And, Outside Looking In

A companion piece to last night's Cassandra, this is my daughter's late lamented Benjamin, who made plans to be an indoor cat every winter.

It's been a very strenuous day, starting out with water exercise. We plan to go to bed early. Boys that can't wait for the Fourth are shooting off intermittent fireworks into the country night.

Yesterday, I shopped the book racks at the Habitat ReStore again (despite already having books enough) while S did hot-pool therapy. Someone had bought the beach painting I was thinking of buying for a couple of weeks. Now I (sort of) wish I had.

Tonight's poem is by the renowned African poet Leopold Sedar Senghor. I found it on page 55 of the thrift-store copy (one of those old yellowed Penguins) of Modern Poetry from Africa (1963,1966.) The book gives no information about sources or translations, but I assume this is a translation from the French, the language he wrote in. Senghor was a very important African intellectual, writer, teacher and statesman. He, too, is of the generation of my father, having been born in the same year, 1906.

All Day Long

All day long, over the long straight rails
Like an inflexible will over the endless sands
Across parched Cayor and Baol where the baobabs twist their arms in  torment
All day long, all along the line
Past the same little stations, past black girls jostling like birds at the gates of schools
All day long, sorely rattled by the iron train and dusty and hoarse
Behold me seeking to forget Europe in the pastoral heart of Sine!

Even though this is a translation, it carries the rhythm of a railroad journey. It can be read aloud in one straight pass, moving right along along the rails.

Inside Looking Out

This is my Cassandra, an Indoor Dachshund, who would like to roam the woods and fields. After an over-full day, I am not thinking clearly enough to write much tonight.
But I want to give you another little taste of Adelman's book on Albert O. Hirschman, which I wrote about last night.  From The New Yorker review. (June 24, 2013, page 78.)

"Adelman is struck by the tone of optimism in Hirschman's notes on his journey. The economist was interested in all the ways in which proiects managed to succeed, both in spite of and because of, the difficulties:

Instead of asking what benefits [has] this project yielded, it would almost be more pertinent to ask: how many conflicts has it brought in its wake? How many crises has it occasioned and passed through? And these conflicts and crises should appear both on the benefit and cost side, or sometimes on one---sometimes on the other, depending on the outcome (which cannot be known with precision for a long time, if ever.

Only Hirschman would circle the globe and be content that he couldn't reach a conclusion ---for a long time, if ever. He was a planner who really didn't believe in planning, He wanted to remind other economists that a lot of the problems they tried to fix were either better off not being fixed or weren't problems to begin with."

This is enough to think about for a week! Look for examples in the things you have studied or (better) been involved in.

Here is your question for tonight from me: Did Che Guevara go through all that to become a T-shirt??? I know I am being silly, but I would desperately like the world to improve so that so many people would not have such terrible lives. (My husband is currently reading Behind the Beautiful Forevers; life, death and hope in a Mumbai undercity, in case I needed a few more specifics.) But how can we get there from here?

Stay tuned. Sleep tight!

Daisies grow in the meadow without a plan

Malcolm Gladwell has done it again!!! In The New Yorker for June 24, 2013 he has written an article called "The Gift of Doubt" on pages 74-79. It's a review of the book, Worldly Philosopher; The Odyssey of Albert O. Hinchman by Jeremy Adelman (Gladwell calls this "a biography worthy of the man" so, as soon as I finish Kafka, I am going to get it onto my Kindle!) Once again, I am introduced to someone I have never heard of who has so many appealing insights and ideas. Some of these I have entertained myself in embryonic form. Here is a Hinchman quotation Gladwell supplies from the book.

"While we are rather willing and even eager and relieved to agree with a historian's finding that we stumbled onto the more shameful events of history, such as war, we are correspondingly unwilling to concede--in fact we find it intolerable to imagine--that our more lofty achievements, such as economic, social or political progress, could have come about by stumbling rather than through careful planning. . . .Language itself conspires toward this sort of asymmetry: we fall into error, but do not usually speak of falling into truth." (page 75)
I had never heard of this HInchman before and am very glad I have now. I'll be thinking/talking more about this tomorrow and maybe even the day after that. For many, many years I have been watching the things I care about (wildlife, birds, forests, bodies of water, the lives of children, various forms of social progress) as  multitudinous individuals and groups try to instigate changes they think will be useful. Using meetings, agendas, demonstrations, fundraising, legal challenges, and streams of written and videographed propanganda, they have demonstrated again and again the futility of most of this.

Careful examination of the past by a clearthinking mind may give us some useful clues! Good Night!

Afternoon light at Goatsbeard Farm

This is my daughter's pasture a couple of days ago. You can see some of her Shetland sheep grazing there. I wrote about them in another post.  They are quite sweet. She locks them up at night because of the coyotes. Coyotes have to live, too, but we don't have to make it too easy for them. Are you a sheep or a coyote, or do you sometimes change your pelt??

One of the great poets of Brazil was Carlos Drummond de Andrade. He lived from 1902-1987, which makes him a member of the generation of my father, Jack H. Hopper (1906-1987) Tonight's poem was translated by Elizabeth Bishop, who is one of our great poets, who spent many years of her life living in Brazil, and translated Brazilian prose as well as poetry. The headnote is by Czeslaw Milosz, from The Book of Luminous Things, page 8.

This poem is like a joke and we are inclined, first, to smile. Yet a moment of thought suffices to restore a serious meaning to such an encounter. It is enough to live truly intensely our meeting with a thing to preserve it forever in our memory. (CM)

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD

In the middle of the road there was a stone

there was a stone in the middle of the road

there was a stone

in the middle of the road there was a stone

Never should I forget this event

in the life of my fatigued retinas.

Never should I forget that in the middle of the road

there was a stone

there was a stone in the middle of the road

in the middle of the road there was a stone.

(Translated from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Bishop)

.
When I first read this poem, I said, "Huh?" But Milosz, a very smart poet, must have chosen it from all of the poems in the world to be the fourth of four poems in the anthology's short first section "Epiphany."  So I read it again, and the headnote, again, and thought some more. I was still pretty much at a loss--no epiphany yet--so I read it aloud a few times. Now I could begin to follow the repetitions, and the rhythm of the phrases as they assume differing places in the poetic line. I liked the sound of that. There are six road phrases and seven stones. The actual fact of the stone's hard existence is, I think, the important thing. I like that it is an inanimate stone, rather than a bone, or a tree or a fox. It can just sit there as a hard fact.

Right now Robert Aubry Davis is hosting his late evening music program on Sirius XM Radio's Symphony Hall. Satellite radio (there is only one now) cramped itself from three to two classical music stations. There are hundreds of other stations; it makes me feel disregarded. Boy sopranos are singing some early Polophony. S is sure that music has improved since then; this makes his brain WEEP! But he lets me listen because of my RAD fanship. Good night.

TWO KINDS of people, those living by Will and those by Imagination

This is that same Viva geranium, as filtered through the Holga setting in Picasa. It's like looking out of a cave   into the light through a spiderweb-shrouded dusty window. Today, as I was hauling a stack of books upstairs to get them out of the living area, I had the sudden insight that I relate best to other people through the medium of books! I read things that some of the other people in my life like because they like them! I read motorcycle travel adventures that my son recommends, for instance. They are pretty cool! There's been a new Paris Review burning a hole in my patience for several days. I had seen there were THREE interviews in this issue. As you can probably tell, biography is just about my favorite form of book. And I LOVE interviews! There wasn't much time today, but I managed to finish the PR Interview with fabulous, much honored biographer Michael Holroyd. This is amazingly interesting and even more full of wonders than the usual PR Interview. For rhose who hadn't found it yet, the Paris Review has placed ALL of its interviews online. FREE. Since the mid-1950s! Enough reading for this lifetime and the next. Get started tonight (or tomorrow.)

I will have to finish my discussion of this Paris Review over the next few days, since I have been away from this post an hour or so looking for photos of my cousin, Dwayne, to post an In Memoriam on Facebook. I just learned that he died last Tuesday. We had such a lovely visit in Mesa, Arizona, a couple of years ago. I was hoping to get back in a year or so!
NOTE: Visit the people you love whenever you can. Tell them you love them!

I'll talk more about the Michael Holroyd Interview later--there is enough in that one article for a week of posting. But I want to give you this one paragraph for tonight. Think about it!!!

"Interviewer: How do you choose your subjects?

