War and Peace 1 - Don't Try to Remember Everyone

(Miss Amy, you asked for a logo, if this one will help, you're welcome to it)

When I was a senior in high school, I first read Anna Karenina. Alongside Les Miserables, and Grapes of Wrath, the book literally changed my life - it was from that year that I learned how I felt about other people, how to make moral decisions, how to think in terms of the suffering of others. Its where I learned about revolution, and its where I learned about love, and its where I learned about sin, and those three concepts have been defining pillars of the rest of my life.

Loving Anna so much, and because I had that wild hubris of the 17 year old, I figured - why not? I'll read War and Peace.

I. Did. Not. Get. It.

This isn't to say I didn't LIKE it. War and Peace is an experiential book. Its less like hearing a story about St. Petersburg, and more like, suddenly being forced to live in St. Petersburg. That experience - at once impersonal and immersive - was very seductive.

But I didn't get it.

I figured I was too dumb. I probably was. I probably still am, but nonetheless, I learned something I think - I don't know how universal this advice is, really, but I will give it, and any of the other people reading along in this book this year may take it or not take it, as they see fit. Its easy to sum up:

Don't worry about remembering everybody. It doesn't matter.

See, that's the thing I've learned about War and Peace. It isn't about the people. I mean it is. It isn't about SPECIFIC people. You know how in the Odyssey, there'll just be these characters that show up? And once in a while, you feel like, "Wait, seriously? Homer, this is obviously some dude you just made up for the sake of the plot!" And he probably did. Because the Odyssey is all about the journey (and all about Odysseus - in this way its more like Anna K than W&P, but the Iliad most people haven't ever had to read (a shame, 'cause its way better)).

Well, that's kind of how W&P is - it is an epic, and the story is not the story of Prince Volotscherduzhenbatskyariznia - its the story of Russia, and about the War with Napoleon, and about people living through that, about the battle between new absolutism and old absolutism. Its a novel about forces and ideas, not about people.

That makes it sound boring, and it makes it sound like the characters aren't very good. The opposite is true, though, because Tolstoy's whole central philosophy (in my mind) is that history is more than just Great Men moving the rest of us around on the chessboard like pawns. Its the story of a thousand tiny men, a story in which individual heroes are destined to fall eventually, because it is only the People who can do truly great and lasting things. Napoleon is such an ideal character to build this story around, because Napoleon is the epitomization of the Cult of Personality (if you want to read a REALLY good novel that presents this feeling, Read Jeanette Winterson's "The Passion" - its actually an AWESOME companion to War and Peace in a lot of ways). And the story of the Russian People, classically, is the opposite story. The Russians are the long-suffering people, the people who win in spite of their leaders rather than because of them. They're the people that won Stalingrad simply because they kept on living after they had been starved and the Germans didn't. They're the people that first beat Napoleon in spite of having the most incompetent military upper leadership of any European major power of the time arguably (I'm no military historian, so feel free to argue that with me). Britain and France do not tell the story of armies when they talk about Napoleon, they tell the story of Napoleon, and Wellington, and Blucher, and etc, etc, etc. The Russians tell the story of a people and a motherland. It is a victory of the Russian people, and that's how the book reads.

And its not just the war that reads that way either - its the peace too. The cocktail party that starts the whole book (I know, I know, they wouldn't have called it that) is a perfect example. The conversation in the room is not a number of people trying to develop the story of the novel. It is hardly composed of individuals - or if it is, it is composed of individuals int he way your body is composed of individual organs. The party is an organic whole, a single body, that drives and cares for itself as a single organism. And this is how conversation works in War and Peace - yes, it matters who says what, but eventually, you begin to recognize people not as Levyoshtroikan Albumitrovamiravich Horlitzborlityburlington. You recognize them as the White Blood Cell. Or the Pancreas. Or the Liver. In the end its a fascinating way to get to know a literary character, because if you GO to a party where you don't know everyone, you will find yourself (if its a well assembled party) doing the same thing - recognizing the current and vibration of the room, balancing, correcting, intensifying or exuding, as the room requires. Tolstoy does not write shouting parties. He writes parties that make you feel you are a part of something.

Now, again, the individual characters are all so human and so finely penned, that you might come read the book again in a few years, and pay close attention to who is who, learn to play the game of reading the underlying social currents and webs of connections that lie just beneath the surface of every interaction. But, that's the fun of dissecting something you already love. To FALL in love, step back, and just swim in it. Don't try to understand everything. This is a war - wars are supposed to be bewildering. Confusing. Maddening.

Read More......

Poplar Fruit

My friend Chris at Stuff as Dreams are Made On wrote a post for me the other day answering a question I had for him - so here I am repaying th favor. He asked me if I would write a poem based on a Billie Holliday song, how can anyone resist a prompt like that? If I were a great poet, I would write a whole book of items on Billie songs! Well, I chose an obvious one, I didn't want to pick something obscure, and I remember on NPR hearing an interview with Norah Jones, where she was talking about in high school, one of hr teachers asked her to do a Billie song for a talent show of some sort. She figured shed end up singing something light hearts, I think her example was "What a Little Moonlight Can Do." Instead, er teacher picked Strange Fruit, one of the headiest, darkest songs on Billies repertoire, a song about racism - in particular Lynchings. I remember thinking how hard that would be, singing a song so bitter and angry and personal, about something ones own ancestors might have participated in. So, this week, i wrote "Poplar Fruit." Hope you weren't hoping for a HAPPY poem, Mr. Chris...

My thighs are plump and sturdy,
My face is butter fat,
My belly filled with poplar fruit
My grandfathers planted.

My children are both quick and pure,
Rich with education,
Their fingers stained by poplar fruit
My grandfathers planted.

My heart is sick and heavyset
My heart, she's over fed
With strange fruit hung from poplar trees
My grandfathers planted

I wear a dress of samite silk
Dyed black and white and red,
From flesh burned ash, from bone, from blood
From poplar fruit grown rich and sweet,
From growing on the poplar trees
My grandfathers planted

Read More......

Happy Anniversary

So, as of this morning (or more accurately, I suppose, as of this afternoon) Amanda and I have been married for 13 years. Thirteen years... that's quite a number of years. The strange thing about anniversaries is that marriage is not a piece of one's identity - in so many ways it becomes the essence of one's identity. It is not something one bolts on, the way one might celebrate, for example, one's work anniversary. It something one transforms into. Its more like a birthday, in its way, and this is one of the reasons I am glad I changed my name when I was married - this is the day I ceased to be Jason Roper, a boy I now hardly remember, and became Jason Gignac, the husband of Amanda.

Like a birthday, though, an anniversary reminds one that the reality of one's existence is an objective fact, that this 'Jason Gignac' character is a person, who exists, who once did not exist who one day will cease to exist again. One steps outside one's self, and looks objectively at one's own story.

It is a peculiar one, Amanda and I. If I were the divine casting director, it is not the roles I would have cast. I'm horribly designed to be the great key to Amanda's happiness, which is always what I've wished to be in a marriage - it's a task that I am awed at the glorious responsibility of trying to fulfill, but that to be perfectly frank, I'm a great bungler at the execution of. But there you have it. When they say love is blind, perhaps this is what it means - there is a mind-boggling aspect to being the man Amanda loves. One continuously wonders, like the Catholic saints of the old days, why one was chosen, when one clearly doesn't deserve it.

And to be frank, this honestly has made me spend many anniversaries just a little bit ashamed, a little bit apologetic. Love has its sharp edges, even on the handle thereof, but it is such a beautiful thing, you feel you have to grab tight to it anyways. It is a hard thing to know that Amanda has made so much of the good for me, when honestly, I'm not even sure I have kept a positive balance in that bank in return. I'd wager not, and if I have, its been more a function of time, since I've made several awfully big negative withdrawals, and still withdraw all of the time. There is a legacy to this one cannot simply release, one cannot (and I think should not) simply say 'well, that's the past'. Responsibility is what it is.

But, then, as I get older, I've learned, perhaps, that on my anniversary, it hardly matters, that in the end, that isn't what one is to look at in an anniversary - there is something about an anniversary, I've come to think, where it is almost selfish to think of it outside of one's self. And those true aspects of what an anniversary is about, I can say wholeheartedly: how much, how dearly, how intently I love Amanda, how deeply, and profoundly grateful I am to have her as the sun I orbit 'round.

How lovely that is, after all - there is something terrific and marvelous about being married to Amanda, to being married to someone you can love and love and love, and never quite find the far borders of. Love is a mystery, right? One cannot understand it - maybe that's the challenge of it, it is the thing which teaches us to be happy whether or not we understand all the ramifications of happiness, to allow happiness to be great for its own sake, not to think of all those adult ideas of 'deserving' and 'balances' and whatnot, but simply to say 'This, all of this, this darling woman, she makes me happy, and she hasn't asked to go, after all, and I love her so desperately, and isn't happiness wonderful?'

Read More......

Once on Monday

Once on Monday
Twice on Tue,
Thrice for Thursday,
Friday - once.
On Saturday, tis deeper done
So Sunday's rosy rivers run.
Then Monday comes,
And once again,
The kiss against,
The clammy skin.
The children's laughs
Are beet-juice red
And echo 'round
The riverbeds.

Read More......

Why the Internet is awesome...

So, this is what happens when you search Flicker's Creative commons for 'Nursery Rhymes':

Read More......

