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April 20, 2008

Trains, Ships, Splints, Knives, Whalesongs, and the Pope

People constantly ask "How are you?" and "What is new?" I know the questions are rhetorical, but I'll reply anyway.
How I Am and What Is New:
1. Went to an eccentric lecture on 5 garbage scows lost in a storm at sea, in 1892, near New York Harbor. The meeting, for ship and rail enthusiasts, took place in an old loft on Walker St.--the nearly extinct kind: dusty, raw, grey with age. The vast, unfurnished space was divided down the middle by a wall with a narrow doorway at center. The doorway was bisected at clavicle level by model-railroad tracks that ranged in an oval around a thousand square feet of space. If, unawares, you poked your head through the aperture, an oncoming locomotive might flatten your nose. Someone switched the trains on, and the clamor of wheels on rails (miniaturized as they were) sounded like a sudden, violent rainstorm. Everyone gasped and automatically glanced up, as if expecting an indoor downpour.
2. A few Sundays ago in Soho, I tripped on an uneven chunk of sidewalk. Tangled in leashes, I went off-balance and down hard. Back home I went downstairs to the café to get ice for the damaged finger. One of the young waiters, also a lifeguard savvy about First Aid, probed, queried, and determined the finger probably wasn’t broken–-more likely sprained or disjointed. Wrapping it in ice proved cumbersome, leaky and, yeah, cold. A little later I learned of a dancer’s remedy: wrap the injury in cold cabbage leaves, which worked better than ice. My hand, half of which was the color of mashed blueberries, felt like it was in a baseball mitt. Within 15 minutes the cabbage sacrificed all of its prana, chi, ki, and shakti to my hand and was completely wilted. I made a splint from a coffee stirrer and tape. But without the splint, the end of the finger still dangles, so perhaps I should see a doctor after all. Maybe.
3-A. On a recent Thursday at noon, on the south edge of Washington Square, two huge men with knives ran across my path, bloody and screaming, just about killing each other. No cops in sight, despite the formidable police trailer always parked there to dissuade drug dealers. (Whether the trailer ever is occupied remains a mystery, for the windows are covered with newspapers.) As fast as they'd appeared, the thugs tore off to continue their mutual mayhem and maiming elsewhere. Then:
3-B. The very next week: same day, same time, same spot, I was swept up in some kind of Earth Day celebration. A sizable parade of, presumably, NYU students -- girls in nothing but body paint (or less), and guys in Speedos (one gold lame´) -- appeared out of nowhere, chanting and dancing in the chilly sun.
4. On a Sunday during this same time, a three-masted, fully rigged clipper ship dreamed its way down the Hudson. The Stad Amsterdam. She’s on YouTube, if you want to see her.
5. Yesterday, went to a seminar on whales, whalesong and New York City, at the 42nd St. Library. Speakers from Harvard, Princeton, NYU. Of course my favorite lecture was the one about Moby-Dick. I heard some fascinating insights, such as why Melville has Ishmael (and the novel) start off from Manhattan, rather than New Bedford. And why Melville, who knew better, called the whale a fish.
6. Outside P.S.234 on Greenwich Street is a story-bookish garden--probably home to gnomes and elves as well as pigeons and rats. Now in delicate bloom, the prima donnas are two cherry trees in fountainous pink-tulle ballet skirts. At one end of the garden, like a stage prop, is a roughhewn, clapboard birdfeeder that looks like a forgotten camp shack in the Catskills, and the frilly flowers are like characters out of Gilbert and Sullivan County.
7. This morning the Pope and entourage arrived at Ground Zero, an event that silenced all of Tribeca and Battery Park City, as thoroughly as if humanity had been erased. The West Side Highway, usually an inexorable rageway, was so quiet you could hear the click of canine nails on asphalt. You could hear traffic lights change. Half an hour later, the world began again, like a crowd of movie extras responding to the cue: "Background! Action!"

Posted by Jane on 3:04 PM | Comments (1)

April 6, 2008

Mental Notes

1.
This morning behind a small parking lot
On Warren Street I chanced to see a new view
of old lofts from the back, aligned in a minimal row.
What a terrific painting it would make I thought,
noting the vertical bars of gray, blue-gray,
white, black, and a strange dull yellow like tallow.
Later the same day, at the Whitney Museum,
I saw similar bands of ochre, white, gray and black
bars that were houses too, and, in truth, even in
the same backdrop composition. The painting
I had in mind of color-bar buildings, forsooth,
has already been done by Charles Demuth!
2.
Through the windows of an overloaded bus sliding
incrementally across 72nd Street at rush hour,
the part of Park I am able to see between packages,
profiles and elbows is a dim sort of tarnished green,
indicating what? Oh, of course, the start of spring.
The bus creeps along in the developing dusk
and the failing light. Images disappear from view
like a chemical tray in reverse. Slowly we scroll
past a dense calligraphy of hoary trees, barbed
nests, scratchy mezzotints, charred kindling--
a dense monochrome like a Seurat drawing.
Suddenly, at a remote height, and easily missed,
a tiny figure strolls, or rather wafts, square
in his coat like a silver gilding leaf, mote
of ash, paper scrap, some gaff-rigged sail
or manta-ray kite--a sort of rhombus
in a sketchy field: white on graphite.

