Reading through the Fall

October and November reading list

To Begin Where I Am

by Czeslaw Milosz

When I was a student at the University of Michigan taking courses in Eastern European literature, I remember meeting a woman named Bogdana Carpenter who taught some of those courses. (Another of the courses in that area was entitled: When Pushkin Comes to Shovekin. I have never heard of a better title than this for a course of any kind.)

I met with Bogdana because I was studying Czeslaw Milosz and his contemporary Zbigniew Herbert in an independent study. She knew both of them personally and, I believe, was Polish herself. Her last name might suggest otherwise, but if I remember correctly, she had married an American academic but her first name and accent gave it away.

Milosz and Herbert respected each other as artists but also held starkly different views of writer’s responsibilities in the cesspool of totalitarian depravity that erupted every place the Soviet Union touched. Bogdana told a story of hosting for dinner both Milosz and Herbert at her home—I think in Berkely—and that the evening nearly ended with a fistfight between the two poets. I have the impression that Herbert was a choleric man and had seen enough betrayal and death in his Polish home to resent Milosz for having escaped the Soviets via defection from their foreign service and for his “artsy” or whimsical response to some of the depredation back home. Reading Milosz extensively makes me think this is not an entirely accurate description of his position, but then, it was not my country and they were not my friends and family that Herbert had seen butchered. No doubt he earned his anger the hard way.

Zbigniew Herbert. Photo credit: Anna Beata Bohdziewicz

If you’re unfamiliar with Milosz, just read his poetry—it’s very approachable. If you like his poetry already, you will probably enjoy his prose too. He is a rare kind of writer. He feels intensely and is also unflappable—like a docent in the terrible museum of modern history who keeps showing up to work despite witnessing day in and day out the horrors of our most civilized of centuries. It was probably this quality in him that provoked Herbert’s ire. The Witness of Poetry is a good piece of his prose—a short book, long essay—and his Captive Mind is a study of the character-corroding effects of totalitarianism on the human soul. It’s a little like the Gulag Archipelago. On the other hand, it’s hard to beat the approachability of a collection of essays and To Begin Where I Am is a very rewarding such collection.

What does he have to say? Biographical details from his youth that grow into reflections on human character under duress; art; geography; culture. He writes about religion, poetry and poets, exile, and doubt. He asks a question I wrestle with all the time—and one that might have infuriated Herbert. “Can the muses love a man of action?” He notices that French intellectuals can still enjoy their espresso and baguette after producing some of modernity’s most pathogenic ideas because they do not commit the vulgarity of acting on their ideas. Leave that to the colonials and watch what happens in, say, the American university as a result.

Milosz notices that fertility of wombs and fields is cyclical and that “every kind of ritual is dealt a blow when a species has to oppose the cycles of nature.” He comments on Natural Family Planning “the subtle comments of theologians seem dubious to me, and I cannot discern a difference in the methods used since their causal effect is the same: the cunning of the human mind deployed against nature.” He describes the failed intellectualism of the Vatican II reforms:

“ritual and theater are ruled by similar laws. The Latin, the shimmering chasubles, the priest’s position with his face toward the altar and his back to the faithful, made him an actor in a sacred theater….When they began speaking in the language of newspapers, their lack of intellectual preparation was revealed.”

And there is this comment which should warm the hearts of classical educators:

If Polish critics and poets treated their obligations seriously they would convene a major conference dedicated to the classical education of youth, because only a good classical program could lend truth to Norvid’s pronouncement that ‘neither a shield nor a sword, but a masterpiece, is the people’s weapon.’ One should not trust today’s pedagogical positivists. From the point of view of literature, they are Romantic arsonists. In their hearts they are convinced that civilization dates from the nineteenth century and the rest is utter nonsense.

I tend to agree with him about this point, though, since he wrote, the time horizon of acceptable material to our set of pedagogical positivists has shrunk from the nineteenth century to the utterly contemporary.

