We met two years ago as new teachers at a private school in New York that, as the New York Times once put it, first came into being “to serve the downtown financial class.” I mention this because Nicole, a first-generation college student (and doctor of letters) from Trenton, New Jersey, had turned down higher-paying work at another school: Grace was where she wanted, in very conscientiously thought-out ways, to make a difference. To its credit, the school’s heart is in the right place, but it goes without saying that these are not always easy places in which to work; all such schools have their residual pathologies, reflecting in magnified form the country in which we live. Nicole was as undeluded as she was unjaded in being there for her students, while encouraging them—in active, daily, truly tireless work—to resist a certain culture that sets in. How do you create a culture of expectation and shared trust without stifling curiosity, exploration, kindness, and without letting these same qualities become mere bywords? These schools don’t always seem to have figured it out. A blazing force of one, in the proof of her practice, Nicole had.

We had planned to drive to the Hudson Valley this past Thursday to see Shakespeare. Now two tickets for As You Like It sit on my desk. A rainy day in Harlem. I buzzed and buzzed at her door, and called, and called, and waited. Some people never don’t respond. And then, from her partner, calling down, the news.

All the stories I was going to tell her about a recent trip on the drive up, all the questions I had about her year ahead (two electives—long awaited). Being stalked through a boutique hotel in Rio by a pop star’s security. A mononym I’d never heard of, but I’m betting Nicole had. Because I’d been treated to her good-natured laughter on many occasions, I was sure this awaited.

In trying to speak to my friend’s presence, and in signing off from this yearlong experiment in writing, I want to include as coda—we reach for what solaces we can—these chance words from another much-mourned presence, held words, that I feel well describe her:

“Many people have what you call ‘unaffected humanity.’ You just have to get out more. Gentle souls with determination and generosity of spirit.

“They are the ones who search and eventually find.”

In trying to account for the uplift of these two photographs, two seemingly effortless testaments to the spirit, by Cartier-Bresson—measures of wonder salvaged from the scrap-heap of history, and so lightly, as if he’d simply sketched them, in wonderful cahoots with his young troupe of players, in air—I go back to that fragment from Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” wanting to read it slightly against its sense within the poem—because the inspired effect of this first picture begins, seems wholly latent in, the ecstatic lightness of this boy’s pose, the way he’s leaning on that scarred wall, only not for strength, rather for some sort of dreaming reassurance, some modest license from the world without (it takes so little) to delve deeper in, all as we’re invited into his way of seeing, perhaps the only one to which he has access, some kind of unearthly light, as in Goya, sweeping down, a superabundance you’d never have guessed—and like that, we find ourselves in the main of light. For a moment, there’s no suggestion of deprivation, of any need to go defended in this world. Look at how open he is to sensation, that right hand turned down. His small apron of sorts. What else does he have for protection? Just the solicitude—goodness doesn’t seem too strong a word—of whoever might be there with him, now or in time, whatever watcher, whatever fellow-traveler. And it’s this second spirit, the companion spirit of the photograph, the implied one voyaging out to the one before us, that Cartier-Bresson’s picture exemplifies, asks of us, invites us to share.

And then it’s as if Cartier-Bresson had smashed open this next wall to reveal some unsuspected dimension beyond, as if he’d found a clearing, some way out of it all, in which mirth were busily being made out of nothing, a kind of runaway joy nothing in the circumstances could explain, nor diminish, so much rubble suddenly fostering a stage, and those smattered back rows of children, as if immediately instructed in the sense of occasion by their unlikely visitor, mirroring that same watcher whose vantage we share. As if so much levity could be seen into history, let down to us, newly discovered in the mess of it all. Someone’s been caught and is free. Someone’s crutches are much too big for him, but he’s forgotten the accustomed fact of pain. Someone, forgetting what part to play, looks back to see his twin in perfect repose, for even what uplifts, the chance moment, needs its witness, or two. Everyone else: thrilling with motion.

Some kindred lesson, some kindred work of transforming the ground of history by the most lightly sketched gesture, the most passionately seen, is brought home by Tish Murtha, in photographs saved from oblivion by the devoted work of her daughter Ella. Who is this young woman? A painter, a composer, had the world around her had a bit more imagination. She’s lifted by the life-raft of that overturned sofa, the trick to achieve just a bit of separation (not too little, not too much) from what is.

Murtha, noble in her commitment to beauty, noble in her anger, also gives us figures like this one, bids us face them squarely. Such intensity of presence. Against what she called “vandalism on a grand scale,” just the intimate work, steadfast in the face of all, of seeing a single soul, whether in challenge or consolation, in whatever ineffaceable register of emotion.

Reich has done at least as much as any poet of our time to bring out the beauty and some of the bewitchment of ordinary speech, which is a way of saying that his music reminds us (to risk two archaic grandnessess) of a humanity and a dignity we can come very near to forgetting is our own. Those speaking voices that we hear in “Different Trains,” so beautifully underlain by violin, are moving emblems of an art whose aesthetic effect seems inseparable from, so much as becomes, a moral argument: the beauty here, though you hardly stop to think such a thing in the rapture of listening, lies in a pronounced moral commitment of the composer’s.

This is Reich’s commitment to expressing not only what Aleksander Wat called the devil-in-history, but—in equal measure—what we might call the angelic-in-man. Reich possesses in abundance two qualities one is so used to associating, in our time, with the art of certain history-ridden nations of Europe: historical imagination and the special sort of spiritual intensity to which it alone gives rise.

I think of Wat because of that moment in My Century (his astonisher of a book simply spoken, how fittingly, into being) when he remembers, in the midst of his time in one of the prisons, suddenly hearing, from somewhere, strains of Bach, and, far from being steeled against the mere unacting beauty of the thing, feeling: This, at least, will survive, the whole ethereal transport, the true weight of this beauty, impervious to the assaults of history; this, at least, cannot be wronged out of existence. In much less extreme circumstances, the young John Coetzee heard a neighbor playing Bach at the piano, and felt for the first time—inarticulately, unmistakably—visited by the sort of beauty that seemed surpassing strange, and that would in time come to form his conception of the classic.

If each of these moments shows the listener in some way liberated from his accustomed way of being, from the bare is of identity, his rapture abstracting him altogether out of his own and all other history, one thing to say about Reich’s music is that it seems in some sense to work in reverse of this. Reich would not say with Joyce’s young artist that history is the nightmare from which he’s tried to awake. “Different Trains” instead transports the listener, in a movement whose beauty is not uninflected by remembered terror, and by a sense of the uncanny, headlong into the dark backward and abysm of time.

The piece has its origin in Reich’s seeing a picture of a young Jewish boy condemned, among uncountable others, to be borne off by one of the trains. Reich tells of seeing, in the image, something at once mercifully alien to his own experience, and still uncannily close. For Reich would’ve been about the same age as that boy in the war years; only the simple and finally inexplicable fact of geography could have spared him, he saw then, that selfsame fate. Not only this, but the young Reich, a child of divorce, spent that same interval of time being shuttled between parents and coasts, by train no less, accompanied by a governess. This rather charmed variation on that horrifically alternate reality, on so much history proceeding so awfully, far away—how could something of the lucky benignity and insularity of his experience, as a statement about the extreme divergence of contingent human fates, not come to haunt us?

Yet if one of the effects of Reich’s piece is to explore just the abiding difference of those trains and those lives (the positively ebullient conductor of that “crack train to New York” hardly comes near, say, the man remembering all his lost disquiet in recounting how “the Germans invaded Hungary”), the astonishing thing about the piece is the way in which, while doing nothing to console itself by effacing that originary sense of terrible distance, and while giving full witness to historical horror (an inheritance precisely of many and not all); and while refusing to join truly irreconcilable fates in a way that might gainsay the terrible primacy of historical suffering, what Celan could only call that which was— while doing nothing of this sort, “Different Trains” nonetheless asks us to hear each voice not only in its irreducible individuality, in the particular way it rises and falls, but so too to hear each voice under the sign of our common humanity: hence the string quartet providing a transfiguring backing, a numinous undersound, Frost’s “tone of meaning” working with and through the words.

In this way Reich, for all his brave refusal of the orchestral—an aesthetic disinheritance that, for reasons well-rehearsed by such critics as George Steiner, has everything to do with certain grotesque turns of history and the reckoning they require—has given no less than soaring voice to that all-encompassing thing we find most movingly in Dante, or in Milosz:

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard

As are all men and women living at the same time

Whether they are aware of it or not.

This is what those strains of Bach might, in the worst of circumstances, still tell us. This is what we hear in each of the recorded voices, these artifacts of concurrent histories that could never meet—each one brought in its way to the condition of music. What does not survive as beauty, Milosz wrote, survives as evidence. But evidence can be beauty too; and witness, art— at once awaking us to the irredeemable depths of history and making possible the recovery of a forgotten humanity, one perfectly uncowed if imperfectly consoled.

I’ll never forget the first time I heard, quite by accident (from unsounded depths of iTunes…), the third movement of Reich’s piece, “After the War.” I remember exactly where I was, on one of those brilliantly sunlit winter days, passing through Beinecke Plaza, near the end of a particularly wearing semester-of-unfeeling, as alien to myself as anyone else. Just those opening strains were enough to quicken something I’d thought gone. I don’t care how time comes to judge it; let me call Reich’s piece, with thoughts of that essay of Coetzee’s, classic.

I want to say a bit about my favorite musical stretch in the life of cinema, a span of unforced sublimity in which image and sound, longing and form, reach a kind of unforbidding zenith, in which the haunting spirit of the grounds (for this is in fact his house) Almodóvar, with help from his brother Caetano, invites you in to listen, as one of the crowd and as privileged hearer. I’ve lost the habit of seeing the film in full, but once a year or so, sometimes more, I come back to this much-discovered country, hoping what it has to share of wonder hasn’t yet abated, ritual returns aside. I’ve never been let down.

I have it from the singer that much made such natural-seeming beauty unlikely, though it all seems inevitable now, assured as great art always comes to seem in the gloss of retrospect: a countryside, an enchanted crowd, someone springing up in the midst of it all—as what are days, what are nights, for—to issue some reminder of love, of yearning that must make its way across, whether in the fulfillment or the expression alone. It always does.

Unlikely, this particular coming together, because a Brazilian cognoscenti habituated to Bossa Nova had made their dismissal of a popular mode from Mexico known. Caetano writes: “It’s a Mexican song from the 1950s that became a popular hit all over Latin America - and came to Brazil when I would hear it on the radio many times when I still was a child. It was considered one of the most vulgar, kitsch, sentimental examples of Spanish-American song a Brazilian could imagine.” But Veloso and Almodóvar, unfazed, each bearing their own knowledge of beauty, planned to include the song at the close of Flower of My Secret, only for both to see Wong Kar-Wai—perhaps so possessed by beauty he forgot to ask permission—take it, that year, for a film of his own. They went with an alternate. For his part, Wong sent women bearing flowers, as apology, when Veloso had a concert in his vicinity soon after.

And so a path opened, to sing a new Cucurrucucú in Hable con Ella. Knowing the low esteem in which some held it—hardly high art, the thinking went—someone in the Brazilian film circuit had teased Veloso at a party: I bet you don’t have the courage to record Cucurrucucú.

That he had—and the falsetto, and the inimitable way of suggesting the quavering of a whole being and making it beautiful—with Almodóvar’s Marco and Lydia, as in a tableau, reminding us what the whole song is dramatizing, how near to us it all is, how far it reaches. But really we need no reminding, in the presence of Caetano’s voice.

There are some in the crowd—Almodóvar’s actors, and friends—who seem, yes, to be acting. Nervous about the cameras, wanting to be striking, wanting to project deep emotion. But others seem perfectly sincere—self-forgetting—having been transported from themselves. They’re in the presence of singing.

Caetano writes: “My story with the Paloma song may unmake the charm you found in my singing the song in Almodóvar’s movie.”

Not a chance.

It’s not a secret to the small group of those that know me that I have struggled for years to come to terms with profoundly manipulative and abusive behavior—with sadistic cruelty on the part of an eminence whom I met as a teenager—within the literary-academic realm, behavior I can now better understand as being underwritten, enabled, and celebrated (it continues to be celebrated) by the whole establishment of sinecured artists in our time, including by those I thought of as dear mentors and friends. The Cambridge coterie of poets.

I’ve called a friend, an emeritus professor of national repute, to seek solace in the face of ongoing difficulty. Two years ago.

And she tells me a story.

A friend of hers is giving his dissertation defense, at MIT, decades ago. And after his prefatory remarks, his adviser—the person who has (seemingly) endorsed, supported, and responded to his project over years—is the first to speak. The adviser now says, in the presence of all, choosing his words well: It’s a trivial subject.

It’s a trivial subject.

And like that, this person’s whole hope: of a career, of a life engaged in the discipline—is finished.

My friend says that this man wandered in a kind of wilderness for a decade, thereabouts. But found some adjacent profession. He’s kept on.

And then my friend says on the phone, of the adviser, nervously: He’s a good man. Please don’t share this with anybody.

My friend: tenured, then emeritus, more than set. But pleading for silence.

Such is the level of fear people feel in ever speaking to cruelty, especially on the part of those who hold power of whatever kind.

The adviser’s name is Noam Chomsky. The one you saw on a plane with Epstein. Noam Chomsky.

He turned out to be the son of one of my father’s sisters whom I only met then, Aunt Lita, who lived in Goiás, it seems, with relatives, though the story was never really untangled. I was twelve years old when they appeared in our house, appeared and stayed, she for a month, he for life. I didn’t like the boy, his sickly white skin, his nose and scent so different from ours, taking up my mother’s attentions. She changed his diapers without the affection with which she changed Celina’s, a little one still. It upset me, seeing my mother’s embarrassment—it was as if she were treating the boy well to give me some rest from my habit of being bad. Hard to accept him as a cousin—or brother, as my father wanted—, this flat-footed boy, no doubt destined for the same thick eyebrows as Aunt Lita. Corina, child-crazy, wanted to stay with him, if only she had. I trembled in my bed, frightened by the night-curses my father hurled his way, this boy made to know he needed to be up early the next day to get to work. It scared me, this wild side of my father’s, who was always so patient with Celininha’s cries. My mother, bearing it all for the love of God, stuck close to the Commandments, Celininha enchanted with the baby, a little living doll, Ariela just yearning to know life outside, on the street, and the task falling to me, a young girl, to be just as my mother was, good for the love of God. I didn’t even kiss or nuzzle Henriquinho, only Celininha did, and maybe my mother, secretly, when she felt a pang, a rush of pity. I laughed at him once, I’d gone to peek at him through the mesh of the baby hammock, there he was awake, he laughed right back at me— fifty years ago. My father and mother are already gone, Ariela got married, Celina went to the convent, there’s no one left to lie to me: you don’t change, do you, Afonsa?

Appear, Henriquinho, give news, come live with me.

There's a “collected” above that should be “collectedness.” “Bladly”: “blandly.”

There’s another poem I’ve been turning over all this time, Yeats’s “Among School Children.” For the first time the other month, I lost a word in reciting it (in mind) and couldn’t summon it back:

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning.

A kind old nun in a white hood replies.

The children learn to cipher and to sing,

To study reading-books and histories,

To cut and sew, be neat in everything

In the best modern way. The children’s eyes

In ___________ wonder stare upon

A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

Those four syllables that were gone, that wouldn’t come back all day, after a couple decades—momentary!

[To anyone getting these pieces by email: sorry for the seasonal flurry and thanks for taking an occasional look; I plan to stop at the end of summer, which I date by the tennis in Flushing. I find that I have to send these pieces out before real fine-tuning, hence typos and less easily correctable fallings-short in thought]

A provocative comment from someone I have known for many years sent me back, as bulwark and stay, to irreducible words any rebuttal of mine might have paled before. I’ll share the comment shortly, but first I’d like to take, on something like their own terms, the words I was drawn back to—those comprising, beginning and end, Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel and cri de coeur and glimmering effort at keeping one’s head above water, this gorgeous life-raft thrown our way, Offshore.