Posted by Jane on 11:48 AM | Comments (1)

April 4, 2008

Quote-Unquote

When: March 13
Where: Chambers St.
Who: tall gray-haired man on cell phone
Attitude: resigned
QuoteUnquote: “I was going to walk there, but I just tore my meniscus.”
~
When: March 21
Where: West 4th St.
Who: two young guys
Attitude: vehement
QuoteUnquote: “When parents make their kids feel guilty, it’s child abuse!”
~
When: April 2
Where: crossing Varick at Leonard Street
Who: boy, about 8, being led across street by girl, about 16
Attitude: plaintive, bratty
Situation: boy yells to the driver of the car stopped at the light
Quote: “Can you run her over? Please?? She’s annoying me!"
~
When: April 3
Where: Kate’s Paperie, 13th St.
Who: boy, about 4, with mother
Attitude: sad
QuoteUnquote: “Today when we were eating lunch the fish died, and nobody noticed.”
~
When: April 4
Where: in line at the Whitney museum
Who: man to his friends
Attitude: neutral
QuoteUnquote: “I was born in a little village, in a forest, in Iceland.”

Posted by Jane on 8:21 PM | Comments (0)

April 1, 2008

The Attic and the Sea: what lies above, what lies beneath

Here are rough notes comparing two 19th-century romantic epics, Jane Eyre (England, 1847) and Moby-Dick (America, 1851). Both novels are narrated by first-person observers: Jane Eyre and Ishmael are both young, articulate, intellectual and introspective loners. Both are orphans. Both are survivors. While the one novel is landlocked, the other takes place on the open seas, yet both are saturated with extensive nature imagery.

Rochester and Ahab are heroic, abstruse, charismatic, fascinating. Both move in fugal (if antipodal) rhythms: Rochester’s repeated travels away from his wife hidden in the attic; Ahab’s unremitting travels toward the elusive Moby Dick, both objects of hatred and perceived malice. Both men are larger-than-life, but while Rochester is a tragic hero in the classic sense, Ahab is not: Rochester undergoes change through the stages of hubris, peripeteia, and hamartia. His reversal begins when Jane runs away, and climaxes when Bertha sets Thornfield on fire. (Fire figures too in M-D, viz. the corpusants, in ch. 119, "The Candles.") He recognizes his error in cajoling Jane to be his mistress when marriage is no longer possible [“I did wrong” ch. 37]. His hubris, in the end, is humbled. But Ahab’s arrogance lasts to the salty end: “from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee…" ch. 135].
~
Bronte’s and Melville’s protagonists are autocratic and dominating, both are older (38 and 58) than the narrators (about 18) but not wiser. Both men are missing limbs. The time frame from their disfigurement to the climax is one year for each. (While Ahab is already crippled when we meet him, Rochester is injured at the end of the novel, but both amputations are central, not incidental, to the plot). Both men bear lightning-like scars, and both are compared to lightning-struck trees.
~
In ch. 25 of JE, the chestnut tree (whose name is cognate to “Rochester” and “chest,” or heart) is struck by lightning. JE address the tree “as if the monster-splinters were living things.” She says:

I faced the wreck of the chestnut-tree; it stood up black and riven: the trunk, split down the centre, gasped ghastly…vitality was destroyed—the sap could flow no more: their great boughs on each side were dead…a ruin, but an entire ruin... scathed as you look, and charred and scorched, there must be a little sense of life in you yet...[but] you will never have green leaves more…

The image is repeated at the end of the novel in Rochester’s “cicatrised visage,” “scorched eyebrows,” and “crippled strength,” his arm “a mere stump—a ghastly sight!” Jane Eyre says:

His form was of the same strong and stalwart contour as ever: his port was still erect, his hair was still raven black; nor were his features altered or sunk: not in one year’s space, by any sorrow, could his athletic strength be quelled or his vigorous prime blighted. But in his countenance I saw a change: that looked desperate and brooding … dangerous to approach in his sullen woe….“I am no better than the old lightning-struck chestnut-tree in Thornfield orchard,” he remarked….“You are no ruin, sir—no lightning-struck tree: you are green and vigorous.

~ The “scar of fire on [Rochester’s] forehead” is similar to Ahab’s scar. Compare the passage above with M-D, ch. 28:

He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say.

The reference to "cast Perseus" reminds me of: "[Rochester had] thought himself [Celine's] idol, ugly as he was: he believed, as he said, that she preferred his 'taille d'athlete' to the elegance of the Apollo Belvidere."

Other findings: Each virile hero sheds a tear at the end: JE: “As he turned aside his face a minute, I saw a tear slide from under the sealed eyelid, and trickle down the manly cheek.” M-D: “From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea; nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.” (ch. 132). And while JE is very much about finding one’s home, M-D is about escape from home. I’m going to contemplate an analogy between Rochester and his ward Adele, and Ahab, who becomes a father-figure to Pip. And here is a parallel communion between Rochester and Jane, and Ahab and Pip: Jane Eyre, ch. 23: R. to J.: “I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you…as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and 200 miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly.” ~~~Moby-Dick, ch. 125: Ahab to Pip: "Thou touchest my inmost centre boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings.”
~
I may be reading too freely into this literature, but that’s part of the fun of reading. I do understand the biblical significance of Ahab’s name, but can’t help forcing a Sanskrit/Latin analogy, regarding “A-hab” as “not-habiting.” Maybe it’s just as well I don’t have a PhD.

Posted by Jane on 12:46 PM | Comments (0)