Athens (which could not tolerate Socrates) and Jerusalem (which could not tolerate Jesus) come down in history as the poles of the ancient world (for Proust, Arnold, Joyce, Zukofsky). If these two long traditions have fused, they have no genetic line. Judaism is closed, is itself exclusively; Athens is diffused and lost.
This paradox: that where exact truth must be found the only guide thereto is intuition, the soul moving like the animal it is by a sixth sense, which Heraclitus called small, thinking of the exquisite nose of his dog. All the senses must be opened and trained, exercised, clarified.
Psychology is the policeman of the bourgeoisie, enforcing middle-class values with as bogus a science as alchemy or palm reading. Foucault was right on this point.
In Kafka other people are too close and God is too far off.
Journal II
THE WASP CARRIES HIS WIFE FROM ASTER TO PEAR.
A Plymouth Brethren chapel, or hall as they say, on the Faeroes. William Sloan, Scots missionary of the Plymouth Brethren, converted the Faeroes in 1865. The Danes call them Baptistar or the sekt. They are abstemious. “Beer,” they say, “is another man.”
A March laundry line of oystercatchers. Drifting acres of glare on the sea, clouds grazing the chimneys. Oystercatchers like wash lines in March.
Randolph Bourne’s idea, that critical discernment is in knowing why we like what we like, is intelligent and wise. He was disturbed that education in art is geared to an imposed canon. Our problem now is that nobody knows anything to begin with. A love of knowledge is gone, and with it curiosity and a critical eye. We have theory instead of perception, contentiousness instead of discussion, dogma instead of inquiry.
Jaako Hintikka, philosopher and critic of Wittgenstein. In private life a reindeer.
“Not ashamed to sin but ashamed to repent” (Defoe). A motto for Kentucky.
Neither Kafka nor Donald Barthelme could have written an autobiography.
Crusoe was on his island for the thirty-five years before the landing of William III at Torbay (which he mentions as the place of a shipwreck). Defoe was among William’s soldiers. Friday was the empire.
A life is a secret.
Freudian analysis turned out to be insensitive to the very values that give art its identity, as deconstruction is a hostile cross-examination of a helpless witness.
An American reading Lévi-Strauss is in the peculiar position of a person without a civilization reading a person from a highly civilized country writing about culture. In some sense we do not know what he means. “Hell is other people.” But for the American the Other does not exist. We are solipsists. We are not individuals, as the individual does not exist except in a culture. No culture, no individual (who can only be an example of a culture). So we must read Lévi-Strauss as people he’s writing about rather than for.
The USA and the USSR have exhausted their inherited European culture.
In our century the great event has been the destruction of the city, and therefore of public life, by the automobile. Next, the obliteration of the family by television. Thirdly, the negation of the university by its transformation into a social club for nonstudents. Fourthly, the abandonment of surveillance by the police, who act only upon request and arrive long after their presence could be of any use. All of this can be blamed on the stupidity, moral indifference, and ignorance of politicians and public alike.
There’s a Dutch philosopher in Groeningen who charges forty dollars and hour for Wittgensteinian solutions to problems. “They know the answers. It’s their questions they aren’t aware of.”
Jane Kramer says that the French prefer a common etiquette to a common ground. We all do, I think. It’s Lévi-Strauss’s table manners as a technique of culture. Boring and impossible people are primarily violators of etiquette, imposing a different sense of space, time, periodicity.
High-minded principles and intolerance are twins. The word liberal has over the past fifty years come to mean illiberal. Not only illiberal: puritanical, narrow-minded, mean.
Avoid the suave flow of prose that’s the trademark of the glib writer. An easy and smooth style is all very well, but it takes no chances and has no seductive wrinkles, no pauses for thought.
It was Bourdelle who advised Rodin to clothe his Balzac.
The emptier a room the smaller it seems. This is true of minds as well.
PHYTOLITH. Nardus stricta contains phytoliths that could not be mistaken for those from any of the other grasses. Microscopic bits of crystal from the soil that get built into blades of grass.
