William James in 1884: "Our mental life, like a bird's life, seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings."

Henry James perhaps remembering this in 1898, has the Governess begin her narrative:  "I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong.

Unexpected Reunion

It just occurred to me that Johann Peter Hebel's amazing story "Unexpected Reunion" -- which Kafka famously called "the most wonderful story in the world -- is a version of Orpheus and Eurydice.  Or perhaps it might be called Eurydice and Orpheus, with all such a converse might apply.  At any rate it's the Eurydice figure who turns back, Eurydice who's been exiled in this world for all those years.

Ophuls' Black Orpheus, problematic as its real world construction is (for short: not the fact that it depicts an exotic celebration per se, but the exoticization of the actors), is still a brilliant and beautiful movie, and its most brilliant part is what Orpheus sees when he turns back: Eurydice as a very old woman.  What he sees is the truth of marriage, time, aging, death.  A truth, anyhow: the other truth is that these things are okay if one doesn't turn back, doesn't seek to turn back.  

In Hebel's story, too, the woman becomes very old, in her vast separation from her "young husband" ("θαλερὸς παρακοίτης," as Andromake calls Hektor).  But it is she who turns back to see his youth, and to mourn their lives and their parting, she who is more Eurydice than ever.

"With ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh"

WITH ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh,

Like stars in heaven, and joyously it showed;

Some lying fast at anchor in the road,

Some veering up and down, one knew not why.

A goodly vessel did I then espy

Come like a giant from a haven broad;

And lustily along the bay she strode,

Her tackling rich, and of apparel high.

The ship was nought to me, nor I to her,

Yet I pursued her with a lover's look;

This ship to all the rest did I prefer:

When will she turn, and whither? She will brook

No tarrying; where she comes the winds must stir:

On went she, and due north her journey took.

This sonnet has always haunted me, without my thinking much about why.  But today I realized it's the amazing twelfth line.  All the other lines are end-stopped (or could be) with no sentences ending midline.  But then we get that amazing caesura, just in the question about when the ship would turn: "When will she turn, and wither?"  And then the only enjambment, as she does turn, and another clausal ending after "tarrying" in line 13.  You read the last three lines as a kind of three line poem-within-the-poem, and they're pure blank verse in this Petrarchan sonnet.  The sense of enjambed, even Miltonic, blank verse -- except that it's purely Wordsworthian -- overlays and displaces the sonnet form that contains it, and that's what the ship is doing too -- brooking no tarrying, commanding the winds, sailing due north.

The Sacred James

 I'm reading Henry James's bizarre last unfinished novel, The Sense of the Past, which I guess he started around the time of The Sacred Fount and just after Turn of the Screw.  Anyhow, the way it treats its central character's relation to a cousin whose intelligence waxes and wanes during a single conversation reminds me of The Sacred Fount, which treats intelligence and insight as a kind of fluid quantity that flows back and forth between characters.  That's what literally happens in each chapter, as characters go from complete imbecility to supersubtle analysts, back to imbecility: with the observing narrator also needing to worry about his own susceptibility to this coming and going of accurate insight in himself.

And it occurred to me today (maybe this is a brief waxing of insight) that James is explicitly parodying what happens in all his novels, parodying the way Isabel or Strether or Milly Theale or Maggie Verver go from being less intelligent and insightful than those around them to being far more so.  It's as though James thought to give this another, how shall I say?... turn of the screw, in order to see what would happen if the dynamic would shift back and forth.

Why would he do this?  Well, partly for fun, mainly for fun, but partly as an experiment in style, since it's style alone that can suggest insight that then becomes so fine that (as Eliot says) no idea can violate it, at which point it becomes obtuseness, an obtuseness so intense that it can't help becoming self-aware and turning into insight again, in an incessant dialectic that can go nowhere except into the subtlety of its own endlessly elaborating, endlessly self-modifying sentences.

“Parentheses” (and quotations)

Geoffrey Nunberg (somewhere) makes the point that parentheses and quotations follow similar typographical, and, you could say syntactic rules: If you open a parentheses (with a lunula) you have to close it (with another, facing the opposite way).  Likewise if you open a direct quotation (with raised, inverted commas (auf Englisch, zumindest), you have to close it (with reverted commas, but at the top of the line as well (das gilt auch für Deutsch, für die „Gänsefüßchen”)). (Look closely at what surrounds the words “inverted commas;” there's also a more minor question about punctuation, which can sometimes go inside a closing mark without suggesting that it's part of the original inscription, whereas parenthetical insertions are treated as either part of a sentence, so that there is no punctuation mark just before the last lunula, or they are sentences in themselves, as here, so that the parenthetical at the end of the previous sentence is part of a longer sequence of words and therefore does not itself end with a punctuation mark, whereas this parenthesis is a stand-alone sentence, so it does.)


