Do you think it’d be okay if I kept my knee-socks on for a gynecological exam?
Interesting insight among my friends into choice of physicians. Most seem to prefer a female gynecologist. Personally, I’m only used to and therefore more comfortable with men being down there.
Ran into an ex uptown today. What makes it so hard to recognize a face that’s out of place? He had me at an advantage, my name on the door panel of the car parked out in front of CVS. He walked towards me, smiled a bit and said hello. I smiled and said hi, how are you. I didn’t know it was him until I heard his voice. How strange, to live with someone for six years and then not know his eyes.
We stood at different counters, and I was trying to decide if I should go up to him after the clerk had rung me out. The last time I talked to him was probably three years ago. And told him it’d be better if he didn’t call. It happened once before like this, where I walked right by him at the Dunkin’ Donuts. But I was with Jim, and again, recognized him by his voice after we’d walked past.
I heard him giving the clerk a hard time about some photos he was picking up. I wondered why he hadn’t printed them himself. Purple hands from squeezing grapes, broken nails from outdoor work, remnants of a cold sore on my lip and garden shoes; I decided to just walk away. Again.
Yesterday as I came across the Collinsville Bridge over the Farmington River, I noticed something I’m usually not fortunate enough to see in the minute or less it takes to drive across. In the row of hunched shoulders, poles hanging over the side, connected to the rushing waters below by a hair-strand of line, one man had caught a fish. With his pole in one hand, and what I could see of a wriggling fish in his other, he was releasing it from the hook. It was a small one, about two inches of tail flipped wildly out the edge of his grip. Once he’d freed it, he hauled back and flung the fish high into the air over the water. I could see it wriggling as it arced and dropped out of sight.
I wondered what the fish was thinking–if he thought at all. Was he terrified, or still stunned by the fight, the pulling through the wall of worlds between air and water. Was this the first time he’d ever seen a man, glowering down at him in judgement of his size.
And the flight, was it one of shock and terror, or did he, discovering something so incredible it was beyond his imagination, soar?
Watching on PBS: I’ve never seen anything like it; it looks like a highbrow rock concert. This famous violinist is playing a concert back in his homeland of the Netherlands, and he begins by leading in his musicians in a march through the audience, waving and smiling to the music. And, they don’t stop smiling as they play on stage. The music is upbeat and soul-lifting, the strings resonating deep inside and it makes you feel like you’re flying.
It is wondrous, the musicians are actually singing along and laughing as they play their instruments. The singers are nodding and grinning to each other. Rieu is smiling and dancing as he plays. The audience is up and dancing. There’s not a serious face in the house.
If there is any concert I’d want to be at, this is the one.
After the usual introduction as to establishing a purpose to this essay, in this case, in answer and expansion to a treatise by Caecilius, the author gets to the naming of those essential elements of what makes up the sublime in language.
In brief, there are five: 1. The power of forming great conceptions, meaning–and this is explained further on–the importance or loftiness of the idea or topic. 2. Vehement and inspired passion. Longinus claims that these are innate, and the final three are result of art: 3. Formation of figures, that of thought and expression; 4. Noble diction, including metaphor, simile, and elaboration or use of language; and 5. Dignified and elevated composition, likely meaning how the theme is manipulated for presentation. Underneath all, there a foundaton of great discourse.
Longinus does explain this further, and gives us examples from Homer and others. I will attempt to give examples from McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper to enhance both readings with the benefit of analysis. Obviously, I’ve already and likely will find many more examples of point #4, in McCcarthy’s work.
One of the elements of what Longinus (or whoever) claims makes up the sublime he calls "noble diction" — "which in turn comprises choice of words, and use of metaphors, and elaboration of language.
Here is where Cormac McCarthy excels. I must share this:
All was quiet. The birds were stilled in their first tentative and querulous chirpings. Low in the east and beyond the town a gray soulless dawn gnawed the horizon into shape. (p.97)
The imagery alone is incredibly drawn, a day dawning colorless until the separation of earth and sky is seen, ragged (gnawed into shape) treeline and mountain. But with McCarthy, you can take more from this: gray and soulless would indicate a continuation of a life without hope, as if the heavens had given up on God and man alike. Gnawed the horizon into shape seems to offer a power that controls, but with either the toying with life, as a dog worries a bone, or the hunger to consume it all and nearly suck out the marrow–depending upon your interpretation of the verb to gnaw. What does that mean for the world, and the men in McCarthy’s story that live within it?
