Morning Read
¶ In the Decameron, IV, viii, we’re back to courtly love. Girolamo, sent out of town to get him away from an artisan’s daughter, is distraught to find, upon his return, that she has married someone else. So what does he do? He lies down in bed next to her and resolves to do. (He holds his breath, in fact. I believe that this is impossible.) And then, what does his former lady-love do? Although she’d forgotten all about him, and rather wished that he wouldn’t lie down next to her &c, all it takes is the sight of his corpse at the funeral to rekindle her passion. “What a wonderful thing Love is, and how difficult it is to fathom its deep and powerful currents.” Stendhal says somewhere (and I wish I could source this) that people wouldn’t think about falling in love on their own; they have to read about it first. Boccaccio seems to have been intent on making sure that everyone read about it, over and over and over.
But the best part of the tale is this dry bit of business, before Cupid’s arrow strikes the second time:
“Girolamo,” she whispered, “it’s time for you to be going.”
On receiving no answer, she assumed that he had fallen asleep. So she stretched out her hand to wake him up and began to prod him, but found to her great astonishment that he was cold as ice to the touch. She then prodded him more vigorously but it had no effect, and after trying once more she realized that he was dead. The discovery filled her with dismay and for some time she lay there without the slightest notion what to do.
In the end she decided to put the case to her husband without saying who was involved [remember, the married couple is in bed, with the husband on one side of the lady and Girolamo’s corpse on the other], and ask his opinion about what the people concerned ought to do about it; and having woken him up, she described her own recent experience as though it had happened to someone else, then asked him what advice he would give supposing it had happened to her.
To this, the worthy soul replied that in his view, the fellow who was dead would have to be taken quietly back to his own house and left there, and that no resentment should be harboured against the woman, who did not appear to him to have done any wrong.
“In that case,” said the girl, “we shall have to do likewise.”
¶ In the Aeneid, Aeneas bumps into the recent suicide, Dido, but, what do you know: she won’t hang around to listen to his explanations. (The gods made me do it.)
And at last she tears herself away, his enemy forever,
feeling back to the shadowed forests where Sychaeus,
her husband long ago, answers all her anguish,
meets her love with love. But Aeneas, no less
struck by her unjust fate, escorts her from afar
with streaming tears and pities her as she passes.
Now, just how does one pull off the neat trick of escorting from afar? The Latin is almost cute, as if saying makes it so.
nec minus Aeneas, casu concussus iniquo,
prosequitur lacrimis longe et miseratur euntem.
This gallant but utterly pointless and unlooked-for gesture that must have sent elegant minds of the Seventeenth Century into raptures.
¶ And so, farewell to C K Williams, at least for a time. The New Poems, angrier and more topical than his earlier verse, read like notes toward a lamentation. “Cassandra, Iraq” is a poem worth puzzling over.
She’s magnificent, as we imagine must be
who foresee and foretell and are right and disdained.This is the difference between us who are like her
in having been right and disdained, and us as we are.Because we, in our foreseeings, our having been right,
are repulsive to ourselves, fat and immobile, like toads,Not toads in the garden, who after all are what they are,
but toads in the tale of death in the desert of sludge.
We’re toads, the poet says, because we can’t figure out what to do about the awfulness of, specifically, the American misadventure in Iraq. I myself am not shamed by this; I think that Williams overlooks, as many on the Left do, the awful potential for another civil war that the Christianist stab at ascendancy has exposed. Wishing that this country were not so prone to the religious convulsions that engendered it is not, in the end, good enough; and the convulsion that just now seems to be dying down of its own accord could only have been stilled by a fearfully greater one. What toads need to do is learn American history — really learn it. Be that as it may, Williams ends his poem with an irresistible but somewhat impenetrable suggestion. Having noting that Cassandra could not foretell the manner of her own death, he concludes,
Her abductor dies, too, though, in a gush of gore, in a net.
That we know; she foresaw that — in a gush of gore, in a net.
Gore’s Internet?
Tomorrow, a few poems from Seanus Heaney’s District and Circle.
¶ Today’s Blogging Hero (Nº 15 — halfway through!): Joel Comm of JoelComm.com. More unexplained mysteries of SEO — I know, I could find out about it elsewhere, but the true theme of this book does seem to be Search Engine Optimization and Its Discontents — but also more than a little murk about what the site of the day is about. Finally: “I’m part of an unintentionally underground niche — the whole Internet info-product marketing niche. Marketing seminars, e-books, and so forth.” Ah! And so forth! Yesterday’s entry, for example: “Kindle Your Revenue Stream.” I just want someone to pay for my Kindle.
¶ In Chapter XXVII of Le rouge et le noir, Stendhal’s contempt for Julien’s fellow seminarians rises to excoriation, as he protrays a Church of such corrupted piety — its very priests honor the pope in exchange for good dinners and lots of casuel (perks) — that Julien’s almost helpless excellence earns him the nickname “Martin Luther.” The chapter portrays a gang of mediocrities enforcing their low standards out of sheer self-interest. How to prevent this sort of thing is one of the most vexatious of human problems. How to keep ten dim-witted thugs from trumping one first-class mind. Not to mention trouncing.
¶ Writing about Richard Rhodes — one of his few living subjects and the author of two very superior books about the invention, if that’s the word, of thermonuclear devices, The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb — Clive James gets at one of the weaker habits of mind of those inclined toward the Left:
The left is always at its weakest when it argues for an alternative past [i e, the world would be a better place if the atomic bomb had not been developed], administered by better me. They can only mean men like them. (This assumption of personal superiority is where the perennial left comes closest to the classic right.) But the past was administered by men as clever as they were at the very least. The chief virtue of Rhodes’s book about Los Alamos is to give you the feeling of how a group of the cleverest men on Earth combined their best efforts in the belief that building a bomb to kill a hundred thousand people at a time was the only thing to do. There can be moral discussions of the modern world that don’t take that fact in, but they won’t be serious.