EPIPHANY

“The physiological mechanisms of epiphany, not necessarily religious.”  Catchy little subject, don’t you think?  NOT.

I used to preach about this -- the moments that some of us feel (not everyone) in which we are flooded with awareness of how hot and sweet the world is.  We stand motionless for a moment, not wanting it to end.  It’s real, but we don’t seem to have control over when and how it happens.  What the heck is it?

If you’re a god-believer, you might use the terms “theophany” meaning god (theos) breaking through to you or if not religious, “epiphany” which the anonymous writer at Wikipedia broadens and secularizes as a sudden insight into a problem after a long period of study.  In fact, the entry illustrates our Western cultural tendency to make everything explicable (explainable) and the product of rational thought or else some obscure Christian doctrine.  Those are your choices.  Be a grad student in the sciences or be a learned old guy in a church, both male.  

I’m trying to evade all that.  It’s not easy because the idea is SO deeply embedded in us and anyway it is the product of a lot of underlying ideas that people aren’t even aware that they believe, even after decades of countervailing strategies from feminists, Aquarians, and even psychologists.  Their sorting categories prevent them from having a place to put the knowledge and therefore it evaporates.

I’m saving for reflection an article on fMRI studies in which the experimenters challenged deeply held beliefs of people and actually got them to change their minds, to shift to a new point of view.  You can SEE it on the computer screen.  The experimenters did not record what it felt like, because now the idea is to switch from the logical rationality of people to their computerized brain synapses.  Both logic and neurology neglect “feelings” and yet feeling is our true guide in life.  

Suzanne Langer developed many relevant ideas.

Feeling is the whole-body response to one’s inner metaphors.  All thinking is metaphorical.  Rationality is a particular metaphor system -- it is the SUBset of thinking, which is really feeling.  By over-emphasizing rationality, particularly that which is represented in writing, we have suppressed and denied much of our feeling and therefore distorted our humanity.

We’ve lost our ability to perceive subtlety, what the Japanese used to call “shibui” -- elegance, sensitivity to small nuances.  We commodify everything into the symbolic invention of money and then play with its value by making it “worth” more and less according to mysterious rules about gambling on the stock market.

We help the needy according to symbol systems that render the help useless:  convening to wring our hands, writing poems about the emotion of compassion for others without any sharing of the plight of the objects or translating it into effective help -- turning it all back to ourselves in the Mother Teresa image of self-denial and sadness.  We don't let the needy speak for themselves.  Yet people in the most broken societies of the planet are often joyful, full of song and dance, giving it away.

Of all the most obvious “felt” symbol systems, sex in the most direct sense of body contact
is the feeling most commodified and disconnected from the new reality created by lab technology: petri dish conception, three-parent children from mitochondrial donation or from surrogate gestation, viagra-caused hydraulic responses without eroticism or bonding, deflected paraphilias, dab-on pheromones, transgressions of all kinds.  I was startled that a philosopher seeking a “new religion” would give as an example of degradation the habit of “watching porn.”  How does one tell porn from mainstream programming?  

More than that, how can one seek a new religion without first breaking apart the old ones into the hierarchical, institutional, patriarchal corporations they are.  The word "religion" as we were taught in seminary, is rooted in semantics.  Remember Wikipedia is a collaboration of male grad school students with tenured academic pedants, both types common in the “Western world” still yearning after empires.

“The Latin term religiō, origin of the modern lexeme religion (via Old French/Middle Latin) is of ultimately obscure etymology. It is recorded beginning in the 1st century BC, i.e. in Classical Latin at the beginning of the Roman Empire, notably by Cicero, in the sense of "scrupulous or strict observance of the traditional cultus".

“The classical explanation of the word, traced to Cicero himself, derives it from re- (again) + lego in the sense of "choose", "go over again" or "consider carefully". Modern scholars such as Tom Harpur and Joseph Campbell favor the derivation from ligo "bind, connect", probably from a prefixed re-ligare, i.e. re- (again) + ligare or "to reconnect," which was made prominent by St. Augustine, following the interpretation of Lactantius.”

