you spend a certain amount of time worrying about the Decline of Practically Everything, as I tend to do, a weekend spent among some of America’s finest youth is a salutary tonic!

I had last been in Greenville in 1952. Needless to say a lot has changed. A slightly seedy mill town in decline has been transformed by civic imagination and a spectacular architectural intervention into a very happening downtown. It centers upon the waterfalls of the Reedy River, anciently used as a source of mill power, around which a nearly perfect mix of green space and tasteful commercial development offers a variety of attractions from the cultural to the gastronomic. And speaking of the gastronomic Rita and Phil Dean, parents of the bride, regaled us with a seemingly endless sequence of Southern feasts. I had a good hint of what was in store when I opened my gift bag at the hotel. Prominent among the goodies were a bottle of RC Cola and a Moon Pie. There were other distinctive touches, such as

THE HAT

The actual ceremony took place on the large stone terrace behind the old Falls Cottage. From that prospect one looks down upon the greensward below. While we were there that view included the temporary stage set for an open-air production of The Merry Wives of Windsor! I recalled, imperfectly, one of the final speeches of the play:
In love, the heavens themselves do guide the state...
And, thank Heaven, the heavens guide also the heavens. The weather was hot and steamy—I mentioned perhaps the venue, South Carolina?—but the faint menace of rain, which gave us a moment or two of anxiety earlier in the day, receded the moment the minister marched in with the groom.

A view of Falls Cottage, site of the wedding, from below

I suppose I owe it to my faithful readers to make a few remarks more general in nature than gloating about my son and wonderful new daughter-in-law. There would be a good deal to say. The Greenville County Museum has several splendid collections, including a large gallery full of Wyeths and several devoted to southern art. Timing problems kept us from seeing the extensive collection of Old Masters at Bob Jones University, though we did manage a visit to a smaller satellite housing an impressive cameo sampling of their holdings. I could touch upon other topics of significance, but allow me to make a beeline for the peripheral, as is my wont. I can report that Upcountry South Carolina is conspicuous for its high rate of tattooed females. This fact, obvious from even a stroll in the public streets, was confirmed by my visit to the Otter Creek Water Park, where the bathing attire allowed for more complete appreciation. The pictorial quality of the body art varies, as does the sophistication of the iconography. Melanie herself sports a beautifully understated dragonfly on her shoulder, much to be preferred to either the Death’s Head or Cross-in-Crown alternatives on view at Otter Creek. I have long been interested in the relationship between text and image in medieval manuscripts. I therefore noted with particular interest that many of the tattooed limbs and torsos were textual as well as pictorial, with the onomatological motiv prominent.

Bloody old Queen Mary, grieving over the loss of the last British possession on the Continent, claimed that when she died an autopsy would reveal the word “Calais” written on her heart. Of the names written upon the Carolinian ladies’ hearts (or nearby) I was able to make a rough-and-ready calculation:

Name of bearer: 21%
Name of boyfriend/husband of bearer: 34%
Name of Son of God and Savior of the World: 41%
Too cryptic to guess: 4%

Name of French town: 0%

Our visit to Greenville also leads me to meditate upon the Bliss Gap in western art. Why is nasty usually more interesting than nice? How can it be that most readers regard Satan as the most appealing character in Paradise Lost? Why does the tragic sense of life so frequently trump the comic? I remember the terror that struck my heart when I first came upon a remarkable image in Beowulf, in which the poet presents as the ne plus ultra of misery the circumstance of an old man forced to view the execution of his son. This cannot have been common even in brutal Old Germanic society, and it struck me as gratuitously grotesque as well as horrible.

Swa bið geomorlic gomelum ceorle
to gebidanne, þæt his byre ride
giong on galgan, þonne he gyd wrece,
sarigne sang, þonne his sunu hangað
hrefne to hroðre, ond he him helpe ne mæg,
eald ond infrod, ænige gefremman.

[In such fashion is it wretched for an old man to see his young son “ride” the gallows. Then he utters a sorrowing song, when his son hangs as a morsel for the ravens while he himself, ancient, stricken in years, can offer no help.]

But I was in my early twenties, unmarried, inexperienced—quite the opposite of eald ond infrod. My reaction was actually rather shallow. Oscar Wilde quipped that youth is too good a thing to waste on the young. I sometimes feel the same way about literature. I have spent my life in the probably vain attempt to teach Hamlet to adolescents. How can one know what is tragedy until one has oneself ingested some small portion of it?

Fortunately, there are also joys that can be savored to the full only by those who have spent many years preparing for them unawares. The parents who stand in attendance at the wedding of their beloved youngest child to a lovely, brilliant young woman, and hear the fervor in their voices as they unite themselves to each other, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health—these parents experience a joy I have found adequately described nowhere even in our greatest literature. The newlyweds are now in some vegetarian paradise for bird-watchers in Costa Rica, but while I was writing I was interrupted by the door-bell. A florist arrived with a bright bouquet. An accompanying note identified it as a token of thanks for our help with the wedding. Never has a gift been more pleasing or more superfluous. May the Lord bless you and keep you, Luke and and Melanie. May he lift up the light of his countenance upon you.

Sophia and her Abba Zvi, with marginalized Uncle Rich, get serious on the dance floor