Nothing else is

I just came across this quote from King James I: “Dr Donne's verses are like the peace of God: they pass all understanding.” I'm sure he was just jealous. James himself was known behind his back as ‘the wise fool’ because he wanted to be thought clever and wasn't particularly.

But Donne has often been chastised for being convoluted and verbose, getting himself into logical tangles for the sake of argument, allowing the lawyer in him to outrun the lover. He died in 1631, and was largely ignored until Coleridge rehabilitated his reputation. Many thought him obscure or abstruse.  TS Eliot was instrumental in bringing him abruptly into the twentieth century, and rather than finding him quaint or antiquated, moderns found him modern.  He often speaks in a very direct, conversational tone, with a disconcerting frankness of irony, lust, weariness, or despair.  He does sometimes seem to take argument absurdly far, (as when he tries to seduce a woman by arguing that their bodily fluids have already mixed in the digestive system of a flea), but there is something persuasive even in this logical elasticity. He’s seductive because he’s doctrinaire. As “The Sun Rising” proves, smart is sexy.

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late schoolboys, and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long:
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me
Whether both the Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear:

“All here in one bed lay.”

She is all states, and all princes I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compar’d to this,
All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.

The happiness project

English novelist Jenny Diski offers a fairly scathing review of Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project, pointing out that originally ‘happy’ meant something more like lucky, as in ‘happenstance.’ The pursuit of happiness is a fairly modern project, consisting, it seems, largely of positive thinking and to-do lists (what about to be lists?). 

Rebecca's comment prompted me to think about what constitutes happiness in the fictional worlds of different authors, Shakespeare’s in particular.  Even though most of Polonius’ advice is meant to be derided, his memorable line “to thine own self be true” seems to strike a chord with Shakespeare's own thinking. In the world of the plays, happiness seems to be constituted mostly in the idea of individual freedom and personal authenticity. So argues my doctoral supervisor Peter Holbrook in his recent book Shakespeare's Individualism.

Acquiring or relinquishing happiness is not necessarily the nerve centre of a story, but it seems ubiquitous enough to be worth studying. So what about others - Tolstoy? Hardy? Faulkner? Woolf? I just have this hunch that literature is a better clue to happiness - getting it, understanding it, understanding that we can never really get it - than the projects of pop psych.

The ghosts of American soldiers

I am a firm believer in the capacity of literature to enable and ennoble human being, and also to accommodate complexities that other kinds of discourse don’t or won’t make room for. So, alarmed by the spectre of soldiers counselled into resilient optimism, I am reassured by the spate of poetry produced by US soldiers active in the middle east across the last decade. The AFR today has a review by New Yorker Courtney Cook of Brian Turner’s collections Here, Bullet (2005) and Phantom Noise (2010) that concludes thus: “Turner shows us soldiers who are invincible and wounded, a nation noble and culpable, and a war by turns necessary and abominable. He brings us closer to our own phantom guilt and speaks the words that we both do and do not want to hear.” Far more than fixed smiles and trauma resistance, such ambivalent writings are to me indicative of humanity flourishing in the most inhospitable of soils. Here is Turner’s poem “Ashbah”:

The ghosts of American soldiers
wander the streets of Balad by night,

unsure of their way home, exhausted,
the desert wind blowing trash
down the narrow alleys as a voice

sounds from the minaret, a soulful call
reminding them how alone they are,

how lost. And the Iraqi dead,
they watch in silence from rooftops
as date palms line the shore in silhouette,

leaning toward Mecca when the dawn wind blows.

Mor(e)on happiness

The latest Harper's has an interesting article about psychology and the happiness industry.  When Freud visited the US in 1909, he came “to the land of unbridled optimism to inform its inhabitants that a fragile equipoise between repression and abandon was the best they could hope for,” writes psychologist Gary Greenburg in ‘The War on Unhappiness.’ A century after Freud's visit, Greenburg attends a psych conference at which Freud's pessimism is laughed out the door by a new breed of evidence-based happiness gurus who are contributing to a state-endorsed project of human flourishing, starting with trauma-resistant soldiers. Maybe it’s not as alarming as Greenburg makes it sound, but there is much to be wary of in the notion of happiness as a means, rather than an indicator, of flourishing. Not unlike the craze for laughter yoga, which attempts to harness the medicinal effects of laughter without recourse to jokes. 

What's more encouraging is this article from the NY Times suggesting that happiness in African Americans has measurably improved with the gradual (if stunted) improvement in social equality and civil rights over the past five decades.  Happiness flowing in this direction seems more plausible than the tautological ‘winners are winners’ philosophy of the state-supported gurus.

Are you from the past?

I am always uncomfortable with historical fiction, only slightly less so with historical film, but I've never really put my finger on why. Jonathan Dee, reviewing Tom McCarthy's Man Booker short-listed C, has done it for me:

"A novel is a document of consciousness, and since consciousness today is not precisely what is was when Woolf wrote, or Flaubert or Cervantes, the search for a form that reflects faithfully what it means to be alive in one's own time - for 'realism,' if you're willing to define it as broadly as that - must constantly refresh its own terms. In this light, the historical novel would seem to offer if not a false testimony exactly, then at best a kind of gloss on existing testimony. The effort to credibly reanimate a time, a way of being, that one never knew: even at its most technically successful, what is that effort drawing upon other than research - in other words, the historical novelist's experience of reading other people's writing?"

I concur.