What a lark! What a plunge!

Since we've had quite a bit of poetry this week, here's one of my favourite bits of prose: the opening words of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. If prose is to walking what poetry is to dancing, then this is prose cutting in.

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning — fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”— was that it?—“I prefer men to cauliflowers”— was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace — Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished — how strange it was!— a few sayings like this about cabbages.

The world's contracted thus

Donne is in my head today. As in “The Sun Rising,” this poem describes being in love as a contraction of the world to the experience of the lovers, or an expansion of the lovers to fill or obliterate the world. Love is a world, and “makes one little room, an everywhere.” This is apt for the towering, obsessive, almost destructive love of Shakespeare’s sonnets or some of Donne’s early work, but I think it also fits the quiet, steadfast love of a life lived in “one little room,” as John and Ann Donne's was - needing nothing else, because “nothing else is.” It fits both love's annexing and love's foreswearing of the world. This is “The Good Morrow.”

I wonder, by my truth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved; were we not weaned till then,
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?

’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.

And now good morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room, an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to others, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess our world; each hath one and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp North, without declining West?
Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one; or thou and I
Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die.

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.