And Trimmed Its Fire: from Journal 2: Part 2

Journal 2: Part II: ‘And Trimmed Its Fire’

Excerpt:

            In Roman Streets

            Shakespeare's Hamlet, citing the lines:

                   "The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead/Did squeak and gibber

                     in the Roman streets" from Act I, Scene i.

"The Shepherd of the Giant Mountains" : a ballad in which a shepherd kills a griffin that is attacking his sheep. The ballad had been translated into English in blank verse by Lewis Carroll's cousin Menella Bute Smedley in 1846, many years before the appearance of the Alice books. 

from Phantasmagoria:

Blue lights to burn… Condensing lens of extra power,

And set of chains complete:

"What with the things you have to hire -

The fitting on the robe -

And testing all the coloured fire -

The outfit of itself would tire

The patience of a Job!

"And then they're so fastidious,…

Wherever I was sent:

I've often sat and howled for hours,

Drenched to the skin with driving showers,

Upon a battlement.

"It's quite old-fashioned now to groan

When you begin to speak:

This is the newest thing in tone - "

And here (it chilled me to the bone)

He gave an AWFUL squeak.

            And Trimmed Its Fire…

            In the 1850 Prelude, ll. 418+, Wordsworth writes of his visit, circa 1790, to the severe Carthusian Monastery in Switzerland. Arnold's poem on the same subject, "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse," is from 1855:

"The silent courts, where night and day

Into their stone-carved basins cold

The splashing icy fountains play -

The humid corridors behold!

Where, ghostlike in the deepening night,

Cowl'd forms brush by in gleaming white." (31-6)

…

            "For rigorous teachers seized my youth,

And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire,

Show'd me the high, white star of Truth,

There bade me gaze, and there aspire.

Even now their whispers pierce the gloom:

What dost thou in this living tomb?" (67-72)

            Eternal Notes

            "Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then begin again,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in."  ~ Arthur Hugh Clough,  "Dover Beach

The Interrogation

We could have crossed the road but hesitated,

And then came the patrol;

The leader conscientious and intent,

The men surly, indifferent.

While we stood by and waited

The interrogation began.  He says the whole

Must come out now, who, what we are,

Where we have come from, with what purpose, whose

Country or camp we plot for or betray.

Question on question.

We have stood and answered through the standing day

And watched across the road beyond the hedge

The careless lovers in pairs go by,

Hand linked in hand, wandering another star,

So near we could shout to them.  We cannot choose

Answer or action here,

Though still the careless lovers saunter by

And the thoughtless field is near.

We are on the very edge,

Endurance almost done,

And still the interrogation is going on.     ~Edwin Muir, The Labyrinth (1949).

            The Cold Mist

A sheeted spectre white and tall,

The cold mist climbs the castle wall

And lays its hand upon thy cheek.

~Longfellow.

And would you mind, as a personal favour--considering what a lot of instruction this colloquy of ours will provide for the Logicians of the Nineteenth Century--would you mind adopting a pun that my cousin the Mock-Turtle will then make, and allowing yourself to be re-named Taught-Us?'

            `As you please!' replied the weary warrior, in the hollow tones of despair, as he buried his face in his hands. `Provided that you, for your part, will adopt a pun the Mock-Turtle never made, and allow yourself to be renamed A Kill-Ease!’  ~Lewis Carroll, What the Tortoise Said to Achilles

             The Lightless Face   

Every wing in the world had fallen…

Through muffled sobbing her hands

Played over the hard lid.

