Sherry Chandler

These photos were also taken on April 22. I know the bugs are probably harmful and I shouldn’t have those awful rank things amongst my irises (see below on weeding), but on that one brightly sunny April day, I thought they were quite lovely and amusing.

That is not my shadow impinging in the second photo.

When the new Wavelength arrived in my mailbox two days ago, the first thing I noticed was that the cover illustration is very similar to a photograph I took myself earlier this year – on April 22 to be exact, a pellucidly sunny day after a storm. Ruth Rogers, who took the Wavelength photo, and I must have similar instincts. Or else there is something about irises beside the road.

But I wasn’t thinking about the road at all when I took the photograph. I just wanted to capture the brilliant color of the iris, because they don’t stay in gorgeous full bloom down the stalk like that for very long. It was only after I looked at the photo on the computer screen that I realized that the road almost dominates the picture, leading the eye off over the rise to look for adventure, like a novel. The Rogers photo has some nice chiaroscuro to add mystery, but the placement of the flower blocks you from following the road, brings you back into that shadowy place where poetry is written.

Not everyone is that impressed with irises. Coincidentally, a friend wrote, just yesterday, to bemoan the Sisyphean labor of maintaining perenniel beds:

I have a love affair with annuals. They only last a season, but they work hard while they’re here, sort of like that old country song - live fast, die young, and leave a happy memory. I try to summon the same affection for my perennials, but I get rather irritated at some of them. The iris, for example, bloom for one week, and then just sit there with that ugly foliage for the rest of the summer, sort of like someone who was a hotshot high school athlete and expects to coast for the rest of his life on his teenage glory —

And they have to be weeded all year long as payment for that one week of glory. I’m not that diligent in weeding mine, as you can see if you look at the photo closely.

Issue 12 of Wavelength contains poems by Dory Hudspeth and James Doyle, both of whom are always a joy, in addition to Jane Kretschmann. Subscriptions to Wavelength are $15/3 issues. Single copies are $6. Make checks payable to:

David Rogers
1753 Fisher Ridge Road
Horse Cave, KY 42749

Ruth Bavetta, who sometimes joins the conversation here, has sent word that she has two poems in the current issue of Heliotrope. The poems, “Thin Ice” and “Trash,” are listed in the TOC here, right next to Billy Collins. It’s really exciting to be in the same issue with the big guys! Jump back and see a sample from Ruth’s altered books here.

Also, I have received issue 6 of Wavelength. A quick run down the TOC reveals that Jane Kretschman, who has graciously lent me some of her cat poems and cat photos (here and here), has a poem in this volume. Entitled “Blessing Before Driving,” it has some bite to it.

THE OLD PIONEER

A dirge for the brave old pioneer!
Knight-errant of the wood!
Calmly beneath the green sod here
He rests from field and flood
The war-whoop and the panther’s screams
No more his soul shall rouse,
For well the aged hunter dreams
Beside his good old spouse.

A dirge for the brave old pioneer!
Hushed now his rifle’s peal;
The dews of many a vanish’d year
Are on his rusted steel;
His horn and pouch lie moldering
Upon the cabin-door;
The elk rests by the salted spring,
Nor flees the fierce wild boar.

A dirge for the brave old pioneer!
Old Druid of the West!
His offering was the fleet wild deer,
His shrine the mountain’s crest.
Within his wildwood temple’s space
An empire’s towers nod,
Where erst, alone of all his race,
He knelt to Nature’s God.

A dirge for the brave old pioneer!
Columbus of the land!
Who guided freedom’s proud career
Beyond the conquer’d strand;
And gave her pilgrim sons a home
No monarch’s step profanes,
Free as the chainless winds that roam
Upon its boundless plains.

A dirge for the brave old pioneer!
The muffled drum resound!
A Warrior is slumb’ring here
Beneath his battle-ground.
For not alone with beast of prey
The bloody strife he waged,
Foremost where’er the deadly fray
Of savage combat raged.

A dirge for the brave old pioneer!
A dirge for his old spouse!
For her who blest his forest cheer,
And kept his birchen house,
Now soundly by her chieftain may
The brave old dame sleep on,
The red man’s step is far away,
The wolf’s dread howl is gone.

A dirge for the brave old pioneer!
His pilgrimage is done;
He hunts no more the grizzly bear
About the setting sun.
Weary at last of chase and life,
He laid him here to rest,
Nor recks he now what sport or strife
Would tempt him further west.