While most all of Fitzgerald’s novels represent a painfully composed transmutation of autobiography, to my mind Offshore is the book in which some of the most rending elements of her immediate experience are most triumphantly—but without any unfeelingly triumphal airs; with, instead, a limitless contained pity—remade. It’s in Offshore that Fitzgerald most poignantly expresses her whole vision of life, the tragic recognition that becomes an affirmation precisely in her succeeding to voice it—the assailings of any present we’ve known, any societal configuration that sorts between winners and losers and lends an implied moral weight to those categories be damned. Here’s what Fitzgerald once had to say in an interview:

“I have remained true to my deepest convictions, I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weakness of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?”

Offshore takes up the plight of those who, for reasons not especially worth romanticizing, must make their home upon the water—of the Thames, that is, their often ramshackle barges floating in a true no man’s land, a Chelsea shore in days when that name called up something other than glamor. Just what allows Fitzgerald to conjure these barge-dwellers—each one a little adrift, hard-tested, but bearing saving reserves of irony, clarity, resolve, the wayward self’s final refusal to be driven off course, even if what the course should be is no longer clear—; just what allows her to imagine this predicament and those souls whose humanity, half-sunk, half flourishes within it?

Well, it helps that the predicament was, in some recognizable way, her own. For in the years of her formative maturity, of long unsettled adulthood, this child of Britain’s intellectual aristocracy found herself very much at sea—a single mother whose husband, having drifted into drink, lived apart. The home she made for her three children was on such a boat (one day they’d return from a sojourn on shore to find it sunken altogether; they moved to a shelter). These personal and professional beginnings, these unmoorings, were not sorted out until quite a lot later. Fitzgerald was past sixty when she wrote her first novel, which had its origins in her effort to entertain and soothe her same drifted husband Desmond as he lay dying. Which means that the compassionate imagination that would find expression in Offshore was nursed, or simply stored in waiting, over many years, when writing of a sustained kind was not a practical possibility. Fitzgerald, who must have known somewhere that a life that gave her little luck would give her decades, proved patient, if only because she had to be. To quote the early, encapsulating passage below, she was not easily dislodged:

“The barge-dwellers, creatures neither of firm land nor water, would have liked to be more respectable than they were. They aspired towards the Chelsea shore, where, in the early 1960’s, many thousands lived with sensible occupations and adequate amounts of money. But a certain failure, distressing to themselves, to be like other people, caused them to sink back, with so much else that drifted or was washed up, into the mud moorings of the great tideway.

“Biologically they could be said, as most tideline creatures are, to be ‘successful.’ They were not easily dislodged. But to sell your craft, to leave the Reach, was felt to be a desperate step, like those of the amphibians when, in earlier stages of the world’s history, they took ground. Many of these species perished in the attempt.”

How beautifully Fitzgerald captures the self-divided souls of these kindred folk, torn between aspiration and a kind of placeless regret, the wish perhaps above all to remain loyal to the decided unsuccess of the humane arrangements they’ve chanced to fashion for themselves. She would like us to plainly know that these residents of the river do feel a distressing sense of failure; to imagine so would not simply be a condescending projection on our part. But something more than amphibian fear holds them back, holds them aloft, holds them with equal parts defiance and resignation to this not quite regarded form of life. You can hear it in the very British—but more than that, very Fitzgeraldian—note about what “a desperate step” it would be to lunge toward some more comfortably settled prospect, risk some more “evolved” form of life, leave the barges’ precariousness behind once and for all.

There’s something in this whole spirit, yes, of “keep calm and carry on,” if a little less martial and more fractured, a refusal to surrender composure to circumstances that may mock every effort at it. Character by character, Fitzgerald’s bejeweled insights are always making something actionably wise of true human wildernesses, but her profoundness comes in the way this artful will-to-calm is built upon an open-eyed recognition of all that conspires against us, the small or large human losses and shocks of pain that are our ritual portion, such daily and unordinary despair, such devastation quietly borne, since we have no other choice. The Pascalian pensées with which she often furnishes us in sketching her characters’ ways of being in or looking at the world rarely spill over with ebullience or imply any sort of path to simple contentment—and yet they’re animated by a resolute spirit of compassion, a refusal to give up on those who may be distressful to themselves in their very selfhood, who may consider themselves, like the world itself, lost causes. And, for all this, just how does such assurance and brightness, such high comedy in every sense, enter in? Fitzgerald and her characters attain airs much more fanciful, if no less sensible, than her sentences, in all their intricate workings-out of human enigmas, would seem to imply when taken in isolation. There is real dreaming in it all, a refusal to take the world just as it is (Chekhov, who I think would have admired Fitzgerald’s plainly spoken and crystalline art, wrote of that dual seeing—of the world that is and the world that might be—as presenting one of the writer’s most exalted responsibilities). Beneath the strange constancy of this prose, we can sense the ever rekindling spirit of the dreamer, a little beaten down by life’s onrushing waves, yes, but no matter. Taking everyone who has ever lived or written, such a spirit is decidedly rare. This is true in its arrival and in its continuance.

Here, in a signature bit of epigrammatic characterization, is Fitzgerald’s memorable sketching-out of the reluctant meeting-convener Richard, a sometime officer of the British navy whose bedrock faith rests, only not with any excesses of belief, in some remnantal notion of duty:

“Firmly planted in the rocking boat, he suggested, even by his stance in the doorway, that things, however difficult, would turn out reasonably well. It was not that he was too sure of himself, simply that he was a good judge of the possible.”

Young or old, most of the souls you meet in Fitzgerald’s novel have had to contend with submerged depths of disappointment, have had to throw off any penchant for desperate moves and unfounded hopes, instead becoming good, if faintly stoic or melancholic, judges of the possible. Here is young Martha, daughter of Nenna, the character loosely based on Fitzgerald herself:

“Martha, small and thin, with dark eyes which already showed an acceptance of the world’s shortcomings, was not like her mother and even less like her father. The crucial moment when children realize their parents are younger than they are had long since been passed by Martha.”

The somewhat bleak recognition of a child’s too early accommodation to the ways of our world joins here, is leavened by, a quiet acceptance—Fitzgerald’s and Martha’s alike—of adult helplessness. There is no unpurposive severity in Fitzgerald, no meanness of vision—small miracle, this. Everywhere she sees us, our ways of bearing it all, with an unsentimental compassion. And so the roll call of souls deftly rendered across Offshore is spared from coming across as a mere litany or collective lament. There is too much in the way of tragic-eyed but loving recognition. Here is Fitzgerald on the barge-dweller, also sex-worker, Maurice, a friend drawn from her own life:

“He was incurably sympathetic. His occupation, which was that of picking up men in a neighboring public house, with which he had a working arrangement, during the evening hours, and bringing them back to the boat, was not particularly profitable. Maurice was not born to make a profit, but then, was not born to resent this, or anything else. Those who felt affection for him had no easy way of telling him so, since he seemed to regard friend and enemy alike. For example, an unpleasant acquaintance of his used part of Maurice’s hold as a repository for stolen goods. Richard and Laura were among the few boat owners who did not know this. And yet Maurice appeared to be almost proud, because Harry was not a customer, but somebody who had demanded a favor and given nothing in return.”

If there is something a little sad and credulous in Maurice’s apprehension of this relation with Harry—a willingness to be used by, or to offer himself to, another, only because the exchange lacks the narrow character of transaction—there is something innocent about this suspension of mistrust all the same. An innocence Fitzgerald lets us inhabit. She never mocks at, though she might lightly puncture, the private, sustaining romances of these characters, romances in the broadest sense—the stories they tell themselves to live. That’s the measure of her own committed stake in the work of imagination (she draws from life, but with great sacrifice as well as a quiet, redeeming resolve to make strange; she does not write, and this is one reason she’s lasted, a kind of autofiction before her time). And so she lets her stand-in Nenna write a letter to her sister which we well recognize as willful embellishment, having had our own introduction over the novel’s opening pages to the myriad difficulties of life offshore:

“Nenna was struck by the fact that she ought to write to Louise, who was married to a successful business man. She began, Dear Sis, Tell Joel that it’s quite an education in itself for the girls to be brought up in the heart of the capital, and on the very shores of London’s historic river.”

Such fictions are allowed to stand for a moment as impossibly moving wishes, flights of fancy we’re allowed to see the need and maybe the truth of. They have little chance, really, of transporting us in any prosaic sense away from that unostentatiously Dantesque place—buried reminders of hell, a long feeling of present purgatory, but no failure to catch here and there the transporting glimmers of stars, whether as promise or inconstant solace already arrived, already here with us if we can keep our wits in whatever darkness—this Dantesque place where the novel—a comedy, yes, for all it contains—really lives.

The eighth chapter features two extraordinary conversations, the one Nenna’s failed reunion of sorts with her husband, the other her effort to take and give solace with a neighbor just after a hard passage home. Before the first meeting, Nenna’s husband has figured only as an elaborately imagined specter, this in a mock courtroom of her own devising, where their marriage and meeting of unhappy minds is litigated, with no one getting off easy. Their real conversation is no less marked by glancing blows—but equally, by a tormented sympathy. Nenna can’t bring herself to forget, for all her husband’s seeming desertion, that he is hurting, and that nothing and no one at all (her own beleaguered efforts to render compassion excepted) might come to his aid. So what choice does she have, really, but to be kind, beneath the shallows of marital squabble, unmeant words that wound?

“They were both still standing up, facing each other, at about the same height.

‘Strang is an advertising firm. It’s small, that’s why it’s up here, where the rents are low. They hope to expand later, then they’ll move. I’m not going to pretend anything about my job. It’s clerical.’

Edward’s references from the construction firm when he left Panama had not been very good. Nenna knew that, but she was sure it couldn’t have been Edward’s fault, and at the moment she couldn’t be bothered with it.

‘You don’t have stay there! There’s plenty of jobs! Anyone can get a job anywhere!’

‘I can’t.’

He turned his head away, and as the light caught his face at a certain angle Nenna realised in terror that he was right and that he would never get anywhere. The terror, however, was not for herself or for the children but for Edward, who might realise that what he was saying was true. She forgot whatever she had meant to tell him, went up close, and took him tenderly by both ears.

‘Shut up, Eddie.’

‘Nenna, I’m glad you came.’

‘You are?’

‘Curious, I didn’t mean to say that.’

She clung to him hard, she loved him and could never leave him.”

That the terror Nenna feels is not for herself; that it might visit Edward (as she fears) not in the reality’s coming true but, just before, in his recognition that such a turn could truly loom; that this thought alone might be too much for him to bear—these are the terrified recognitions she endures in venturing out to the somewhat lost soul of her husband, one longsufferer endeavoring to shore up another. If she manages an apt and entirely forgiving understanding of his plight, banishing the more self-interested emotion of anger, this can only be because she has known the same condition too well in her own right. Hurt and disconsolate, she wanders back to her native barge, seeking solace in the kindly pragmatic air of her neighbor-on-the-reach Richard. At least, she washes up on his shore. She finds him in his own moment of extremity, trying to put it all together, his wife having left him, whether for a moment or more lastingly it’s hard to tell. They end up talking about their author’s vocation, the words that make it up, however late Fitzgerald was to take up the work in earnest. The only way to dignify so much quiet confiding, all this hurt casting aside of any airs in a moment of shared exposure, is to quote at some length:

“ ‘That leads up to what I’ve really often wanted to ask you,’ Richard went on. ‘It seems to me you find it quite easy to put your feelings into words.’

‘Yes.’

‘And Maurice?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t. I’m amazed at the amount people talk, actually. I can’t for the life of me see why, if you really feel something, it’s got to be talked about. In fact, I should have thought it lost something, if you follow me, if you put it into words.’”

This profoundly mournful theme Richard picks up again after some maneuvering of the boat he and Nenna are on, as if the greatest questions comprised so much practical business in their own right, as if they were not to be allowed to sweep us away in wastes of self-indulgence or self-pity, demanding instead the same kind of exactitude:

“Once he had fitted in the rudder to keep the dinghy straight against the set of the tide he returned to the subject. A lifetime would not be too long if only he could grasp it exactly.

‘Let’s say that matters hadn’t gone quite right with you, I mean personal matters, would you be able to find words to say exactly what was wrong?’

‘I’m afraid so, yes, I would.’

‘That might be useful, of course.’

‘Like manufacturers’ instructions. In case of failure, try words.”

I know few more humanly affirming (“a lifetime would not be too long”) apologies for the whole prayerful art of finding words—words that count themselves so unsure, at the same time, about whether the finding could make and measure a human success of any kind: “In case of failure,” the mournful if tenacious undercurrent runs, try this further form, fail in this further way, make the sense of your having lost somehow lasting. Articulation—whether in intimate speech or august writing—is not a simple compensation for life, these words know: only life can compensate for life. When Richard asks Nenna how she feels about her husband at this pained impasse, she responds in terms Penelope Fitzgerald—whose personal and professional arrangements, for decades, barely drifted beyond the ramshackle—knew well. What is it like to fall out of love, or to remain in it, helplessly?

“ ‘Well, I feel unemployed. There’s nothing so lonely as unemployment, even if you’re on a queue with a thousand others. I don’t know what I’m going to think about if I’m not going to worry about him all the time. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my mind.’ A formless melancholy overcame her.”

To call lost love, lost connection, a lost coupledom, a form of unemployment is so utterly like Nenna and, behind her, that animating intelligence Fitzgerald. It would be easy to read the analogy as merely a comic or disenchanting or cheapening framing of a human verity we expect to be given its proper airs, whether in the gaining or the losing of it or the simply not knowing. But such disenchantment is not the effect of Fitzgerald’s quietly unforgettable figure as it comes in the novel. Rather, it reflects the habit of mind, something “felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,” of one schooled by the world in which most people must live and have lived, an intuitive recognition of a human reality perhaps not known to most in the increasingly self-regarding class of writers—whether in Britain or the States, whether in Fitzgerald’s time or ours. It wagers all the pathos of our hopelessly mixed-up worlds, that where we seek our bread and the one where we try, perhaps as failingly, to nourish our spirits.

Incurably sympathetic, this writer is. And she perhaps lives out that creed of hers (on “the courage of those who are born to be defeated” and onward) in the character of Maurice, a kind of closet Christ, who yearns, per that early passage, to give of himself and take nothing in return. Fitzgerald drew him from life, but with all those qualities without which we and our literature are lost—the heart, for one, and profligate (however quiet) imagination. Here’s what she said in an interview, per Hermione Lee’s biography:

“A few years ago we were living in a Thames barge, and on the boat next door lived an elegant young male model. He saw that I was rather down in the dumps, a middle-aged woman shabbily dressed and tired, and he took me on a day out to the sea, to Brighton. We went on all the rides and played all the slot machines. We walked for a while on the beach, then caught an open-top bus along the front. What happiness!

“A few days later he went back to Brighton, by himself, and walked into the sea until it had closed over his head and he drowned. But when I made him a character in one of my books, I couldn’t bear to let him kill himself. That would have meant that he had failed in life, whereas, really, his kindness made him the very symbol of success in my eyes.

“I am drawn [she goes on immediately] to people who seem to have been born defeated or, even, profoundly lost.”

It’s not that Maurice is granted an easy passage in Offshore. The novel ends with him and Nenna’s husband caught in storm, heading who knows where (as if to the undiscovered country, or to another world altogether: an ambiguity of the weightiest kind invests this ending, the stakes being Life and death). They are barely staying afloat, or not, both holding on to the barge that bears his name: “It was in this way that Maurice, with the two of them clinging on for dear life, put out on the tide.”

In the face of this testingly compassionate vision—bearing Fitzgerald’s signature note of tragedy made bearable in becoming comedy, some elusive sense of human promise well enough preserved—the words that prompted me to return to her work, that I alluded to at the start of this piece, no longer seem worth rehearsing. Suffice it to say that there was some fulminating on the part of my interlocutor, and the phrase “Houellebecquian loser” thrown in there somewhere. For those who lament the ways in which most every vocation (the field of literature included) has been made synonymous with a zero-sum professional game, hopelessly enmeshed in our time with a blanket pursuit of institutional power and prestige, with a making even scarcer of seats and opportunities than they need to be, with the cynical business of ranking and sorting, a ritual casting out of the “losers” and the lost, a narrow careerism taking the day; for those who lament the way some such runaway principle of competition, domination, predation—as if no other form of life were possible—has come to mark each of our shared pursuits, the impress of a kind of capitalistic or meritocratic (but what is good, and what is earned, and are you so sure?) ruthlessness absolutely everywhere we look; for those who have guesses as to what it might mean to mark their losses as well as their unlikely triumphs in words, to make life bearable and, more than that, bright, by these same means, both for themselves and others, finding a way of bearing on with no loss of humanity, taking heart, keeping the spirit somehow afloat—for all such souls dwelling a little offshore, the profoundly generous work of Penelope Fitzgerald points another way. Her work is dear to me.

There was a wound before we began. Not that you see it. Not that there’s any question of crying out. It is simply part of the business, the art, an ordinary afternoon. Only in the hotel room, on the intricate disrobing, do you see: dried up vermillion—what we live by, the human animal, streaked every which way.

There is a wound before we begin.

The bull of imagination stalks a clearing. Give it, Albert Serra, its moments to haunt us—outside of time, where the fight is fairer. It looms there in a different darkness, snorts and bellows, deeply stares, the eyes (we are in the space of imagination) traveling the distance between gaze and glare and back again. An adversary, or is that a fiction sent up by its body. We—don’t forget this—stand outside it all briefly.

In the mess of it all, remember the bull of imagination.

On the ritual van rides back—from the bright o of the arena to the alien refinements of the hotel—Roca Rey might be lashed to the mast of his seat and driven into headwinds (something about his recessed pose, his unspeaking, his eyes pooling with light but giving off their hint of the inner life, where we cannot go). All so calm on the surface. Always this slow drive, uneventful, through the night quiet of some Seville. “Why wasn’t I hurt?” he says once. This after being gored. As if conscience knew it were getting away.

Why was I hurt, why wasn’t I.

Not a fight but a needless dance of real stakes, ending always in a killing, its violence too obvious for saying, so too its arbitrariness, its perverse majesty, its tenderness and beauty, say what you will. It may be every art shares something in this, every one a ritual of desperate invention, a frenzied way of trying to express something in time, not simply let time pass. But why? Roca Rey, you’re a great one, he is always being told, you’re a cut above the rest. You have huge balls. But something more desolate and more gorgeous than this male talk enters in, these afternoons, the human exemplar in his chosen game so beautifully unsure. Sometimes he is a child again, waiting his turn in the pen, asking whether the crowd is with him. Sometimes, when the mask of fierceness drops, he looks a little shaken, almost lost. So you see

it comes back these afternoons, the conundrum, being human.

Putting on his costume is a whole operation. He enlabyrinths himself. It takes four hands. There are always minders, hearteners, nurturers of the dream and the vanity (what other way to live?) standing by, in the van, in the hotel room, these twin sanctums, a retinue, a right-hand man, a second self whose protective glance a mirror catches. Standing almost naked, he could be anyone, Andrés, spritely in his beauty, androgynous. Beyond the stadium, the risk is

to be ineffable to yourself as well.

That’s why all the reminders come, these earnest, nervous, touching efforts to reassure him his performance of self’s continuous, need not come off with his clothes. And there are other chants in the stadium, the team’s cries going up, the cries of here, bull sent up from every side, making a kind of singing. It is intoxicating, the human music of it, spare and extravagant. There to drive the bull wild. Until, terribly, he lies there, an eye, terrified, stakes being driven in. And with pity, Serra has caught him,

a real bull, the one dear consciousness as it expires, the bull of imagination.

There is a moment (you’ll have to find it, if it’s there for you) a little ways into this film, amid the mundaneness and extremity, the real and made-up stakes, the dropping of masks and the desperate returns to invention, when— when nothing at all happens, but a song comes on, and there is the man, something somehow different in his bearing and his expression, as if in his person he let in and could express for a moment the whole strangeness and pleasure of being, and you feel

gratitude, a kind of understanding passing over, no matter what your life has been.

_{-Bishop, “12 O’Clock News” (the proverbial Martians consider an ink bottle)}

_{“Heart mysteries there.”}

_-Yeats

_{“It is as though I had lost my way & asked someone the way home. He says he will show me and walks with me along a nice smooth path. This suddenly comes to an end. And now my friend says: ‘All you have to do is to find the rest of the way home from here.’”}

_{-Wittgenstein, Culture and Value}

_{1.Safety
2.Mourning/remembrance
3.Reconnection to ordinary life}

_{-Judith Herman, three stages of Trauma and Recovery}

Last week, I picked up an old copy of Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III—poems named after a textbook that sometimes pretend to muster only their own prosy airs. It’s a sibling’s copy, from the high school days. There are some serious markings in the early-going that drop off precipitously, leaving some poems’ surfaces only too pristine, before the markings pick up again out of nowhere, for a time. Who knows if the unmarked poems were unassigned or simply contemplated more deeply than any markings can go. I’ve been learning the closing poem “Five Flights Up” (just five flights, and just ten poems) but, before I touch on that one, I’d like to attend to at least a moment in each of the preceding poems.

Rare in the case of any one poet or book of poems, to read Bishop straight through, no skipping over anything, never dulls into any sort of punishment, whatever the attentional labor. Her work is such a pleasure, its myriad bright feats of perception and surprise depths never needlessly taxing, never thrilling into their own opacities. There’s that tired notion of an art’s “deceptive” simplicity, but the straightforward air these poems emit is deeply real; you don’t deceive yourself in finding them eminently accessible, the mystery is just that something so quietly eternal enters in—a feel, a slant of light, the poems’ signature perceptual climate somehow coming in from another consciousness to yours. “These things are not secrets but mysteries” is the Heaney line (he got it courtesy of an Oisin Kelly) I would bring to bear on our fellow solitary traveler Elizabeth Bishop, so many of whose gleanings from life (visionary gleanings, I want to say, but she might have found the word too weighty and bid us spend years searching for some other) stand out for being “deep and absolutely clear,” to take, a little sacrilegiously, just half of the given line from a great poem beyond this book’s bounds.

One thing I want to say about Bishop, and my reason for maybe unforgivably shortening the famous passage from “At the Fishhouses” above by a couple words, by all that unarticled uncommaed cold and dark—one thing I want to say, since the quality in question marks such a humane contrast to some of the work that’s been most cruelly lauded in our time, is that there is absolutely nothing cold about this poet. She clearly had a heart and held onto it, in spite of a truly rending biography, a life marked by deep forms of abandonment and abuse. (“Have you no homes to go to?” one of the Clancy brothers jokes with an audience toward the end of a concert before granting an encore, and I always think of that question as capturing the plight of the singer in their own right, the poet, any one among us who needs to keep seeking some home in art, anyone for whom there’s simply no other option). If Bishop cultivates a kind of detachment (if her life imposed this exigency as some lives will), the half-distance she keeps graces us all the same with its small miracle of half-gregariousness, a spirit in no way ordained. Her reserve comes hand in hand with a gorgeous openness to others. She’s generous that way.

Part of the majesty of Bishop’s habit of minutely flowing attention, her companionable way of seeming simply to prose on, comes in the way she not only turns outward to the gorgeous bric-a-brac of everyday experience (“unerring muse who makes the casual perfect” was her friend’s wonderful tribute) or inward to the difficult entrancements of memory and imagination but, equally so, to the elemental fact of other people’s individual existences, the basic fact of their being, so many subjects and “objects and apparitions”—to take one translation’s title here—comprising our common world and lending it its abiding sense of actual marvelousness, each friend or stranger bearing their own interiority, their own coequal, if never entirely knowable, capacity for joy and pain and everything in between: Bishop’s own share in those quantities, vast as it may have been, does not mark the limits of the world imagined by her poems. She never seems to be the world in which she walks, to misquote Stevens. She observes too much too well to suffer that predicament. And she makes whatever or whoever it is that her attention dwells on, banishing preciousness, precious.

Where do we find ourselves? With the opening poem “In the Waiting Room,” Bishop might be asking Emerson’s question in “Experience,” if less serenely, not forgetting the human urgency of the question as that sage may have from his grand vantage. I don’t think you can read the poem and keep certain clinical realities, which let on to their kindred, less nameable human realities—but in approximation: detachment, dissociation, of the lifesaving kinds that risk never being returned from, so hard is the journey back—entirely to the side, however much the poem transcends these elements to become that rare thing, a genuinely existential wrestling with what it is to be and bear a self, that never quite settleable quantity—at least not in those moments when we’re woken with a shock to our own strangeness, whatever identifying measure of selfhood will be ours to bear. There’s the famous cry in the waiting room, and the long, minutely turning moment it takes the young Elizabeth Bishop (these two words may not be synonymous with the considering soul whose articulations are preserved here, but nor, I think, would “the speaker” be right—life enters into it all at least halfway, one person’s remembered and transmuted life, it must) to realize the cry is no one’s but her own. After living out a moment like this with such an acute awareness of each little turn in the wheel of sensation, could you ever be effortlessly at one with your own self again?

That move from “I” to “we,” provisional as it is, and half-frantic, since it does nothing to attenuate the sense of falling or the specter of the self’s lost distinctness, where now the terrible falling invests us all—this newly trusted “we,” for all it fails to forestall, does gesture toward some saving measure of togetherness, keeping alive whatever it is that “held us all together / or made us all just one,” as a later line sees and is shored up by. And that’s what I’d want to single out here: Bishop’s wakeful, hard-earned, dearly held-onto way of saying “we.” To discover or recover the simple stay of that word is by no means to win out plainly over disaster—the sense of disaster still prevails after all, the sense of a collective careening no “we” has a prayer of arresting, and may only speed on, only deepen—but it is to master some part of the self’s inchoateness, to win back some sense of balance, articulation, belonging, from frighteningly unforeclosed abysses of being. That’s not nothing.

We come next to Bishop’s charming reimagining of Robinson Crusoe, this incarnation a little deflated on finding himself saved from the long maroonment that might have marked his whole life and fate, for how could such ample safety after-the-fact settle the long solitude, the disorienting sense of needed discovery, the muted fear that came before, all the unsolved questions these intense varieties of experience continue to raise in the perplexity of retrospect? This Crusoe is not done wrestling with the richness and terror of all that unsought adventure—he keeps searching it for meaning and coming up half-empty, whatever the haul of brilliant and spirit-laden detail he nets in the process. He’s grown very collected about it all (maybe too much so); congenially he guides us through the annihilating wastes and revelations, forever provisional, of his experience. To be a while in the company of this voice is to know: he’s not sure that to have become so composed a host to us hearers represents any sort of progress or achievement in the forbidding domain of the spirit. What does he miss, as he speaks to us now, from his grayly saving second island? That vanished intensity, of both plight and imagination, each one giving rise to the other. And, touchingly, he misses the man Friday. There are lines from this poem I drift back to often—the reliably amusing nod to self-pity, in faint but sure association with any salvaging sense of home; and, maybe because of my own persuasion, the lovely little note Crusoe sounds on Friday: “pretty to watch; he had a pretty body.” But it’s the knife I have to take you to, this haunting testament to the way a once vital object—because it had to be, back then, relied on for dear life, you trusted it would save or couldn’t go on, “it lived” as sure as you—might suffer the passage into mere emblem: commanding, instructive, yes, but how much more thinly, stripped of the living force it once possessed. There’s a Frank Bidart poem about his lover’s coat I’d put next to this knife of Bishop’s Crusoe, latent in it the same heartbreaking lesson. About, in part, the emptiness of lessons.

So it’s not just that the knife lives, or did; it looks, even, or refuses to, still holding that power latently. That’s how you know the full measure of this genial Crusoe’s torment. It stares you right in the face.

Come to think of it, here’s my own Crusoe of some years back, which I never found a place for.

Next is “Night City,” in which we take a phantasmagoric flight with the poet. She invites us to see, per the poem’s subtitle, “from a plane window,” a city abstracted by imagination and yet remade in the image of the deeply human gaze she turns toward it—a witness knowing of what she speaks; suffering, not just judging: “The city burns tears,” she tells us. “The city burns guilt.” It’s evident nothing purifying can be made of these elements, neither one escaped, for the guilt and the tears are made only more permanent by this city’s edifices, a good bit of pain underlying all realized ambition: “A pool of bitumen / one tycoon / wept by himself, / a blackened moon. // Another cried / a skyscraper up.” These tycoons, living sometime after Carnegie and before Musk, are in touch with the bedrock human realities well enough to know that nothing they construct could neatly transmute the pains and guilts destined to remain a part of us. And so, in this quiet miasma of imperfectly sublimated human pain, familiar to the tycoon as much as the chance poet flying above, we have just one unlikely consolation, which comes in closing. It reaches us as if doubly protected by Bishop’s signature parentheses, the form of poetic punctuation she should have a trademark on. The figures alluded to here—are they birds, quasi-birds, or just those more pedestrian beings in responsible thrall to traffic lights? Bishop, that consummate searcher for right words, chooses the fancifully capacious “creatures” here, perhaps allowing that we too could take our place among the careful ones at some semi-distance overhead—ever so slightly otherworldly yet minded on this same place—and so find a way of enduring. Bishop’s closing parenthetical makes a metronomic music—carry on, it says, carry on: just a stoic plodding forward will have to take the place for now of some sublimer form of footing, the viewlessly winged one’s more plainly liberated way of flight. And maybe there’s some downcastness in that concession. But to know it’s enough for now, this way of keeping on, in the face of whatever guilt or pain–there lies the consolation.

And there remain for us, if we can’t quite get overhead in imagination, other more moored ways of traveling, as in the unmomentously epic bus ride of the next poem, “The Moose.” Even before we get to the sweet revelation of the poem’s close, where Bishop’s parenthetical emphasis so beautifully replaces her customary reserve, any sense of separation in this buoyant moment (as we all feel) gone—

—there are the casual conversations and home truths—those overheard and actual giving way to the newly evoked and thought-back-to, the long ago—that lend this outwardly uneventful journey its very patiently conjured sense of occasion. Tell me, just how does Bishop so effortlessly wager the word Eternity, how does she get us there all believingly? Find me the first reader who thought anything like it would be in the offing in this particular poem. That Eternity is no cold heaven, I want to say again, predicated neither on the denial nor the magical resolution of human pain; its soothing sense of return to some timeless place in no way effaces the never-ending fact of human hurt. I used to take the twenty-dollar Bolt Bus between Boston and New York, often setting out in the evening, and this poem would come to mind; I felt Bishop had caught the atmosphere of those long rides, the strange way an almost exceptionless hush has of rendering only more distinct those rare voices, maybe one person on their phone, maybe two or three talkers scattered across the rows, as dark descends and gives the prevailing silence a sense of cosmic proportions, all while making the intermittent interruptions that much more intimate, stray human voices lifted in a dark they could make no match for, small flares of each barely defended individuality sent up even so. Moose sightings or not—I never had that good fortune in the Bolt Bus years—a lovely sense of solitude and togetherness would settle over us. You became an honorary, if sometimes annoyed, listener to “an old conversation—not concerning us, / but recognizable, somewhere, / back in the bus”:

The passengers lie back.

Snores. Some long sighs.

A dreamy divagation

begins in the night.

A gentle, auditory

slow hallucination.

And then:

You could imagine this litany going on forever (and it does go on for a few stanzas, at any rate). It would seem entirely unconsoling in substance, except for the essential consolation human voices joined together always represent, however bleak the subject matter and attendant recognitions on the part of speaker, hearer, overhearer, anyone joined together in the sequence, in or across time. There’s a yes, here, importantly, a sense of affirmation, of the humane composure that can come even in an adequate, half-mastering recognition of whatever bleak fare—however “peculiar,” however shadowed it is, life being as we know (the dark whisper of that parenthesis again!).