There is little doubt that McCarthy places well within this element of the sublime, in language alone. And for me, he reaches as well into the "first and most important (is) the power of forming great conceptions." (The Sublime) For what greater conception is there than the natural world, and this is one of McCarthy’s constants, his focus on the land as a setting for his characters.
Well, the grapes are definitely on their way into jelly, seeings that I gave in and took the end of the harvest so there isn’t enough to make wine. Usually the wine takes priority because there’s tons of grapes and we don’t eat that much jelly (though we’re finally out of it now) and the most important reason of all–wine is easy. You just let it sit there and ferment.
Now the tomatoes are a different story. The answer was always: make salsa. Especially since the second coming of the cilantro is likely ready. And I’m rather tired of gazpacho, having had it all summer long. But I didn’t plant onions this year, and the bell peppers aren’t enough, though the hot Thai ones are plentiful. So the decision is…chili, no sauce, no chili, no sauce. I really haven’t made up my mind.
Now I’m headed back out to collect dill, chinese cabbage, and cilantro seeds for next year.
And oh yes, the damn turnips. There’s only so much you can do with damn turnips.
Usually by this time of year I’m hoping for frost, and it’s later this fall; hinted at coming tonight. The great killer of harvest insists that I quickly cut flowers, pluck tomatoes, pull the beans.
I’ve a sinkful of grapes–though I swore this year I would try to ignore them. Last year’s wine still needs to be bottled, and jelly’s a trouble to make. I held out as long as I could till the guilt overwhelmed me, then went and picked what was left from the birds and the deer.
Last weekend and the weekend before I made my best-ever chili, using fresh tomatoes rather than canned. This week I’ll make up another, or maybe just a nice sauce. You never get enough of the big tomatoes when you want them, and I’ve been using the bowlfuls of cherry and plum.
The turnips will sit there alone in the garden, made better, I’ve heard, by the pinch of the nightlayering frost.
Toolin’ up the road, cryin’ to I Loved Her First, which I guess is bound to replace Daddy’s Little Girl on the wedding dance floor. It don’t matter much; I still can’t help wellin’ up and overflowin’. It was always that one, and Old Shep–specially sung by Elvis.
Driving back home, I spot the eagle at the fish hatchery just up the road. He’s sitting on the tippity-topmost branch of his favorite dead tree. I cry for joy.
A friend and neighbor stops in the shop, minutes after I open. She’s lost her cat, a gorgeous grey coon, and she’s got me on the verge again.
I hope to cry once more today…for joy when he is found.
Whenever I read McCarthy I come across a few pages that beg to be read aloud. Usually, a description of a place, and McCarthy colors it well:
He went up the far side of the square under the shadow of the market house past brown country faces peering from among their carts and trucks, perched on crates, old women with faces like dried fruit set deep in their hooded bonnets, shaggy, striated and hooktoothed as coconut carvings, shabby backlanders trafficking in the wares of the earth, higgling their goods from a long row of ancient vehicles backed obliquely aainst the curb and freighted with fruits and vegetables, eggs and berries, honey in jars and boxes of nuts, bundles of roots and herbs from sassafras to boneset, a bordello of potted plants and flowers. (p. 82)
What’s that you say? These are people and things, not places? I disagree. This is the square, alive with color, sounds, and smells. And I read this in a drone that I can’t help falling into, as if, amid all this busyness, there is still a sense of despair.
An author does develop a caring for his characters, and often doesn’t want to let them go. This becomes a problem when he tries to direct them within a setting he’s laid out for them, or when, the story just turns out to be an exercise in skill. It’s also hard to know they’re locked away in some story that one wrote a while ago and is unused and near-forgotten.