A dirge for the brave old pioneer!
The patriarch of his tribe!
He sleeps–no pompous pile marks where,
No lines his deeds describe.
They raised no stone about him here,
Nor carved his deathless name–
An empire is his sepulchre,
His epitaph is Fame.

— Theodore O’Hara (1820-1867)

…and here’s a book cited: “The Old Pioneer” is reprinted from O’Hara and His Elegies. George W. Ranck. Baltimore: Turnbull Brothers, 1875. A book reviewed in The Nation. And here he is in Lawyers and Poetry.

I just received this e-mail from the Mary Anderson Center:

Dear Board and Friends of MACA:

The Mary Anderson Center is preparing for two very special events in June.

Fong Choo Master Clay Workshop, June 2-7th, 2006. SOLD OUT!

Magic at the Mount: The 3rd Dimension, June 10th, 2006, 4-9pm. Music, poetry, sculpture, children’s art activities, food & fun. FREE and open to everyone! Volunteers needed.

The residency calendar is nearly full in June and July. Our refrigerator in the calving barn died (RIP). We desperately need to replace it , in order to accommodate all of your guest artists and special events. If anyone knows of a used refrigerator that can be donated or purchased at a reasonable price, please let us know. Delivery could be an issue, as we are very limited in man-power and muscle. I believe Guy Tedesco has a dolly in the great barn. Please feel free to FWD: this request. I am always amazed at the results of effective networking.

If you want a copy of our wish list to donate gently used items to the center, please e-mail a request. Full size sheets and towels are always needed.

Thank you for your continued support to the center. We will see you in June!

Lisa Angell
Executive Director
Magic Co-chair

The Mary Anderson Center for the Arts
812-923-8602 (Phone)Office hours Mon-Fri,10am-4pm
MACArts@onebox.com
Visit our web site for upcoming events, directions, & options www.maryandersoncenter.org

“Providing time and space for artists to create.”

Juan Cole has an interesting post this morning that attempts to explain why The Da Vinci Code has such a firm grip on the Zeitgeist. It’s all about restoring balance:

Dan Brown’s narrative is about restoring the golden mean to contemporary Western modernity.

The novel has a binary structure. On the one hand you have the Church hierarchy, which is patriarchal, doctrinal, monotheistic, ascetic, and authoritarian. Those attributes are its normal pole, but it is open to corruption when they are over-emphasized. The first step toward over-emphasis is Opus Dei, which stands for a cult-like kind of monotheism in which individualism is much more surpressed than in the Church generally. But even Opus Dei is not so far from churchly normality. The villain of the movie is the man who corrupts the principles of Opus Dei itself, Bishop Manuel Aringarosa and his acolyte, Silas. They take self-denial in the direction of manic masochism…

This pole of the film reflects the authoritarian side of modern institutions and culture. It isn’t about Catholicism at all, or about Opus Dei. It is about the unchallengeable doctrines (norms) of society, and about the constant danger that ordinary obedience to the law can turn into a cultic exaltation of the law above principle and spirit. The Silas’s of the US are the Ollie Norths and the Irv Lewis Libbys, apparatchiks who are willing to break any law and throw over any constitutional principle in order to serve their masters. (I.e. Cheney gets to play Aringosa in the Plame scandal).

…The other pole in the Brown narrative is the priory around the female descendants of Jesus through Mary Magdalene. This pole is about paganism, feminism, individualism, scientific rationality and sexual freedom. This pole, likewise, can become corrupt and antinomian. Thus, the pagan orgy or hieros gamos repulses Sophie Neveu and causes an almost fatal break between the Grail (herself) and the priory. Likewise, scientistic society has led her to become an unbeliever, so that the Grail itself is corrupted by doubt. Sir Leah Teabing is the symbol of this pole gone to unethical extremes. In his quest for the Grail, he is willing to deceive and to kill. He is Silas’s structural analogue.

…The Brown narrative does not advocate replacing the patriarchal,authoritarian, self-denying Church with the feminist, individualistic, pagan, libertine priory.

It is, in fact, only the melding of the two poles that would create the golden mean. That would lie in gender equality, and in moderation in each of the values of authority and individualism, self-denial and self-indulgence, law and ethical principle.

That is the golden mean the public is looking for. It is religious, but for the most part values individualistic spirituality above dry Church discipline. It is willing to sacrifice, but not at the price of giving up self-actualization and individual ethical integrity. It is increasingly challenging patriarchy, though that struggle is lively. It recognizes the need for authority but is suspicious, in the Madisonian tradition, that too much authority will corrupt its holders.

