A Cultural Weekend

 

I am coming off what was a highly satisfying cultural weekend.  Years ago there were two movie theaters in our no longer so little town.  One of them gave up the ghost so many years ago that I can barely remember it, but the other, the Garden, hung on and eventually metamorphosed into the kind of “art” cinema every college town should have and usually does.  It has to a degree prospered and seems recently to have had a qualified interior spruce up.  It is no longer in obvious need of roof repair.  From the frequency with which we receive its begging letters it appears to remain appropriately marginal from the business point of view.  But of course it is wonderful to have an “art” cinema in town.  We find ourselves in fairly frequent attendance.

 

So near the end of last week we went to view “The Tree of Life.”  I had never seen this film; in fact, I don’t think I had ever even heard of it.  The setting of “The Tree of Life” is a little difficult to describe, as it includes both highly imaginative cosmic topography and (mainly) that of a modest middle class section of a sizeable Texas town or small city, which I think “is” Waco, in the 1950s.  East Texas is apparently an especially apt geography for “coming-of-age” movies.  I remember another great one from fifty ago: “The Last Picture Show.”  Waco is not an unknown place on the national scene, and it is certainly known to me as a professor of English literature  It is the home of Baylor University, an important cultural institution in the state, and a center for the study of Victorian poetry, especially that of the Brownings.  There is a certain eccentricity to academic libraries.  There are some outstanding specific topical collections on individual writers to be found scattered throughout the world.  In the middle of the 1950s I was living in a little town in East Texas, Mount Pleasant, where I graduated from its high school in 1954.  Mount Pleasant is maybe a couple of hundred miles northeast of Waco.  This must have been about the time of the imagined setting for “The Tree of Life.”  The makers of the film had spent a lot of time on authenticity of the film’s setting.  So I experienced a certain vague sense of dejà vu arising from my own late adolescent experience in East Texas.

 

            I am by no means a cinema buff, and I knew nothing of this particular movie in advance, except that it was supposed to be good—a judgment that I regard as an understatement.  The film is in my view superb.  Not that I could tell you exactly what it is “about,” beyond what is accurately if elliptically suggested by its title.  I would have to see it again even to be sure I could summarize all the elements of the plot accurately.  But the acting—including that performed by several very young actors—is superb.  It is not always easy to predict those sections of the population likely to be moved by a work of art, but this one has broad ambitions.   If you are a mother or a father—or are closely related to anyone who is, such as your own parents—you will almost certainly be moved, pensive, curious and reflective after seeing this film.  One of the things you will be pensive about, even if you have never heard the word before, is what Aristotle called mimesis—the fascinating and mysterious ways in which art is made to “imitate” life.

 

Jennifer Borghi, soprano

 

            Well, that was (I think) Friday night.  We now move on to Saturday night and something, as they say, completely different: Mozart’s Requiem performed by dedicated and talented singers from the chancel steps of a mini-cathedral, the Princeton University Chapel.  Except that it isn’t “completely different,” of course.  The energies of art, though highly differentiated, are quite often surprisingly convergent.  Anybody who watches “The Tree of Life” is likely to be set to thinking about the meaning of life.  Anyone who listens intently to the Mozart Requiem is guaranteed to be set to thinking about both life and death.  The huge chapel was nearly full for this superb performance, which was offered to the Princeton community as a free gift.  Amazing!    It was an event we would both want to attend under any circumstances, but there was in this instance a particular reason that guaranteed our presence.  The soprano soloist was Jennifer Borghi, who has been our friend since she was an undergraduate here twenty-some years ago.  Jen’s singing on this occasion was particularly strong and beautiful, I thought, as indeed was that of the other soloists.   It was a stunning performance.

 

 

            I suppose it is possible to react to a religious liturgy in purely aesthetic terms; then again it is possible to take a shower with your socks on.  I do not recommend it. Mozart himself was deeply religious, however conventional his actual religiosity may seem to us.  I remember seeing a letter of his, written when he was twenty or twenty-one, in which he practically gloats over the death of Voltaire.  But people’s meditations upon eternity tend to sharpen and mature as they approach its portals.  Given the fact that he was working away at his Requiem on his own death-bed, I can hardly doubt that the Last Things were on his mind.  The word requiem has become a bit dark and scary, but it actually means neither death nor a death dirge.  It means rest, as in relaxation, freedom from physical or mental effort.  The first two words of the Mozart requiem Mass petition for an eternal rest bathed in perpetual light.  That is solemn, sober, exalted; but it is far from tragic. 

 

            The simple medieval hymn Dies irae (“Day of Wrath”) appears early in the work.  Dies irae, dies illa/Solvet saeclum in favilla/Teste David cum Sibylla…(Day of wrath, that day/Will dissolve the earth in ashes/As David and the Sibyl bear witness…)  This little poem—it has a second strophe of three lines—is a nearly perfect example of medieval literary humanism.  It hard wires together the archetypes of the biblical and the classical-gentile prophetic traditions, the latter of which is so often explicated and illuminated by the former.  I spent a good deal of my scholarly career trying to understand and demonstrate this theme in early European poetry and the visual arts.   The Sibyl (who guides Aeneas between the worlds of the living and the dead) is the gentile “type” of the Hebrew king and prophet.  The word sibyl came to denote various versions of the female prophet.  Mozart attempts in music what so many Renaissance poets attempted in their verses.  He produced a work which, imitating the spiritual scheme from which it rises, defies mortality.

turned out to be not quite the last

 

 

           

Unamended Speech

 

    The written Constitution of the United States is an intricately structured document worked out over a long period of vigorous debate, complex compromises, and artful dodges.  The deliberations in Philadelphia occupied several months of the year 1787.  But there was definitely something about the process that, if not quite haphazard or spur-of-the-moment, was dramatically incomplete.  It gave intricate instructions about how laws were to be made, but said very little about the people for whom they were to be made, interpreted, and enforced. The over-all authority for the document was grand and noble—it was the people of the new nation expressing themselves through elected representation.  But precious little was said of the people themselves.  The wise men who had devised the document were of course aware that their work, however impressive, was partial and radically incomplete, and they made pretty precise rules about how it could be improved, corrected, clarified and expanded—all of which activities fell within the definition of a single word, to wit, amendment.

 

    Amending the Constitution began almost immediately with ten more or less related amendments largely concerning the rights of individual citizens as opposed to governmental structures.  These we call the Bill of Rights.  The First Amendment is a doozy: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.  There is probably more cultural history packed into these forty-five words than was lost in the tragic incineration of the Library of Alexandria.  The blanket authorization of freedom of religious belief and practice, freedom of speech, freedom to write and publish, freedom to petition the Government—extraordinary!  Freedom of speech is what is on my mind at the moment, as various voices in or around the Trump Administration are seeking to get rid of a foreign-born “student activist” from Columbia University, Mahmoud Khalil.  They don’t like some of the things he has said, but since most of them know in their heart of hearts that he presents what many of us regard as an open-and-shut free speech case they are trying to find some possible criminality in his personal or intellectual associations to justify his expulsion.  This evasion offers a kind of screen behind which an illiberal idea can to some extent enjoy a spurious plausibility.  And it does seem destined for success.  One highly respectable conservative guru—respected by me, among others—has declared that this is not a free speech case at all, but an administrative issue of immigration status and the shade of green on Mr. Khalil's green card.   Mr. Khalil’s offense is a thought-crime.  He appears to be an open supporter of Hamas, for example, and so…so what?  The Bill of Rights says nothing about qualifying the rights of people with whom we disagree, or whose ideas most or even all the rest of us may actually find repellent, even dangerous. 

 

    Many of the greatest quotations in history are not actually quotations yet accurately represent the thought of those to whom they are attributed.  If Voltaire didn’t actually utter the following words, he certainly lived them: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.  That sentence structure dramatizes, quite gratuitously, Voltaire’s own privilege of dissenting from the ideas expressed.  And it is the template of most such expressions.  It contains its own implicit “virtue signalling”.  But Mr. Khalil’s right to express his ideas is in no way dependent upon what Voltaire, you, I, or anybody else might think about Khalil or his ideas.  Not that there is no good explanation for the hostility to “absolute” freedom of speech.  Quite apart from the business of shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater—or its contemporary telephonic form, “SWATing,” making maliciously false reports to the police--people don’t much like hearing themselves, their country, their political ideas, their religious beliefs roughly countered, denied, traduced or insulted.  I certainly don’t.  But that is one of several annoyances you simply have to suck up if you sincerely adhere to democracy.  It could even happen that your preferred candidate in a presidential election might not prevail.