A sixty is a flower pot three and a half inches in diameter, so called from sixty of them being thrown from the one batch of clay.
“Hibiscus!” said the lion. “Isaiah!” replied the owl. The moon was white, was round, was rising. Bartók, the cicadas.
One road into Rimbaud is through his meadows.
Michel was, as he figured it, happy. He was not certain what happy was, but his happiness had been noticed and specified. Once when he was smaller his class had gone to the museum of Mankind to see Eskimo things, and he had, while their teacher was showing them a kayak, taken off his shoes and socks to count his toes, of which there were ten. Suzanne, the busybody and snoop, said: “O mère de . . . look at Michel!”
Teacher had said, placidly, “Michel is happy.”
Isak Dinesen’s meadow at Rungsted. Beyond an apple orchard. Her grave is under a great beech.
Forty finches in the thistles, in the high summer of time.
The road, always the road, through groves of olives, through fields yellow with wheat. Figs, melons.
Their walking made the silence creak. Flap of sandals. Thomas, the twin, talking.
— Rabbi, this tearing off of the foreskin, is it right?
Yeshua’s answers were always quick, as if he knew what you were going to say. He looked at something else while you were talking, a woman with a jug of water balanced on her shoulder, a sparrow hawk circling, cows in a wadi, and at you when he answered.
— If the Everlasting had wanted us to have no foreskin, we would be born without one. Nothing should be shorn that does not grow back.
Thomas looking around Yeshua’s hat to study his eyes in the brim’s shadow.
Yeshua’s smiling irony.
— If our bodies are designed by the Everlasting for our souls, what a wonder!
Yeshua talking, talking with the sweet patience of the fellowship, to Thomas and Simon and John, and to someone else also. They had remarked on this among themselves, that their company sometimes included an unseen other.
— But if our souls are created for the body’s sake, that would be the wonder of wonders. The Egyptians elongate the infant’s skull while it is still soft, and there are people you know nothing about who bind their women’s feet and picture their skins all over with needles and ink, and file their teeth to a point. Only the subtle Greeks, whose Heraclitus could parse the grammar of creation and whose Pythagoras discovered the harmony of numbers, leave the healthy body intact, as it was created.
A stonechat dipped and sailed sideways. Yeshua put out his hand and the stonechat came and sat on it, head cocked.
Yeshua speaking to the stonechat, in its Latin.
— Is the flesh then god? Thomas asked.
— Is there, Yeshua asked, perhaps of the stonechat, perhaps of Thomas, Simon, or John, any other way of being? The Everlasting’s work is all one creation. Are we to say of the one creation there is that it is nasty?
Thomas looking at his fingernails, Simon at his feet.
Horses buck, cocks crow. Cat dogs one’s step. Dog badgers. A subset of animal words. To squirrel away things, to cow one’s enemy, to horse around, to ferret out, to weasel, to parrot, to canary, to ape.
Many russet-clad children
Lurking in these broad meadows
With the bittern and the woodcock
Concealed by brake and hardhack.
Samuel Palmer. Moss sopped in gold clotted on the thatch of a
roof. Mr. Christian trudging by.
“When angry, paint bamboo.” — Wang Mien (1335–1415)
The white frost that made the fire feel so good, and the quilt so comfortable, had also reddened the maples and mellowed the persimmons. Cloth shoes stink by the fire. Foxes bark in the deep of the wind.
Opossum:persimmon::moth:mulberry. Christmas Island (South Pacific): imperial pigeon, noddy, glossy swiftlet, reef heron.
To see a clock as a clock, Wittgenstein said, is the same as seeing Orion striding in the stars.
Queneau on Fourier as a mathematician, making Marx more of a Fourierist than a Hegelian.
No force however great
Can stretch a thread however fine
Into a horizontal line
That is absolutely straight.
(A prose sentence in a textbook, by sheer accident a Tennysonian stanza. There’s a Yeatsian sonnet so disguised in The Counterfeiters of Hugh Kenner.)