The same holds, I’d say, if it’s just one “lone traveler,” as Bishop is here, addressing us: just one voice: that too is consolation. My favorite part of the next poem, Bishop’s wonderfully imaginative effort to estrange the ordinary, concerns that potent writerly well, at least for former generations, of the ink-bottle. We get word on this same object from the proverbial Martians, an alien perspective that restores to the ordinary some of its grandeur, perhaps for us to keep here. Here’s what sense they make of it:

Bishop has put “savior” in scare-quotes, and my sister has duly circled that two-part performance of hope and doubt. If a little irony in such matters as the writer’s role and reach is always called for, we shouldn’t give up on some core of earnestness in the face of our difficulties, or on the preciousness of first and last hopes, or on the real weight of the word rescue, which (note it well) doesn’t suffer the quote-treatment here. Bishop hasn’t gone the way of easy irony; there’s too much imagination here, too much yearning and heart trafficked in from afar, like the readier quantities of guilt and pain of the earlier poem. They give this thought-experiment of a poem its glimmering weight. Its conversation, yes, concerns us. And like the moose in its own ordinary otherworldliness, it lifts.

Much that might perform the work of rescue goes, of course, untended to in time; who knows what saving things we go about our days failing to properly see. Our eyes, like the tired-out Crusoe’s, rest lazily on some object or person and move on, failing to catch the spirit, letting that precious quantity dribble away. Bishop takes us to one such object of neglect in the next poem. It’s a “little painting,” or maybe only a “sketch for a large one,” “a minor family relic” on which the poet, as if to make things right, expends her characteristically humane and intimate and far-reaching attention, always understatedly open to the possibility of revelation, if never quite giving the air of expecting one. She looks at the painting for a long time and, as tends to happen when you fix your attention on some unmoving word or poem or painting, isn’t quite sure what she sees anymore, the ambiguities multiplying: “A specklike bird is flying to the left. / Or is it a flyspeck looking like a bird.” For all that, there’s a shock of recognition—undeceptive simplicity, deep clarity—as she stares at her great-uncle’s painting of a home that conjures so fully the Nova Scotia in which she spent part of her own childhood, in the care of her grandparents, the great-uncle’s “ ‘vision’ ”—though she’s shy of that word—and life somehow merging with hers. And so, for the first time, they enjoy a kind of meeting, one person’s experience flowing into another’s. You could call this a happier staging of “In the Waiting Room”’s vision of self and other and their uncanny commingling, in or out of time. No war’s on here, at least not in the same way, but the threat of some imminent dismantling does creep in in the last line. Against it, as a quiet counter, Bishop gives us a beautiful word and testament: the simple fact of our “abidance.” I wondered, on first read, if this was a coinage of hers; though a search tells me otherwise, I’ve never seen it anywhere else. My sister, the marker of the question mark, must have paused over it in the same way. A little more religious, it seems, than “abiding” would’ve been, a little more like a condition, a going state, than a continuing action. Echoing, maybe, the sense of forbearance—there being no simple saviors in evidence. But we do have these geese, all undismantleable—“how touching in detail.” Creatures so unassuming, and steadying, you’d never find them caught in quotes. And so, still standing in their way, they take pride of place at the poem’s close.

And coming back to “One Art,” it seems evident that Bishop puts some of her most painful and finally unsilenceable feelings in parentheses, as if they could ever be neatly contained there, or saved from the ravages all around, or kept separate from her sometimes Crusoe-like performances of courteous shyness, or, looked at a different way, as if this will kept them alive all the more intensely, like Shakespeare’s “liquid prisoner[s] pent in walls of glass,” as present as the love for the lost one here is kept defiantly present, no changing that, whether you’re time or the poet, the dipper-into the inkwell or some studious marker or the unfeeling effacer of all marks. The poem still recites this love’s presentness.

There’s a poem I love by Keats, written to his brother Tom on that man’s birthday, in which he expresses a humble enough wish, that they both might have a little more time for ordinary joys. Keats in a minor key. It’s a wish lent extraordinary pathos (for us, invited overhearers of the future) by the looming fact of this same brother’s fate, and then the poet’s not long after, Tom dying of tuberculosis two years before young Keats: “Many such eves of gently whisp’ring noise / May we together pass, and calmly try / What are this world s true joys, ere the great voice, / From its fair face, shall bid our spirits fly.” There’s something enormously affecting about catching a searching poet in some small moment like this. And Bishop’s “The End of March,” our next offering, strikes me as her own version of a poem in this vein, her only ambition to retire to an imagined home—as for her any home would have to be. And do what? Do nothing or, a revision that makes the casual perfect, “nothing much.” And this “in two bare rooms”: two rooms of one’s own, any self being multiple. There’s a quiet bewitchment in that strange emphasis, just as there is, flashing into our sight a little later, in “lovely diaphanous blue flame” flickering free of any article, communicating in this way too an immediate sense of the limitless, one more “element bearable to no mortal.” Such imagined conquests of limitlessness and shelter Bishop gives as her reason for walking the beach on a cold, windy day, in this poem dedicated to two friends and to a place and utterly unselfconscious, for once, in its liberal use of “us” and “our.” Even if it culminates, ultimately, in the gently voiced wish to retire.

There it is again, the entirely unexpected “forever” here, a decidedly lower-case eternity we’ve simply beach-walked our way toward, and then—in those “boring books”—there are voices that could be like those at the back of the bus talking on consolingly, no matter how drily, since human beings not too remote from us in time took pains to set them down, and since another has done the dreaming work of picking them up again and passing them on (at least in outline or aspiration).

And so we come to the poem we’re told only after the fact is a translation from Octavio Paz, and we need to be told–since in its combination of patience and quietude and extravagant imagination, it reads everywhere like the handiwork of the Bishop we’ve come to know across this book, or maybe she’s freed to be a little more elliptical, in stanzas paying vivid tribute to Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes, or memory boxes, or whatever term you prefer, where, true to one line here, “things hurry away from their names” and still have a way of ambling back toward a pleasing sense of ordinariness, abidance. We have, per the title of the poem, the familiarity of objects observed as well as the lightening weight of apparitions intuited. There is a theater of spirits haunting everything. It’s a tribute to Bishop’s own fine acts of perception that, while never neglecting to notice the world that is, she doesn’t miss the evidence of things not seen. Maybe it takes this translation to remind us.

I feel as though with Paz-Bishop’s wonderful line “lasting as long as this phrase lasts,” a poem of reverent tribute becomes at the same time a poem of almost Shakespearean—“so long lives this, and this gives life to thee”—confidence, radiating the maker’s ebullience. It also works in the other direction, of course, suggesting brevity, the impossibility of casting any spell for good. You read that phrase and don’t want this poem to end, not yet.

And so you come to the tenth and final poem in this unassuming book published more than half a century ago. Like so much that never took pains in its day to seem novel (at least, it never gives that impression), it still seems contemporary with us. Worth communing with a while, and worth that first step of study. I stood there looking into it last week at one of the pleasantest standing desks in the world, as I’d call it, the wooden fence of sorts there at the edge of Newcomb Hollow Beach, with its level plane broad enough to lay an open book on, looking out at an extraordinary expanse of sea, the dune dropping down before me; poem, sea; poem, sea. What was the right thing to study? The horizon offering its promise so lightly! And the sea its easy store of beauty. Neither troubling anyone with a word of the past; you could never stare out at sky and sea and feel the weight of Bishop’s word yesterday (not unless, that is, you found yourself a self still). I’m in less scenic climes now. With a little trepidation—in pencil—I’ve made some markings.

PS: The part of the book I’ve left out thus far is the textbook excerpt at the outset, driness lent the air of whimsy simply by being placed there. Questions, if that is what they are, answered directly, simply, in a performance of knowledge easily enough absorbed—but somewhere in that last rush of questions (“In what direction” and so on), there’s the sense of something headier, more ineffable, entering in. Flowing and flown. And the answers (that’s where we come in, it must be) all unwritten down.

Applicant-Angel, Klee called this one, and supplementary texts tend to make the point that its chances at heaven can only be grim. It is hardly looking toward the crescent moon–a symbol of new beginnings–with any uplift in expression or bearing, its two hard wings hardly poised for flight. How much crude sadness has Klee snuck into its pose, into the narrowing dark wells of eyes, while throwing off the mere unfeeling refinements—as he’d come to see them—of adult vision. You could come across this picture, like so many others in Klee’s roster of angels, in a children’s book, and be so charmed as to let its hurt work upon you–the hurt of any aspirant who fears in some recess of his being there’ll be no moving on from this. Somehow his condition, the state of his soul, seems to announce itself as final. It’s why, at the end of the day, he touches us still.

But there are Kleean angels who find themselves in another kind of flux or suspension, worrying at the very mystery of what they are, what they’ve allowed themselves to become, or whether, in the only sense that could matter, they’ve been able to hold on. Sometimes—in this world or some other—you look over your shoulder—the very plane of vision unfixed—and see your own body, your breasts maybe, the swelling wings of your arms, all in a strange state of withdrawal, simply floating about your person, in a nearness that can no longer be made to cohere. And your pupils know no redeemingly shared focus either, little points driven up and down as can be, some fine x or half-cross investing your face at an angle. That’s when you know you’re “still human,” as I’ve seen this one called alternately, “still woman.”

This pair of humanly uncertain solitudes notwithstanding, the two Klee figures that most moved me at the current exhibit at the Jewish Museum are his emigrants of 1933, symbols of uncountable others (hence the title Klee chose, Emigrating) who nonetheless stand out in their entire individuality, the one not needing to suppress her downcastness, since there her beloved is as audience and consolation, someone to lean upon. He’s a little stunned by the task that’s fallen to them, the driving need to follow a path whose end’s all unknown. All we know is the first hard steps have somehow already been taken, though the two seem entirely fixed in this pose, part of their tragedy to seem locked in stasis, even in being driven on and away. Their feet carry at least the promise of motion.

Klee existed before Benjamin turned one of his angels into a grand statement about history, and he should be allowed to exist after, for all the profundity of Benjamin’s meditation. Like everyone else writing about Klee, I cite my bit of Benjamin above. Klee’s figures—not of the angel of history but of each human spirit caught up within it, processing on to who knows what–brought me back to one of the most painfully affecting, and unlikely, such couples I know, here at the close of the Dardenne brothers’ film La Promesse—

—the boy walking alongside, then following after, the woman whose companion he desperately wants to become, both before and in making, as if on his father’s behalf, this terrible confession. I know little in art as terribly eloquent as her turned back, her walking on, the decided silence by which she says everything–so too with the intensity of her shocked circling back, her pained, interrogatory stare, which somehow finds compassion for the young one who looks on with such longing apology. She can’t bring herself to banish him in time. And so he’s permitted to run after her, not wanting there to be that final “rupture of human relatedness,” to take words from Stephen Greenblatt. He is desperate not to desert (her, his own soul). Another applicant-angel, however ill-starred. Another still-human.

As with the Paul Klee who looks out at us here, something waiting in his own eyes, something humbly imploring. You feel a judgement still forming. And still, before and after history, a presence warmly trusting, a sense of expectancy we may not deserve. Who knows where from, who knows how preserved—whether by a mystery, or an art, or a labor, or a prayer.

The first letter Bob Marley ever sent by mail, according to Timothy White’s exhaustive and compassionately imaginative biography Catch a Fire, went to his mother Cedella Booker, who’d moved to Delaware from Jamaica some months before. She’d written her teenage son in the hope he’d follow, fare for travel included. The grandfather who’d helped raise the young Nesta had died, leaving him land he had no wish to lord over; the love of his girlfriend Rita (soon to be wife) notwithstanding, he was in some deep sense alone. Knowing himself at that young age (or simply having the courage of his imagination), he wrote back as follows, with love and a token of his own. He’d just gotten a small sum on a first recording:

“Mom, here I enclose this money. I just send it to you as a token of love. It is not much, but I worked hard for it and I want you to be proud of me. Now I am singing. You remember when you are singing and you go on the stage singing with feeling so you touch the people? Well, that’s the same way I feel. There is something in me, and when I am singing with everything in me I feel it.”

Just seventeen years on from this moment, Marley would console his mother as she wept by his bedside, saying with all the clarity and mystery of his great lyrics, “Maddah, don’ cry. I’ll be all right. I’m gwan ta prepare a place.” Everything he accomplished by way of self-fashioning, song, all that arduous and joyous work of the spirit—it’s sobering to think all this took place in the narrow span of two decades, less than that.

I have before me three pictures of Marley. First, at twenty-one on his wedding day, with all the young man’s intensity. He looks just a little drawn, with a sense of self-assertion that must be willed (nerves? fear?), and then there he is just as ebulliently with his bride. In either guise, he could be any other young person from Nine Mile. You see so little of the soul he became. Little in these first pictures suggests the man we’ve come to know as Bob Marley (as George Eliot reminds us in what I take to be one of her most hopeful moments, whatever the attendant vexations, character is not just a fact but an unfolding). Just six years later, we have this twenty-something who seems fully the Bob Marley we remember, looking at us just a little quizzically, the dreads arrived. I can’t look at long, and so spare you, the last picture in White’s montage, those same dreads shorn, the half-blanked grimace-smile a little asymmetrical, the cancer having metastasized, the scared face no longer his own in either of the earlier incarnations, for it no longer bears the young man’s intensity or the only slightly older man’s majestic assurance. As I look at these pictures, I want to go over three songs I’ve been playing most often of late. I’d like to attend to them and see if they can’t stand in for, say something about, the searching beauty of his work, its extraordinary engagement with unfashionable words and concerns like good and evil, an engagement that nowhere limits its lightness or its depths, the deep beauty one man made of joy as of pain.

Waiting in Vain

I would guess that this song has drawn as many tears as “No Woman No Cry” has salved or stopped.

Something I notice only on looking at the lyrics is that the line I’ve always heard as “the waiting feels fine” is instead set down as “the waitin’ feel is fine.” A little like Faulkner’s “it is hard-believing to think that….” Believing or waiting being redrawn as the very elements in which we live, rather than as moving or passing affective states. So total can feelings be. And then I notice, in all its plain force, how utterly at ease and ill at ease this one song is with that waiting, turning back on itself in every other line, so that the love it canonizes never becomes anything less, every repetition very much alive with contradiction, painful and peaceful still: it’s fine, it’s not fine at all, I can forebear, I can’t bear it kind of thing. And this impassioned way of being simply continuing. So much so that the singer is left in another season, given the inner weather (“ ’Cause if summer is here / I’m still waiting there”). As always with Marley, always beautifully, the song isn’t shy about voicing an essential mystery, how some stoic and necessary lesson arrived at after long-suffering (“In life I know there is lots of grief”) could coexist with a continuing overflow of feeling, never solving the problem of individuality by some blankly universal truth, thank god: “Tears in my eyes burn, tears in my eyes burn.” My favorite cover of this song is by Gilberto Gil, whom I once saw close up for the space of a handshake. He had august gray dreads and glinting eyes. Like Marley, he experienced a sort of exile in London. I like the thought of their having met, though I don’t know if they ever did.

Interlude

In Catch a Fire, Timothy White comes back here and there to the suggestion that Marley, who “looked like a skinny lion [and] moved like a spider…lived like a ghost.” I don’t see it—passionate spirit that he was. But the book credits and sensitively inhabits the Akan/Rastafarian notion of a holy or unholy trinity in each sufferer and searcher who yearns to return to their spiritual home:

“The Akan people, from whom most black and brown Jamaicans are descended, believed that man has three souls: the Life-Soul, sent directly from the Supreme Being at birth; the Personality-Soul, which determines his destiny; and the Guardian/Shadow-Soul, which protects his conscience and remains behind in the form of a duppy [ghost, haunting spirit], after his body has gone into the ground and his Life-Soul has returned to God.”

