Tuesday Night PotPourri at the Gates of Dawn

*Why poets should run countries, Exhibit No. 1.

*And, speaking of poets, there’s an exhibit about the journalistic work of Djuna Barnes (who “used journalism as a means to understand New York City’s people and places”) that I’d give my eye teeth to see. Maybe a miracle will happen, this brief will just write itself, and I’ll hop on the train one morning, see the exhibit, do some shopping, have lunch with a friend, and get back to D.C. before I’m missed. And I am Marie of Romania. Still. Stranger things have happened.

*Here’s one of Barnes’ poems that I can recite almost by heart:

SEEN FROM THE “L”

O SHE stands—nude—stretching dully
Two amber combs loll through her hair
A vague molested carpet pitches
Down the dusty length of stair.
She does not see, she does not care
It’s always there.

The frail mosaic on her window
Facing starkly toward the street
Is scribbled there by tipsy sparrows—
Etched there with their rocking feet.
Is fashioned too, by every beat
Of shirt and sheet.

Sill her clothing is less risky
Than her body in its prime,
They are chain-stitched and so is she
Chain-stitched to her soul for time.
Ravelling grandly into vice
Dropping crooked into rhyme.
Slipping through the stitch of virtue,
Into crime.

Though her lips are vague as fancy
In her youth—
They bloom vivid and repulsive
As the truth.
Even vases in the making
Are uncouth.

I love the closing lines: “Even vases in the making/Are uncouth.”

*And, speaking of museum exhibits that I’d love to see, @francesmayes (who knows a bit about writing from a sense of place) alerted me today to this exhibit that will cover one of my favorite illustrators, one of my favorite childhood books, and one of my favorite devotionals in all of English literature.

I’m surprised to read that:

If you can’t remember the bit in The Wind in the Willows when Mole and Rat go searching for a missing baby otter, only to find him asleep in the hooves of the muscular, horned god Pan, then you’re not alone. “It is the chapter that everyone forgets about it,” said Jamie Andrews of the British Library. “For most editions it’s left out.”

***

The chapter – The Piper at the Gates of Dawn – is normally dropped because it jars, seems so strange compared to all the others and, to some, is vaguely homo-erotic. Grahame thought it essential.

I’m surprised because, for me, that chapter has always been the entire point of The Wind in the Willows. The cover of the first edition shows an embossed figure of — you guessed it: Pan.

I think I may have read Wind in the Willows when I was 9 or 10. My memory is that I felt that I was reading a book that I thought was definitely written for “younger kids,” but was enjoying it very much. (I went on, as was my wont, to read all the sequels. And loved them all.) And somewhere in my nascent Pagan soul, I was deeply nourished to read:

“This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,” whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. “Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him!”

Then suddenly the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror–indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy–but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. With difficulty he turned to look for his friend. and saw him at his side cowed, stricken, and trembling violently. And still there was utter silence in the populous bird-haunted branches around them; and still the light grew and grew.

Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fulness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

`Rat!’ he found breath to whisper, shaking. `Are you afraid?’

`Afraid?’ murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. `Afraid! Of him? O, never, never! And yet–and yet– O, Mole, I am afraid!’

Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.

Sudden and magnificent, the sun’s broad golden disc showed itself over the horizon facing them; and the first rays, shooting across the level water-meadows, [See! Sense of place!] took the animals full in the eyes and dazzled them. When they were able to look once more, the Vision had vanished, and the air was full of the carol of birds that hailed the dawn.

As they stared blankly. in dumb misery deepening as they slowly realised all they had seen and all they had lost, a capricious little breeze, dancing up from the surface of the water, tossed the aspens, shook the dewy roses and blew lightly and caressingly in their faces; and with its soft touch came instant oblivion. For this is the last best gift that the kindly demi- god is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and lighthearted as before.

I was putting away a book in my bookshelves just the other day, gazing at my annotated version of Wind in the Willows, and wondering when I could read it to G/Son. I cautioned myself not to rush it.

The exhibit sounds wonderful:

The library said The Wind in the Willows would be one of more than 150 literary works to feature in a show that aims to explore how writers in Britain, from Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare to Angela Carter and Hanif Kureishi, have been inspired by and helped shape our understanding of landscape and place.

***

Andrews, the show’s lead curator and head of English and drama at the library, said: “We think that every item here will connect to another in some way and the best thing is, sometimes the connections will be obvious – Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath to the Brontes say – and sometimes they won’t, like Ballard and Chesterton.

“We’d like to think everyone can have an individual experience navigating their own connections.”

Andrews conceded they were choosing from millions of things. “We know we’re leaving things out. We’re trying to choose things we know that, on their own, are redolent and exciting but they also add up to a larger whole – they spark these connections.”

Because the library can only paint a partial picture it will launch an online initiative inviting people to make their own contributions – whether that is saying who wrote the definitive novel for Milton Keynes, or who created the great ode to Didcot. “We want to create this literary map of Britain, where every space and place is in some way linked to a literary text. We can’t do that but we believe it must be possible to do.”

The exhibition will span 1,000 years of creative writing and include sound recordings, letters, photographs, drawings and song lyrics as well as yet to be revealed contributions from contemporary writers.

*And, speaking of English writings about a sense of place, I’m reading and loving The Wanton Green: Contemporary Pagan Writings on Place. The title comes from Shakespeare’s Queen Titania (and Shakespeare, one must admit, may also have known a bit about writing from a sense of place):

The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;
The nine men’s morris is fill’d up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
For lack of tread are undistinguishable

Watch here for more on this book, soon.

*And, speaking of a sense of place, my own place is full of stirrings and shiftings. The light grows longer every day. Just this weekend, the Potomac was the iciest jade I’ve ever seen, but, this morning, it was as blue as the warm blue sky above it. Every tree branch is covered with hard, brownish-pink buds and the poison hellebores are blooming and budding all over my Western cottage garden. This weekend, when I should have been working, I went outside to sit on my deck, mug of jasmine tea in hand, and warm my old woman’s bones in the weak, but growing, Spring sun. I sat for a long time conversing with the blue jays and squirrels who really own my Bit of Earth. I want, in the words of Joanna Colbert, to be in on the gossip of my landbase.

What’s the news in yours?

Picture found here, but be careful; it’s full of spam.