WRB—Aug. 7, 2024

“stomach of the soul”

It is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles. And yet when the Washington Review of Books come, he make them all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall, all dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him. Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come, and like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great, and we break. But the Washington Review of Books he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again, and we bear to go on with our labor, what it may be.

N.B.:

The monthly D.C. Salon, on the topic “May we despair?”, will take place on the evening of August 17. If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.

Links:

• In Liberties, Ben Libman on nostalgia:

  In truth Nostalgia has little to do with “home”; any connections are incidental. What matters in “homecoming” is the notion of return, or recurrence. A thing must happen, or must be imagined to happen, twice. And time must intervene: there can be no nostalgia in simultaneity. The intervention of time is important, because time produces the impasse that gives this pang its potency. Nostalgia asserts what we already know: nothing truly happens twice. First as tragedy then as farce. Is there a more nostalgic line in all of Western thought? Remembering, going back, retreading the same ground: each of these is a farce in the generic sense of the term—ridiculous, absurd, extravagant, improbable, nonsensical. Time’s arrow only points one way. And the entropy it produces cannot be reversed. Nostalgia is a limped defense mechanism against the ruthlessness of time’s passage.

  [I have always found it moving and true that one of the main memories in “Exile’s Letter” (Li Po, translated by Pound) is of being away from home, called by a friend and the friend’s father to spend time with them: “And I was drunk, and had no thought of returning.” It’s not about being home; home is just one of the places that can have the magic. (“Home isn’t where it used to be / Home is anywhere you hang your head.”) And then, speaking of a later chance encounter with that friend:

  And if you ask how I regret that parting?

  It is like the flowers falling at spring’s end,

                  confused, whirled in a tangle.

  What is the use of talking! And there is no end of talking—

  There is no end of things in the heart.

  The talking is useless, but it is also the only way to bring the past back to life. —Steve]

• In Poetry, Robert Rubsam on Else Lasker-Schüler:

  These early poems waltz back-and-forth between desire and its anticipated disappointment. In one poem her love causes her to go “wild and screaming like gazelles”; in another, she longs to tell her lover “how I sink / to find your kiss / gone empty.” In a typical Lasker-Schüler narrative, the flush of love when “your kisses darken on my mouth” gives way to distance, and what was once experienced can now only be recalled. Even the natural world—the moon and the sky—turns away. At times, the poems tip into despair: “I adapted to you, / because I longed for what is human. // I have become poor / from your begging charity.” But there is always another infatuation. Rather than the proper poems of a woman in love, Lasker-Schüler’s read like the confessions of a desire so capacious it approaches holiness. “I am not accustomed to living on a small scale,” she would later write.

• Two on Willa Cather; first, Carol Iannone, in the archives of Modern Age, on her New York City:

  It is to capture the purity of such moments that art is created, according to Cather, to defend against loss and ugliness, to act as a stay against the rushing, retreating, ebbing beauty of life, hardly recognized before it is gone. Another of Cather’s opera singer heroines, the fierce, uncompromising Thea Kronborg, the main character in The Song of the Lark (1915), comes to realize that art is “an effort to make a sheath, a mold in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself,—life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.” Indeed, Cressida’s tragedy lay precisely in her surrender to the force of personalities who buzz around her flame but cannot help her gift to glow. (One wonders if it is only by coincidence that Cather has her two characters leave the park by the Seventh Avenue entrance, the Artisans’ Gate, rather than the Sixth Avenue entrance, the Artists’ Gate.) Trapped as Cressida is between old and new values, it seems no surprise that she perishes on the “Titanic,” which sinks in the ocean that lies between the Old and the New Worlds. 

[Behind the paywall: Julia on love, annihilation, and the ecstatic, Steve on Romeo and Juliet, browsing, reality TV, Henry James, bookmaking, Iris Murdoch, ruminating, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you, just like on Saturdays. If you like what you see, why not sign up for a paid subscription? The WRB is for you, and your support helps keep us going.]