In a world that with you makes no sense
I am spending too much of my days lately in so much pain that I am randomly falling asleep from the exhaustion of it, but I am trying not to lose track of time as completely as the first half of this week. Have some things.
1. Because I have known for decades that Tanith Lee wrote two episodes of Blake's 7 (1978–81) and has a handful of radio credits besides, I must have known that her oft-reprinted vampire novelette "Nunc Dimittis" (1984) was adapted for an episode of The Hunger (1997–2000), but somehow I had missed the fact that it stars David Warner. I don't care if it's a good adaptation or not. To my absolute shock, the DVDs of the relevant season are available through my local library system. I am only trying to decide whether to wait until October to watch it.
2. I don't want to get into a fight in the letters section of the London Review of Books, but I had such an explosively inimical reaction to a portion of this review of a new biography of T.S. Eliot that I wound up reading several columns aloud to my mother in order to express my disagreements vocally, which she was patient with.
It's worth pausing on this key question for biographers of poets: how many words can be walled off from personal biography as cases of pure sound? Consider a symbol that appears in the tragedies of both Othello and Eliot himself: the handkerchief. After one parting in December 1935, Eliot wrote Hale a regretful jingle: 'I waved too, but my handkerchief was blue.' Pentameters such as this often crest the surface of Eliot's prose, making it 'sound well'. They appear in his critical essays and public addresses, and Ricks detected them in his letters, spotting 'a heroic line' in a 1927 epistle where Eliot excuses himself to his brother for not visiting their dying mother because Vivien needs him. 'I must not leave her, even for a night,' Eliot writes, constraining his wildly irregular circumstances to the regularity of prose rhythm. The heroic line (an eloquent five stress phrase) is a form that tends towards the tragic intensity and hint of self-dramatisation that Eliot identified when he spoke of Othello. It's no surprise then that such lines are also present in the Hale letters. The jingle about the handkerchief emerges from this longer sentence on parting: 'I watched you go down the street, turning and waving, and I waved too, but my handkerchief was blue and I fear you did not see it wave.' Eliot's words to his brother and his letter to Hale may share both shape and subject (to leave or not to leave) but they diverge in cadence: one is locked into tragic intensity, the other carries a light anapaestic trip in the middle and a failed gesture of such bathos that it throws off any austerity of sound or sense.
Emily is presumably not expected to believe in Tom's improbably blending-in handkerchief. He is offering up the line as consolation for their asymmetry, for the failure of their intentions to meet as neatly as the sounds that rhyme 'too' and 'you'. This was a might-have-been wave to his might-have-been love. Eliot departs from official music-making in his letters, but these (mock) heroic line forms show that he never fully abandons it: the blue handkerchief blends with its surroundings and the private prose with the auditory imagination of the published writing. Crawford refrains from commenting on details like this, but his poet's ear selects them for quotation. He allows this particular line about the handkerchief, with its jaunty forlorn grace, to contour the end of a chapter called 'Irrevocable'.
The cumulative effect of such moments, as Crawford presents them, is to suggest new possibilities of understanding what Eliot spoke of as the 'auditory imagination'. He defined this as 'the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling'. Sounding out phrases in letters as well as in verse kept things going for Eliot: he needed a low level of compositional hum. Like a secular spiritual exercise, the letters sustained a gentle level of committed awareness of words and feeling, occasionally reaching ecstatic pitch. This was the way he liked to live, and to write, as he made clear to Hale on several occasions in 1933. 'One simply could not live if one's emotions and sensibility were wholly awake all the time . . . Occasionally, very rarely, the periods of heightened life pass for a moment into a mood of peace and reconciliation, a momentary perception of a pattern in life, which one just accepts.' Momentary patterns like the prose rhymes of 'too' and 'blue' perhaps. Or the allusions across the letters to Eliot's work, both past and future.
I was with the reviewer as far as tracing the prosody of Eliot's prose was concerned and then in the middle of the third paragraph I blew a gasket, because I have never formally studied Eliot beyond a high school introduction to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," but I know a lot of poets. People who play with language will play with it in their private lives as much as their professional endeavors, not as a form of keeping their hand in while resting up from their vocation, but just because their brains are tuned for it. (Spot the five-stress phrase!) It's part of communication. It entertains, it emphasizes, it may even be unconscious. I have two separate friends who tend toward fiction that could be scanned as blank verse. I am prone to patterns of allusion and assonance and incantation almost no matter what I am writing, on which I try to keep an eye in case they need breaking. It doesn't surprise me at all that Eliot had shifting registers of poetry in his letters; I might be more surprised if he did not. (Blame Christopher Marlowe.) I really stick at calling it a secular spiritual exercise. In short, I am willing to grant Eliot all sorts of inescapable importance in the history of English literature and my development as a writer personally, but when it comes to juggling tones and rhythms outside of his published verse, I do not see how he differs at all from the general run of poets. Or even people who just like words.
The reviewer writes beautifully, incidentally: I love the comparison of the two cadences. I feel it would be unnecessarily snide to go through with a pencil and commit scansion.
3. I had a pistachio éclair this evening. I do not mean that it had pistachio-flavored crème pâtissière inside. It had a pistachio-flavored icing on top and then inside, as far as I can tell, it had pistachio butter. It was fantastic. It looked like a special effect of pond slime. It could not be eaten without leaving the impression of a massacre of water lilies. I am seriously considering, as soon as the shop opens tomorrow, acquiring another.
4. A friend who is not on DW sent me an article about Howard Pyle's The Mermaid (1910). I followed the link through to a search for "mermaids" in the collections of the Delaware Art Museum and I am charmed by John Sloan's Atlantic City in Mid-Winter (1894).