It might be easy for anyone not connected to or versed in the given tradition to see this as so much remote spiritualism. But most religious and secular reckonings that take up the human creature with any profundity come away with adjacent suggestions and sensings-out, I think. The George Eliot who gives us the phrase “our persistent self” is very much in tune with Marley’s picture of suffering and longing and loving human consciousness, baffled by what it sees here but retaining intensities that must come from elsewhere, that dear elsewhere within. And in tune with the Akan vision, too, there’s someone I was seeing for a time who said, of a terrible irruption in existence of nearly twenty years ago, “It makes sense that your soul left your body,” and his words seemed entirely true, nor was there any speaking to the all-important question of whether a soul ever returns in such a case, or will. If Marley’s own Guardian-Soul is still here or there in some way—as, at the time of White’s telling, he says “some in Jamaica are joyful” in faithfully knowing—hopefully the waiting feel, known before, known for so long, is still fine and more than fine, still giving rise to some kind of singing.

Natty Dread

A song that knows and feels and doesn’t need to stress the questing nature of its quest, that so abounds in love (and a little deigned instruction) for all whom it holds kindred that it need not fill you in on the details. You have to take it on faith—have to feel, as you will, if you’re human—that each conversation with a fellow Dread, each numbered street, has the chance of marking out some high communion, that the blessed land of Seventh Street, if reached by some miraculously ordinary chance, would represent a consummation, one however briefly transfiguring everyday’s Babylon.

Things I notice here:

The pointedness of the lyrics: we’re in a war; don’t just stand there. Live and think, the life of action and/or contemplation each representing a different path than the life of the gesture, of the mere gesturers—the most of us, and those whom Dante placed at the gates. Here didacticism is given gentleness and force by the sacred fact of feeling, which announces the messenger-messiah’s own vulnerability. He’s not singing or speaking from on high, he’s here in the street, but he’s also invested by the spirit of some other place he can’t quite, not yet, and yet has to, get to—Congo it could be, the lyrics say, real insofar as it’s aspired toward, kept alive in yearning, the waiting that can never be in vain, joyful and painful as it might go on being, such is expectancy, exile, the prophet’s arrival at the dreamed place.

I also want to say: Marley’s dancing in this performance—words like “good” or “bad” no longer apply, he’s channeling something entirely his own. Marley, according to a documentary on the Wailers I sat rapt before on the Sony Channel as a kid in a hotel in Brazil, where it played on repeat, didn’t want to sing at first, didn’t trust his voice (“The archetypal voices sing off-key” – Lowell). I feel about his voice the way I do about his dancing. That that doubt might have been there, because these things didn’t come from any instruction or fashion. It’s singular to him, natural but slick in no way. He might have gotten looks, if he weren’t so captivating and the one singing. It’s beautiful to see.

Time Will Tell

I’ll just say about this song that it contains, like so much of Marley’s visionary music, the seed, all-unspoken, of its own counter-possibility, what would redeem. Like Solon of Athens or any beaten-down preacher-man, it busies itself on the surface with the cautionary—what could have been messianic harshness, except that it’s softened by sympathy, because it knows, it’s lived through: “Think you’re in heaven but you’re living in hell.” It does this all while making palpable the thought, the feeling, that you might get from that woken-into hell to some heaven yet. This intuition lives somewhere in the rhythm, the play, the inflections of the dancing voice, the serene assurance with which a man says “time will tell” while telling us by the same token that this time here now’s not all. Listen to the way he sings, and says—

Oh children weep no more

Oh my sycamore tree—

And you know this is not a man anymore in Babylon. He’ll prepare a place. As he has.

I’ve been thinking about King Lear and spun out this recording in a nod to Julian Girdham, and then thinking of commentary from Catherine Nicholson, Frank Kermode, Stanley Cavell, and my brother. I don’t have a future as a radio man but don’t want to sweat over a recording, if you can bear the presentation. Pharoah Sanders makes a cameo, and the ever-present sirens in my neighborhood a little before 18m (fire house plus hospital a couple blocks away in different directions, I don’t recommend).

And now: to think summer thoughts.

^{And when I said to Fatoumata Diawara after her show at City Winery, I wish you’d played Nina Simone, I love your Sinner Man, she said, You didn’t hear Feeling Good?}

^{-Proverbs, Book of My Life}

To risk an old wrought word, it still seems like a kind of magic, that you would flip open a little book and have music—an unmistakable, singularly drawn even as it newly evanesces, remembered and actual music drift your way, possess you for some moments in the way of real experience, real and not strictly repeatable. That you’d be able to listen in this way. I don’t mean to conjure many books; I mean one: a little red volume of Bob Dylan lyrics I picked up a little halfheartedly last year in Berlin, halfheartedly because I didn’t expect the lyrics shorn of song—the song they breathed into being and were breathed into being by—to recapture that remembered fullness for me, to make any music in their own way. It’s its very own pleasure, to flip to an entry at random and, right away, in the quiet of the room in which I’m reading, hear the one voice in its surviving strangeness sing the words out with so many tones and tracings of emotion, sudden stops and drawings-in and longings-out the words themselves would have known no language for, the sheerness of the page never imply—all this playing in and with time, across the line, so much elaborate, brimful, and still very vulnerable—because of the way it spurns in every next moment of its fulfillment all self-defendedness, dares to go without it a while—humanity that comes back to us. That makes its way again across. For anyone with ears to hear, having heard before, here’s an opening:

I dreamed I saw St. Augustine

Alive as you or me

Tearing through these quarters

In the utmost misery

With a blanket underneath his arm

And a coat of solid gold

Searching for the very souls

Whom already have been sold.

And here’s another:

William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll

With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger

At a Baltimore hotel society gath’rin’

And the cops were called in and his weapon took from him

As they rode him in custody down to the station

And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder

But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears

Take the rag away from your face

Now ain’t the time for your tears.

It’s a little sad to think that generations to come, or here with us now, Z and Alpha and whoever’s next, may not be able to hear this music in all its beauty and pathos, not as vitally (doesn’t art participate in our vanishing in this way, every language and form of expression, even the fairly lonely examples of transcendence, however canonized, being in the end ephemeral, for all the talk of “immortality” and its in some ways unlikely hold? Take, say, an unquestionably prophetic soul—take Shelley— When’s the last time you or I or anyone has read Shelley? We always need the baton to be passed, song and language to be somehow remade, spirit to surface in new forms that say it’s still with us, even if nothing ever changes so deep down.)

But back to the songs, the lyrics, the stresses: Dylan’s “saw,” his first syllable of “misery”: these are some of the sounds I love hearing as the page itself gives them off, in Dylan’s vision of St. Augustine. And then just the superabundance of spirit in his laying out those first lines of Hattie Carroll, the way he sets it all before us and sees it feelingly, these individuals and fates and (because you, because we, are so sunk in it too) all the right or not ways of listening or feeling or of being there in witness. “But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears”: I love the work he does with and against these words, the way certain sounds and meanings explode in his telling, or collide. “Philosophize disgrace” it does some new starkness to see on the page.

I took that book down on seeing some occasional prose by Dylan in the NYT. I copy it below and set it beside Dylan’s words for Willie Nelson on my fridge:

“The best thing about being 80 is that you outlive the clocks that have been chasing you. It’s freedom from that lie that anything was ever under control. You don’t chase the parade anymore. You’re an old king from some vanished country. You’re harder to program. You’re not rushing to become anything and you’re not haunted by things that you did. You’re haunted by how little of it really mattered in the way you thought it would.

'‘The worst thing about being 80 is that you still want to say yes to everything, but the world moves without asking. The old fire in your heart still tells you to do this and that, but your body says we already did it. Also, nothing surprises you. It sounds like a luxury, but it’s not, and also you’ve run out of illusions. People treat you like either you’ve solved something or you’ve lost something, and you haven’t. You see life repeating itself everywhere.

“The really worst part about being 80 is that you find, at last, you’ve got an understanding of something that might have altered everything in the past, had it come at a time when something could still be altered. When you’re young you think that time moves forward. At 80, you know that it doesn’t, it stands still. We’re the ones that move.”

That last paragraph is heartbreaking, and seems true, maybe well before 80. I report this from less than half that age.

An idea from the life of Wilde, De Profundis, approximate (I am trying not to look everything up these days, a questionable rebellion against AI and its antecedent tools, as we can see them now): Christianity, the intuition that we can alter the past.

Some words from the life of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, his poem “The Table,” translated by Bishop—that great poem in which he wakes to find himself at table with imagined, with the dearest lost, company:

And say, if, after all,

there isn’t, among my errors,

an unexpected truth.

This is my explanation,

my best or unique verse,

my all, filling my nothing.

And now the table, replete,

is bigger than the house.

We talk with our mouths full,

we call each other names,

we laugh, we split our sides,

we forget the terrible

inhibiting respect,

and all our happiness

blighted in so many black

commemorative banquets

(no use remembering now),

gestures of family affection

accumulated, held back

(no use remembering now)

the kind and gentle words

that said at the right time

could have changed our lives

(no use changing now),

are at table, spreading out

unprecedented food.

And then at my Think Coffee of choice, as I sat outside half-reading Herodotus and Studs Terkel and whoever else, someone’s hubcap came skittering up to the sidewalk, grazed by a mammoth semi truck. She stood boldly in front of the truck for the next thirty minutes, wouldn’t let the three men up front make scarce. “Unshaken, unseduced, unmoved, unterrified” is the Paradise Lost gloss on this. They talked up and down at each other all that while, high drama. You couldn’t always hear the words, but the tones caterwauled clear through the air: the unrelentingly indignant vs. the professionally nonplussed, conceders of nothing. My bit role was that of busybody, chirping up as I got ready to leave, “What happened?” And a man mutters down just the one word that matters, shruggingly, playing it perfectly cool: “Life.”

More happily, the Knicks are in the finals. Uncertain blessing, I can hear the future from my apartment: I realized a little ways into Game Three that my TV must be on a slight delay, relative to the MSG-watch party, whose sounds must be making their way all these avenues east, these blocks south. It’s a little crazy, how far sound made in such numbers travels. Raucous cheers meant Josh Hart or Landry Shamet would hit a three in a few seconds, give or take. That telltale groan, excitement curdling in the selfsame vocal motion into pain: that a shot would roll in and out, a free throw be missed. Silence suddenly cratering for a few seconds and the Spurs were about to drive some dagger in. I tried not to let this news from the future ruin the watching, but that was hard-going; with a few minutes left in the fourth quarter, the Knicks down, I turned the TV off and just listened to all those eloquent notes in the dark.

I may not find another passing moment to say how much I like Victor Wembanyama. A year or so ago, a writer patched along one of my favorite offhand definitions of the aesthetic imperative, the impulse to root for beauty and spirit alongside whatever else, when he shared the following remark by his spouse: “I am rooting for the Pacers and Jalen Brunson.” I’m that way with the man known as Wemby. Who moves fleetly, affectingly, in his own way (“I don’t have a normal body,” he comments); who can do quick math (see Charles Barkley’s discourse on American education); who projects now high emotion, then calm; here unseasonable maturity, there fiery youth. He’s curious in both senses of that word (hence his trips to NASA headquarters, to Washington Square Park for a chess match, to the Shaolin Temple for—something else.) I wish more American athletes, more students, more of us, were made in his image. An unearned digression, but it’s summer: My times in the classroom have made me feel that, more than anything else, it’s curiosity that’s rare, ever rarer.

And speaking of rooting and working for some other side, there being no sides: here’s the passage I alit on in my pocket Herodotus (The Madness of Cambyses), here’s one in Studs Terkel (Hope Dies Last). Connections everywhere you look, however felled by the summer heat.

Tonight I am rooting for the Knicks and Wembanyama.

Crutching my way to PT the other day, I was quite sure I saw x across the street, both of us waiting for the light to change, and all of it came back, not with any assailing intensity but crystallized into its core of sorrow. Couldn’t sleep for days. Going back home when my mother was dying and getting a call saying I didn’t “qualify for the Employee Leave Act” and would be let go. Then being asked to draft up a set of instructions for my replacement: “We’ll be able to say,” were my boss’s parting words to me, verbatim, “that you didn’t leave us in the lurch.”

Leaving someone in the lurch is a phrase I come across maybe every six or seven years in reading or conversation; it’s not common—but there it was in Middlemarch the other week. For me, it will never have any other association. I hope to see it retired fully from everyday speech, just because.

That crossing of paths, seeing x across the way, happened around the moment of Scott Pelley’s much publicized confrontation with the new CBS gurus, including Bari Weiss, of whom he said, “You’re murdering 60 Minutes.” Whether you’re Scott Pelley or working in precarity and obscurity, or anywhere in the vast middle terrain, the law of workplaces in this country (mine: retail store, publishing house, law firm, second law firm, school, second school) reliably stipulates that anyone daring to speak back about some conviction has to be prepared for their whole situation to be exploded by the resident powers-that-be. Almost no one, in America in 2026, has the practical freedom to take such a risk; of the few that do, almost no one (in my experience) can or does, only now for moral reasons. And it may be that the forms of ostracism, punishment, and “life-warp” (Heaney) that attend such speakings-out are just too great.

I was reading Bernard Williams’ chapter on responsibility in Shame and Necessity, his argument that we can be right to go on judging and punishing ourselves severely, even when there may be no justifiable collective moral verdict on our same action or inaction, whatever it is we have or haven’t done. I read these words with a kind of instinctive recognition, realizing then: some of us are still Greek.

Two Greeks who were sometimes at loggerheads with one another in the life of the American theater: Arthur Miller, August Wilson.

In Jitney, which I’ve been rereading, you have father and son, Becker and Booster, each like Miller’s Proctor in The Crucible, each man “crying out with his whole soul,” as Miller puts it in a stage direction toward the end of his play. And, bringing in Bernard Williams, you have both the philosopher and Miller sounding a note of skepticism, however passingly, about the very tragic vision they so commandingly advance, as if anxious as to how their audiences might receive them—or, receiving them, with what absoluteness they might be moved to act. (Williams: “it is a grave illusion to try to express that silence and grandeur in real life.” Miller, in a similar whisper of a stage direction, of Proctor’s moral stand: “he knows it is insane”).

Only Wilson, as I see it, spares—or denies—us such a note. There’s a great bravery in that, a bravery both aesthetic and moral, just as there is in Scott Pelley’s gestures (looking up his quote, I see that some Fox News pundits gathered round to call Pelley “pompous”). In the precarious patchwork that comprises the lives lived by many or most of us, such moves can spring only from a kind of recklessness, an absolutism that carries its assortment of time-tested, negative associations (pride, fixity, foolishness, and so on, and then perhaps most of all, in our current moment—since the nature and meaning of our intensest actions is defined in some way by their context, you don’t have the freedom to decide the form and tail of the very gestures you make, as Williams also witnesses in the long and sometimes punishing astonishment of his book—a kind of anachronistic theatricality). In the case of a Pelley, you can also say: he acts from a kind of cocooning height, there would be no way for someone lower down in the chain of social power to emulate his example. So be it. My sometime elevator-mate Brad Karp, making deals with Trump, making small talk about golf and asking Bannon how to get him into Augusta, didn’t show himself to be capable of the same power-backed speaking back to power. However complex our attitudes to acts either Greek-tragic or distantly inspired by them, acts occurring ambiguously in their long wake, I hope that we haven’t gotten entirely beyond recognizing this sort of unfashionable, genuinely self-risking starkness in utterance or action, however liable it is in its own right to be or to go wrong; I hope we haven’t forgotten the claims of such action, knowing both the peril (for ourselves and others) of its enactment and the peril (for ourselves and others) of its disappearance from civic life.

I’ve been trying to account for the extraordinariness of Eithne Ni Uallachain’s version of the Irish air “Lough Erne Shore,” as it struck me when wayfaring away some weeks ago from Paul Brady and Andy Irvine’s more familiar rendition, and as it strikes me now, the song having lost none of its capacity to surprise and move, however many listens in. I’ve been playing it on a loose, interrupted loop this weekend, hoping to write at least a few sentences speaking to this singing, the music itself, as I haven’t managed to do in the case of Derek Gripper. “When Eithne sings,” a fellow-traveler of hers remarks in retrospective present tense (the eternal present recordings such as this one allow us to imagine, in defiance of time?), “something in people just goes silent.” Which might be a vanished line from Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, might be the last words worth saying on the matter. Something goes silent in you, yes—only in this case in the sense of a waking up to what’s being given, minus the unnecessary noise of the self, an opening out to receive, since you have the uncanny sense of something coming across you want dearly to be present to and for. There is something momentary about all beauty when you recollect yourself to it, when some grace lets you rise to its occasion. Something passing over you again newly, even if the evidence of it is preserved in perpetuity and is technically there for you to consult at your leisure. “It being the first time that I met her,” Ni Uallachain sings, “my heart, it did leap with surprise”: could one sidelong way of getting at song be: a way of lifting the voice that stalls or slows or quiets or gathers power in ways that defy all prosaic expectation, that are in no way foregone—that depend crucially on the inspiriting self and listening audience—and so return us to a more fragile and unaccountable sense of our humanity, refusing the workaday conventions of time and timing and, in so doing, somehow preserving the capacity to please and surprise, even when such a song has become, on any rational accounting, the most known of things? So we pass through the unknown, remembered gate yet again; so we can. I haven’t been able to part with the unutterable beauty of this version yet, however many listens in. (A shortlist of songs that have had to resurrect themselves in my hearing after periods of intense overplaying: Tive Razão, He Can Only Hold Her, Sylvia McNair singing Pie Jesu. There was a time when I thought that much of the beauty in life, my life at any rate, had concentrated itself in those stray piano notes floating in a quiet incantatory in the background, but the foreground if you’re able to really listen in to them, of Mr. Tambourine Man, a song I cannot really be there to hear in the same way anymore.) At first, I wondered if one of the things that stunned me about Eithne Ni Uallachain’s version of Lough Erne was coming to it by way of the more masculine, the more done-up, performance of Andy Irvine and Paul Brady—the experience of this potentially tired story (yearning man, ravishing and unearthly beauty) returned to as if from a mournful and yet disinterested distance, as if from within, by the entirely powerful and sensitive, the assured and still touchingly uncertain (since every venturing out of real stakes must be a new one) voice of this one woman become the true voice of feeling, an entirely natural-seeming sort of singing. But going back to Irvine (hurdy-gurdy, strings) and Paul Brady’s (voice) version, the only one you’ll find on Spotify, I’m reminded that in spite of the more pronounced and fetching airs of the instrumentation, there’s very little that’s manfully assertive or conventionally assured in that rendition either–Brady’s voice haunts the border of an almost boyish way of being, he launches out a sort of unprepossessingly wild yearn of a whine (shades of a texture that’s there as movingly in Dylan?) Maybe Brady’s voice is that of the old troubadour who wouldn’t trade his song for the beloved who’s made the song’s beauty possible by absence, as we were taught, the beloved who then lets the song be raised on and on. But this would also be a way of saying that the Brady/Irvine version draws back into its own remoteness from us. Eithne Ni Uallachain’s is something else. If an incantation or visitation, still utterly and sincerely and simply human. I kept thinking of those four-syllable words (“And I thought that she could be no mortal”), but not before the word offering, which the dictionary would tell you consists, in the first instance, in the sense of “presenting something to God, or a god”—does the human recipient of such a gift make for so obvious a comedown that it doesn’t get to be enumerated? Only if we’ve lost touch with that higher register, whatever new words it might need, whatever form it might take. A little further down, there’s the sense of a “making something available.” Something: that silence in us, the opening out. If we lean a bit on the lyrics, if we can be forgiven this, we might add as adjacent possibilities made available to us, in the song’s time: some sense of beauty a little outside the ordinary, something more innocent than a long enough moment of any one life or, much more, any summary sense of the human experience would allow us to believe in, back in the realm of ordinary articulation and awareness? And yet those same rare qualities seem so powerfully on offer in these moments—the voice instantiating unrepeatably the very preciousness the inherited lyrics pay witness to— that we’re freed from that province of disbelief in which wakefulness requires we spend our days. You see the singer standing so plainly apart, her gift and her burden, as it’s been said, freed into telling us again of our predicament, making us feel it. That’s her husband Gerry O’Connor playing in the background, but seemingly one more listener in the way he looks at her, with a look of entire tenderness and admiration and affection, almost shy in the face of what he too seems so moved by. “The soul adventuring,” another contemporary of Ni Uallachain’s remarks about the experience of hearing her, I think not a touch too grandly, a soul adventuring and standing in place with us for the time the song takes, time it offers. These words have been a sort of a circling around a center, an effort at sketching out the simple mystery of it by a kind of contrast, a kind of charcoal rubbing, and so maybe I am back where I began, but—what singing, as you know when you hear it.

-

PS, I agree with Bob Dylan that the best versions are almost always the live versions, and unless we’re talking about an Amy Winehouse, my corollary would be that the best versions of any song that has taken root are often the covers. Songs by Anonymous (relatively: reborn in the case below as Verona Brooklyn, a band I’ve never heard of otherwise) that stop you. Here’s one.

In this not-quite-essay, I stray freely and try, in light of the last page or so of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, to go back to four cantos by Dante and to read each one in a slightly different way:

Inferno I: as an exercise, a note on each tercet. Very willed, as it had to be.

Inferno IV: my own favorite moment in the Comedy, or the one I can least get away from, read with help from Erich Auerbach and Arthur Miller.

Purgatorio II: encountering one of my favorite singers, a decade or so ago, in the subway (86^th and Lex, 6 train). In the Barnes & Noble days, which are briefly gone into.

Purgatorio XXI: an effort–but how hard it is—to say something plainly.

First, a very long raft of epigraphs—shades massing at the riverbank, souls at the gates—with thanks and apologies to the translators who’ve given me some of these lines, especially if I’ve gotten the lines wrong. These can be skipped over at whatever point, rearranged in whatever way, depending on the reader’s mood, sensibility, metaphysic, and earthly or unearthly vision. The Calvino gem just below is the one most responsible for all this, but of course you have to take the line with the paragraph in which it comes, the paragraph with the page, the page with the book:

“Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” – Calvino

“Terror-stricken or brazen compassion” [of anyone who brings the dead back by imagination–I can’t find this line] – Franco Fortini

“But a certain failure, distressing to themselves, to be like other people, caused them to sink back, with so much else that drifted or was washed up, into the mud moorings of the great tideway.” – Penelope Fitzgerald

“We know that the world was not made for us, or we for the world, that our history tells no purposive story, and that there is no position outside the world or outside history from which we might hope to authenticate our activities. We have to acknowledge the hideous costs of many human achievements that we value, including this reflective sense itself.” – Bernard Williams

“Ill at ease in the tyranny, ill at ease in the republic. / In the one I longed for freedom, in the other for an end to corruption.” – Milosz

“The beating of the huge time-wound we lived inside” - Heaney

“Here below is no lasting community.” – Augustine

“Because the lord can’t see us underneath” – Tupac

“There is a though-faith, though.” – King

“The passing away of people and things is not the only secret of time.” – Milosz again

Q, child, approximate- But what remains after someone’s gone?

A, aunt- “…The way a person moved…or that they were good.”- Kieslowski, Dekalog I

“Of man present to his own / frailty” – Ungaretti

“I’m bound to life, and I look at my companions.” – Carlos Drummond de Andrade

“As long as blood turns in the breast your dark star” – Zbigniew Herbert

“Since death held no terrors for her (she spoke often to the dead)” - Morrison

“Almost as hardly killed as easily wounded: sustaining, for a while, without defense, the enormous assaults of the universe.” – James Agee

“The narrow cleft of earthly human history” – Erich Auerbach

“Lamb of the world, lupus in fabula, I am burning / in the glass cabinet of the present tense” – Janos Pilinszky

“The tragic right is a condition of life, a condition in which the human personality is able to flower and realize itself.” – Arthur Miller

“And God has taken a flower of gold/And broken it, and used therefrom/The mystic link to bind and hold/Spirit to matter till death come.” - Frost

“Do you have any doubts or dissatisfactions about the piece?” – Leon Fleisher, teaching (earnestly, light irony)

“Have you gotten to Brother Yorick yet?” [General silence] “O, keep an eye out for Brother Yorick!” – Cornel West, mirthfully, tragically, to a high school class

“Their eyes, their ancient, glittering eyes” - Yeats

“Could I start anew, every poem of mine would have been a biography, or a portrait of a particular person, or in fact, a lament over his or her destiny.” – Milosz yet again, in his ninth decade

“We were looking for an echo / an answer to our sound / a place to be in harmony / a place we almost found.” – Jerry Lawson, The Persuasions

My sometime copy of Invisible Cities is in Toronto with a friend, and because this is one of the many books I never make it to the end of and am forever beginning over, I took the liberty of finding one of those online copies uploaded with ambiguous legality by a college in Padua or Panama or Porto and printing out the last twenty pages. By such means do we make it, at last, to the end. How audacious for Calvino to finish with a fusillade of inferno’s, a word that must mean something else when you speak the same language as Dante! And then to make the weight of the word so much more his own when, with that combination of radical newness and unshowy inevitability of which writers are made, he drops the article “the” and with it the pretense of there being no plain lesson emanating from and coexisting with the gorgeous work of his imagination, irreducible withal, the fantastic conversation between Polo and Khan that might merely be two great soliloquies happening in parallel, lifted in the prayer of somehow meeting, or is it of never meeting and so having an excuse to carry on as is, into that infinite series of cities which might merely be aspects of ourselves? At the two Ballaké Sissoko & Derek Gripper concerts I attended some weeks ago (touched on in one of the pieces here), I felt that the manner and nature of their conversation had been fully expressed, or known, by the Calvino of Invisible Cities. But I digress, digress… What Calvino gives us in the end, asks us to face: not l’inferno but simply inferno, not a place but, how much more terribly, an essence, something we might have cause soon enough to see in ourselves as in others, something we might any one of us risk becoming, becoming part of:

Reproducing these extraordinary words by themselves, I see again how flattening it can be to separate the words of a text from those that come before or after; to do so risks giving some quivering insight, the only kind that counts, an air of readymade, and therefore unaccomplished truth (in my sometime discipline of secondary school teaching, this is largely the model, now: in my most recent berth, we taught fragments almost exclusively, sometimes long or sutured-together fragments, but rarely “full texts,” a phrase that now needs to be uttered). As a kind of analogue, I remember David Goldblatt’s tormented, gravely doubting but earnestly agnostic words on whether someone not from South Africa could ever get or glean or know anything lasting from his images: “How can anyone not steeped in the life, ways, obsessions, graces, laws and particulars of this place and people, discern what is embedded of us even in these pale rubbings.” Substitute “book” for “place and people,” and you have the same self-assailing question, which doesn’t spare its audience, either.

I went to the Italian, wanting to be sure that the profound business of the missing article (l’inferno giving way to Calvino’s vision of inferno) hadn’t been just the translator’s being up to no good, to more good. And I was graced with these words I can half-discern, since to know a second language somewhat is to have good guesses at many more. I’d taken these words to Union Square. They blew away from me. A beautiful day, light breeze picking up briefly. That little leaf of paper danced and danced and came to a rest about ten feet from me. Suddenly I was seized by the strange desire that someone in the midday swim of passers-by, coming out of Whole Foods onto the plaza, would pick it up (and read, and “be changed,” moved, consoled, at the very least intrigued). It was a kind of game, watching; its constituent eternity must’ve lasted about five minutes. No one alit upon the lost scrap, but the words–I am on crutches at the moment, and couldn’t easily retrieve them—were blown right back my way at the end of that little eternity. A small miracle I felt ambivalent about. Should I have been dispirited? Grateful? An allegory somewhere in this, for what the game of writing has been all along? is, was, and will be? The words you can only half-make out coming back to you:.

But I went back to Dante, to four cantos that returned in their way: Inferno I, the having gone astray, and there is Virgil, sum total of courage and consolation; Inferno IV, the keeping going, the extraordinary face touched not in fear but compassion, the poets; then bounding over so many circles to Purgatorio II and Casella, sweet singer, who tells us what it is to stay in journeying and in journeying stays; and then at last Statius, that Virgil-to-be, kneeling at the close of Purgatorio XXI to embrace, if only he could, his great teacher; and letting it stop there, far shy of the rest of purgatory, in all its unforgiving forgiveness, shy of paradise. And now I’d like to conduct you through some highlights, flares, stars, blazing out from my own makeshift Dante of that day, this less than fragmentary Comedy.

My guide among translators is Mandelbaum, since he was there first (“and as you see, it has not left me yet”). His versions of Dante’s lines don’t strain to have you call them poetry, they might simply be breathtakingly beautiful prose, and still just the right quotient of poetic form is there to let the lines take their place among the lines of the poets. Time and again, you have the unmistakable impress of an extraordinary line, out of nowhere this deepening-down, or you feel you’re suddenly there at some summit of vision, even as it passes, even as we have to (so we’re told) keep on. And I admire Pinsky’s very different translation, the verve of it (Heaney to Pinsky, before the latter risked getting lost in it as one must: “Do it quickly”) and the sheer audacity of going for the terza rima (which others have attempted, but–to do the rhymes well, what a feat). One of the good days of my life was to drive Robert from Cambridge to Milton, then hear him read a few cantos and share with a Harkness table’s worth of students in a class called Founding Voices that so much was mixed together in Dante, that this kind of mixing might be all we know for sanctity and beauty here on earth (at the prep schools at the time, this was a kind of heresy). Pinsky said that, no, translating Dante had not made him think more about an afterlife, only maybe mortality, the life we have here (see Calvino above; see, as Pinsky honored and cited, the Jewish faith). He lent me a sharp blazer on no-notice that day; I made, I think, a workable Charon, thanks to my trusty Subaru Impreza. But, as the Mandelbaum has it, “what’s told is often less than the event.” Here are the cantos.

Inferno I

For this canto, nothing fancy, just an assignment to myself: make a note about each tercet, why it cuts the reader or solaces or sings or makes strange, whether singly or in combination. What would Giuseppe Mazzotta say? This is all of course Mandelbaum’s Dante, so a great deal might be the translator’s doing: you have the crucial caveat, and so be it.

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.

To lose “the path that does not stray”: different from actively straying off of some path. As if there were only one right road (a phrase from Eliot somewhere, “Marina”?).

Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,
that savage forest, dense and difficult,
which even in recall renews my fear:

“Which even in recall renews my fear”: one of those Mandelbaum gems, it’s come back to me how many times—like its other and contrary forms in Dante, the memory of love being lovely, the memory of song as singing. Memory being all these many things.

so bitter — death is hardly more severe!
But to retell the good discovered there,
I’ll also tell the other things I saw.

Since it is necessary to tell those other things to the end of telling the good, making it manifest. None of this is incidental. The euphemism of “the other things”: a brief courtesy before it gets ugly. Toni Morrison talked about this in her novels–putting her hand on the reader’s shoulder before going further.

I cannot clearly say how I had entered
the wood; I was so full of sleep just at
the point where I abandoned the true path.

A different case, now, about the path, not just lost but abandoned. A question of courage more than direction. The falling-short/shrinking-back that is the pilgrim’s familiar habit—like his infinite propensity to recover. And fall back again.

But when I’d reached the bottom of a hill —
it rose along the boundary of the valley
that had harassed my heart with so much fear —

Here you spot the bird of the heart for the first time, no longer obscured by brush and whatnot.

I looked on high and saw its shoulders clothed
already by the rays of that same planet
which serves to lead men straight along all roads.

A more expansive sense of possibility, as “all roads,” not just one path, might be right or straight. A change in the light enough to effect this? All weather inner weather.