 

    Majoritarian rule, a feature of our democracy, is hardly without its inconveniences.  But Churchill’s famous, possibly sardonic, remarks on the topic still command attention: “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”

 

    There are many inconveniences attendant upon old age.  I discover new ones daily.  But one enjoys also the great advantages of memory, experience, and perspective.  I can laugh out loud at much of the apocalypticism of certain sections of the American press.  I repeatedly read that “never before in American history have we witnessed” this, that, or another enormity that I last witnessed in my thirties or forties if not later.  Democracy does require work, apparently more work than most citizens are willing, or perhaps too many of them, able, to perform.  Perhaps it really is the best of an imperfect suite of options.  Things are often very messy in democratic systems.  But the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.  Churchill has a discouraging word of wisdom on that subject too: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

 

 

Dulce et decorum?

The proud tower

 

            This has been a week when a kind of unplanned and unexpected serendipity of coherence has emerged from the reading we have been doing.  I use the plural because Joan and I, in addition to whatever we happen to be reading on our own, usually are also slowly working through a book we are sharing aloud.  We share it, but she does the work of the actual reading, both on account of personal preference and vocal mellifluousness.  We are just now in the midst of a wonderful read that I could recommend to anyone: The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig.*  Zweig, an excellent and once popular Austrian writer, was born in 1881 and died in Brazil (along with his wife) by suicide in 1942.  A highly cultured European cosmopolitan Jew, he left an autobiography that is, among other things, a pained lament for the shocking barbarism of the European wars that had destroyed the old Europe of his youth and his fevered dreams. 

 

Stefan Zweig
 

As the topic of literature war is of course a prominent, indeed dominant subject and spiritual theme.  On almost any reader’s list of the world’s greatest novels, Tolstoy’s War and Peace is likely to appear at or near the top.  I myself would put it right at the pinnacle, but I shall not spend any effort justifying my judgment here, except to say that I regard the title itself as brilliant.  To the extent that all art holds up its mirror to life, war and peace are what human history, and therefore the lives of those men and women who made history or simply endured or suffered it, has chiefly consisted of.  In the Western literary traditions with which we are familiar war can be said to have had a paramount role.  The Greek Iliad and the Latin Æneid, the most obvious inspiration of the vernacular epics of the Middle Ages  and the Renaissance, have their narrative origins in ancient myths of an Ur-conflict, the Trojan War.  Hence Beowulf, hence the Song of Roland.  Did not Horace himself, the ur-guru of literary critical theory,  say that the Trojan War is the only right subject of the ambitious poet?

 

The First World War (still often called the “Great War” despite being eclipsed in many categories of horror by the Second) had a profound literary posterity, brilliantly discussed in the important work by the late Paul Fussell, a personal acquaintance of mine: The Great War and Modern Memory.  Zweig was in no sense a military historian.  I should describe him as an acute aesthetic commentator.  Perhaps in fact he regarded “historical” perspective as no part of his task.  But he did see in the war the obscene negation of all the positive impulses of the old European culture, a disaster not merely apocalyptic but also incomprehensible.

 

            Life forces upon us unexpected Jungian synchronicities.  Why else should I have happened by chance this week to see a brief moment of the English “Antiques Roadshow”—a mere snatch of the program--which featured a book once owned by Wilfred Owen, perhaps the most tragic of the young English poets lost in the First War.  It was  a book preparing a young confirmand for the sacrament of confirmation and a first Holy Communion, given to him by his parish priest .  Those who know Owen only or mainly through such terrifying poems as “Dulce et decorum est”—the line comes from Horace, It is sweet and fitting [to die for one’s country]--may be startled to discover in their youthful author a  pious Anglican ‘teen-ager still wholly innocent of the horrors of blasted bodies and  rotting flesh.  The chief impression left on my mind by this glimpse of fairly recent history was that war, which has so often been the subject of great poets, has also been the death of poets.  The episode ended as all of us hope that episodes on the “Antiques Roadshow” should end.  The expert evaluator informed the gobsmacked current owner of this rather battered pious and pedestrian  religious handbook that he was the unknowing possessor of a small fortune.