Hemingway’s prose is like an animal talking. But what animal?
AFTERWORD: REMEMBERING GUY DAVENPORT
GUY DAVENPORT DIED ON A GREY WINTER MORNING IN JANUARY, 2005. As if on cue, my watch stopped working that day, which made me think of W. H. Auden’s elegy for William Butler Yeats, who also, as it turned out, died in January. But Auden doesn’t say that the clocks stopped, as I wrongly remembered, but rather,
The mercury sank in the month of the dying day.
O all the instruments agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
On that dark cold day seven years ago, I stood out on my front porch with Guy’s companion of thirty years, Bonnie Jean Cox. We exchanged the usual and inadequate words that follow death. Then Bonnie turned to me and said, “I think only a few of us truly understood the innocence of Guy’s mind.”
The earth did not, as Auden said of Yeats, receive an honored guest. Guy’s corpse, ravaged by a lifetime of chronic smoking, was left to the University of Kentucky’s Markey Cancer Center for research. On an early Spring day later that year, about fifty of us — his family members, former students, friends and colleagues — gathered at the University of Kentucky’s arboretum and memorialized Guy with a simple plaque set beneath a handsome sweet gum tree. The plaque read: EVERY FORCE EVOLVES A FORM. Bonnie Jean chose the inscription from one of Guy’s titles, itself a statement by the Shaker founder Mother Ann Lee. Guy, it could be said, admired equally the modernist architecture of Le Corbusier and the Shaker broom (“It is a broom that means business,” he once wrote). A coherent culture, like the 19th century Shaker village not far from where Guy lived in Lexington, Kentucky, is full of the forces that make themselves intelligent through art, architecture and artisanship.
The force that was Guy Davenport evolved and evoked a protean arsenal of forms: poems, stories, essays, novels, translations, paintings, wooden tables, even a fried bologna sandwich that he would serve up for dinner, assuming you would eat it. I ate many of them. Sometimes we would stand in the old-fashion kitchen of his house at 621 Sayre Avenue and eat the sandwiches right over the frying pan. A large poster of the moon hung on the opposite wall. It was a satellite that fascinated Guy — the lonely, distant moon. We might gaze at it for a moment, then Guy would turn and say, “Want a Snicker’s?”
Several years before Guy’s death, before we knew how bad the lung cancer had become, his publisher, Jack Shoemaker, asked him to send a recent photo for the spring catalogue of Counterpoint Press. Since I had a new digital camera, Guy asked me to take the picture. I walked him down the street to a beauty salon. Out in front stood a yard sign that read simply:
STYLIST
NEEDED
I sat Guy down beside the sign and took the picture. I don’t think Jack Shoemaker ever used it in his press material, but the photo amused Guy and he sent copies of it to correspondents. And that’s what Guy was more than anything — a stylist. In an age of minimalists, Guy was a maximalist. His writing was a high wire act in every sense. The sound, the balance, the color of a sentence mattered. Guy was, I have come to believe, the greatest prose stylist of his generation. Cynthia Ozick comes close, Don DeLillo comes close, but sentence for sentence, no one can match Guy for the sheer elegance and virtuosity of his prose. If that were it, that would be enough. But Guy was also one of the most inventive writers of his generation. To my thinking, only Donald Barthelme was more audacious, more daring. When the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters bestowed upon Guy the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award for fiction, Donald Barthelme shook his hand at the ceremony and said, “I read you in hardback.” It is a wonderfully oblique compliment from one master artificer to another.
