I am in the middle of reading a great novel by British author John Cowper Powys, namely Wolf Solent (1929). In 1960, he added a preface to the Macdonald & Company edition which summarizes what I am coming to see as one of the preeminent works of the last century:
What might be called the purpose and essence and inmost being of this book is the necessity of opposites. Life and Death, Good and Evil, Matter and Spirit, Body and Soul, Reality and Appearance have to be joined together, have to be forced into one another, have to be proved dependent upon each other, while all solid entities have to dissolve, if they are to outlast their momentary appearance, into atmosphere. And all this applies to the difference between our own ego, the self within us, the being of which we are all so vividly aware as something under the bones and ribs and cells and vessels of our physical body with which it is so closely associated. Here we do approach the whole mysterious essence of human life upon earth, the mystery of consciousness. To be conscious: to be unconscious: yes! the difference between these is the difference between life and death for the person, the particular individual, with whom, whether it be ourself or somebody else, we are especially concerned.
They suddenly appear on Page 207 of Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night (1988), a strange sect known for sharp knives:
They spent their days singing psalms and making knives. They made blades better than anyone in the whole of Silesia and fitted them with carefully polished handles made of ash wood, which every human hand fell in love with instantly. They sold them once a year in early autumn when the apples were ripening on the trees. They held a sort of fair, which attracted people from all over the district; they each bought several knives, sometimes as many as a dozen, in order to sell them on at a profit. During these fairs people forgot that the Cutlers were of a different faith and believed in a different God, and that it would have been easy to produce evidence and drive them away. For who would make such good knives then?
Whenever they bore a child they mourned instead of rejoicing. Whenever someone died, they undressed him, laid his naked corpse in a hole in the ground and danced around the open grave.
About forty pages later appears this poem, called “The Cutlers’ Psalm”:
Futility on all the earth blessed be barren wombs holy be all sterility sacred is decay, desirous is decline wondrous the fruitlessness of winter the empty shells of nuts logs burnt to ashes that still keep the shape of the tree seeds that fall on to stony ground knives gone blunt streams run dry the beat that devours another’s offspring the bird that feeds on another’s eggs war that is always the start of peace hunger that is the beginning of repletion Sacred old age, daybreak of death, time trapped in the body, death sudden, unexpected. death downtrodden like a path in the grass To do, but have no results to act, but stir nothing to age, but change nothing to set off, but never arrive to speak, but not give voice
The Archangel Raphael in the Style of the Cuzco School of Painting
Currently, I am reading Olga Tokarczuk’s House of Day, House of Night, an early (1988) novel by the 2018 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. I came across the following passage and thought I would like to share it with you:
Quite out of the blue a bizarre and compelling idea came into my head today: that we have ended up as human beings through forgetfulness, through lack of attention, and that in reality we are creatures participating in a vast, cosmic battle that has probably been going on since time immemorial, and which, for all we know, may never end. All we see of it are glimmers, in blood-red moons, in fires and gales, in frozen leaves that fall in October, in the jittery flight of a butterfly, in the irregular pulse of time that can lengthen a night into infinity or come to a violent stop each day at noon. I am actually an angel or demon sent into the turmoil of one life on a sort of mission, which is either carrying itself out without my help, or else I have totally forgotten about it. This forgetfulness is part of the war—it’s the other side’s weapon, and they have attacked me with it so that I’m wounded, invalided out of the game for a while. As a result, I don’t know how powerful or weak I am—I don’t know anything about myself because I can’t remember anything, and that’s why I don’t try to look for either weakness or power in myself. It’s an extraordinary feeling—to imagine that somewhere deep inside, you are someone completely different from the person you always thought you were. But it didn’t make me feel anxious, just relieved, finally free of a kind of weariness that used to permeate my life.
I have just finished reading the essays in Earth Memories by Llewelyn Powys (1884-1939), one of three literary giants in a family that included John Cowper Powys (1872-1063) and T. F. Powys (1875-1953). The essays in the book are mostly nature studies with an occasional jaunt into the philosophical implications of his everyday reality. The following is from his essay “A Butterfly Secret”:
And, indeed, as one walks over these downs at nighttime, under the fathomless pricked dome of infinity, one receives but one answer, The matter is as plain as a child’s sum in a dame’s school. Life is its own justification. There is no other aim to it, no other meaning, no other purpose, and if we think otherwise, we are foolish. Let the truth be spoken. Each one of us, each intellectual soul among us, advances steadily and surely toward the grave. Abdel Krim and his Rifis, General Feng and his soldiers, are all marching down the same road—a road that leads to oblivion and that for a thousand years has been trodden by a procession of all nations. Every religion is as brittle as an empty snail shell in dry weather, as quick to disappear as cuckoo-spit in a summer hedge that conceals at its center no green fly. The secret to be remembered is that nothing matters, nothing but the momentary consciousness of each individual as he opens his eyes upon a spectacle that knows nought of ethics.