 

            As an Austrian Zweig was expected, indeed practically required, to hate with a gem-like intensity the military leaders of the enemy, and to hate especially Lord Grey “the perfidious British Foreign Minister.”  This the humane and cosmopolitan Viennese poet was incapable of doing, as hating was not his thing.  But his fellow Germanophone dramatist Ernst Lissauer gave German-speakers literary leadership in this field with his wildly popular “Hymn of Hate for England”.  “Disastrously,” write Zweig, “it was soon obvious how easy it is to set the forces of hatred working, for here the stout, deluded little Jew Lissauer was anticipating Hitler.”

 

                Quite indirectly, Lissauer sent me back to Barbara Tuchman, two of whose brilliantly written works (The Guns of August and The Proud Tower) were published in a single volume in a splendid Library of America edition edited by Margaret MacMillan, herself an eminent scholar of the Great War.  This book is on my own shelves, and I actually found it—far from the only possible result of my searching for one of my books.  The Proud Tower is one of those books whose title, if it doesn’t quite say it all, manages still to say a whole lot.  Zweig was a secular Jewish intellectual unlikely to turn to semi-theological explanations for historical developments.  I, as a Christian scholar of medieval European literature, am under fewer constraints in doing do.  Pride, superbia, was in the old European thought the mother of all sins; and it was in plentiful supply in all the royal houses of Europe as the Old World hastened to its definitive end.  I do not think I am abusing Tuchman in saying this, for the title of her work is a clear allusion to the biblical Tower of Babel, a canonized emblem of absurd human presumption.  The first section of Tuchman’s Proud Tower is entitled “The Patricians”, and it begins with a Who’s Who of the high and the mighty Englishmen who formed “the last government in the Western world to possess all the attributes of aristocracy in working condition…”—the British Cabinet in 1895.  I cannot quote this brilliant beginning to Tuchman’s book at length.  It is about twice as long as this blog essay.  But I can give you a glimpse.  Among the Cabinet officers was the Lord President of the Council, “a Duke [of Devonshire] who owned 186,000 acres in eleven counties whose ancestors had served in government since the Fourteenth Century, who had himself served thirty-four years in the House of Commons, and three times refused to be Prime Minister.”  One wonders what this fellow would have thought of Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et decorum est” and the flower of Albion’s youth marching blindly through a gas attack, “bent double, like old beggars under sacks/ Knock-kneed, coughing like hags…”

 

God damn England!

*originally first published in German as Die Welt von Gestern (Zurich, Wiliams Verlag, 1942), trans. by Anthea Bell (University of Nebraska Press, 2009), pp. 472.

Mother Tongue

 

I post this essay on Ash Wednesday animated by a strange feeling more like unease than penitence.  A good deal has been happening of late on what I shall call the Presidential Front.  Mr. Trump has been operating at a high speed and a high decibel level that has captured journalistic comment of despairing or of admiring tenor depending upon the predilections of the commentators.  What is at the center of public discourse just at the moment is his highly public and even more highly publicized dressing down of Volodymyr Zelensky, the beleaguered president of Ukraine.  This episode was such “good television” as Mr. Trump accurately described it, that it has captured the attention of the world press and its commentariat and is likely to keep it through several news cycles.  Like most people, I have a lot of thoughts about this episode, but my ideas lack any possible expert authority or originality, and I have no intention of forcing them upon a group I respect as highly as I respect my loyal readers.  There is an old Latin adage preserved by Erasmus: ne sutor ultra crepidam.  This is generally expressed in English as “Shoemaker, stick to your last”—a last of course being the metal frame upon which a cobbler forms a shoe under construction.  The contemporary version of this is Stay in your own lane.  My lane is by no means that of political science, international relations, or most of the other things that dominate the news.  I am a professor of English, and a long retired one at that.  Nonetheless, in the very week of the Zelenksy brouhaha, our President executed an official pronouncement right smack in the middle of my own narrow lane.  And it deserves my comment.

