The Road Taken

Big Frank has been reading Frost again. We all know his great poem “The Road Not Taken”. The general reading of this poem takes the last aphoristic couplet as the gist of the poem “I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference.” Perhaps most readers also like to think of themselves in the same light – as kind of mavericks, striking out on their own. However, Frost, as is often the case actually presents a more complex, and ironic reading. In fact, both roads were equally untraveled. If you look at the beginning of the third stanza it reads: “And both that morning equally lay/ In leaves no steps had trodden black.” In fact there may well be no such thing as a road untraveled. Nonetheless, we, like the narrator of this poem, often like to think – perhaps it serves some kind of consolation – that we struck out on some path nobody else ever took. This ironic reading opens a much richer vein of truth in this poem.

The Road Not Taken
By Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Tough as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day?
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence;
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

"The skreat and skritter of evenings gone"

Big Frank has a moon thing going here with Wallace Stevens; in this one it's a "yellow moon". The poem is a sonnet - although a contemporary one. Sonnet comes from the Italian soneto meaning little song. Traditionally it has 14 lines, and there are various permutations of rhyme scheme and other prosodic formulae depending on whether it's one of these main types: Italian, English or Spenserian. Often it has a turn from a problem presented to a solution, or some other type of turn in mood or tone. The turn was often at line eight or line ten - here look for it right in the middle of line 7 - signaled by "And yet".

Wallace Stevens wrote this sad song of loss. Big Frank asks that you just read it - and let the words wash over you. The mood, the images, the "skreak and skritter" will imprint in you the feeling. We all know exactly what Stevens is writing about here, because we all know loss. This poem captures it by striking that key note that resonates in your soul. It's all about what is gone - and what remains? The yellow moon, and the skreat and skritter overwhelming the unknown - never-to-be-heard sound of the nightingale.

Autumn Refrain
By Wallace Stevens

The skreak and skritter of evenings gone
And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,
The sorrows of sun, too, gone... the moon and moon,
The yellow moon of words about the nightingale
In measureless measures, not a bird for me
But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air
I have never——shall never hear. And yet beneath
The stillness of everything gone, and being still,
Being and sitting still, something resides,
Some skreaking and skrittering residuum,
That grates these evasions of the nightingale
Though I have never——shall never hear that bird.
And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,
The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.

"The obscure moon lighting an obscure world"

Perhaps you know someone, someone that you are close to, that you are drawn to. This person captures your imagination and you use yours to explain this person to yourself. Yet, you can only approximate, hint at, glance over this person, who perhaps, of all others you are closest to in life. This next poem has Stevens skimming over possible metaphors to explain this: YOU of the “half colors of quarter things”, YOU “the obscure moon”, YOU “the melting clouds”. The beauty and attraction of the indeterminate, the waning, waxing, the this-and-that. A wonderfully beautiful poem that captures the elusive: “of things that would never be quite expressed.”

The Motive for Metaphor
By Wallace Stevens

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon—
The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound—
Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

A light in the darkness

More poetry from Wallace Stevens. And how could Big Frank not include one of his poems that includes the line “what it is”. There is no interaction with “the night”: this is what it is. However, what you can “interchange” with is your love. This poem shows how lovers enfolded in unknowable darkness can through their love “in the pale light that each upon the other throws”, enlighten each other through their romance. Stevens shows how through self-knowledge one can perceive the other. While each is alone, in the background of night, through self-knowledge, through true commitment to each other, and through their interchange -enlightenment can come.

Re-statement of Romance
By Wallace Stevens

The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am;
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself

And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,

Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,

That night is only the background of our selves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

The Height of Happiness

It may be that there is some sense to alternating between Frost and Stevens. Not sure exactly what that entails, but it seems appropriate. In the past few posts Big Frank has taken a look at the imagination – its preeminence and its transforming power. Now Big Frank turns to Frost again and the imagination’s ability to stretch a warm happy experience – of love for example – over periods of unhappiness and to overpower them through its intensity. Its height triumphs over the latter’s length. The image in the final lines vividly shows that: the blazing flowers piercing the lovers' shadow as it passes over them. It is a beautiful poem, and a lovely concept. Perhaps it worked for Frost, who had a horrifically sad life, with more than its share of pain and loss. Keep in mind that Frost is not saying that these extraordinary poignant days/moments etc. give more than the merely steady sure partly cloudy days, or even the days of contentment. He is saying that these high points pierce the low - "through its blazing flowers". Such high happiness is an antidote to the stormy mists we all encounter.