Let us, as best we may, reconcile our minds to the fact that all our self-imposed tasks, our political engineering, our brave talk have actually, under the shadow of Eternity, no consequence. Our idealism is treacherous. It is a moonshine path over a deep sea. We are cursed souls each one of us and resemble nothing so much as jackdaws flying about he radiant cliffs of God pretending to be seagulls.
And yet there is no cause to despair. Merely to have come to consciousness at all constitutes an inestimable privilege. The past is nothing, the future is nothing, the eternal now alone is of moment. This is understood well enough by every living creature but man.
RUSSIA – CIRCA 1984: shows Tadzhik Soviet Socialist Republic flags and arms, circa 1984
I am currently reading a book of stories by the Russian writer Maxim Osipov entitled Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Stories. In the title story is an incredible Tadzhik woman who kills an official of a small rural town in Russia who tries to rape her. Her name is Ruhshona Ibragimovma. Although working in a menial position at a restaurant, she is a highly educated woman, which, in the position she finds herself, becomes increasingly unimportant to her.
[D]eath’s omnipresence is no accident, no unhappy mistake. Everyone fears death, just as they fear misfortune, yet death is inescapable, which means it is real. And that we did not invent it. At this very moment Ruhshona begins to see death as the most important thing that can exist within a person. She views those who don’t carry death within themselves—who don’t live by it—as empty, like wrapping paper, like candy wrappers. Hollow, soulless people. She can pick them out at a glance.
This short tale by Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is, to my mind, the most incredible tale ever told about the power of poetry. It is told here in its entirety. It and many equally wonderful poems and stories can be found in Dreamtigers (in Spanish, El Hacedor).
That day, the Yellow Emperor showed the poet his palace. They left behind, in long succession, the first terraces on the west which descend, like the steps of an almost measureless amphitheater, to a paradise or garden whose metal mirrors and intricate juniper hedges already prefigured the labyrinth. They lost themselves in it, gaily at first, as if condescending to play a game, but afterwards not without misgiving, for its straight avenues were subject to a curvature, ever so slight, but continuous (and secretly those avenues were circles). Toward midnight observation of the planets and the opportune sacrifice of a turtle permitted them to extricate themselves from that seemingly bewitched region, but not from the sense of being lost, for this accompanied them to the end. Foyers and patios and libraries they traversed then, and a hexagonal room with a clepsydra, and one morning from a tower they descried a stone man, whom they then lost sight of forever. Many shining rivers did they cross in sandalwood canoes, or a single river many times. The imperial retinue would pass and people would prostrate themselves. But one day they put in on an island where someone did not do it, because he had never seen the Son of Heaven, and the executioner had to decapitate him. Black heads of hair and black dances and complicated golden masks did their eyes indifferently behold; the real and the dreamed became one, or rather reality was one of dream’s configurations. It seemed impossible that earth were anything but gardens, pools, architectures, and splendrous forms. Every hundred paces a tower cleft the air; to the eye their color was identical, yet the first of all was yellow, and the last, scarlet, so delicate were the gradations and so long the series.
It was at the foot of the next-to-last tower that the poet—who was as if untouched by the wonders that amazed the rest—recited the brief composition we find today indissolubly linked to his name and which, as the more elegant historians have it, gave him immortality and death. The text has been lost. There are some who contend it consisted of a single line; others say it was a single word. The truth, the incredible truth, is that in the poem stood the enormous palace, entire and minutely detailed, with each illustrious porcelain and every sketch on every porcelain and the shadows and the light of the twilights and each unhappy or joyous moment of the glorious dynasties of mortals, gods, and dragons who had dwelled in it from the interminable past. All fell silent, but the Emperor exclaimed, “You have robbed me of my palace!” And the executioner’s iron sword cut the poet down.
Others tell the story differently. There cannot be any two things alike in the world; the poet, they say, had only to utter the poem to make the palace disappear, as if abolished and blown to bits by the final syllable. Such legends, of course, amount to no more than literary fiction. The poet was a slave of the Emperor and as such he died. His composition sank into oblivion and his descendants still seek, nor will they find, the one word that contains the universe.