 

On March 1, 2025, the President of the United States made it official, it being the English language, which is now by executive fiat the national tongue.  All I can say is Whew or maybe even Thank God.  I am a retired professor of English, and for long decades the uncertainty surrounding the question has never entirely relaxed its grip on my subconscious.  Though I was unable to articulate the fear even to myself, I was always haunted by the possibility that it might turn out that for all those decades during which I had been studying Caedmon, Chaucer, Christopher Marlow, Pope, Dickens, Emerson, and Danielle Steel, the official language of our country had actually been Albanian.  I know that it sounds far-fetched, but so does a lot of stuff one reads from the front pages of reputable newspapers.

 

My sarcasms probably fail to amuse, but the question of an American “official language” is either disingenuous or simply ludicrous.  It is not an actual question but a political contrivance.  What language is the only language spoken, read, and written by the vast majority of citizens of the United States?  What language overwhelmingly dominates the hugely variegated world of print in our nation?  Without competence in which language are the social and economic prospects of anyone living in this country most likely to be constrained?  The principal language of the United States of America is the English language, as it has been since considerably before the nation’s founding, that founding conventionally taken to have occurred on July 4, 1776, with the publication in English of the Declaration of Independence from the British monarchy.  On that date it was not the only language being spoken by American natives.  There were already living here, and certainly in the contiguous land destined for political incorporation sooner or later, quite a few speakers of Amerindian languages and not a few of other European languages, including French, German, Dutch and (especially) Spanish.

 

I think that the “official language” business is mainly about Spanish.  There are millions of Spanish-speakers in this country.  There are New Mexican aristocrats whose families were living in Doña Ana County before the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought, and there are desperate Guatemalans who waded across the Rio Grande six months ago.  This “hispanic” population is about as homogenous as the “Southern whites” and other vast tribes subjected to confident journalistic over-simplification.  The various forms of Spanish spoken among this large population—with widely differing levels of competence, it must be added--may enrich the American linguistic scene; but it is in no way a threat to the cultural primacy of American English.

 

Many of us born and raised in the US are strictly monolingual. But we happen to be in the minority from a global perspective.  That is, statistics show that more than half of the people in the world speak more than one language. A majority are bilingual (speak two languages), and a significant proportion are polyglots (more than two). However, in the US, about 75% of Americans are monolingual English speakers. But where exactly does this disparity come from? Why are Americans so much more likely to be monolingual than people from other countries?  The reasons are found, naturally, in issues of historical development and in differences in economic and political power—like so much else, the luck of the draw.  You might say that our shared language is yet another advantage like our ample spacious and fertile land and our mainly temperate climate.  Like other valuable assets our linguistic advantage can be taken for granted or appreciated and nourished.

Once upon a time, in a small town in east Texas, I had a great high school English teacher. Her name was Mrs. White.  I suppose that by today’s loosey-goosy standards she would be regarded as a stickler for rules.  She firmly believed in something she called “educated English,” a feature of culture that imposed discipline and art on the human capacity for oral and written verbal communication.  She was absolute death on the comma splice and the run-on sentence, which she seemed to categorize as criminal conspiracies rather than untutored solecisms.  But she presented the mastery of spoken and written English in attractive, indeed aspirational terms, as a universal human possibility available to all.  Like such other inevitabilities of human life such as breathing, walking, eating, sleeping, singing, dancing, line-backing, dress-making, guitar-plucking, cow-milking, cotton-picking—her catalogue included practically everything ‘teen-agers habitually had to do, wanted to do, or simply did—like all these things, the English language could be “done” either well or not so well.  She made trying to “do” it well a lot of fun, as indeed it is.  But so far as I know President Eisenhower never made it “official.”

 

 

Alumni Day at Princeton

 

            I am an alumnus of Princeton University and have been for more than sixty years, though for most of those years the matter went virtually unmentioned.  That is because the degree I have is a doctorate.  When someone tells you he (or occasionally she) is a Princeton grad, he means that he graduated from the undergraduate college, F. Scott Fitzgerald and all that, except of course that Scott never graduated.  After all, the Graduate School is very much a Johnny-come-lately.  It didn’t even exist before 1869, and didn’t seriously exist until the beginning of the twentieth century.  The fact that its alumni in several scientific fields keep winning Nobel Prizes doesn’t necessarily count for all that much, locally.  But my late dear friend John Wilson, who was graduate dean from 1994 to 2002, made a special effort to raise its institutional profile.  He vigorously encouraged doctoral graduates to participate in alumni affairs, which mainly involves attending selected events while wearing a distinctive costume that is at least considerably less absurd than those worn by alumni of the individual undergraduate classes.  Of course having taught at the institution for nearly half a century I do find it pleasing to connect with former undergraduates of many student generations.