See?  Everything defined by categories and specific men whose thoughts have been saved in writing and used by ecclesiastical authorities to bind together their constituencies, which are always based on money, more pleasantly called “prosperity.”

I’m thinking that “religion” works best in times of distress, then deteriorates when the crisis is over.  The people who nearly starved in the Great Depression and then desperately fought to save the world from Nazi ideas felt they were honorably religious and that a big entity overhead was therefore supporting them.  The two forces, one-two blows, in spite of being deeply felt, have by now been corrupted and commodified into terrorists and plutocrats.  It’s all forms of blackmail, extortion, and piracy.

Unless you step clear out of that metaphor system. 

Luckily, sort of by accident, I have an alternative.  I did not enter through mathematical logic, but through actor’s training which is about feeling.  (The Method, as taught by Alvina Krause.)  Not one’s endless stream of feeling, the narcissistic pondering of one’s reflection in a puddle, but rather the empathic sharing of experience.  Inhabiting the Other.  Not just humans, not just pets, not just working animals who have been bred to know what you want, but extension into the metaphorical “feelings” of things and their way of fitting into existence.  People love to make fun of trying to become a tree, but it’s less scary than trying to become, for instance, Tim.  Or one of the boys.

They can explain it themselves, but not necessarily in words.  Image, music, and maybe a private language, jargon or slang.  I love it because it makes me feel.  Not from out here, but from inside their desperate lungs, their spasming guts, their stinging feet.  And their seeking hands, their soaring leaps, their nobly shaven skulls.  

My level of success varies.  The effort is always rewarded.

There’s another source of my metaphor system, which is the Blackfeet reservation.  They teach me that what seems solid might be illusion and might disappear, that deceptions can be entrances never suspected, that -- as the Asians teach -- one must pay attention.  Always.  

In the end, it’s geology: watching the mountains being forced up from the depths, feeling the catabatic winds warm your face, walking past a tipi circle of stones, realizing that you’re smelling sweetgrass.  Even as I struggled to grasp theology, I was taking writing classes from Richard Stern.  The class, three women, were all writing fiction, though no one said we had to.  What Stern was urging us to see (urgently -- sometimes impatiently) was how to build a metaphor system, a poetry of living, so often shocking but more dangerous when quiet.

How can anyone devise or discover a theology for boys who have been thrown out on the street, making a living with their bodies, stunning themselves with drugs?  There’s nothing rational about it; nothing is bound together (ligere) for the sake of institutions.  But it can be felt.  If one has the courage.  There’s no reading list.  DO something.  I’ll go on trying to figure out how to trigger an epiphany, hot and sweet -- salvific.

RICHARD STERN: Some Class Notes

“Lots of good stuff here, but it’s a jumble.  You’re much too flip, too quick.  Your high intelligence isn’t being patient enough and the consequence is you’re not developing, only extending it.  Time to grip a subject with your teeth until you’ve shaken the dumbness out of it.  Same for the prose.  You haven’t worked nearly hard enough on it.”

This was the marking note at the bottom of a paper for Richard Stern’s class called “Approaching Modernity.”  I had no idea what he was talking about.  It has taken me decades to grow into understanding, but it was worth the thirty year struggle, not that I’m smarter at seventy than I was at forty, but now at least maybe I see what the issues are.

First, clarity of understanding.  What IS modernity?  How does one “approach” it?  Maybe the post-modern movement -- so sharp toothed and willing to shake a subject as though it were a sofa pillow -- has helped with this one.

Second, how does one be “patient” with intelligence and what does “high” mean?  I thought it meant being clever and quick-witted.  Now I see it as more like focus and waiting for meaning to develop, something like waiting for a contact photo print to develop in its chemical bath.  Steady contemplation until the insights arrive.

