Between the Eternities

After a day in the high desert, surrounded by mountain ranges wherever we go, as darkness falls once again I turn to books about desert and mountains. Far from seeking escape in my winter reading, what I desire above all is immersion.

The reds are always salmon-colored, terra-cotta, or Indian red; the greens are olive-hued, plum-colored, sage-green; the yellows are as pallid as the leaves of yellow roses. Fresh breaks in the wall of rock may show bright colors that have not yet been weather-worn…. A mountain wall may be dark red within, but it is weather-stained and lichen-covered without. Long-reaching shafts of granite that loom upward from a peak may be yellow at heart but they are silver-gray on the surface. The colors have undergone years of ‘toning down’ until they blend and run together like the faded tints of an Eastern rug.  

- John C. Van Dyke, THE DESERT: FURTHER STUDIES IN NATURAL APPEARANCES (1901)

John C. Van Dyke (1856-1932) was an American art historian and critic, and his books all have to do with art. THE DESERT is no exception. Geologic formation, factors of climate then and now, flora and fauna, and human plans for alteration of the land all find their way into THE DESERT, but it is first and foremost with an eye tuned to art that he examines effects of light and atmosphere, clouds, mirages, and every other aspect of what is to be seen in the desert and its mountains. A few of his details — over a hundred years after this book was written — are by now outdated, but in essence it remains truthful to the land, to his experience, and it wonderfully captures the ways in which such a severe landscape can penetrate and capture a human heart. I read my own experience in his, mine not of artist or art critic but only a seasonally retired bookseller and philosophe fauve, when I read sentences such as the following:

How silently, even swiftly, the days glide by out in the desert, in the waste, in the wilderness! How ‘the morning and the evening make up the day’ and the purple shadow slips in between with a midnight all stars! And how day by day the interest grows in the long overlooked commonplace things of nature! In a few weeks we are studying bushes, bowlders, stones, sand-drifts — things we never thought of looking at in any other country.

In my case those last eleven words do not apply, I think immediately, because wherever I am “bushes, bowlders, stones, sand-drifts,” along with insects, lizards, birds, mammals, tracks on the ground, clouds in the sky, running water or indications of water has run, still water, trees, habitations of human beings and other life — all this I look at and drink in hungrily. I suspect the difference for Van Dyke was one of familiarity vs. unfamiliarity, because in the West he did not find what he “knew so well when [he was] a child by a New England mill-stream.” And yet, something tells me that back in his New England boyhood he must already have been doing much more looking than overlooking, that he must have been noticing and forming impressions and making mental notes about everything he saw around him. Because being open to nature is generally a lifelong habit, and in the contrast of long-ago and recent experiences, after all, both are sharpened. 

For example --

The state bird of Illinois is the cardinal, a bird also common in Michigan, both in summer and winter. Against dense green summer foliage, the brilliant scarlet of the male cardinal commands attention, while seen on a background of winter snow, the white a blank page behind its startling color, it is no less impressive. Amid the dusty hues of a desert wash, to someone from the East or Midwest, the cardinal is more than impressive and attention-grabbing: it is downright improbable, verging on miraculous. 

Arizona’s "silver cardinal," the pyruhlloxia, unfamiliar and new to someone new to the West, is no more wonderful than the familiar cardinal, unfamiliar again in its “new” setting. Both give a lift to the heart and put a smile on the face.

Trail through new snow after April storm in Michigan

In Leelanau County, Michigan, Up North winter brings opportunities for noticing comings and goings of life that otherwise proceeds invisibly all around, as tracks in the snow tell stories. (Follow link to see more Michigan tracks. There was another, more extensive post of tracks in the woods, but I can't find it.) In spring, when the snow is gone, my dog still gets the news with her nose; I, on the other hand, dependent on vision, have the olfactory equivalent of near-blindness in grass and woods and must await dirt roads or wet shoreline sand to see what she detects on and near the ground. Here in the desert there is more bare earth, thus more signs accessible to sight. On dirt roads, in dusty washes, across the desert itself, there are more tracks and trails for me to see than back in Michigan after snowmelt, but whether here or there, looking for signs and paying attention to them is just as natural to me.

Cow tracks on road

Cow path through mesquite

Michigan

And everyone who lives near or visits Lake Michigan, the native of a lifetime or tourist of a single day, carries home stones. Desert and mountain rocks are fascinating and very different from smooth, rounded, water-polished beach stones, but to say I would “never thought of looking at” rocks or stones back home in the Midwest would be utterly false.

