RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,254
(putting the steady hand to the ladle)
Peter Handke has a new book out.
For the Nobel Prize in Literature I
would gladly pit Handke (winner,
2020) against stupid pretender Bob
Dylan, 2016, any day. Handke is
what the prize is supposed to be
about. Teamster couplet-writer
'Bobby Z' is not. These things all
used to matter to me, and then,
by the 2016 version of the prize,
I just gave it up. Looking at the
Nobel/Literature website and list
simply presents him as a glaring
mistake. Sorry. Apparently all
that we do now is dumb-down
things so as to better fit the
colloquial scrim of our present
stagecraft of fakery, lies, and
deceit, or at least that was done
in 2016. (Are lies and deceit the
same thing? No, they are not -
A lie is what others believe about
you; deceit is what you put out
about yourself for others to
believe. Funny difference, but
no one cares. Daylight Savings
Time all the time? They ought
just go to All Darkness).
-
When I first got back to Woodbridge
High School, after seminary, I was
enrolled in a few interesting classes.
Things I needed in order to graduate.
I forget the year really, but the one
teacher I most remember was the it
was a Mrs. Higgins. I 'picked and
choosed' what I wished to be sitting
through. My credits were enough to
coast me through the year with but
a few additional courses. Can't really
remember. Anyway, I stepped into
the middle of coverage of the subject
that English teacher was presenting.
It was on the Transcendentalists.
She did a good job, and I was taken;
in the seminary years my learning
I had was biased and twisted into
proclamations of the growth and
historic expansion of Christianity
in its Rome version : Pippin, Clovis,
Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Empire,
Augustine, Boniface, Bede, etc. It
was a different litany of events, and
it ran into modern times as well. But
never to the 'present.' It was presented
in an interesting collection, basically,
of biased facts. Even as a 13-year old
I knew that and saw what was happening.
-
Walking cold, into a roomful of kids
studying 'Transcendentalism' really
knocked me out. On one hand it made
no sense at all, since these kids, and
that teacher, were anything but, yet on
the other hand it was a viewpoint into
a world I'd been shielded from. All
that time about the spread and the
infiltration of Rome, and then its
retreat, conflicts with Judaism, and
then the ongoing conflicts with
Iberian Islam and the growth of
Muhammadism, the crusades, the
'barbarian' influxes, etc., etc. now
amounted to very little in a classroom
of purely 1960's materialism. It was
a heady mix, and I was further put
out of focus by 'girls,' with whom,
in a classroom setting, I had never
had to deal. To wit, off-putting and
disconcerting (and quite distracting)
for sure! Augustine may have had
his Veronica, but Jeepers, that
was his mother!
-
I was suddenly immersed in all
sorts of other literary passes besides
Transcendentalism, as well. Even the
names teased me to a better life: Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and
then a passage over to the likes of
William Wordsworth ('Intimations of
Immortality,' 'Tintern Abbey').Samuel
Coleridge - and any and all of those
'colonial' writers scratching through
the American settlements, people
fairly well unheard of by the average
American Joe and Jane : Anne Bradstreet,
Edward Taylor, Henry Timrod, Sidney
Lanier, among others. To which I'll
add, as well, John Greenleaf Whittier,
(British), and - in general reference -
the Maypole of Merry Mount! I
found myself loving all that stuff.
-
I think, as you can see, what I'm
pining for here, and driving at, is
authenticity and truth. All of that
once actually existed; when people
first wrote their heart. It had not
yet become calculated and frissoned.
I read once where 'Plagiarism' does
not want you to know the original,
whereas allusion does. Let's let
the writer Christopher Ricks
tall it: "One important distinguishing
factor between plagiarism and allusion,
which is common among poets and
songwriters, is that plagiarism wants
you not to know the original, whereas
allusion wants you to know. When
Eliot says, ‘No! I am not Prince
Hamlet, nor was meant to be’ —
to have a line ending ‘to be’ when
the most famous line uttered by
Hamlet is ‘to be or not to be’ — then
part of the fun and illumination
in the Eliot poem is that you should
know it. I don’t think Dylan is
alluding to Timrod. I don’t think
can say that you’re meant to know
that it’s Timrod.”
-
All of this means much to me,
immersed as I am in the exposed
studwork of that construction of
'writing and thought.' It's the point
by which I've defined my life and
never left from. I suppose that
accounts for non-achievement,
because there is no true means of
'achieving' in worldly terms that
which doesn't exist. Keeping one's
'hand' in means as well keeping
that hand steady. Try to authentically
transcend that, and tell me what
you yourself come up with.
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