The film is popular because it isn’t about Catholicism or France or some odd conspiracy theory centered on Mary Magdalene. It is popular because it is about the dilemmas of secular modernity.

I’ve cut out a lot of neat detail to bring you the outline of ideas, especially some parallels between Shiite Islam (where the prophet Mohammed did marry and have children) and the themes of the film. So you should go and read the whole essay.

Also, Professor Cole is talking about the movie and I think I heard that Ron Howard softened the ending a bit in his film.

Still, weariness with the culture wars seems as good an explanation as any why this mediocre book has been so enthusiastically received. I’m sure tired of all the shouting — have been since the Reagan years.

---

BTW, I have only read the book and don’t plan to see the movie, but I think Professor Cole has also hit on one of my major problems with Dan Brown’s craft (and I’ve heard that Ron Howard is very true to the original):

As a film, it has its disappointments. The figure of Langdon does not actually speak like an academic. His talk at the Louvre is a sermon, not an analysis. His arguments with Teabing are jejune and the substance unbelievable. There is too much exposition, too much explaining and dwelling on the details of the whole gnostic conspiracy theory. To be good, the film would have had to be more allusive and less preachy, to show not tell.

That, and the fact that the novel in a primer in how not to write an English sentence (as I read in the NYTimes).

The form of a poem, that to which every detail relates, is the same whether it is examined as stationary or as moving through the work from beginning to end, just as a musical composition has the same form when we study the score as it has when we listen to the perormance…One reason why we tend to think of literary symbolism solely in terms of meaning is that we have ordinarily no word for the moving body of imagery in a work of literature. The word form normally has two complementary terms, matter and content, and it perhaps makes some distinction whether we think of form as a shaping principle or as a containing one. As shaping principle, it may be thought of as narrative, organizing temporally what Milton called, in an age of more exact terminology, the “matter” of his song. As containing principle it may be thought of as meaning, holding the poem together in a simultaneous structure.

…

The form of the poem is the same whether it is studied as narrative or as meaning, hence the structure of imagery in Macbeth may be studied as a pattern derived from the text, or as a rhythm of repetition falling on an audience’s ear. There is a vague notion that the latter method produces a simpler result, and may therefore be used as a commonsense corrective to the niggling subtleties of textual study. The anology of music again may be helpful. The average audience at a symphony knows very little about sonata form, and misses practically all the subtleties detected by an analysis of the score; yet those subtleties are really there, and as the audience can hear everything that is being played, it gets them all as part of a linear experience; the awareness is less conscious, but not less real. The same is true of the response to the imagery of a highly concentrated poetic drama.

— Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1957)

I have been dipping into Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting and I wanted to share some lines from Günter Eich (1907-1972), translated by David Young. Eich was in the Wehrmacht, an American POW released in 1946. He was one of the founders of the left-wing Gruppe 47, along with Paul Celan, Günter Grass, and Erich Fried.

Geometrical Place

We have sold our shadow,
it hangs on a wall in Hiroshima,
a transaction we knew nothing of,
from which, embarrassed, we rake in interest.

And, dear friends, drink my whiskey,
I won’t be able to find the tavern any more,
where my bottle stands
with its monogram,
old proof of a clear conscience.

I didn’t put my penny in the bank
when Christ was born
but I’ve seen the grandchildren
of dogs trained to herd people
on the hills near the Danube School,
and they stared at me.

And I want, like the people of Hiroshima,
to see no more burnt skin,
I want to drink and sing songs,
to sing for whiskey,
and to stroke the dogs, whose grandfathers
sprang at people
in quarries and barbed wire….

There is great restraint in this poem, which I think allows us to look at the horror and longing for innocence that we share with the poet. It does not fall over into sentiment or ask for our pity, but reminds us that instead of finding our innocence, we continue to pile up guilt from which we rake in interest. [Updated note: I think of this interest as both financial – war can be very profitable – and psychic, as in compounded guilt.]

The following lines seem contemporary to me, they are part II of a three-part poem:

Seminar for Backward Pupils

II

Then came
mustard-skilled men,
turnip-counters,
delegates of welfare.

Wooden-eye, be watchful!

They scoured us clean
with sandpaper,
factual accounts
and politeness.

Wooden eye, be watchful!

Now we know everything:
the sun lies always before us.
We define freedom anew:
soon
we’ll be rid of it.

Wooden eye.

The Kentucky Guild of Artists and Craftsmen Spring Fair runs today and tomorrow in Berea.

We aren’t going to be exhibiting – there’s still the north side of the roof to do – but a great bunch of craftsmen will be, so if you get a chance stop by.