At this my fear was somewhat quieted;
for through the night of sorrow I had spent,
the lake within my heart felt terror present.

I don’t know why “the lake within my heart” hits as it does. Heaney on Dante’s “head-clearing similes.” Do poets write metaphors like this anymore? “Spent”/ “present”–I like Mandelbaum’s occasional rhyme, even if it’s only an accident let stand.

And just as he who, with exhausted breath,
having escaped from sea to shore, turns back
to watch the dangerous waters he has quit,

But there’s no safe shore here. Eliot: “in a dark wood…where is no secure foothold.” The simile imagining whatever safeness can be made.

so did my spirit, still a fugitive,
turn back to look intently at the pass
that never has let any man survive.

Since, from Odysseus on, the hero is always a fugitive. And the heart (That song–coração vagabundo)

I let my tired body rest awhile.
Moving again, I tried the lonely slope —
my firm foot always was the one below.

Dante not following post-surgery best practices, as I know now (“up with the good, down with the bad”). Risk-aversion?

And almost where the hillside starts to rise —
look there! — a leopard, very quick and lithe,
a leopard covered with a spotted hide.

That direct address, or self-address, willing himself to face whatever memory makes manifest, present again as the tense.

He did not disappear from sight, but stayed;
indeed, he so impeded my ascent
that I had often to turn back again.

Stayed and impeded–but not threatening per se? In a way a mirror of what the pilgrim and the poet, in exile, aspire to–not to disappear altogether, even if from sight. To stay, if far from the yearned-for center.

The time was the beginning of the morning;
the sun was rising now in fellowship
with the same stars that had escorted it

As it was in the beginning, is now and shall be. The spirit of quite a few Chekhov stories at their close could be caught by this and the next tercet

when Divine Love first moved those things of beauty;
so that the hour and the gentle season
gave me good cause for hopefulness on seeing

This first line is Mandelbaum at his best, though this may seem straightforward.

that beast before me with his speckled skin;
but hope was hardly able to prevent
the fear I felt when I beheld a lion.

Per the note above, that same leopard rechristened as a kindred, staying spirit of some kind? See how our perceptions change.

His head held high and ravenous with hunger —
even the air around him seemed to shudder —
this lion seemed to make his way against me.

That’s how menacing menace is–the air itself shudders. But this passage is bedeviled by “seemed”–the avowed power and attendant self-doubt of an imagination, which makes greater and minimizes in equal measure.

And then a she-wolf showed herself; she seemed
to carry every craving in her leanness;
she had already brought despair to many.

This passage is fraught by gender, but let it be recorded that some of us have known one, he-wolf, she-wolf, whatever. You never forget such presences (Said and Rushdie, each in their way: it takes courage to forget). We meet Calvino’s Inferno in Dante’s.

The very sight of her so weighted me
with fearfulness that I abandoned hope
of ever climbing up that mountain slope.

Just the sight. Again the specter of abandonment (of oneself and one’s hopes, as of abandonment by others). Edward Thomas: “Just hope has gone forever.” Thomas the soldier-poet, killed by a bullet that never touched him. Just the fright.

Even as he who glories while he gains
will, when the time has come to tally loss,
lament with every thought and turn despondent,

The grandeur of this simile is the way it heroizes an ordinary person, an ordinary human turn, even in the fall to despondency. “He who glories”–different from “even as glory gives way to lament,” etc.

so was I when I faced that restless beast
which, even as she stalked me, step by step
had thrust me back to where the sun is speechless.

I have the sinking feeling that “sun is speechless” may be Mandelbaum not Dante, but, how brilliant—light itself cannot speak here.

While I retreated down to lower ground,
before my eyes there suddenly appeared
one who seemed faint because of the long silence.

Silence, that impossibility of articulation and dearth of exchange, as punishment, weathered by the self and compassionately projected onto another. Our common lot, here. The pilgrim escapes himself and is able to pity–his teacher.

The song “Berimbau”: “The one who never gets out of himself / will die loving no one.”

When I saw him in that vast wilderness,
“Have pity on me,” were the words I cried,
“whatever you may be — a shade, a man.”

And so awakes to the pity of his own predicament, still shadowed by fear, cries out (nobly, deeply, collectedly).

He answered me: “Not man; I once was man.
Both of my parents came from Lombardy,
and both claimed Mantua as native city.

The extraordinary power (and, simultaneously, lament) of “Not man; I once was man.” He is both more and less.

And I was born, though late, sub Julio,
and lived in Rome under the good Augustus —
the season of the false and lying gods.

Sometimes you spend your whole life looking back at the same footnotes. The gods of antiquity, disowned by Virgil with a vengeance. How incongruous that sudden anger seems—under it, a bid for paradise, for all the crime of being born, “though late,” too early for Christianity?

I was a poet, and I sang the righteous
son of Anchises who had come from Troy
when flames destroyed the pride of Ilium.

The common cry.

But why do you return to wretchedness?
Why not climb up the mountain of delight,
the origin and cause of every joy?”

The questions do the pilgrim the honor of imagining this is plainly a choice, a possibility. They give courage, rightly: the teacher’s only task?

“And are you then that Virgil, you the fountain
that freely pours so rich a stream of speech?”
I answered him with shame upon my brow.

Shame as a corollary of devotion, instinct with great respect–and the fear of being less than the occasion presented by another real presence (Eliot: “Lord, I am not worthy / but speak the word only”). In some ways, this sentiment is not of our time.

“O light and honor of all other poets,
may my long study and the intense love
that made me search your volume serve me now.

The first word spoken by mortal love. Divine love came first. Anything said about this tercet seems like pedantry. It moves.

You are my master and my author, you —
the only one from whom my writing drew
the noble style for which I have been honored.

Devotion and, within it, importantly, a measure of self-assertion. Those worldly honors matter, or a sense of honor does, and honor is a conversation with the bright world above (the world below heaven).

You see the beast that made me turn aside;
help me, o famous sage, to stand against her,
for she has made my blood and pulses shudder,”

A second turning-aside (from the original going-astray). Turning aside from the path of redress after going astray. As Erich Auerbach suggests, we’re never told what the cause of that first fissure is.

“It is another path that you must take,”
he answered when he saw my tearfulness,
“if you would leave this savage wilderness;

Another path: your own. There being no other. (Emerson: “Build therefore your own bible”—as Dante does; like poet, like pilgrim).

Virgil’s language decidedly that of agency, though Dante has cried, “help me.”

the beast that is the cause of your outcry
allows no man to pass along her track,
but blocks him even to the point of death;

And now, in tension, Virgil awakes Dante to his place in a sequence of other sufferers, alike impeded. The James Baldwin quote everyone is always quoting.

her nature is so squalid, so malicious
that she can never sate her greedy will;
when she has fed, she’s hungrier than ever.

Yes. A great summation of malice (Borges on Dante: he can capture more of human character in a line or two than most modern novelists in their…“full text”). A prefiguration here of the punishments that speak to their constituent sins. But we haven’t yet come to the full logic of contrapasso.

She mates with many living souls and shall
yet mate with many more, until the Greyhound
arrives, inflicting painful death on her.

Our first redeemer figure is a dog, a godly anger. God, along with the offices of godliness, is not just love.

That Hound will never feed on land or pewter,
but find his fare in wisdom, love, and virtue;
his place of birth shall be between two felts.

As if a mirror of the beast above (like fighting like, which is why the soul’s battle is so fraught), only he feeds on the right things.

He will restore low-lying Italy for which
the maid Camilla died of wounds,
and Nisus, Turnus, and Euryalus.

Italy itself as the sufferer—the polity, not just the soul.

And he will hunt that beast through every city
until he thrusts her back again to Hell,
for which she was first sent above by envy.

As Dante has been thrust to Hell, albeit in a probationary way, and with a blessed end?

Therefore, I think and judge it best for you
to follow me, and I shall guide you, taking
you from this place through an eternal place,

“Therefore”! As if this has all been a logical exercise, or a pitch. “Through an eternal place,” not “to.” Since hell is also eternal, and we can only be briefly resident in, or glimpsing of, the other spheres for now?

where you shall hear the howls of desperation
and see the ancient spirits in their pain,
as each of them laments his second death;

The pity of it. The beauty and compassion of “the ancient spirits in their pain.” The second death unending.

and you shall see those souls who are content
within the fire, for they hope to reach —
whenever that may be — the blessed people.

“It is another path that you must take” – and there are other souls you may study, other ways of being and becoming.

If you would then ascend as high as these,
a soul more worthy than I am will guide you;
I’ll leave you in her care when I depart,

“If you would”–your choice; a conversation, even though Dante has been speechless as the sun. ‘I can’t go with you, but I won’t leave you alone.’ Care under limitation.

because that Emperor who reigns above,
since I have been rebellious to His law,
will not allow me entry to His city.

You can hear the suppressed cry of Virgil even as he professes his sin of not being Christian. Passion and outcry under restraint.

He governs everywhere, but rules from there;
there is His city, His high capital:
o happy those He chooses to be there!”

“We few, we happy few”; “O happy day.” Two things that come into my mind. After Virgil’s invitations of mortal choice, the dread, irrevocable decision of god from on high.

And I replied: “O poet — by that God
whom you had never come to know — I beg you,
that I may flee this evil and worse evils,

Just two tercets in reply to all this! Dante as devotion’s quick convert, again wielding exclamation. His parenthetical invocation taking to heart, in the most pained way, the divinely necessitated, looming from the very beginning, separation from his beloved guide.

With “worse evils,” too, he confirms receipt of Virgil’s message. He knows full well where they’re going.

to lead me to the place of which you spoke,
that I may see the gateway of Saint Peter
and those whom you describe as sorrowful.”

“The place of which you spoke”; “whom you describe as”: the limits of language (and of any teacher), Dante quietly questioning the final authority of both? Hoping that the sorrowful may not merely be so?

Then he set out, and I moved on behind him.

Frost said, or jested, that the ‘strongest’ line in English-language poetry was this passing bit from Hamlet: “So have I heard, and do in part believe it.” He put a version of that line in his own poem.

Some of my favorite lines in Mandelbaum’s Dante are these canto-closes, their air of dread decision or momentous finality (in the most transitory moment).

Dante is following Virgil, but at a sort of distance. Each undertaking their own journey, in a way? Do souls ever meet, etc.

Inferno IV

And now, that somewhat school-boyish exercise out of the way, just three tercets from this canto—to embrace the brilliance of the fragmentary, a dream-vision haunting, with all its earthly weight, well apart from any system or context, seeing as the glorious edifice is not all, Dante in the end soars as a lyric as much as an epic poet (a fact the extraordinary Erich Auerbach necessarily stints in his monograph, along with probably every Dante critic who’s come after). The below tercets: lines that can never be stripped of their human reach, no matter the tragic or transcendent fact of translation. My whole life as a reader, I’ve had this problem: when anything in a book, prose most assuredly, stops me with some shock of beauty, the last thing I want to do is go on, there comes this strange sense that the only task left is to consider what’s been given; some unreformable part of me considers the work of communing already done (this is overcome often enough, but always as a matter of will, of tomorrow). The nine lines below mark such a pass I might never have crossed in the first instance, and they come so early! The last lines below can only ever call up, now, one moment I have lived with another, a stranger who became, by the work of a held gaze, my intimate, in the most nightmarish passage of my earthly term thus far, in a kind of underworld here–but more on that some other time. Here are the tercets:

“Let us descend into the blind world now,”
the poet, who was deathly pale, began;
“I shall go first and you will follow me.”

But I, who’d seen the change in his complexion,
said: “How shall I go on if you are frightened,
you who have always helped dispel my doubts?”

And he to me: “The anguish of the people
whose place is here below, has touched my face
with the compassion you mistake for fear.

I’m currently stalled, for the same reasons rehearsed above, on pp. 132-3 of Auerbach’s Dante: Poet of the Secular World. I’d like to set the inspiring, and so impeding, passage in question next to the tercets above and see what light they might shed on each other, what sparks give off.

There’s much to love and work over in these paragraphs by Auerbach, most of all their extraordinary sensitivity to the essential predicament Dante dramatizes, our shared predicament–as you feel, at least, in the moment of reading these words: that of being somehow astray, or of always being shadowed by that possibility, by the sheer uncertainty in it all (whatever the path strayed from or returned to or newly set out on may be), of being somehow alone with one’s fate (for all one’s fellow-journeyers), obscurely in the dark even in “the bright world above”—but against that earthly reality, which may simply be a matter of attending human specters, for all that to glimpse—still blazing up and out—such saving elements as these: the mortal chance to lift and be lifted in spirit by another, by some path that deserves the name, by the real possibility of right or courageous choice, of some momentary communion that could stay and transfigure, the selva oscura shot through with light, and above it, as faithfully returned to us at the end of each canticle, as if such scattershot brilliances nonetheless comprised our promised end, those stars Dante gives us in each last canto, be it hell, be it purgatory, be it heaven, be it this world or some other. “Nothing is left open,” Auerbach tells us in one of those hushed voices you have no choice but to attend to, “but the narrow cleft of earthly human history, the span of man’s life on earth, in which the great and dramatic decision must fall”: you feel instinctively that he means a decision the individual must make, or some god above, or he means the two in one, in some partial coming-together or tension. I am halfway through the collected Arthur Miller and can’t help but think, in connection with this picture, of the playwright’s words on tragedy and “the common man,” or as we might put it today, the ordinary person, everyone:

“The tragic right is a condition of life, a condition in which the human personality is able to flower and realize itself. The wrong is the condition which suppresses man, perverts the flowing out of his love and creative instinct. Tragedy enlightens—and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man’s freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts… The Greeks could probe the very heavenly origin of their ways and return to confirm the rightness of laws. And Job could face God in anger, demanding his right and end in submission. But for a moment everything is in suspension, nothing is accepted, and in this sketching and tearing apart of the cosmos, in the very action of so doing, the character gains ‘size,’ the tragic stature which is spuriously attached to the royal or the high born in our minds. The commonest of men may take on that stature to the extent of his willingness to throw all he has into the contest, the battle to secure his rightful place in the world.”

For months my print-out of this essay had a typo, for months I tried to figure out what it meant: “the tragic night is a condition of life.” Auerbach might have solved (or illuminated) this chance conundrum, as he writes:

“But since the human world receives the measures by which it is to be molded and judged from the other world, it is neither a realm of dark necessity nor a peaceful land of God; no, the cleft is really open, the span of life is short, uncertain, and decisive for all eternity; it is the magnificent and terrible gift of potential freedom which creates the urgent, restless, human, and Christian-European atmosphere of the irretrievable, fleeting moment that must be taken advantage of; God’s grace is infinite, but so also is His justice and one does not negate the other. The hearer or reader enters into the narrative; in the great realm of fulfilled destiny he sees only himself alone unfulfilled, still acting upon the real, decisive stage, illumined from above but still in the dark; he is in danger, the decision is near, and in the images of Dante’s pilgrimage that draw before him he sees himself damned, making atonement, or saved, but always himself, not extinguished, but eternal in his very own essence.”

I don’t think we need “the other world” to mean anything doctrinal; it might live even for such agnostics as myself as a way of saying “some moral sense,” however inchoate or hard to articulate that is. And I feel similarly about every other word and combination of words in Auerbach’s passage, or would like to, even the words “God’s grace.” That we have this span, this cleft that is “really open” (Auden’s Prospero in The Sea and The Mirror, half-disbelieving, there at the end, that the journey is “real” and we have “really to take it,” the journey he thought was already accomplished), the sense of the “magnificent and terrible gift of potential freedom”— terrible because shadowed by the ever-present possibility of its failed enactment—the sense of this fleeting stage in which we find our human fulfillment, or not at all—it would be hard-going not to believe these things still have, should have, some bearing on us.

