A Dream of Noise

For some days my shirt pocket has been holding, near my heart, a dream of un-dreamlike immediacy and almost palpable reality.

In it, the incompetence and brash blunderings, verbal and otherwise, of a certain world leader make a saint of him. Through his actions and inactions he forces his country into a corner where the practices and processes falter that have primarily a monetary reason for being. Of the space it occupied before, no more than this corner remains to his country. Only through dedication to individual well-being on a universal basis may it again enjoy freedom of the whole room. Capitalism staggers, if not quite collapses. A socialist remedy offers the sole recourse. The solution to the country's ills requires cooperation, mutual regard, and thoughtfulness.

Meanwhile the roads are emptying. We hear "the busy hum of men" — that hum which drew Milton's youthful thoughts toward the city and away from rustic ways and pleasures — die down to something un-busy, if a hum at all. We find ourselves swept up, too, in helping meet the Paris Accord. Up till now, emissions-reduction guidelines have generated much hot air and heated reaction, contrary to their aim. Cooler exhalations emerge. Not only have we shown ourselves that human health towers over the putatively all-powerful deity of The Economy, but we find that the quieting of the busy hum puts us in the corner of what we call Nature, or the Earth.

Our corner seems not so small, suddenly; and that old room, the one from which our country is in retreat, less large.

Absurd, you say? Dreams are. And which would we rather have? A lamed Hephaestus named The Economy, or a Nature in the process of being murdered? Do we not hope to hear that shout across the waves from a far island: "Oh — I was wrong! Pan is not quite dead!"

Besides the staggering Economy and a more freely breathing Nature, those among us who regularly attend the church of Poetry are learning that a revered spirit, that of Silence, has not forsaken the human world. With what pleasure, the other morning, I stepped out to check our bird feeders and heard chickadees, finches, and, in the distance, crows — but not a motor, even though a state highway cuts through our village not a block away, and another, larger one transects it but a mile from here.

Single-handedly for his country, through ill-meaning impatience and self-interested blindness, this world leader has subdued the malignant deity that propped him up, has abruptly lowered fossil-fuel emissions, and here and there, now and then, has restored the Sabbath stillness that has gone missing from even the Sabbath. Seeing this man-child of tantrums wearing this new halo of wholesome achievement, we may feel the urge to raise him to sainthood — even though he has proven himself not quite the material for presidency.

How strange it has seemed to me that this last should still have needed proving. But much has seemed strange, and worse than strange, even before this time of calamity and fatality.

Weekday mornings, in our village, we listen in vain for Silence. The local bank has been building a new, large facility near here, which as yet is but a steel skeleton with walls and a few window-openings. The construction crew still appears early for work, running potent equipment and driving outsized vehicles over what peace and quiet might lie in their path — as such vehicles do, without asking permission from nearby ears.

In my mind, dare I say, I see shambling members of a dying race toiling in the lifeless shell of a temple to money earned from money.

We never will leave our noise behind us, though — except by going extinct. We never will leave it because it is a part of us — a part that has been stolen, disfigured, and amplified by motors and automatic tools, and rendered so malignantly overpowering that it dominates some arts. Reading Keats, though, teaches us that "gently whisp'ring noise" may mark a realm where gathered souls may find fulfillment. "Noise" appears in his sonnet "To My Brothers" not as an awkward rhyme that Keats forced into place, but as a fitting word. "Noise," in his time, applied to a spectrum of sounds.

May we find it in us to re-create a vanished world, and to restore that driven-away, whispering end to the spectrum — now that restoring it has been shown humanly possible.

Elsewhere . . . the life of the sea returns to Venice, and blue to the sky of China. Perhaps in those places as here, the life of the soul threatens a return, to meliorate an increasingly uncivil civilization. Silence opens the door for such a return.

I personally would rather not see a blathering blusterer ascend to sainthood — so well-suited does he seem to descent. I have in mind, however, Emerson's conception of a force that he called Fate, that goes masked in many guises.

"If Fate is ore and quarry," he says, "if evil is good in the making, if limitation is power that shall be, if calamities, oppositions, and weights are wings and means, — we are reconciled."

May we all so be, if and when we see the good in the making.

The Cask of Purple ... and Poe's Prose

The other day my eye caught on a line written by a writer with experience, who was giving advice to one without:

"I can't advise on how to make one's writing more Poe-like because I don't admire purple prose."

It being his birthday today I feel it only fitting to let Poe's prematurely buried spirit utter its "Nemo me impune lacessit." To say Poe's prose is purple is to call it, as this writer also does, "the overwrought, some say hysterical, prose of Poe." This writer offers it as representing one end of the writing spectrum, with the "minimalist approach as used by Carver and at his best Hemingway" as the other.

To say some among Poe's narrators are overwrought and sometimes hysterical seems to me fine, as a statement. So does saying that some among Poe's narrators are saturated with rationality. We could also say that some are murderous, because of their being actually murderers; or that some are witty. Poe himself takes no place among the characters in his stories. His stories require that their narrators be someone other than Edgar, in order to work.

Clearly Poe put words in his narrators' mouths, or writing hands. I hope no one sees this as a damning observation: for he did so with a fine command of his materials.

Clearly, too, Poe worked in a literary atmosphere influenced by the Gothic; and his genius likely found this influence inescapable because complete escape offered no particular attractions. Yet his vision arose from within a sphere of other influences, as well, including that of Milton—although some readers may regard Milton, too, as "overwrought."

In any case, even if an author's narrator's expressions might seem to do violet violence to the English tongue, for someone to take that one narrator's narrative rhetoric from among the variety to be found within that author's works, and then to glue that particular rhetoric-name as a generalization upon that author's prose, strikes me as unfair to the author, and unbecoming to the one so gluing.

One might as well call "The Cask of Amontillado" purple in its prose because its hapless character Fortunato, who is not the narrator, in essence purples himself with wine.

Poe's prose offers many examples of his utter clarity of expression, as well as his economy of expression. These should offer correction enough to any accusation of purpleness in his prose.

(At a time when I was reading more Hemingway than I have in recent years I happened to read "Amontillado" for what seemed the first time. It may well have been my first time as an adult reader. I recall clearly my impression upon emerging from it that Hemingway would never have become the writer he did without Poe's story to point American letters in the direction it did.)

While as a reader I relish some wildly absurd passages in Poe's stories, I cannot call his prose in general wildly absurd, even as to its content. The absurd, however, has its place as a technique in his tool box. Similarly we would find Gothic excess to be a technique in his tool box. Similarly, too, we would find expressive restraint.

Among his stories we encounter some among the most analytically constructed works we ever will. In thinking and speaking about Poe we need to keep in mind his distinct and distinctive grasp of literary craft.

Grapes going into a crush destined to become Amontillado, by the way, I imagine must be darkly purple. Any excess of color falls away, however, by the time of casking. This happens to some degree naturally during the wine-making process.

Yet it happens to some degree, too, thanks to the skill of the winemaker.

Cheers ...