 

two eminent alumni

 

 

There are only two events for which Dean Wilson sought out our participation, and which I still try to attend in fealty to our ancient friendship.  One of these is Alumni Day, which came around last Saturday.  Alumni Day mainly features a few award ceremonies, but at its center is a large sit-down lunch which includes brief speeches by the President of the University, the President of the Alumni Association, and sometimes one or two others.   There are always more  ad hoc brief ceremonies, and the special awarding of a prize to two alumni,  special honors bestowed upon one undergraduate and one graduate alumn(a/us).  This year the undergraduate alumna was Elena Kagan.  Everybody already knew who she was: an associate justice of the Supreme Court.  Some of us had to read the program to identify the graduate alumnus: David Card, an eminent Canadian Nobelist economist teaching at Berkeley.  I actually chatted with him a little as we sat next to each other for the “class photo”.  You can tell from a mile away that he’s a really nice guy.

 

My saintly friend Frank, who is unstintingly solicitous of his aging friends, transported me to the venue of the lunch—the vast Jadwyn Gymnasium, or “Cage”, as it is sometimes called.  My mobility is not good; I am unsteady on my feet.  And I tire pretty quickly if I have to stay on my feet too long.  A lengthy stand-up gab-session followed by a luncheon for several hundred people on the basketball court floor is a bit of a challenge.  This was apparently obvious to the general observer.  Three different deanlets approached me during the crowded non-alcoholic pre-lunch nibbles to ask me if I needed a wheel chair.  After thrice rebuffing the suggestion with muted indignation, I had finally to agree that that was exactly what I needed.  After succumbing to this reality, life became considerably simpler.

                                         

                                            full court press luncheon

The lunch, a cold salmon steak, was above average for such events, and I enjoyed the conversation at my table.  There was also an engaging talk by the suave Director of our University Art Museum, which has for several years been being transformed into a much larger and more architecturally imposing space—of which he gave us a detailed slide-show preview.  What one sees under construction from the outside may look like a mud wall to the uncharitable, but the new interior is obviously going to be very classy.  The next stop was the Memorial Service in the University chapel.  In recent years this solemn event has been for me the main attraction of Alumni Day.  A shuttle bus dropped us off near its venue, where we repaired after lounging briefly in overstuffed chairs in the nearby library.  The University is a big operation—not merely students and faculty but a very large number of support staff in many fields.  So the number of people who die each year and are individually remembered in this impressive service—I would describe it as semi- or crypto-religious—is quite large.  The Princeton chapel is manifestly a Christian house of worship.  In fact it is a mini-Cathedral.  But the ecumenical ceremony, acknowledging the considerable religious diversity of the campus, makes room for prayers and chants from all the principal world religions.  The printed necrology always includes several members of the faculty and staff, as well as increasing numbers of the alumni personally known to me.  Dean John Wilson’s own name appeared in the list in the last two years.  The individual memorialization of the recently dead is achieved by means of a very moving march of living members from all the classes which still have living members.  The participants, in pairs forming a solemn flow,  march down the cathedral’s long central aisle from the narthex to the top chancel steps.  There each marcher places a single flower blossom against a specially prepared board.  These bright blossoms—this year of a pure white color--gradually increase to the number of classes with still living member to become as it were a single huge flower.  And this year I realized, as I should have done years ago, that this ceremony has all the allegorical energy of the various parades and processions of Dante’s Paradiso and was was very probably inspired by that divine poem.   Furthermore the procession echoes the words of the service music. The hymnody always includes the classic Watts hymn “O God, our help in ages past…” with its poignant lines “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away…”   The word sons is naturally updated to recognize more explicitly than does the English of the early eighteenth century the equal-opportunity mortality that reckons neither of sex or social status.