Happiness Makes Up In Height For What It Lacks In Length
By Robert Frost

Oh stormy stormy world,
The days you were not swirled
Around with mist and cloud,
Or wrapped as in a shroud,
And the sun’s brilliant ball
Was not in part or all
Obscured from mortal view –
Were days but very few
I cannot but wonder whence
I get the lasting sense
Of so much warmth and light.
If my mistrust is right
It may be altogether
From one day’s perfect weather,
When starting clear at dawn
The day swept clearly on
To finish clear at eve.
I verily believe
My fair impression may
Be all from that one day
No shadow passed but ours
As through its blazing flowers
We went from house to wood
For change of solitude.

Imagination's preeminence

From Robert Frost to Wallace Stevens through the power of the imagination. Frost thought it fruitless to seize the day during the day. Rather it was through the backward glance tinged inevitably by the power of imagination that the seizure occurs. Wallace Stevens is the poet of the imagination. He wrote “Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof.” And “Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities it can be made into.”

Philip Roth also recognized the preeminence of the imagination when he wrote: “Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.”

This is not to say that facts are not out there. Nor is it to say that the being does not exist apart from facts or the mind. However, apart from our ordering and making sense of our experiences, we exist as a – what kind of a metaphor shall we use – a single tone, a single line? To join with our life is to use our mind, and our mind gets experience from imagination. Stevens wrote: “The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them. If this is true, then reason is simply the methodizer of the imagination.” So whether you call it intuition, imagination, flights of fancy, or gut feelings – these are what create your sorrow and your joy. The mind’s reason simply fills in the picture and tells the story. The imagination is the spark: we then feed the fire.

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
By Wallace Steven

Light the first light of evening
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

Carpe Diem (yeah, right!)

Robert Frost has something to say about the backward wisdom of nostalgia. Seize the day - perhaps that is reminiscence speaking, acknowledging what the overcrowded present cannot do. Are they really strangers. It appears so. Frost's poem has the living taking place in our imagination, and the present is - well, too present to imagine. It's as though there needs to be a gap, a pause, to allow the imagination to reimage the present in order for true enjoyment, true "seizure" to occur. A kind of nostagia. Here’s Frost’s poem:

Carpe Diem
By Robert Frost

Age saw two quiet children
Go loving by at twilight,
He knew not whether homeward,
Or outward from the village,
Or (chimes were ringing) churchward.
He waited (they were strangers)
Till they were out of hearing
To bid them both be happy.
“Be happy, happy, happy,
And seize the day of pleasure.”
The age-long theme is Age’s.
Twas Age imposed on poems
There gather-roses burden
To warn against the danger
That overtaken lovers
From being overflooded
With happiness should have it
And yet not know they have it.
But bid life seize the present?
It lives less in the present,
Than in the future always,
And less in both together
Than in the past. The present
Is too much for the senses,
Too crowding, too confusing –
Too present to imagine.

Stanley Kunitz "Live in the layers, not on the litter."

Who better to reflect the passage of time than the poet Stanley Kunitz, who lived to the age of 101. Here are a couple of photos of a younger and an ancient Stanley Kunitz. And while the photo on the right is obviously aged, I don't think anyone could say that it is scary. It seems to reflect a good life. As he says in his poem below, "I am not who I was/though some principle of being abides."

And what better to accompany these two images than his great poem, Layers, wherein he exhorts us to "live in the layers, not on the litter."

Layers

By Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written,
I am not done with my changes.

Appropriate images

Take a look at this photo of Patricia Highsmith as a young woman. Pretty good looking - I think we would all agree. Then compare it to the photo below when she had aged. Is one image a truer representation than another?

Then take a look at that photo of James Broughton below as a younger man (I know it's not very clear, but there are not many photos out there of Broughton as a young man). Still the difference is striking.