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Jungle Wild

by Joseph Coe

Speaking of contemporary, Jungle Wild was published just a couple years ago. Its author lives near us and became an acquaintance when we butchered a couple steers in his shop. Joseph has excepted himself from the usual rules of the world, an understandable—even enviable—situation influenced by the fact that his childhood was spent deep in the jungles of Venezuela living among native Venezuelans rather than in the homogenous environment of assembly line schooling where children are habituated to the “rules” of the world. His parents were Christian missionaries serving in a remote part of the jungle and Joseph spent a great deal of his time with native kids hunting and fishing. The quiet heroes of this book, in my mind, are Joseph’s parents, who allowed him to have real adventures as a kid, risks and all.

Each chapter in this short book presents an adventure Joseph experienced on a hunt. My eleven year old son devoured the book in one sitting. Episodic and as unpretentious as it gets, Jungle Wild is chock full of that rare and vanishing treasure that should be a signal part of every young man’s life: adventure. He accidentally spears an electric eel and “rides the lightning” underwater until managing to release his spear (refashioned rebar); he traps a jaguar in a hollow log and shoots it just before it fights its way out to him. He’s attacked by an Orinoco Crocodile in his boat. Etc.

The chapters almost all end with a simple prayer of thanksgiving to God for seeing him through some adventure or delivering the game directly to the end of his muzzle. It’s entirely charming.

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Religion of the Day

A couple of months ago I noted a book from the University of Mary called From Christendom to Apostolic Mission. It’s an important book which challenges believers to a paradigm shift. I’ve spent some time with that book, even giving a talk at a parish near Seattle about the shift in thinking it suggests, so I read its sequel, Religion of the Day, also from the University of Mary Press, with some interest. Whereas the first of these two books served as a provocation and delivered a vocabulary to make sense of the disorienting environment in which faith exists now, the second reads a bit more like due diligence. The authors present intellectual history and context for the paradigm shifting claims they make in their first book. Due diligence is not as exciting as pioneering new geographies, but the book is well-written, approachable, and insightful.

Take, for example, the observation that modern man’s loss of integrated self creases a crisis of pride.

In our experience of ourselves we are among history’s most fragile and unconfident humans. While in our approach to things divine we are among the most prideful people the world has ever known. This odd combination points to a key challenge for Christians of our time: how to stir up magnanimity, courage, confidence, and high ideals on the one hand, and on the other how to regain a humble and therefore true stance toward God.

Then, one of the book’s observations has an ominous ring to my ear. Even though our culture has abandoned Christianity, it is still in many ways informed by thousands of years of Christian thought and evangelization. And even though many do not believe, most are, in fact, baptized and the graces of baptism restrain demonic activity. How much worse would things be without those graces? How much worse will things be when baptism recedes? We’ll find out soon.

Much of what we take for granted as normal human behavior—being kind to the needy and poor, avoiding cruelty, recognizing the basic rights of all people—was anything but normal before the coming of Christ. Even modern atheistic ideologies are living off the capital of Judeo-Christian beliefs for their moral ideas, though they do not usually know it.

Religion of the Day seeks to describe the intellectual postures that play the role of religion in our lives and rightly spends some time explaining progressivism’s poisonous legacy. Important to note that progressivism here is not the narrowly partisan political kind. In fact, many on the right fall into the progressive trap as these authors describe it.

A necessary result of the Progressive utopian vision is the conviction that political action is the primary means by which the world will arrive at its desired goal. For progressive believers, politics is not a secondary, if important, realm of human activity where compromise is often demanded for the sake of social concord. It is instead the central concern.

That’s right. We can’t ignore politics and pursuing justice in the social order, but we certainly don’t place our hope in it either.

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Canopy

by Linda Gregerson

Not too long ago I wrote about one of Linda Gregerson’s poems in a brief piece called Reluctance to Shine.

It’s a poem from a previous collection of Linda’s, but I recently read her latest book entitled: Canopy. Full disclosure, Linda was a professor and advisor of mine when I was a student at the University of Michigan and she remains today a friend of mine.

Canopy was published in 2022. I’ve always thought that the voice in Linda’s poems is entirely consistent with her voice in conversation, only the slightest elevation is necessary to formalize her words into poetry. This is not to presume the poems are easy to write or to suggest they are artless—on the contrary. But all of her poems are true to her. They resemble the way she talks, reacts, thinks. They share her poise, politics, and sincerity.