Holroyd: My very first subject, Hugh Kingsmill, was an accidental subject. I came across his writings and his books in a public library, which in a sense was my university. One reason he appealed to me is that he believed life was divided not between men and women, Tory and Labour, or one nationality and another, but between people of will and of imagination, all of whom sought a sort of unity. People of will often did so by force. Those of imagination detected a harmony underlying the discord of our lives. And that latter idea was very pleasant to me, because it appealed to my laziness. It meant I didn't have to go out and fight, and, after having done National Service in the Army, this was an attractive alternative. So I wrote about Kingsmill. I particularly liked his little book on the writer and editor Frank Harris, which seemed to me a wonderful mixture of irony and lyricism/ And a minor subject in that book was Lytton Strachey, because Kingsmill was considered a follower of Strachey, who evolved into my next subject. That happened again with Augustus John, who appeared in Strachey, and then with Shaw, who appeared in Augustus John. And so it has gone on. It gives me the illusion of them choosing me, rather than me choosing them."
Paris Review, 205, pages 46 and 47.

In thinking about this paragraph, don't get taken in by Holroyd's modesty. He has written very long books on very important and well-documented people, and is clearly not lazy, or drift-along. What I'd like you to think about is that division of people into those living by will or those living by imagination. Try to think about people you have known and see whether you get any new insights this way. It seems very interesting to me. And with that flat sentence, I'll say good night, and get to bed!
 

DSL failure means no post tonight

View from the living room last nite. Attempting to send via 4G phone network. Excelsior!

True Red Geranium

20-SAM_0169, a photo by jhhymas on Flickr.

I told you about this yesterday, and here is a portrait, taken with the Samsung NX-1000, which is turning out to be a sharp, quick, useful little camera. I got it from WOOT! Every time I buy something from that site, I am reminded of my old neighbor, Fernando, who told us about WOOT, and always called me up if they had a special on photo paper, on which he thought I spent toooo much. He also got us started on computing in early 1983 (Apple IIe) and both computing and WOOT have been important to me ever since. He died several years ago from something called Burkett's Lymphoma; I still miss him.

The geranium is called Viva Big Red and is billed as the "first true, deep red." This was the last one left, beautifully grown, and I snatched it up! Now to keep it going all summer. I try to have a porch geranium every year--the climate seems suited for that and they do flower for a long time. My mother-in-law always had beautiful orangey-red geraniums in a planter under her window in the years right after my marriage. She was a truly hard-working woman, and was always very nice to me, so I am often surprised at the conflicts I hear about.

I was rolling right along with Richard Yates today, until I misplaced the book when I got up to answer the phone. So I switched back to John Cheever. I am sure this is not a good idea, since they lived at about the same time and I am sure to become confused. But the reading News Of The Day is the book of essays by Janet Malcolm called

Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers 

I started it on my lighted Kindle in the night and read a lot more this morning. Since it is essays, I could keep pretending that I would just read the few more pages of the one I was on. The first one, on artist David Salle is riveting. I have read several of these essays over the years in the New Yorker, which often publishes her work, but I didn't mind at all reading them again, As soon as I finish posting tonight, I look forward to running upstairs and finishing the book before I go to sleep. And, happily, there is a lot more Malcolm available on Kindle.

Tonight's poem is the last of the ones I brought with me by Li Young Lee, when I left his books in Idaho.
It is the most mysterious to me but offers up irresistible beauties and quite makes my mind hum! Follow the seed, the sown, the births/deaths to the wee man carving a name on a stone, Here it is!

My Father's House

Here, as in childhood, Brother, no one sees us.

And someone has died, and someone is not yet born.

Our father walks through his church at night

and sets all the clocks for spring. His sleeplessness

weighs heavy on my forehead, his death almost

nothing. In the letter he never wrote to us

he says, No one can tell how long it takes a seed

to declare what death and lightning told it

while it slept. But stand at a window long enough,

late enough, and you may some night hear

a secret you'll tomorrow, parallel to the morning,

tell on a wide white bed to a woman

like a sown ledge of wheat. Or you may never

tell it, who lean across the night and miles of the sea,

to arrive at a seed, in whose lamplit house

resides a thorn, or a wee man carving

a name on a stone, the name of the one who has died,

the name of the one not born unknown.

Li-Young Lee from Book of my Nights, BOA Editions, LTD, page 23.