Now, both Broughton and Highsmith led lives on the edge in more ways than one. Their appearance in later life perhaps reflects the toll their life style took on them. Still one can ask which image best represent them.


This does bring to mind the whole issue of what image is appropriate for someone who has died. That person can be represented by a range of images. We tend not to use the childhood photos, which are an immature, not fully formed person. Should they be represented by the last living image that they bore? Or by some kind of median or average image. Say take the the age at death and divide it by two. In that case - Broughton, for example would be best represented by an image at the age of 42. Which image would you choose for yourself? Is one truer than another?

Patricia Highsmith's gift for description

Big Frank is reading Patricia Highsmith's novel "Those Who Walk Away". It is an extremely well written novel; well written at the sentence level. It reminds one of Cormac McCarthy's gift for carrying the reader through scenes minute action by minute action with 360 degree coverage of the scene and uncannily revealing portraits of the characters. It is these portraits that Big Frank is most impressed with. Describing someone, a character, for example is always best done by going beyond the physical. A mere physical description carries no emotional impact. Every face that is seen is seen through another's eyes is seen through their memory, their associations, their emotional reactions, and their judgements. They are what really have an impact on the observer, and Highsmith knows that.

Here are a few good portraits, as it were, that she puts down in "Those Who Walk Away".

Inez
Ray hung his coat on a hook and sat down. He glanced at Inez, who was looking at him. She was a darkish blond, about forty-five, slight, and she wore good jewelry. She was not quite pretty; she had a receding and rather pointed chin, but Ray sensed a warmth and femininity in her, that was most attractive.

Mr and Mrs. Smith-Peters
He was a man who liked to move quickly, Ray saw. His hair was nearly white. Ray could not imagine him young, with more weight on him, but it was easy to imagine his wife young, bright-blue-eyed and pert, with a rather common Irish prettiness that needs youth or else. Mr. Smith-Peters' face reminded Ray of certain old baseball players' faces that he occasionally saw on sports pages in the states and never cared to read about. Lean, hawk-nosed, grinning. Ray did not like to ask if he had been keen on any sport before he started his business. He knew the answer would be either baseball or golf.

The bit on "rather common Irish prettiness that needs youth or else" is perfect - we all instantly know that face, and the "or else" couldn't have been said better.

Ray Garrett
From his father, an oilwell worker in his youth, a self-made man, now a millionaire with an oil company of his own, Ray had inherited wide cheekbones. It was an American face, slightly on the handsome side, hopelessly marred by vagueness, discretion, the second thought, if not downright indecision, Ray thought. He disliked his appearance, and always saw himself leaning slightly forward as if to hear someone who was speaking softly, or as if incipiently, bowing, kowtowing, about to retreat backwards.

Here the handsomeness (in Ray's mind) is sullied by his own lack of will. Even his posture belies (in his mind) his obsequiousness and cowardice.

James Broughton "This is It"

James Broughton - poet, filmmaker, and practitioner of "Big Joy" is buried in Port Townsend, Washington. His epitaph reads: "Adventure – not predicament." He said in an interview, "Suffering can't be avoided. I think the way to happiness is to go into the darkness of yourself. That's the place the seed is nourished, takes its roots and grows up, and becomes ultimately the plant and the flower. You can only go upward by first going downward. I've never been afraid of losing my beautiful neurosis as a source of my poetry.” (Laughter)

And laughter was big with James Broughton – philosophical insights tinged with laughter as in this great poem of his:

This is It

This is It
and I am It
and You are It
and so is That
and He is It
and She is It
and It is It
and That is That

And in this quintessentially Buddhist poem that reminds me of Thailand and the saying that I heard there: “slow down and get there quicker”.

Ways of Getting There

What makes you think
you know your way around?
You add the mileage
but subtract the scenery.

When a white rabbit
runs out of the wood
and startles a stag
you step on the gas
roar past the hunter
run over the chipmunk.
You say you have to
get to the station
ahead of time.

Time doesn't care if
you are ahead of him.
Or way behind.
He's on the go
no matter what.

Why not for once
wander off a path
without caring how
long it takes?
You might bump into
Time's older brother
the one who never needs
to go anywhere.