Many of these poems are political—not my favorite variety of poem though I confess to have written a few myself, but even if the politics jar, the poems never lose the warm feeling of a generous intelligence turning over the objects of its experience.

The poem “Slip” features many of Linda’s strengths. The occasion for the poem is a memory of or reflection on the play Salome—I’m guessing Oscar Wilde’s—which (it’s not perfectly clear to me from the poem) she may have seen or participated in as a girl. She handles language in this poem to amplify the eroticism of the subject:

Liquid alignment of fabric and outer
                                       thigh. Slip.
Which mimics the thing it’s meant to allow.
                                       Passage

of air on either side of the tongue whose meat
                                       as if
to thicken the likeness of substance and sound
                                       meets just

that plot of upper palate behind the teeth.

That stanza break after “passage” is one of my favorite stanza breaks ever. You get it right?

But the slippery language sets us up for a fall when we continue through the perhaps autobiographical poem and face squarely the idea of predation—not just the predation Salome was involved in which ended St. John the Baptist’s life, but also a freight load of suggestion about the predations of the “entertainment industry,” drama, and casting, the price placed on perfect bodies…. It is just this kind of artfulness and thoughtfulness that Canopy delivers by the bookload.

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Cuttlefish Bones, The Occasions, The Storm and Other Things, Saturna

by Eugenio Montale (translated by William Arrowsmith)

Can poetry emit UV light?

Montale was born at the very end of the nineteenth century, wrote his poetry throughout the twentieth century, and received the Nobel Prize in 1975. Montale is Italy’s greatest contribution to the century of literary modernism. I read his first four books which were published between 1925 and 1971. The first of these is called Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones), one of those titles which, even in translation, I wish I had thought of.

Sadly, I don’t have Italian and had to read Montale in translation. Happily, Norton has published a handsome collected poems translated by the poet William Arrowsmith. I can’t truly compare his work to the originals, but many of these translations are entirely delightful and strong just as they are.

Can I do better here than offer a sampling of his work? In “The Lemon Trees” he unites the best of gritty modernism with an ancient frame declaiming:

Listen: the laureled poets
stroll only among shrubs 
with learned names: ligustrum, acanthus, box.
What I like are streets that end in grassy
ditches where boys snatch
a few famished eels from drying puddles

No arch and posturing naturalism for Montale. He announces that the modern poetics has arrived, eschewing the Latinate nomenclature of the vegetable kingdom for the earthy pleasures of actual life. These are poems where you can hear the beach sand rasping between the pages and reading too long risks sun burn. The poem “Falsetto” describes an object of his admiration, and we learn a great deal about him by learning what he loves: “Anxious tomorrows leave you unafraid. / All grace, you stretch / on the rock ledge shining with salt / and burn your body in the sun.”

If the hyper-intellectual Ezra Pound focused his poetic genius through the prism of history, Montale’s genius is quintessentially Mediterranean. From his poem “Mediterranean:”

O sea,
petrified by your presence then as now,
I think myself not worth the grave admonition
of your breath. You told me as a child
the petty ferment
of my heart was merely a moment
of yours; that your perilous law
lay deep within me: to be vast and various, 
but unchanging too

You can also learn a lot about a poet when he writes about poetry. Now, I like rhyme and formal poetics as much as the next guy, but Montale’s wry complaint in a poem called “Rhymes” is just right:

Rhymes are pests, worse
than the nuns of St. Vincent, knocking at your door
nonstop. You can't just turn them away
and they're tolerable so long as they're outside. 
The polite poet stays aloof, disguising
or outwitting them (the rhymes), or trying to sneak 
them by. But they're fanatical, blazing
with zeal and sooner or later they're back (rhymes
and biddies), pounding at your door and poems, 
same as always.

It’s very cheeky, and Montale is excellent when giving us sun-drenched psychodrama from a coral-studded coast, or cheeky meta-poetical ribbing.

Norton’s several hundred page alternating Italian / English tome is beautiful new on the shelf but even better after being creased and dinged up for a couple weeks worth of reading, each instance of which will bring you pleasure and just a hint of sun tan.