And so, those tercets– “The irretrievable, fleeting moment” imagined and set down seven hundred years ago, give or take, dramatizes beautifully what may still be possible in a world not without end, but a world that is neither “a realm of dark necessity nor a peaceful land of God,” as Auerbach tells us. What may be possible: those forms of connection, of journeying with or seeing some other, we sometimes call pity, call compassion (good works that keep the deeper possibility of communion alive, even if it can’t quite be managed in the circumstances), and that we always risk, such is the general weather, mistaking for fear—an emotion you couldn’t say our world doesn’t call for. Of all this Virgil, that “stern master of tenderness”—to take the great phrase Wilde writes, free man, from prison–reminds us.

A portrait of Janos Pilinszky I have always thought of in association with this passage in Dante:

And Leonardo’s J., as if given a different name by the painter’s “terror-stricken or brazen compassion”:

And these great words from Eudora Welty: “The sharpest recognition is surely that which is charged with sympathy as well as with shock — it is a form of human vision. And that is of course a gift. We struggle through any pain or darkness in nothing but hope that we may receive it, and through any term of work in the prayer to keep it.”

So, to think through this moment, I need Mandelbaum, Auerbach, Arthur Miller, Pilinszky, Leonardo’s Judas, Welty, and undoubtedly much else.

Purgatorio II

To start in the middle way of this Canto and see it through to its close, and then try to say something about it all, this time by juxtaposition:

The souls who, noticing my breathing, sensed
that I was still a living being, then,
out of astonishment, turned pale; and just

as people crowd around a messenger
who bears an olive branch, to hear his news,
and no one hesitates to join that crush,

so here those happy spirits—all of them—
stared hard at my face, just as if they had
forgotten to proceed to their perfection.

I saw one of those spirits moving forward
in order to embrace me—his affection
so great that I was moved to mime his welcome.

O shades—in all except appearance—empty!
Three times I clasped my hands behind him and
as often brought them back against my chest.

Dismay, I think, was painted on my face;
at this, that shadow smiled as he withdrew;
and I, still seeking him, again advanced.

Gently, he said that I could now stand back;
then I knew who he was, and I beseeched
him to remain awhile and talk with me.

He answered: “As I loved you when I was
within my mortal flesh, so, freed, I love you:
therefore I stay. But you, why do you journey?”

“My own Casella, to return again
to where I am, I journey thus; but why,”
I said, “were you deprived of so much time?”

And he: “No injury is done to me
if he who takes up whom—and when—he pleases
has kept me from this crossing many times,

for his own will derives from a just will.
And yet, for three months now, he has accepted,
most tranquilly, all those who would embark.

Therefore, I, who had turned then to the shore
at which the Tiber’s waters mix with salt,
was gathered in by his benevolence.

Straight to that river mouth, he set his wings:
that always is the place of gathering
for those who do not sink to Acheron.”

And I: “If there’s no new law that denies
you memory or practice of the songs
of love that used to quiet all my longings,

then may it please you with those songs to solace
my soul somewhat; for—having journeyed here
together with my body—it is weary.”

“Love that discourses to me in my mind”
he then began to sing—and sang so sweetly
that I still hear that sweetness sound in me.

My master, I, and all that company
around the singer seemed so satisfied,
as if no other thing might touch our minds.

We all were motionless and fixed upon
the notes, when all at once the grave old man
cried out: “What have we here, you laggard spirits?

What negligence, what lingering is this?
Quick, to the mountain to cast off the slough
that will not let you see God show Himself!”

Even as doves, assembled where they feed,
quietly gathering their grain or weeds,
forgetful of their customary strut,

will, if some thing appears that makes them fear,
immediately leave their food behind
because they are assailed by greater care;

so did I see that new—come company—
they left the song behind, turned toward the slope,
like those who go and yet do not know where.

And we were no less hasty in departure.

The promised juxtaposition, with unnecessary digression, but such is the thrill of liberty: I’m waiting for the 6 train at 86^th and Lex, during my months-long stint as a cashier and book-shelver and errant gift-wrapper at the Barnes and Noble near there. I’m “mad good at V-carts,” according to a coworker, and so constantly given early-morning shifts: bad fate. I have never gone back, back down that long escalator. I make $8.50 an hour in 2014-dollars. A few weeks in, I get a glimpse of a document handed down from on high for hiring purposes. A list of virtues in the first column, a list of constituent vices in the second—Dantesque, I think I can get away with saying. Ex: First column, the virtue sought for in an applicant: Likeable. In the second column, this same quality raised to the condition of a vice: desperate to be liked. Or: Independent / Hardheaded–and so on. I wish I could see that doc now. One manager tells me halfway through my term of employment that no, she did not call up my second reference to ask if I would make a good cashier. My second reference is Robert Pinsky. I ring up Chris Cuomo, who seems nervous when I fail to hide, by a smile, that I know who he is. I am saying the titles of our small section of Large Print books very loudly, as requested, for a customer who has trouble hearing, and I realize it is very hard to speak this loudly and this slowly and not sound angry, and I am quite sure a small crowd is gathering at the edge of my vision as I half-shout in slowed-down syllables: Melville – Moby Dick, James Joyce - Dubliners. I am asked by at least one customer if I “know how to read.” But another will say, “I like your style”–it’s all a wash, really. In one of the small highlights of my life, I tell a customer on cue, in Russian, that I don’t speak Russian–this is the intensest moment of my “long study” of Tarkovsky–and I’m sure what he grumbles back to me is, “But it sounds to me like you’re speaking Russian.” Anyway, I’m waiting for the train. I’m carrying gifts for my family, carrying wrapping-paper. My tenure is coming to an end, though I don’t know it yet–I’ll quit as a gift to self before the Christmas holiday. And down there in the station for those moments, the place is awash in song, beautiful song; a little doo wop, much soul, but nothing antiquated, a sound contemporary with us as poetry that’s poetry must be, singing that lives. The unmistakable timbre of a voice, a set of voices I feel I’ve heard in some other life. I go to drop some money in the collection-hat in a lull and say, “You guys sound like the Persuasions.” And a smile from one of the men, and already I’m walking a few paces away to the random waiting-place that’s become mine, when a great voice booms out, or baritones, “Young man— Young man—,” and I turn around, and the speaker says, “What do you know about the Persuasions?” and then they’re all smiling –“I know a lot about the Persuasions.” And my man says, “This is Jerry Lawson”—and a self-delighted pause, and great comic timing, comic in our sense and in the sense applied to Dante, with this wonderful emphasis I can still hear, a decade later, cresting to laughter–“…from the Persuasions.” And I am right there with Jerry Lawson, shaking hands. Why does the train come right then? Why do I get on? (Not “what negligence? What lingering is this?,” as in Dante: what a failure to linger.) Why don’t I pour my wallet out, and my heart? Why don’t I risk a cliché or two? Why is Jerry Lawson, whom my mother first heard as a teenager in Chicago in 1975 or so it must have been, singing—Jesus –in 2014, in New York City, in the subway? And has paradise, just like that, broken into purgatory?

Purgatorio XXI

Simple sentences.

An extraordinary thing happens in Canto XXI of Purgatory. I have nothing new to say about it all. I just want to repeat what my teachers and peers–those I have heard or read or talked with a while—have shared with me over the years, since certain things should be said over from time to time, whether to others or to ourselves. Since recitation itself may be a little like prayer, or somehow change things. You stray from the right line, say, and it stands reimagined.

For some time, the pilgrim and teacher have moved strangely through Purgatory. They still affect a certain sense of their place apart: sadly for Virgil, whose allotted place is Hell, and blessedly for Dante, who can still yearn for Heaven, neither one quite belongs in this middle region. And we know that non-belonging, whatever its nature, imposes its difficulties. Both seem a little more unsure of themselves—even if we have traded the agony of hell for so much sighing, even if this is only a waystation, comparatively easy. Dante assumes his ritual place behind Virgil, but in some way (in spirit) they really are in this limbo together.

We sense with a new intensity just how vulnerable Virgil is, part of the spiritual precariat, as we all are. He is fixed by his own fate, his own essence, and he couldn’t hope to conceal this from Dante. When he expresses the hope that one of the souls in purgatory will ascend to heaven in time, this gesture is a greathearted one, yes. But there’s no missing the pain in his words. The human cry: “And may that just tribunal / which has consigned me to eternal exile / place you in peace within the blessed assembly!”

Virgil celebrates his charge with the same greatheartedness. “You’ll see / plainly,” he says to one of the crowd, “He’s meant to reign with all the righteous.” So he is still carried forward and aloft by this faith, perhaps before Dante is. It would be too much for the pilgrim to wholly trust that what’s meant to be will be made to happen. He is only and he is still human.

But Virgil knows it: this faith marks the infinite center of his knowing, even if he can’t know everything. He teaches even though his teaching can only reach so far, no further. There are things he doesn’t understand about the geography of purgatory, the moral laws of the place. So he asks questions of the shades in his midst, a little shyly, maybe, but without embarrassment. He does this for his own benefit now as much as Dante’s—even though the answers give knowledge he may never be able to act on. His desire, his devotion, are disinterested. He asks: “But tell me, if you can, why, just before, / the mountain shook and shouted, all of it— / for so it seemed–down to its sea—bathed shore.”

The answer we hear is the one we’d hoped for: that shaking means things are working as they should. A soul has been cleansed and lifted from its own limbo, a little higher, a little higher. Until that day it is somehow pure enough, pure.

It’s not just any man who’s shared this principle with Virgil, Dante standing a little away, taking the lesson in too. The speaker is a kindred spirit, another poet steeped in Virgil’s work, just the same as Dante. His name is Statius. He does not yet know that the man—not man! soul—he is speaking to is the one he so honors. He doesn’t know this when he says: “And to have lived on earth when Virgil lived–/for that I would extend by one more year/the time I owe before my exile’s end.” This is a real feeling one can have; there is a single person about whom I feel this way, painfully.

This is all, you see, exile, that very earthly term—for Statius as for Virgil, exile. Anyone not in Heaven, in Dante’s poem, is mourned and dignified by that same word, and is allowed to know it.

And the extraordinary thing has been set in motion, as when the divine first moved those things of beauty, a loveliness that will move toward the thing itself, proceed to its own imperfection. Virgil turns to Dante and seems to say: say nothing. But there is no menace in this, for once; it is something else. Humility, maybe. Dante can’t help himself, though–how could he. Irrepressibly, he smiles, as one does. Because we go deeper than some narrow ethic of self-mastery would suggest. There’s something in us.

And Statius sees that “flashing” of a smile, and he asks what’s behind it. And Virgil, how beautifully, looks at his charge and speaks those words that might belong in part, now, to the Irish poet. He says, “Do not be afraid/to speak.” And Dante does some teaching for a bit, and next thing Statius is so moved he momentarily forgets the very laws of this place he’d just imparted, the most basic fact of all. He wants to embrace the man before him: he believes (how could he not) it is still the man. And Virgil offers a feeling correction, only to get a lesson in turn from Statius—but between the one’s “Brother, there’s no need—” and the other’s “Now you can understand,” really they are saying the same thing. Here are the last lines of the canto—the lines at which, for the time being, I close the book:

At this, I answered: “Ancient spirit, you
perhaps are wondering at the smile I smiled:
but I would have you feel still more surprise.

He who is guide, who leads my eyes on high,
is that same Virgil from whom you derived
the power to sing of men and of the gods.

Do not suppose my smile had any source
beyond the speech you spoke; be sure—it was
those words you said of him that were the cause.”

Now he had bent to kiss my teacher’s feet,
but Virgil told him: “Brother, there’s no need—
you are a shade, a shade is what you see.”

And, rising, he: “Now you can understand
how much love burns in me for you, when I
forget our insubstantiality,

treating the shades as one treats solid things.”

-

One more thing: I want to append these words from an email. When I forget our insubstantiality.

…spirit - and it needs a proper outlet and world, which you can make for yourself (with some help from others) -if you set yourself to it and banish all thought of the past.

for now, rest.

the conversation will continue. you need a virgil. i can act as a part-time stand-in until you find one or become one yourself.

infinite love.

m

(Zakir Hussain by Dayanita Singh)

I went to see the guitarist Hayden Pedigo a few weeks ago at a church in Brooklyn (all my favorite music these days takes place in churches, something to do with the economic landscape for true ones who are making their music a little athwart the culture–Pedigo, Gripper, every other soul on tabla or sitar). He did a little number, between pieces, on hands—the whole mystery of watching your own hands play and realizing, with increasing alarm, you don’t quite know, in your head that is, the notes coming next, and hoping, just hoping, your hands remember their hours of work, can carry off the right sounds in sequence when the time comes, since there’s no getting off the ride. The condition Pedigo was speaking to seemed, in its suggestion of rescue and mystery, to go even deeper than the prosaic question of muscle memory, to delve down to the sense of being at one and the same moment, in body but not only, estranged from and returned to yourself, returned and estranged. And so I’ve been coming back to that set-piece, thinking of hands.

I see, or once made the mistake of seeing, an analogue of Pedigo’s picture of things in this photo from João Pina’s series on Operation Condor, the CIA-backed initiative through which a number of authoritarian regimes in South America strove to torture, disappear, and vanquish the leftist opposition. Here’s Pina’s haunting photo of an Argentinian police officer being taken to trial years after. I said to Pina, at a Think Coffee in Chelsea, that he had brought to light a brutal man’s regret, something like the embattled sensitivity of a Franz Bieberkopf, however passing its self-discovery, whatever violence might come before or after this conscience’s brief swimming to the surface. How can a man staring at his hands convey anything other than guilt, some of us wonder, the instinctive guilt of a body about to be known by a mind? (Lowell, if on a different plane, the inward or interpersonal as against the historical: “My eyes have seen what my hands did”). When we compared notes on the picture, Pina said flatly: you’re wrong. “That man had just thrown a chair at me.” But I wonder, still, if its frozen intuition of a latent self might stand, to the extent that a photograph may not just be, as Chris Killip was fond of saying, the chronicle of a death foretold, but so too the emanation of a counter-realm the same brutal history might have made possible. If what the picture enacts is a seeing-into-it-all of some human-scaled guilt, however belated, even one disowned by the subject.

Since “even a closed fist,” the Amichai goes, “was once an open hand with five fingers.” And then there’s the line of Rilke’s whose shock I still remember. It’s still there on rereading, but different in kind or degree–these lines that really do depend, in some way, on your not having encountered them before: “O slowly disappearing photograph / in my more slowly disappearing hand.” The one line saying we weren’t always this way. The other saying, in the most existential sense, we won’t always be. But so quietly, all it takes is the flicker of a hand. Or a handshake–what Paul Celan said any realized poem amounted to, in a kind of affirming reverse of Pedigo’s vision of uncanny distance between us and ourselves, as if what you make, that handiwork, could speak you fully into being and speak only one thing, as if your quintessential presence could be made material in this way and meet someone else’s on a level, if only for a moment, only ever in arriving or going. A poem, a handshake. But is the darkness shadowing this vision that it makes of the artwork a necessarily passing thing, for all its humbly assertive sense of solidarity? (Celan again, just holding on: “We live under dark skies and—there are few human beings. Hence, I assume, so few poems. The hopes I have left are small. I try to hold on to what remains.”) A tragic falling-short, within history, of any deeper possibility of exchange? (Emerson on all our blows being glancing.)

If all Western philosophy is footnotes to Plato, every image of a hand in Western art might be footnotes, or forward-lookings, to Raphael. And I have to confess, looking at these discoursers now, I want to side with Aristotle, the beautiful assurance of that level hand saying the court is here, how could it not be here in this our element, or like the tennis line-caller’s telling us, not a word needed, the ball went in.

My last conversation with my mother– Have I been an okay son? – and though gestures recognizably hers had deserted her for days, she reached across to me, one hand moving inarticulately is the word that came after, with what will, what an effort of love, in that vast self-sacrificing struggling-to-say, as she summoned one last time, having lost it I thought for good, my name–a hand fighting its way through air, a sound spoken, and from who knows what depths a brilliant smile, that most eloquently forgiving of things–as if it weren’t needed, not the question itself, not any other answer to the question.