5.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch took a picture of me in a self-explanatory T-shirt.
1. Because I have known for decades that Tanith Lee wrote two episodes of Blake's 7 (1978–81) and has a handful of radio credits besides, I must have known that her oft-reprinted vampire novelette "Nunc Dimittis" (1984) was adapted for an episode of The Hunger (1997–2000), but somehow I had missed the fact that it stars David Warner. I don't care if it's a good adaptation or not. To my absolute shock, the DVDs of the relevant season are available through my local library system. I am only trying to decide whether to wait until October to watch it.
2. I don't want to get into a fight in the letters section of the London Review of Books, but I had such an explosively inimical reaction to a portion of this review of a new biography of T.S. Eliot that I wound up reading several columns aloud to my mother in order to express my disagreements vocally, which she was patient with.
It's worth pausing on this key question for biographers of poets: how many words can be walled off from personal biography as cases of pure sound? Consider a symbol that appears in the tragedies of both Othello and Eliot himself: the handkerchief. After one parting in December 1935, Eliot wrote Hale a regretful jingle: 'I waved too, but my handkerchief was blue.' Pentameters such as this often crest the surface of Eliot's prose, making it 'sound well'. They appear in his critical essays and public addresses, and Ricks detected them in his letters, spotting 'a heroic line' in a 1927 epistle where Eliot excuses himself to his brother for not visiting their dying mother because Vivien needs him. 'I must not leave her, even for a night,' Eliot writes, constraining his wildly irregular circumstances to the regularity of prose rhythm. The heroic line (an eloquent five stress phrase) is a form that tends towards the tragic intensity and hint of self-dramatisation that Eliot identified when he spoke of Othello. It's no surprise then that such lines are also present in the Hale letters. The jingle about the handkerchief emerges from this longer sentence on parting: 'I watched you go down the street, turning and waving, and I waved too, but my handkerchief was blue and I fear you did not see it wave.' Eliot's words to his brother and his letter to Hale may share both shape and subject (to leave or not to leave) but they diverge in cadence: one is locked into tragic intensity, the other carries a light anapaestic trip in the middle and a failed gesture of such bathos that it throws off any austerity of sound or sense.
Emily is presumably not expected to believe in Tom's improbably blending-in handkerchief. He is offering up the line as consolation for their asymmetry, for the failure of their intentions to meet as neatly as the sounds that rhyme 'too' and 'you'. This was a might-have-been wave to his might-have-been love. Eliot departs from official music-making in his letters, but these (mock) heroic line forms show that he never fully abandons it: the blue handkerchief blends with its surroundings and the private prose with the auditory imagination of the published writing. Crawford refrains from commenting on details like this, but his poet's ear selects them for quotation. He allows this particular line about the handkerchief, with its jaunty forlorn grace, to contour the end of a chapter called 'Irrevocable'.
The cumulative effect of such moments, as Crawford presents them, is to suggest new possibilities of understanding what Eliot spoke of as the 'auditory imagination'. He defined this as 'the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling'. Sounding out phrases in letters as well as in verse kept things going for Eliot: he needed a low level of compositional hum. Like a secular spiritual exercise, the letters sustained a gentle level of committed awareness of words and feeling, occasionally reaching ecstatic pitch. This was the way he liked to live, and to write, as he made clear to Hale on several occasions in 1933. 'One simply could not live if one's emotions and sensibility were wholly awake all the time . . . Occasionally, very rarely, the periods of heightened life pass for a moment into a mood of peace and reconciliation, a momentary perception of a pattern in life, which one just accepts.' Momentary patterns like the prose rhymes of 'too' and 'blue' perhaps. Or the allusions across the letters to Eliot's work, both past and future.
I was with the reviewer as far as tracing the prosody of Eliot's prose was concerned and then in the middle of the third paragraph I blew a gasket, because I have never formally studied Eliot beyond a high school introduction to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," but I know a lot of poets. People who play with language will play with it in their private lives as much as their professional endeavors, not as a form of keeping their hand in while resting up from their vocation, but just because their brains are tuned for it. (Spot the five-stress phrase!) It's part of communication. It entertains, it emphasizes, it may even be unconscious. I have two separate friends who tend toward fiction that could be scanned as blank verse. I am prone to patterns of allusion and assonance and incantation almost no matter what I am writing, on which I try to keep an eye in case they need breaking. It doesn't surprise me at all that Eliot had shifting registers of poetry in his letters; I might be more surprised if he did not. (Blame Christopher Marlowe.) I really stick at calling it a secular spiritual exercise. In short, I am willing to grant Eliot all sorts of inescapable importance in the history of English literature and my development as a writer personally, but when it comes to juggling tones and rhythms outside of his published verse, I do not see how he differs at all from the general run of poets. Or even people who just like words.
The reviewer writes beautifully, incidentally: I love the comparison of the two cadences. I feel it would be unnecessarily snide to go through with a pencil and commit scansion.
3. I had a pistachio éclair this evening. I do not mean that it had pistachio-flavored crème pâtissière inside. It had a pistachio-flavored icing on top and then inside, as far as I can tell, it had pistachio butter. It was fantastic. It looked like a special effect of pond slime. It could not be eaten without leaving the impression of a massacre of water lilies. I am seriously considering, as soon as the shop opens tomorrow, acquiring another.
4. A friend who is not on DW sent me an article about Howard Pyle's The Mermaid (1910). I followed the link through to a search for "mermaids" in the collections of the Delaware Art Museum and I am charmed by John Sloan's Atlantic City in Mid-Winter (1894).
5.
spatch took a picture of me in a self-explanatory T-shirt.