                                         

Birds and Words

 

Last Saturday night we attended a choice concert presented by a small group called the Princeton Singers.  I suppose that this ensemble is typical of the probably hundreds of very impressive amateur and semi-professional musical groups to be found scattered throughout the country.  Such manifestations of serious musical talent are to be found not merely in most small urban centers but also, and perhaps especially, in even smaller college and university towns.  In Princeton, NJ, there are several, some with more or less formal ties to academic institutions and others simply the logical corollaries their sociology: the kinds of people who tend to live in academic communities.  The current director of the Princeton Singers, under the title of Artistic Director, is Steven Sametz an impressive and versatile composer in his own right.

 

 

The venue was Trinity Church, our old parish, full of family memories, including baptisms and the wedding of our daughter.  And though the greatly increased traffic in the center of town has led us to a more easily accessible parish church, I always enjoy being in the old building and frequently revisit it.  It is a beautiful neo-Gothic construction from the classic period of the nineteenth century.  It has a long, slender nave with two stubby transepts at the crossing, a layout hospitable to hearing music.  One special attraction of the evening was that an old friend, Jennifer Borghi, was singing with the group.  We came to know Jen more than twenty years ago when she was an undergraduate and have remained friends ever since.  Great wits to madness sure are close allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide—Dryden, I believe.  Same goes for the sublime and the ridiculous.  I never know when philology will mislead me into an indelicacy possibly offensive to my esteemed readers, but I feel one coming on now.  

 

Jennifer Borghi 

The Princeton Singers of course sing songs, and the songs chosen and in part created for this occasion were short lyric poems, several of them by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), one of the true geniuses of our American poetic tradition.  Lyric poetry takes its name from the stringed musical instrument from which it was once inseparable.  Dickinson’s short poems are songs that practically cry out to be sung.  And if she had never written anything else than “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” with its haunting line Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone, she would claim her place in our American Parnassus.  (That poem did not feature in the evening’s program, but you can’t have everything.)  And though Dickinson dominated the program, the evening’s structural highpoint, and perhaps also emotional climax, came with its powerful treatment of one of the best-known poems of one of her eminent English contemporaries, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889): “The Windhover.”  The central conceit of this poem, dedicated “to Christ our Lord” surprisingly compares Christ to a bird, a small raptor of the kestrel family.  The comparison is typically arresting, and as with most of Hopkins’s poems the linguistic gymnastics are quite dazzling.

 

 “The Windhover” was a fitting climax to the program, and it was greeted with audience enthusiasm.  I enjoyed the whole evening, but I have to express a heretic’s view about this one piece.  Hopkins occupies a unique place in the poetry of the English language, and the uniqueness is largely to be found in his deeply original rhythms.  What he called “sprung rhythm” was a prosodic invention based in part on his understanding of the prosody of Old English—that is, the English of before the year 1000, the English of Beowulf’s readers.  But I wonder whether the name of the bird—windhover—was chosen for reasons of euphemism.  The old word for this bird was windfucker.  There is no doubt that the bird is one of a variety of small kestrels.  Here the Oxford English Dictionary can help us out.  Thomas Nashe, the Elizabethan poet and dramatist of the end of the sixteenth century, writes of the kestrel as follows: “one of these kistrell [kestrel] birds, called a wind-fucker…”  I am not an expert in the history of English obscenity and have no wish to become one, but as the word windhover makes a somewhat later but still early appearance, the usage may or may not imply a discomfort with the older popular term.  The Elizabethans on the whole were a linguistically franker group than were the Victorians, that’s for certain.  The older term reflects the rapid rhythmic flapping that can make the bird appear to the distant eye to be floating nearly motionless in the air—that is, to hover there--as it surveys the fields of its prey below.

 

The ”f-word” as it is now ludicrously called has in the meantime become the all-purpose gap-filler for those who cannot think of anything better to say.  It is sort of like, well, like like.  It has nominative and adjectival forms.  I have even heard an adverbial form!  It has infected all educational and social classes.  Of course what is ubiquitous and commonplace soon loses its power to shock.  What was among the very most vile and unspeakable obscenities of my youth now goes unnoticed, having after four or five centuries lost most if not all of its obloquy.  In fact neither sexual nor scatological terms excite much attention for their obscenity.  The only sure route to obscenity these days will be found in the political vocabulary.