Michigan

Arizona

Enough, however, of this caviling. I did not set out with the intention of arguing with Mr. Van Dyke. On the contrary, I love his writing and especially love his love of nature. Was it the art criticism of his time that hailed “art for art’s sake,” rather than for conveying and imparting spiritual or political values? He does not insist on “meaning” in art, I’m guessing (not having read any of his other books), any more than he looks for it in nature, where he finds beauty “in itself."

Line and tint do not always require significance to be beautiful. There is no tale or text or testimony to be tortured out of the blue sky. It is a splendid body of color; no more.

Michigan blue

Arizona blue

Mountain blue

And there I am absolutely on the same page with this writer of over a century ago. It is not “sermons in stone” that I look for or find in mountains; nor do I find the absence of sermons something that mountains lack. In themselves, both as they are now and as they became over millenia, along with the changes they continue to undergo, mountains with no addition of sermonizing are endlessly fascinating and awe-inspiring. They are enough. No, more than enough. Monumental and overwhelming — and at the same time engaging, welcoming, beloved.

At the same time…. 

At the same time, neither Van Dyke’s prose nor his sensibility are those of our age but belong instead to the nineteenth century, a period that had closed — on the calendar, at least — only very shortly before this book appeared. While he refrains from passing judgment on nature, stylistically he is given not only to rhetorical questions and flowery exclamations, but also to the personification of nature and to teleological thinking, writing of nature’s designs and purposes, mysterious as the latter must always remain. 

Those first twenty years of our life we were allowed to sap blood and strength from our surroundings; the last twenty years of our life our surroundings are allowed to sap blood and strength from us. It is Nature’s plan and it is carried out without any feeling. With the same indifferent spirit that she planted in us an eye to see or an ear to hear, she afterward plants a microbe to breed and a cancer to eat. She in herself is both growth and decay. The virile and healthy things of the earth are hers; and so, too, are disease, dissolution, and death. The flower and the grass spring up, they fade, they wither; and Nature neither rejoices in the life nor sorrows in the death. She is neither good nor evil; she is only a great law of change that passeth understanding. The gorgeous pageantry of the earth with all its beauty, the life thereon with its hopes and fears and struggles, and we a part of the universal whole, are brought up from the dust to dance on the green in the sunlight for an hour; and then the procession that comes after us turns the sod and we creep back to Mother Earth. All, all to dust again; and no man to this day knoweth the why thereof.

Over and over he reminds us that the individual is of no concern to nature. Only in his closing pages does he finally conclude, somewhat shockingly, that nature is equally indifferent to species, and, probably, even to life on earth itself. Shocking? Surprising, certainly, and yet the conclusion is of a piece with all that came before. Nature is not benevolent, he has said all along. Nature is indifferent. So why would nature care about the survival of a planet?

Individual, type, and species, all shall pass away; and the globe itself become as desert sand blown hither and yon through space.

Van Dyke acknowledges that such a “destiny,” as he calls it, seems “harsh” to us, but he sees purpose even in the eventual destruction of our planet, as he sees it in the “waste” of the arid desert — 

…not because they develop character …, but simply because they are beautiful in themselves and good to look upon whether they be life or death.

Would I use those words? Destiny? Purpose? Destinies and purposes seem at odds with indifference, and I can’t help wondering how a mountain would remain beautiful with no one to behold it. — Of course, without senses and minds to apprehend and appreciate desert and mountains, the question of beauty would never arise. So here we are. 

Yes! Here we are, me here and you wherever you are! And aren’t we the lucky ones, though, to be alive at all, “to dance on the green in the sunlight for an hour” on our transit “from the sweetgrass to the packinghouse”? 

Timely Holiday Message to All Americans

Are the geese getting fat? What’s sauce for the goose, ’tis said, is sauce for the gander, as well, and therefore every transgender bird too must get happily sauced, to be able to stomach the holiday table in our nation’s capital. If, that is, we would stick — like cliched glue, like old-fashioned loyalty, like clear-sighted honesty — to science-based evidence rather than falling back (with suicidal determination) on ignorance and superstition, falling backward like fetuses returning to the womb and from thence (in at least a few wild-eyed theories), orbiting back to the beginning of Time, as Time runs backward, and falling at last down a dense black hole, an educated populace scurrying (like a thunder of terrified rabbits) for cover, fleeing the hare-brained politicos determined to stop their mouths and paralyze their brains. 

A pox on morons and idiots! Yes, I call them out! ’Tis mincemeat they make of our merry holiday season, the scoundrels! And so ’tis mincemeat I make of a handful of figures of speech, mixing geese and rabbits and black holes, for who can do less (or more) when threatened with the loss of clear language? 