The Voice Behind the Voice

I suppose it might be a vice, but I think its intoxicating to listen to recordings of poets and writers I already love. This is odd, because I don't like it in reverse - for instance, reading song lyrics that I heard first makes them feel somehow less - maybe I've just never had the right experience, but removing a spoken word to the page feels like translation and reduction. Taking a poem on the other hand, and having the poet read it, feels like a different, entirely separate work of art, particularly if I already know the written work well enough.

I was reminded of this, this week, when I listened to Madeleine L'Engle read an audiobook of "A Wrinkle in Time" (by the way, whichever of my friends knew this existed, and failed to notify me, I'm very disappointed in you (j/k)). When I first read this book as a kid, I believed Ms L'Engle was British, actually - I imagine it was simply that where I lived, people did not have lovely, romantic names that must be spelled with apostrophes, and that are difficult to alphabetize properly. And though I did learn better, this manufactured voice is what I heard the book read in, pretty much my whole life. Listening to Ms L'Engle changed this entirely, for me, made m understand the book in a slightly lisping, cranny-filled Northeast accent in a way that made the book even more beautiful than it had been.

It also reminded me of two New Yorkers I've heard the voice of: Jack Kerouac and Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman, who was recorded so early we're lucky to have him at all, positively shocked me the first time I heard it - his poetry is all fire and boldness, and I pictured it being read like a sermon, the way that Dylan Thomas (hilariously, to me) reads his poetry (no, seriously, listen to him read, its like the 'Death Comes Unexpectedly' scene from Pollyanna, and was WITHOUT A DOUBT imitated (poorly) by me in the golden days of Death and Baby Death if you've wondered). Mr. Whitman, though, first of all has an accent that we tend to resere now for movie characters (the closest analog in terms of dialect in my mind is the masterfully researched performance of Daniel Day Lewis as Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York (warning for content on that one - I'm just saying it was well researched, I've never been able to stomach the film well enough to tell if I like it). Only, instead of the accent being in a continuous snarl, You hear this strain of almost fragile love through everything - all that poetry about the wide, expansive united states, poetry we often asscoiate with empty fields and rural imagery (also his voice, and a strange, strange commercial on top of it all) suddenly compressed into a little garret anda drinking hall in Greenwich.

In other poets one hears something else - Plath and Woolf and Sexton are all recorded reading their work, and each one, in my mind has this edge of something almost like hatred in thier tone, almost like they are daring you to listen, the cycnic trying to hope. Sylvia Plath recordings keep me awake at night.  Or in a James Joyce recording, one hears how fully he inhabits what he's writing, how much his writing really was simply a voice in his many-voiced head. Or with Yeats, you hear his fragility, his tottering air of almost continuous shock at the world he's in.

Anyway, it's December, and I thought about these all this morning, and I thought I would collect links to listen, in case you've never heard them. If you know any other revealingly recorded poets and writers, I'd love to hear about them.

Madeleine L'Engle reads from "A Wrinkle in Time"

Sylvia Plath reads "Lady Lazarus" or "Daddy"

Virginia Woolf reads an essay entitled "Craftsmanship"

Anne Sexton reads "The Truth the Dead Know"

Dylan Thomas reads "And Death Shall Have No Dominion"

Jack Kerouac reads "Charlie Parker"

WB Yeats reads "The Lake of Inisfree"

James Joyce reads from "Finnegan's Wake"

Walt Whitman reads "America"

Read More......

Duetto

My enemy, each morning in the chill
  Of shining white and biting light,
My enemy, so close at break of day,
  Our lips too close to kiss,
  Our eyes too close for sight,
My teeth are bared,
  Your flesh too close to bite.
 
        Your smile is strange, this morning, oh my love,
           Did you forget the chessboard that we set?
        You slid your bishop, can you then resent,
          The queen I prod against your parapets?
          The knight your king's engaging in a tete-a-tete?
        The same way that we spoke
          When first we met!
 
My enemy, I thought that black and white,
  Sufficient stirred, by deed and word,
Could blend into a self-sufficient grey.
  My enemy, a thought occurred:
  That I was like a broken-winged bird,
And broken winged birds must learn to love the rats.
  In retrospect, it seems absurd --
 
        Hush now, my best beloved! You are mine.
          Bound closer than a wedding band,
          Upon your shriveled hand.
        Hush now, my best beloved: You are mine,
          Bound like the tide is bound unto the land.
          You be the lady, darling, I will be the man.
        Our body is a little girl's tea party, now,
          Where we two sit, and play at pat-a-pan.

Mine enemy, I beg of you, one day,
A single day, let it be today.

        Hush now, my best beloved! Go to sleep!
          You wished to be the one who lives within the mirror-glass,
        We signed our banns, and you agreed,
          You said that all you wanted, now, was rest.
          Your labors, then my darling one, are past.

(Image: Madame Jeantaud by Degas)

Read More......