 

 

I caught this morning morning's minion, king- 

  dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding 

  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding 

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing 

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

  As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding 

  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding 

Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing! 

 

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here 

  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! 

 

  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion 

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, 

  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

 

 

 

Shadowy Goundhog

 

 

This is the year that I have had to admit quite openly that I no longer enjoy winter—if I ever did in the first place.  In fact, you might say that I have come to hate winter.  The weather for the past week has not been extreme—most days had stretches that were barely freezing, with at least an hour or two that got to forty degrees Fahrenheit.  The precipitation, which was never very copious, was also mainly nocturnal, leaving a thin patina of morning ice or snow that melted slowly and messily by midafternoon.  On one day, Saturday, I was even able to take a passable walk in a longish dry spell.  But the sun made only the briefest of cameo appearances during several days, and when it did appear seemed tentative and reluctant.

 

The audience of this blog is mostly domestic, but I do enjoy a small international readership, mainly though not exclusively in England.  On a couple of occasions I have received private communications from this sector complaining that this or that thing I have said is of such exclusively parochial American interest or expression as to be opaque to them.  Since I myself have had to learn to cope with Brits talking about “Boxing Day” and other such mysteries—it turns out to have nothing whatsoever to do with pugilism—I shall try to be sensitive concerning the very American parochialism of Groundhog Day, the second of February.  But of course explaining Groundhog Day supposes that one knows what a groundhog is.  That is an unsafe assumption.  A groundhog is an unappealing rodent animal closely akin to if not identical with the animal more widely known in England as a woodchuck.  Both of these names—ground hog and woodchuck, especially the latter—are a little strange.  The strange element is the chuck part.  The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology has four disparate listings for this word, and two more for the possibly related chuckle.  None of them seems connected to the idea of tossing or throwing, incidentally.  The sense of the word in the classic tongue-twister beginning “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” is actually uncertain.    No other use of the word chuck to denote an animal is known to me.  However, a myth or social witticism developed among the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch—who of course were not of Netherlandish but of German (Deutsch) ancestry—to the effect that the weather on one particular day, February 2, was a sure harbinger of the comparative brevity or protraction of the winter weather still ahead.  It all depended upon whether the groundhog (woodchuck), peeking his head out of his subterranean fastness on that day, could see his own shadow.  Well, Groundhog Day passed unnoticed by me a week or ten days ago, and I don’t know whether or not the groundhog saw his shadow.  In fact, I have trouble remembering  whether it is good or bad news if he does see it.  It is all rather “counter-indicative” as my students say.  That is, a sunny day casting shadows presages more rather than less cold weather ahead.   But I don’t need strange signs or portents.  I can feel in my bones that winter is not receding any time soon.

 

 

There are some thousands of small towns scattered throughout the American heartland, many of which strive mightily to claim some element of distinctiveness if not uniqueness.  I don’t know by what circumstance Punxsutawney, an otherwise obscure village in central Pennsylvania, became the national arbiter of the important matter of predicting the annual advent of spring, but it did.   Punxsutawney is a small town just about three hundred miles due west from here.  I have never been there, but I am very familiar with its type.  There are literally thousands of such places in America, each with its own unique distinction—well advertised, usually by a large faded painted sign at either end of the Main Street: America’s Frog Capital, Home of the world’s largest living cave, Birthplace of pinochle champions, Life-Sized tableau of the Battle of Mud Flat, etc., etc.  Some of these places have managed to claim a place in the national annals of world-class kitsch.  One thinks of the giant peach water tower of Gaffney, S.C., or any one of Paul Bunyan’s several blue oxen bringing fame to hamlets on the Minnesota tundra.  But with its meteorological groundhog, Punxsutawney really hit the jackpot.  There was even a fairly amusing film featuring it a few years ago. Unfortunately, as diverting as all this can be, it does little to make more tolerable the unpleasantness of winter, which becomes more oppressive to me with advancing age.  I must console myself with the true fact that in all of the years in the nearly nine decades of my lengthening experience spring has never failed to arrive (eventually), so that I have solid reasons for hoping for this year as well.  But the wait threatens to be tedious.