“Use your words,” parents say to their little children, encouraging direct and clear communication. In the current harsh political climate, we adults must say it to one another, every day, encouraging each other and reinforcing courage in ourselves. Courage and encourage. That is to say, take and give heart. 

Keep calm, carry on -- but keep using your words, too! Perhaps a sign on the bathroom mirror, to read as you brush your teeth each morning:

KEEP CALM.

CARRY ON.

USE YOUR WORDS!

And do not let your joy be stolen any more than you would let anyone steal your words. Keep the faith! Happy holidays!

The Oddness of a Small Italian Coincidence

Up, up from the Inferno and through the Purgatorio we climb with Dante, our fearless tiny band of readers, and as we climb I realize more and more the aspects of this work that speak most clearly and compellingly to me. They are not the long inventive passages, the pictures conjured out of the poet’s imagination. No, those I labor through, like one lost in a dark wood, but from time to time I fall upon a sunlit clearing where fresh breezes play.

Even as sheep that move, first one, then two,

then three, out of the fold—the others also

stand, eyes and muzzles lowered, timidly;

and what the first sheep does, the others do,

and if it halts, they huddle close behind, 

simple and quiet and not knowing why....

Do you see them, the simple sheep? What about these gamblers?

When dicing’s done and players separate, 

the loser’s left alone, disconsolate— 

rehearsing what he’d thrown away, he sadly learns; 

all of the crowd surrounds the one who won....

Whenever Dante describes something of this world, our world, it rings familiar and true to me, though I am no more a sheep farmer or shepherd than I am a gambler. The parts of the Purgatorio that mean the most to me are not otherworldly at all but this-worldly, as when in the Inferno he recalled a busy shipyard or used the analogy of Italian rivers to drive home the point of his vision. So too when in Canto VI of the former he apostrophizes his native land--

Ah, abject Italy, you inn of sorrows,

you ship without a helmsman in harsh seas,

no queen of provinces but of bordellos!

--it is his native land on earth that grieves his spirit, just as Wordworth poured out his sorrow in “” when he wrote--

MILTON! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;

O raise us up, return to us again,

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power!

Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart; 

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:

Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,

So didst thou travel on life's common way, 

In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart 

The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

Harsh seas or stagnant marshes, both poets turn to nature—earthly nature—to express their desperate feelings for their governments and the politics of their times, and however little we know of the details of those periods we have a sharp sense of the writers’ discontent and longing from the figures of speech they use, for nature is nature from one century to the next.

The small coincidence came yesterday, when David picked up some magazines left behind to be picked up by anyone who wanted them in the lobby of our public library. One of them that caught my eye on the table last night after dinner was the September 2011 issue of Harper’s, its cover promising something on Dante within! Opening eagerly, I turned to a piece by Elif Batuman, the story of her participation in a “Danta Marathon” in Florence in the spring of 2009. As I read, I was wondering if this would be something to take to our group meeting on March 1, something to share with the other toilers through Dante’s three-tired afterworld, but then, near the end, the writer turned on its head what has been written by a couple of famous Dante interpreters:

For both Lukács and Auerback, meaning and truth in Dante’s world reside in the afterlife, where figurae are fulfilled and totalities formed. Mortan existence is, by contrast, incomplete, illusory, secondary. But I think the opposite can be said, with equal accuracy: it’s the afterlife that is a tissue of illusions. Dante’s afterworld may be highly structured, but he invented that structure himself, synthesizing classical mythology, Christian theology, and medieval demonology. Dante’s afterworld, drawing attention to its own eccentricities, paradoxes, and loopholes—it’s Dante’s afterworld, based in his own experiences. Seen from this perspective, the only thing that’s indubitably real, the only thing everyone can see and agree on, is the stuff of this life—all the stuff that Dante himself studied with such interest and love. Is Paradise more real than all that? Is it better? Is Paradise enough to compensate for the loss of the world?

Batuman’s view is not at all a denial of Dante’s poetry. She simply points out that what gives the poem life springs from this world and are ever part of it.

Postscript:

I used to think it was a shame that my own beautiful part of the world is not better known, its lovely corners and vistas not as famous as those of the Italian hills or the English lake country or even the states on the American Eastern seaboard. In my view, northern Michigan lacks nothing in a comparison of beauties. What is absent here are the associations: We have no centuries of battles, no lives of world-famous, no buildings dating back centuries. But if we did? Would life be better for those of us who live here?