In thinking of going the novel route–and this will in no way preclude the other writing projects I intend to take on, nor the short stories that come unbidden–I’m thinking already of who lives there? An unlikely setting is unrolling in my mind and characters who have peopled stories sitting now in a file on my hard drive begin pounding at the chips for my attention.
Some stories–and I have a good thirty or so of them–are just never going to be rewritten or revised simply because they’re not worth it. But the characters just may be. And I may use them to populate this place I have in my mind. It would be well to work with friends.
And here I’m thinking back to Storytron, and Sims, and wondering if the learning of these is not of more value than I thought and perhaps should be placed back there on my list of things to do. Storytron holds promise of character development. Sims holds the ability to visually see the setting.
So maybe I’m not dropping out of these worlds after all.
Could I really, after seven years, have finally come up with a premise and theme for a story that can run novel-length?
It all reincarnated with a novel I wrote at that time, the writing of fiction that I hadn’t written in years. Then to learn about writing; on to writing short stories again and for the first time, poetry. Now, maybe, back to the novel form, with a real story that has relevance and impact, societal concerns.
Gotta go write a quick outline.
McCarthy is a master at keeping the reader on a level with his characters in time. If someone’s trudging down a road, we know how he’s walking, how long it’ll take him to get into town. And this, a fight that turns deadly between Marion Sylder and an obnoxious hitchhiker who tries to likely steal the car:
Sylder closed his eyes too and buried his face in his shoulder to protect it. The flailings grew violent, slowed, finally stopped altogether. When Sylder opened his eyes again the man was staring at him owlishly, the little tongue tipped just past the open lips. He relaxed his hand, the fingers contracted, shriveling into a tight claw, like a killed spider. He tried to open it again but could not. He looked at the man again and time was coming back, gaining, so that all the clocks would be right. (p. 40)
Yeah, we held our breath, watching, reading the image and thinking, that guy’s gotta be dead. And we wait for McCarthy to tell us. McCarthy waits for us to find out. Time stopped, then caught up again, and we’re all on that road looking down.
YOU must know, my dear friend, that it is with the sublime as in the common life of man. In life nothing can be considered great which it is held great to despise. (Chapter 7, Part I)
It would seem that Longinus believes, in his attempt at defining the sublime in literature, that its appeal must be universal. To this I would argue that it is too limiting in nature to require that it be so pure as to be incontestable as a matter of opinion. While McCarthy and Faulkner, to me, reach heights of literary finesse to make me swoon, frankly, some hate them. Beauty, even in literature, I would think, is in the eye of the beholder. A majority vote, then, would satisfy my standards. But then, is that mere excellence, or the truly sublime?
When, therefore, a thing is heard repeatedly by a man of intelligence, who is well versed in literature, and its effect is not to dispose the soul to high thoughts, and it does not leave in the mind more food for reflexion than the words seem to convey, but falls, if examined carefully through and through, into disesteem, it cannot rank as true sublimity because it does not survive a first hearing. For that is really great which bears a repeated examination, and which it is difficult or rather impossible to withstand, and the memory of which is strong and hard to efface. (Chapter 7, Part 3)
Here’s where we may point to the classics, the Shakespeare’s, the Plato’s; that which read and reread by the same and by the many, can still bring one to find new things, and still marvel at the known. What turning of phrase, what complexion of words, what startling new grammatical form need literature take to become of that ilk?
Honestly, I’ve spent most of the morning with a mental hand clamped over my mouth.
One thing I’ve come to realize is that this weblog is also for thoughts that fly in, and with any luck, out into the great unknown and can’t find their way back. This thought is like that, only it’s not fully researched and not fully formed, and shouldn’t perhaps, be uttered.
However, it escapes me: There are definitely a new set of problems that we’ve created in the last fifty years, and a new one that we’re in the process of screwing together right now. Population versus borders.
It affects us now: The longer we’re living–now in the high 70s for both men and women, and an extraordinary number of those making it well into the 90s–has changed both the way each generation is living and will continue to do so for quite a while. Not even taking into consideration the immigration and illegal alien inflow over the past couple of decades, the elderly alone are adding to the population simply by not dying when they (we) were expected to die.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology