I’ve reached the age when I need to brace myself before scanning the obituary page, lest I come across the name of someone I knew personally. I recently wrote on my website about the passing of my dear friend and favorite bookseller, Warren Farha, whom Greg Wolfe eulogized on this blog. This week, I pause to remember another man whose work and friendship altered my life for the better: Robert Coles, who died on June 4 at the age of 97.
Wait, you might ask, what do Pessoa, the great Portuguese Modernist writer and Aleister Crowley, the notorious occultist, have to do with one another and, for that matter, with the Boca do Inferno? That’s a good question. The answer is surprising in all sorts of ways and also slightly crazy and definitely confusing and then maybe even verging into the territory of….
Lawrence’s “The Migration Series” is painted with Casein tempera, a paint derived from milk protein. HeLevi’s poems are composed of air from the lungs, the vibration of the vocal cords, and the shaping of sounds with the mouth and throat. The voice was translated into visual form, alphabetic writing, and was initially preserved in iron gall ink written on parchment or vellum. This poem, these paintings: wonders. The might of human imagination and artistry.
What I’ve been reading is the account of many long and short conversations between Goethe and a person named Johann Peter Eckermann, who was a youngish literary-minded fellow who sent Goethe some of his writing, writing that was rather ass-kissy in its love of, and reliance on, a Goethian way of thinking, and so Eckermann sent Goethe some of this Goethe-worshiping writing and Goethe, unsurprisingly, lapped it up and invited Eckermann to come and visit him at his fancy house in Weimar.
This overwhelming self-referentiality is exceptionally ironic given the emphasis of current mainstream discourse on marginalized communities and their importance of “inclusion.” I’m all for Inclusion, but in my own experience, the inclusion that seems to be on offer is the mere gathering of difference—not its dynamic melding. We are a basketful of sullen turtles, pulled into our shells, I guess.
We are not living in an age of synthesis—let alone humility—in public dialogue, whether about art, literature, or religion, Rather, the dominant pose (and take note of how I framed that) is one of the endless, exhausting refinement of distinctions, the chopping up of this not that. If you’ve ever been the target of a long Twitter pile-on, you know what I mean.
Paul Mariani’s latest collection of poems, All That Will Be New, just published by Slant Books, covers a wide variety of subjects and poetic forms. There are poems about particular classic paintings, about race relations, about death (including Christ’s), about Covid, about the trees and birds in his own yard, and more. The poetic forms range from free verse to iambic pentameter with ABBA rhyme scheme to terza rima.
You stood beside me while I crouched on the floor with a pair of bright red pumps, an oddity remembered only because of what happened next. There was the musty smell of sweat and old soap, the mold’s cool talcum in the shoe bed, the clatter of the bright room when we heard your aunt say to your mother-in-law: “You hurt me.”
Reading, I felt a physical wave pass through me, and I had to steady myself, as though there’d suddenly been a stiff wind blowing through. What is Time, that a simple piece of paper could make it actually contract in me? My sense of my own body, my own sense of presence in the world was, for a few unstable seconds, gone.
The Internet hadn’t yet arrived, so the conversation was solely in letters at first, scrawled on notebook paper, sent three or four times a year at the most. It was not a witty crypto-romance, like the set of letters that make up Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road.
We arrive at the beach house in the dark, the ocean’s roar schooning over the dunes to meet us on the gravel path and ask: who are you? We get out of the car numb from the road and the nerves of a long drive just before the lockdown’s official lift, and we don’t answer.