Now I've changed my mind, and it isn't resignation. I am thankful for the historical and literary obscurity of my home ground. In the woods I may come upon an old rock that looks to me like a grindstone from pre-European times, or a former small clearing now filling in with young trees may reveal, among the weeds, an old iron tractor wheel, and those signs of earlier lives are quite enough. They are quiet signs. No stone fortresses on hills, no rivers running with blood or fields littered with ghosts of fallen bodies. Just woods and orchards, seeps and creeks, people now as then quietly going about keeping themselves and their families alive. We have stories here, but they are stories of ordinary people.

Down into Darkness, Up into Light: A January Paradox

In that part of the young year when the sun

begins to warm its locks beneath Aquarius

and nights grow shorter, equaling the days,

         when hoarfrost mimes the image of his white

sister upon the ground—but not for long,

because the pen he uses is not sharp—

         the farmer who is short of fodder rises

and looks and sees the fields all white, at which

he slaps his thigh, turns back into the house,

         and here and there complains like some poor wretch

who doesn’t know what can be done, and then

goes out again and gathers up new hope

         on seeing that the world has changed its face

in so few hours, and he takes his staff

and hurries out his flock of sheep to pasture.

Dante, The Inferno, Canto XXIV

We are indeed in January, with cold nights and slowly lengthening days, so in that sense we are coming into the light. To read The Inferno, however, is to descend ever deeper into darkness and misery, visiting sinners in their abode of eternal punishment. And as Dante’s descent was supposed to have begun on Good Friday (1300 CE), his journey partook of a similar paradox.

With Canto XXIV, we are still in the Eighth Circle of the Inferno, the place of torment for men who were deceivers of other men. In preceding “pouches” of this Circle (and I have not written before of any particulars of this work, so did not explore earlier Circles in detail) we encountered panderers, seducers and flatterers (those guilty of “ordinary fraud”); simonists (corrupt churchmen); corrupt politicians; diviners, magicians and astrologists; grafters; and hypocrites. In Canto XXIV we shall pass from hypocrites to thieves, and as this passage begins Dante seems a poor, frightened sheep, soothed by his shepherd guide, Virgil, who capably leads him down a craggy, treacherous path.

It is interesting that sins of violence—whether against one’s own self, against others or against God—are punished less severely by Dante’s imagination than sins of fraud. So too lust and gluttony, “deadly” sins by the reckonings of the Church, occupy only the mildly punished Second and Third Circles, just below Limbo (Limbo that First Circle occupied by otherwise good people who unfortunately died without baptism or lived prior to its Christian possibility). Frauds, grafters and hypocrites, behold your place in Dante’s scheme of things! Your sins are worse than murder and suicide! Worse than the punishment meted out to heretics is your fate! Why did Dante see it (or wish to see it) so?

My first thought was that a blasphemer, a murderer or a suicide, like a lustful person, may have been taken by momentary passion, whereas fraud requires steady, cold-blooded intent, but the friend I tried out this answer on (another reader in our group and more studious than I by far when it comes to secondary literature) objected that murder also may be planned and executed in cold blood. True. And so my first speculation fell to ground.

Can it be that flatterers, seducers, corrupt churchman and lying politicians, grafters and hypocrites and the like spread their harms more widely because their use of language to deceive undermines the very possibility of truth, which is itself the necessary condition of justice? This is my new hypothesis—a philosopher’s hypothesis, to be sure--and I’ll be watching to see if it holds up as I descend to the Ninth Circle.

Meanwhile, strange as it seems, I don’t mind lingering a while in the Eighth Circle, since at this depth I seem to have broken through more completely than before to the wonders of the poet’s invention. The diviners, astrologers and magicians, for instance, because they “wanted so much to see ahead,” to tell the future, are punished by having their heads fixed on backwards, “...so awry that tears, drawn from the eyes,/bathed the buttocks, running down the cleft”! Tears running down their butts! What a wild notion! Introducing the fifth pouch of this Circle, in Canto XXI, Dante begins with a description of an Italian shipyard in winter--

         As in the arsenal of the Venetians,

all winter long a stew of sticky pitch

boils up to patch their sick and tattered ships

         that cannot sail (instead of voyaging,

some build new keels, some tow and tar the ribs

of hulls worn out by too much journeying;

         some hammer at the prow, some at the stern,

and some make oars, and some braid ropes and cords;

one mends the jib, another, the mainsail)...

 --to set the stage for the punishment given to politicians who took bribes: they are submerged in boiling pitch, and if they so much as dare to lift a hair above the level of the pitch, their tormenters push them back down under, like cooks “...force the meat with hooks/deep down into the pot, that it not float”! And don’t you think they deserve it, too? And can you wonder now that I am tempted, when at last I reach the end of this book, to turn back to the beginning and spend more time on the analogies, some given in a word, others in a phrase, still others in long, multi-stanza passages of description?

Phew! It’s hot down there!