Third, how do you work hard on prose?  I thought it was correctness.  He was talking about rhetoric, but not just choice of words or proper antecedents.  All my papers are full of problems with what I now know as “rhetorical grammar,” sentences internally arranged in a way the reader can assimilate.  My sentences tended to be built in the order that the elements occurred to me, with the result that the “point” was often in the wrong place.  My sentences were “inside out.”  


Fourth, I was a flim-flam artist.  My undergrad education was in acting, so I sometimes tried to outwit profs by using terms and strategies from that realm.  With Stern, no matter where I went, he’d already been there and knew the context.

None of this was discouraging.  I should have changed my major, but I was enrolled on ministry scholarships and that task was equally challenging, though not unrelated.  The overlap between writing and theology was in the concepts, because good writing has to be rooted in clarity.  But secular writing includes human consciousness (here’s where the modernity comes in) which challenges classical reason and theology, not necessarily a welcome enterprise even in the Unitarian Universalist seminary of my legal enrollment.

___________________

My Stern class notes include the following bits, aphorisms mostly unsourced.  I hope they are worth pondering.

“Don’t give a person the knowledge of himself like a hard blow to his head but slowly let him come to his own knowledge according to his capacity to bear it.”  (“Bear” is clearly written -- the word is not “hear.”)

“Allow the sensations to speak for themselves.”

“It is characteristic of Americans to constantly modify their statements.”

“Pound’s theme is that everything is connected.”

“One has a secret self, an ‘other’ self, as a way of escaping an intolerable tight spot.”

“A novel forces one to a kind of justice that is not demanded by poetry.”

“Pound takes a Renaissance approach: by WORK on manuscript fragments one opens them up and makes them new.”

“The conditions of beauty:  rant, war and destruction broken through by the individual.”

“The unity imposed by the psychological and organic arch of one personality.”

“Impossibility of capturing and penetrating reality but the obligation to make the attempt.”

“Armature becomes the lifeline of the sculptor.”

“The sense that the answer to the mysteries lies right within the mundane facts: the key, the lock, the table.”  (Joyce)

“A book written to include its own origins.”  (Joyce’s “Ulysses.”)

“Whether or not to get involved: witness, voyeur, or participant?”

“Slow estrangement of a man bewitched by art.”  (Flaubert)

“The absurd is the hatchet that opens up the closed doors.”  (Kierkegaard)

“Reality favors SMALL symmetries.”  (Borges)

Stern to Pound:  “How are you?”

Pound to Stern:  “Senile.”

“The good writer produces a hunger only he can satisfy.”  (Stern)

___________

I’ll posit that before modernity the central mission of a writer was to achieve “high standards” of thought and writing.  Modernity shifted the focus to human consciousness, but Stern/Pound insisted that there was still a deep pattern that ought to be found.  Post-modern came along and said,  “Oh, sure, a deep pattern that YOU see!  Because it serves YOUR needs to be in charge, empowered!”  They examined the fragments and found fingerprints everywhere -- humans, sure, but not who they claimed to be.  There were structuralists, and then the post-structuralists.  (I write this in a flip, bloggy way -- consciously.  Or maybe I’m just covering my butt.)

The present literary movement is commodification:  what sells, what the big-shots respect, one’s self-promotion, one’s Amazon rank.  Stern’s obits -- as were the reviews of his books -- are full of name-dropping and the lament that Stern never was “popular,” as though being a best-seller were an indicator of quality.  They love his rueful quip:  “I was a has-been before I’d been a been.”  

Blogging is an enterprise that doesn’t really encourage the values of reflective patience,

clarity, careful grammatical sentence rhetoric --  it’s a hotbed of flim-flam and flip.  That’s why I like it and Stern despised it.  But it is my personal desire to please Stern that makes me take the next step:  gathering my blog hipshots into manuscripts for revision, revision, revision.  There were few-to-no personal computers in 1980 when I took Stern’s classes.  No one has remarked much on the new ease of working on structural, rhetorical, sentence grammar.  Stern used to emphasize the necessity of generating raw material to work on, but then to revise, revise, revise.  The third step is knowing when to stop.  Some fast hot writing should stay ragged and passionate.

As Pound said,  “Everything is connected.”  Everything unfolds out of what went before.  Stern always taught irony:  that every optimism should contain the seeds of its defeat and every pessimism should include a dawning light.  I’m wondering what David Brooks is going to say now about his old professor, who blog-beat him severely for being nice about Sarah Palin.  tfteacher.edublogs.org/2008/10/03/richard-stern-rips-pbs-a-new-one/ 

Brooks might be pleased to know about me catching Stern out.  The latter had blogged that these Middle Eastern wars must not amount to much since he didn’t know anyone whose sons were fighting, the way everyone knew about such young men during WWII or even Korea and Vietnam.  So I sent him a description of the photo displays in every Montana small town grocery and bank, praising the double-dozen local athletes now in the military.  I told how the bodies came home at the head of a long solemn parade of newly clean pickup trucks.

He could have just zapped my email.  But at once he saw that he had missed the fact that his friends were elite people who could exclude their children from danger.  He had been assuming that his experience was typical when he knew very well it was not.  As a writer of novels, he was forced to justice.  But he sweetened my criticism of him with a bit of praise for me, just as he had with the dead-on criticism of my unformed writing quoted at the top of this blog.  Teacher habit.

Stern claimed he was a teacher because he didn’t make enough money by writing to raise his four children.  That was a disguise.  His beloved “modernity” is already centuries old.  The famous old men he met as peers for meals and talk are dead or dying.  Stern’s students are just hitting their stride.  He loved teaching because he was curious about us and where we might go.  His wasn’t a reputation based on the past, but one aimed at the future where all is potential and can’t be labeled this or that.  I’m hoping we are writing for justice and transformation.

A memory.  By accident I was breakfasting with a book at a local cafe when Stern came to meet his soon-to-be second wife, the poet Alane Rollings, at a nearby booth.  They were plainly delighted to see each other.  I overheard him ask, sincerely wanting to know, “Did you sleep well last night?”  Just a little human fragment, private but universal.  Sleep well, Professor Stern.

RICHARD GUSTAVE STERN

When I made it to the U of Chicago, I went looking for Norman Maclean as a fellow Montanan.  Retired and in the early stages of Alzheimers (poorly understood in 1978), he was hard to track down but I finally managed to spend a little time with him.  I asked him about Richard Stern.  In his woods-crew foreman voice, Maclean said,  “I hired him to run the undergraduate English program because the job demanded a mean sunnavabitch and he’s been very satisfactory.”  What he meant was that this particular cohort of students is brilliant, tenacious, resourceful and determined, so he needed someone tough and smart enough to hold the line.  Stern may have overachieved a bit.

A great believer in the grindstone theory of learning, I headed straight for his classes and took all that he would let me into. (Three.)  When I signed up for his writing class, which in the past had been packed with eager young men -- a sign of high status -- he was at a low point because of a fracas over censorship of the student lit mag, which wanted to print the favorites of the Seventies: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, et al.  He was identified as on the side of the administration, a suppressor, though he protested that he was not, and he actually helped and contributed to a breakaway defiant alternative.   He was, after all, a translator of Rimbaud and Baudelaire. 

The result of the popularity drop was a class of four women.  One young man had signed up but Stern warned him away on grounds that he would need more male company and also that there was a clear possibility that the class might simply be canceled for insufficient enrollment.  It was not, probably partly because of feminist political pressure, but also I got the impression that it was a bit of a self-affliction on his part, acceptance of fate.  We were a goofy bunch: two were around twenty, one was thirty, and I was forty -- very different in background and soon tightly bonded.  He regarded us with exasperation and we saw him with considerable affection.  I feel sure of this.  He didn’t think we worked hard enough and he was undoubtedly right.  One of his eyes went off on its own, but if he saw you weren’t relating to his good eye, he’d point to it so you could reorient.

Stern and I were a mismatch, but he gave me a lot anyway.  He didn't understand the American West, he didn't understand women like me, but he understood words and his exasperation with mine was an honest and dependable compass I've used ever since.  I’ll come back to this in a later post, but what I want to point out -- esp. in view of the rather bristly obit in the Chicago Trib -- was that he was essentially a tender and wary man capable of going to war if necessary.  But maybe because he was so Jewish, so Manhattan, so conscious of the precariousness of prosperity, he was a little too cautious for the popular taste.  

His major hero was Ezra Pound, whom he had sought out.  Of all people to befriend, this cryptic, crazier-than-anyone-in-San Francisco poet, such an example of adult non-compliant defiance disorder that for a month he was kept in a 6’x6’ public outdoor steel cage, on display and spotlit at night, until his sanity broke.  Pound’s entire biography is astonishing, but this is about Stern.  For the latter’s military service, post-WWII, he was an interpreter and translator.  I think that for him the world always had two versions at least; this awareness was suitable for the study of modernity but less so for the teaching of opinionated students.  He was sexually circumspect and yet broke his first marriage for love of a student poet of talent.  Never one to waste good material, he wrote “Other Men’s Daughters.”  That second marriage lasted until his death.

In many ways his saving gift was recognition of the hilarious absurdity of being human.  One episode of one of his characters had him enjoying an evening with a lady of the night and taking her back to his hotel.  In the very early morning he is awakened by the woman breaking wind like a bassoon next to him.  Her sleep is content; his wakefulness is not.  This sort of thing makes the reader wonder how much is from real life, but you’re unlikely to find out when it comes to Stern.  His novel “In Any Case” AKA “The Chaleur Network,” set in the post-WWII chaos, traces a man’s effort to refute accusations of treason against his son.  Gradually he indicts himself.

Stern understood the political forces that stuck him with four women students more interested in studying him than actually writing.  I think he came to enjoy it.  But the first course I took from him was “narrativity” just as everyone was asking, to quote Banksey, the graffiti artist,  “What the Foucault?”  Stern had helped to organize a seminar with big guns to consider this post-narrative, post-modernity eruption.  I walked into the classroom the first day to find a scrum of students around Stern’s desk getting scarce tickets to the seminar.  Carelessly, I remarked,  “Oh, a person can generally sneak in on such things if you wait until a while after they’ve started.”

Stern came up out of the bent-over students like a buffalo heaving up from a river crossing.  “You will NOT behave improperly at this conference,” he bellowed.  He was big, his comb-over had come loose (again), and his blade of a nose was flaring.  I was impressed.  This was the sort of authority figure I had expected in the Divinity School where everyone had turned out to be disappointing mild-mannered.

I was so delighted to see the photo of Stern as a young man in the Chicago Trib, but I knew him as a fully-grown, highly-productive and long-suffering prophet.  My life merely grazed his:  from my bedroom I could see the tennis courts of the Faculty Club where he pursued the ball without benefit of binocular vision, on a second side I could see the playground of the daycare supervised by his first wife, and on my desk was a growing stack of his books and my writing.

______________

Richard G. Stern, 1928-2013

Award-winning novelist taught at U. of C. for 46 years

By Bridget Doyle, Chicago Tribune reporter

January 27, 2013

Richard G. Stern taught literature and creative writing at the University of Chicago for 46 years while establishing himself as a writer of novels and essays that won a devoted if never especially wide following.

Mr. Stern, 84, died of cancer Thursday, Jan. 24, at his home in Tybee Island, Ga., his son Andrew said.

Mr. Stern, a "breakfast table conversationalist," spent much of his time in Hyde Park cultivating students and engaging with those who "enjoyed the life of the mind," said David Bevington, a professor emeritus at U. of C. and longtime colleague. Mr. Stern's circle of friends included Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.

Students in the writing classes Mr. Stern taught were held to very high standards, Bevington said.

"You had to be a pretty skillful writer to be in his classes," Bevington said. "They were mainly the serious pursuit of writing fiction. Students would say he's a very knowledgeable but exacting teacher."

In his long literary career, Mr. Stern wrote more than 20 books. Among the best-known, according to Bevington, was "Other Men's Daughters," published in 1973. Though highly regarded in the literary field, Mr. Stern never achieved the wider popular following many thought he deserved, Bevington said.

"He was very aware he was in the shadow that way, but intellectuals regarded him as important," Bevington said. "His writing is somewhat dense, although clear. Perhaps he was writing for a more tough body of intellectuals."

Mr. Stern was born Feb. 25, 1928, in New York City. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina in 1947, his master's from Harvard University in 1949 and his doctorate from the University of Iowa in 1954.

With his first wife, Gay Clark, he had four children, Christopher, Andrew, Nicholas and Kate. After they divorced, he married the poet Alane Rollings.

Andrew Stern said that growing up in Hyde Park, he and his siblings regularly met authors and academics his father brought to their home. Mr. Stern also worked very hard, his son said.

"He spent his career writing like mad," his son said.

Mr. Stern's first novel, "Golk," was published in 1960. His other novels include "Stitch," "Natural Shocks" and "A Father's Words."

He received the Award of Merit from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1985. Mr. Stern also was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973 and the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Award in 1995.

In 2001 he retired from the university as Helen A. Regenstein professor emeritus in English language and literature.

Andrew Stern said his father traveled widely, once moving the entire family to Venice, Italy, while he was on a yearlong sabbatical.

"He loved soaking up the world to try and come up with characters," his son said.

Mr. Stern also loved playing tennis. "He was intense about the sport," his son said. "We'd go play for hours in the withering-hot sun on courts where the Regenstein (Library) is now."

Mr. Stern continued to write in his later years, publishing a collection of essays, lectures and other writings called "Still on Call." He also tried his hand at blogging.

"He didn't much appreciate (blogging)," his son said. "He'd ask, 'When do I get paid for my words?'"

In addition to his wife and children, Mr. Stern is survived by five grandchildren.

Services have not been scheduled.

bdoyle@tribune.com

"READING MODERN POETRY" Explained

All my bookshelves are 34 inches wide because that’s about the span a one-by-twelve board can be without sagging under the weight of books. Once I tried wider spans and sawed the boards out of plywood that was too thin and the effect was a series of hammocks attached to the wall and only barely. That was in Helena near Last Chance Gulch in apartments divided out of an old brick printing plant with a pasta restaurant on the first floor where my friend Jon used to buy me wonderful meals. He has slipped away. (Not died.) Maybe it’s just as well. But I’ve kept all the boards, even the section that is the same width but made of one-by-nines because when I went to buy more boards in Saskatoon the lumberman laughed, saying there WERE no one by twelves in Saskatchewan.

Only two shelves are of poetry specifically: one of anthologies and one of chapbooks. I’m not good at poetry. It slips away from my grasp, except for the kind that Garrison Keillor often reads on the radio -- little stories with a button on the end. That’s what he personally likes best and so do I, not least because sometimes I can write them.

Tim writes like this: “nighttime touches just the dark of us/ leftover light and cups/ what rag of sunlight to wash our eyes with lye/ what logic is there left to trace/ lips/ milk-pale path of sky/ minute by minute/ the dawn like childhood/”

I didn’t ask if I could quote him -- I just stole it because I love it. I steal words when I love them but no one ever knows because normally I just put them in some secret place. Once I kept a beautiful green leather book into which I copied poems with green ink. It was one of those conceits girls have. At least I didn’t dot my i’s with little hearts. Someone stole it. I didn’t mourn the loss of the poems because I was more invested in the mental image of me writing them than in the actual words, but I did grieve over the loss of a sketch I once made of Bill Shaw, the boy I loved in college undergrad. He died of a brain tumor but not until having establishing a brilliant career and a family. His daughter wrote to me -- full-grown -- because she had decisions to make and found my blog with her father’s name. I told her to have adventures, to take risks. She never made contact again.

In grade school Mrs. Othus, the library teacher (the rumor was that her husband loved her dearly though she was gaunt and wore a wig), made us memorize poems and I chose Wordsworth. “I wandered lonely as a cloud. . .” (The clouds in Montana are not lonely and they don’t wander -- they charge across the sky in great herds like albino bison.) In high school I was always in “enriched” English. If you were a boy, you were in “enriched science.” Why couldn’t I have had both?

Anyway, Martha Shull was our teacher in our sophomore year and she was also the president of the national NEA. She was very stylish, the princess daughter of an important lawyer, and she threw her fiancee’s diamond engagement ring at him right there in the creaky old hallway. Her lifelong partner was female. We thought nothing of it. Martha Shull read us “The Frogs” by Aristophanes, her stylish bright lipsticked mouth (now middle-aged) pronouncing, “Krek ka ka kek, ko-ax, ko-ax.” (I wrote about this once before and someone said I was spelling it wrong. The frogs would find that funny maybe. I did. Who knows how frogs spell?) She taught us “modern” poetry and I was changed forever.

It wasn’t until I was in grad school classes with Richard Stern that I found again the anthology we had used to read “modern” poetry. (Copyright 1955, no longer modern now -- almost as old as Tim.) Our copies were robin's egg blue with white dots, hardback. In it Stern had a translation of Rimbaud’s poem, MY BOHEMIA:

Underway, my pockets split only with my fist,
My topcoat as well looking somewhat platonic;
Under the skies I walked, the muses’ sidekick.
Oh la la! What lovely dreams I kissed.

In my one pair of pants a large hole,
Hop-of-my thumb dreamer, I shelled rimes
En route. Put up for the night where the dipper climbs.

My stars in the sky had he sweetest roll
And I heard them, squatting at the roadbelt,
Those good September evenings when I felt
The dewdrops on my brow like a wine of spirit,

And where, amidst the fantastic shadows,
I drew the laces of my injured shoes
Like lyres, one foot approaching my heart.

Stern also translated Baudelaire, as in this poem called “Correspondences.”

Nature is a temple from whose living pillars
Confusing words are now and then released.
Man wanders trough this huge, symbolic wood
While it observes him with familiar stares.

Like long echoes which far away confound
Themselves in oneness, deep and tenebrous,
Vast as the night and vast as clarity,
Colors, sounds and perfumes correspond.

There are some perfumes as cool as children’s flesh,
Gentle as oboes, green as the prairies --
And others, rich, corrupt, triumphant,

Having the expansion of infinite things,
Like amber, benjomin, incense and musk,
Which sings the transports of spirit and sense.


So now you know why I love Tim and the boys and the dogs and all the places they inhabit, but particularly the dreams, even the ones that Sustiva gives them, full of terror and the falling in or out, or the slipping away. Because it is T.S. Eliot’s gyre, coming back around like a merry-go-round and I know it again as though it were the first time. I throw the ring of gold mined in Last Chance Gulch back down the creaky hall but want no other companion than my old eMac even if there are the fingers of invaders on the underside of my keyboard recording all I write. Or not.

You go on ahead. I’ll linger a while to pick some sage. The harvested sweetgrass already haunts my house, braiding into the coffee smell and something else -- wet earth? One doesn’t translate these days -- one learns the language.

http://lesenfantterrible.tumblr.com/ Tim Barrus