Another typographical convention that intuits the similarity is the rule that when you break a quotation into paragraphs, you open each paragraph with inverted commas, but only put the reverted commas at the end of the entire quotation.  (Cf. Virginia Woolf's The Waves as a good example of the Hogarth Press's conformity to this rule.)  Similarly, parentheticals that are broken into paragraphs have opening (concave) lunulae at the beginning of every paragraph but closing (convex) lunulae only at the end of the entire parenthesis (I am using “concave” and “convex” as understood intuitively, perhaps: the opening lunula opens an interior space: the closing lunula pushes us onward into the flow of the larger discourse).

I was thinking about this the other day, and realizing that there is an interesting and symmetrical difference between quotations and parentheses.  A parenthetical phrase (like this one) may refer to things outside of it, parts of the sentence it inhabits (say) that have no reciprocal need for the parenthesis (which is why it's parenthetical; look at how cleverly Pope allows you so skip parentheses in The Rape of the Lock without disturbing the rhyme scheme (though parenthetical phrases will often contribute (“(not in vain)” (The Essay on Criticism)) to the meter)).

Quotations on the other hand must not refer to the quoting context, since they precede it logically and temporally.  (“Scare quoted” material may, I suppose, but here they're pretty much meant to quote the context.)  So parentheses are outward-looking, supplemental to the discourse in which they appear, but quotation is inward-looking.  The quoting context is the late-coming supplement, unregarded by the haughty indifference of the quoted words.

Wittgenstein's Cat

Imagine a cat in a box (it could be a duck or a rabbit or even a beetle instead, of course but we will assume without criteria that it's a cat) . She is caterwauling (you might be going to the vet or some such, because the cat is sick) but you can't tell if her cry is closer to "yanny" or to "laurel." At some point she quiets down, which after a while is worrying. You'd stopped at a fabric store on the way to get some soft silk to make the cat more comfortable in the box. The shopkeeper matched the gold fabric which you gave him a sample of to some silk he had on hand. Then perhaps he counted out fourteen inches of fabric (perhaps he recited the numbers from 1 to 14 as he counted out each inch: he counted in just the way we count, in the most ordinary sense). You arrive at the vet and she opens the box in her examining room. I want to say you will see either a dead cat surrounded by the funerary crepe of black fabric or a living cat rolling upon pink to work it in. But what was she doing before that, and was her caterwaul "yanny" or "laurel?" (We assume it has to be one of those.)

We went to see the HD version of the Met's Walküre yesterday. Despite the much-hated set (which I ended up thinking was okay), I thought it was amazing. And I think I got something about Wagner -- how the extreme length of his operas matters. (Twain's joke: You go to see a Wagner opera that starts at 6, and an hour later you check your watch to find that it's 6:15.)

As with Act II of Tristan, Act III of Die Walküre is a long interchange between a devastated authoritarian, a father figure whose grief seems impossible to reconcile with his authority, and the person -- here Brünnhilde -- whom he must injure, who has brought her injury upon herself, and whom he must explain himself to.

Such explanations are not easy. This is the opposite of the marvelous efficiency of dramatic or film dialogue, where clarity is completely efficacious. This is more about mind-changing. The argument, the reasoning is clear from the start. What acts to change Brünnhilde's mind is the strange, bass-baritone emotion with which Wotan (and Marke, a basso profundo in Tristan) sings. It's as though their loss, despair, powerlessness is in part the impossibility of their singing in a tenor's register -- Siegfried's par excellence. Hunding (also a basso profundo), is simply evil. He revels in his authority. Wotan doesn't. His authority is a fact that he cannot escape. If he could be a tenor, he would. If he could have two eyes he would. Wotan and Marke (and to an extent the baritone Giorgio Germont, the father in La Traviata who finds himself unexpectedly having to explain to Violetta why he needs her to give up her love for his son) cannot set aside the burden of office, the burden that makes him a type, not a character, an opposition and not a protagonist. It's a very hard position to be in, and there's something very moving about the hopelessness of power the very long explanation conveys. Care sits on their faded cheeks, and the length of their scenes is an amazing demonstration that there is nothing to be done.