What would have naturally been the dining room of the house Guy turned into his office. In the center of it sat a large table he had made himself, modeled after one Ezra Pound built in the ’20s for his Paris apartment. The de Stijl-inspired table was the size of a front door and in the center sat Guy’s large electric typewriter. Guy kept up a voluminous correspondence, and he would reply to everyone who wrote him, however cracked or misguided the correspondent seemed. For hours each afternoon, Guy sat at his table and composed beautiful, high-spirited letters. I can conjure the image easily in my mind. Light is slanting through old blinds that hang in the front windows, falling across the potted plant on one corner of the table and the books that are stacked around the typewriter. To Guy’s left, a small metal stand holds up the letter to which he is responding, and to his right, smoke curls up from the ever-present cigarette resting in a black ashtray. On a well-worn oriental rug, a gray cat drowses in the sun. The news is on the radio. Guy listens for a moment, then looks at the cat and says, “Did you hear that Felix? George Bush just started another fucking war.”
At that same table, Guy also transposed and transformed passages from his journals into the experiments — he preferred the word “assemblages” — that became his stories. Guy alternately bemoaned and bragged that he had only thirteen readers. Though he received hundreds of letters of fan mail, each new fan was inducted into that cabal of thirteen who had somehow found his message in a bottle. Guy waved off the accusation that his art was elitist. “Calling art elitist is like calling money valuable,” he countered. That is to say, art is by nature elitist because so few can actually pull it off. Still, he admired many artists, such as Eudora Welty, who one would not call elitist. And he loved the British working-class films of Mike Leigh. Though he had no TV, Guy watched videos and DVDs with Bonnie Jean, at her house, six blocks from his. The greatest compliment I ever heard Guy pay another artist was when he said, “When Mike Leigh gets to heaven, Chekhov will want to shake his hand.”
Guy once wrote, “Art is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world.” I think that single sentence defines his philosophy, his arts poetica, his reason for sitting down at the typewriter or the easel every day. The purpose of art is to remind us to pay attention to the wholeness of the world, or to what Guy also like to call “the wholeness of being.” That wholeness is held together by what the pre-socratic philosopher Heraclitus called the logos, the gathering principle, the invisible syntax that bound together God and nature via desire and design. Desire is the syntax of design, God speaking through nature. The role of art is to listen and translate.
That Guy would one day become my mentor was more or less an accident of geography. I grew up in the suburbs of Louisville, Kentucky, and my parents had few books in the house that weren’t Bibles or guides to the Christian life. Still, due in part to the encouragement of an English teacher, I decided toward the end of high school that I wanted to be a writer. I applied to several universities with reputations for producing famous writers, but my high school grades were poor, and in the end I was only accepted into my state school, the University of Kentucky. My English teacher told me to make the best of it and to try to take a class with some writer named Guy Davenport.
When I arrived on campus in the fall of 1985, I went to the newsroom of the student paper the Kentucky Kernel and ask
ed for an assignment. That September, Guy’s collection of essays, Every Force Evolves A Form, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. But apparently, no one on the regular staff of the paper wanted anything to do with that story. They had all heard about this professor’s intimidating presence and his caustic attitude toward students.
The editor looked through her file of assignments and asked if I had ever heard of Guy Davenport. I said that I had. She told me to go interview him and write up a profile for the features section of the paper. I went straight to the university library and checked out Guy’s first book of stories, Tatlin! I could make absolutely no sense of it. I had read Thomas Hardy in high school and thought that rough going, but I had never read anything remotely like this. The sentences were unending, the languages multiple, the allusions beyond me, the plots unrecognizable. And somewhere inside that dense thicket of prose, the characters seemed to be having a lot of sex.
As I recall, the interview in his UK office was something of a disaster. Guy sat at his desk. Beneath a portrait he had painted of James Joyce, he was chain-smoking Marlboro reds and batting away my inept questions. After about forty-five minutes, he said that I must certainly have enough information for my article and sent me on my way. Somehow I pulled the story together and eventually got promoted to staff writer at the paper. But it took two years before I screwed up the courage to actually register for one of Guy’s classes. While he was calling the roll that first day, he paused over my name and said, “The reporter from the Kernel?” I nodded. “I’ll remember you,” he replied ominously. The whole class turned its pitiable gaze in my direction. You poor bastard, they all seemed to be thinking.
The Guy Davenport Reader Page 39