I have been reading Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Discourses, in which he writes about governance and warfare in his day (around AD 1517). In Book II, he gives an anecdote about how not to negotiate with Alexander the Great:
When the whole East had been overrun by Alexander of Macedon, the citizens of Tyre (then at the height of its renown, and very strong from being built, like Venice, in the sea), recognizing his greatness, sent ambassadors to him to say that they desired to be his good servants, and to yield him all obedience, yet could not consent to receive either him or his soldiers within their walls. Whereupon, Alexander, displeased that a single city should venture to close its gates against him to whom all the rest of the world had thrown theirs open, repulsed the Tyrians, and rejecting their overtures set to work to besiege their town. But as it stood on the water, and was well stored with victual and all other munitions needed for its defence, after four months had gone, Alexander, perceiving that he was wasting more time in an inglorious attempt to reduce this one city than had sufficed for most of his other conquests, resolved to offer terms to the Tyrians, and to make them those concessions which they themselves had asked. But they, puffed up by their success, not merely refused the terms offered, but put to death the envoy sent to propose them. Enraged by this, Alexander renewed the siege, and with such vigour, that he took and destroyed the city, and either slew or made slaves of its inhabitants.
The following is a dream that poet Joy Harjo, a Creek/Mvskoke Indian, had when she was a child and it was feared that she had polio. The excerpt comes from her book Crazy Brave: A Memoir.
It was shortly after the polio scare that I began to dream the alligator dream.
I am a young girl, between four and five years old. It’s early in the morning. I delight in my feet touching the ground and in the plant beings who line the trail to the river. I breathe in playful energy from small, familiar winds as I walk to get water for the family. The winds appear to part the tall reeds through which I walk with my water jar.
An alligator whips me suddenly to the water and pulls me under. I struggle, and then I am gone. My passing from earth is a quick choke. To my mourning family, my life has been tragically ended. They did not see that I entered an underwater story to live with alligators and become one of them.
I believe now that I had the beginnings of polio. The alligators took it away. It is possible. The world is mysterious.
H. L. Mencken knew how to write, but not everything he wrote holds up today. In Prejudices Second Series, he took a hatchet to the literary reputation of the American South in an essay entitled “The Sahara of the Bozart.” Since then, some of the best American writing has come from the South, including William Faulkner (at the top of the list), Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Harper Lee, Zora Neale Hurston, Robert Penn Warren, and a host of others. Still, Mencken is fun to read:
Alas, for the South! Her books have grown fewer— She never was much given to literature.
In the lamented J. Gordon Coogler, author of these elegaic lines, there was the insight of a true poet. He was the last bard of Dixie, at least in the legitimate line. Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity. One thinks of the interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the now mythical ether. Nearly the whole of Europe could be lost in that stupendous region of fat farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums: one could throw in France, Germany and Italy, and still have room for the British Isles. And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the “progress” it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert. There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac; there are probably single square miles in America. If the whole of the late Confederacy were to be engulfed by a tidal wave to-morrow, the effect upon the civilized minority of men in the world would be but little greater than that of a flood on the Yang-tse-kiang. It would be impossible in all history to match so complete a drying-up of a civilization.
Yes, I am still reading Clarice Lispector’s Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas, which runs to almost 800 pages. Tody, I am quoting a writer that Lispector in turn quotes in her Jornal do Brasil column for September 4, 1971, namely Hélio Pellegrino:
Living—ah, that difficult delight. Living is a game, a risk. Whoever plays can win or lose. The beginning of wisdom consists in accepting that losing is also part of the game. When that happens, we gain something extremely precious: we gain the possibility of winning. If I know how to lose, then I know how to win. If I don’t know how to lose, I win nothing, and I will always go away empty-handed. The eyes of someone who doesn’t know how to lose eventually grow rusty and blind, blind with resentment. When we come to accept with true and deep humility the rules of the existential game, living becomes more than good: it becomes fascinating. To live well is to consume oneself; it is to burn the coals of time from which we are made. We are made up of time, and this means we are a passing thing, movement without respite, finitude. The quota of eternity allotted to us is embedded in time. We need to search it out with ceaseless courage so that the taste of gold may shine upon our lips. If this happens, then we are joyful and good, and our life has meaning.
Tarnmoor 
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