 I have not forgotten that lightless face;

  It rises in my mind without end, without end. ~ Gottfried Keller, Untitled poem

      The Pisa Griffin is a large bronze sculpture of a griffin, a mythical beast, which has been in Pisa in Italy since the Middle Ages, though it is of Islamic origin. It is the largest medieval Islamic metal sculpture known… The griffin has the head of an eagle, wings, and the body of a lion, or other mammal(s), with toes. Its dimensions are: height 107 cm; length 87 cm; width 43 cm. It is made of cast bronze (i.e. copper alloy) with the wings cast separately and held in place by rivets; it is largely hollow inside.  [Daniel’s vision: the last image…]

            The griffin is much the largest of a group of surviving Islamic bronze animals, most of which are much smaller and functioned as aquamaniles, perfume-burners and the like, and whose origin goes back to pre-Islamic Sassanian vessels. A much smaller group of middle-sized works contains several that were clearly fountainheads, probably originally arranged in circular groups facing outwards, in the manner of the famous stone lions still in place at the Alhambra in Granada… the "Cordoba Stag", the best known of the group after the Pisa Griffin… It is in the Museo Arqueológico Provincial de Cordoba, and was found in the ruins of the large palace-city Madinat Al-Zahra outside Cordoba… Smaller pieces are the "Kassel Lion" signed by Abd Allah Mattial from the 10th or 11th century… The griffin is generally agreed to have arrived in Pisa at some point during the late 11th or early 12th century, and may have been a spoil of one of the many successful "wars" or raids conducted by the Republic of Pisa against Islamic states at this period, when the small city was at the height of its power as a maritime republic. The successful attack in 1087 on Mahdia in modern Tunisia, capital of the local Zirid dynasty is one candidate.[21] The griffin was placed on a platform on top of a column rising from the gable above the apse at the east end of Pisa Cathedral, probably as part of the original construction, which was begun in 1064. This was a very prominent position, but one that meant that it could not be seen close up, and its Islamic origins were forgotten over the centuries.

            The replica Griffin above the apse of Pisa Cathedral (to right) in snow, with the Bapistry to the left and the Leaning Tower of Pisa at right[20]

             

            n 1828 the griffin was removed and placed in the Cathedral Museum, with a replica later placed in the original position. Once seen closely, the Kufic inscription made its Islamic origins plain… In recent years the griffin has travelled to exhibitions in Berlin in 1989, and Granada and New York in 1992. There is an ongoing "interdisciplinary project on the Pisa Griffin and related metalwork and material culture, in collaboration with Oxford University, Pisa University, Pisa Opera del Duomo, and the Istituto Superiore per il Restauro e Conservazione in Rome.

            Reinhardt Dozy wrote:,

"The fame of Córdoba penetrated even distant Germany: the Saxon nun Hroswitha, famous in the last half of the 10th century for its Latin poems and dramas, called it the Jewel of the World."

            The pillars of the Mezquita, famously, came from ruined churches and roman ruins all over the Arab-ruled world. The illusion of meditative symmetry is broken up a little bit on closer inspection; each pillar seems to be different to the next… Most potently symbolic of all[?], following the defeat of the Visigoths in 712 by the Arabs, Spain became the entrance point to Europe for the empire of Muhammad, the first setting for the encounters between Christianity and Islam that continue to rock the world today.

            And then came the new conquerors. Less than 90 years after Muhammad's death the Arabs had been making raids on Spain from their new territories in North Africa, testing the strength or weakness of the Visigoth kings. Finally they invaded along the spine of the country through Toledo and right up to Zaragoza in the north. By AD712, most cities had fallen. The governors sent from Damascus to keep an eye on this new conquest settled in Córdoba, and peace briefly reigned.

            But after a bloody coup in the heart of the empire, Damascus, the one surviving member of the ousted Ummayad family, Abd Al-Rahman I, made his way to Córdoba, and took over there. At this point the links between Al-Andalus, and the home of Islam were severed. Now Córdoba was a superpower in its own right, capital of a large Islamic country, and soon to become the location for one of the greatest Islamic buildings in the world, the Mezquita.

            At the crossroads of history

            To visit Córdoba is to be confronted with a new version of the past. Most westerners learn of the Greeks, the Romans, the European colonies. It is a strictly occidental viewpoint. Our learning has, we assume, come to us in a direct line from the Greeks. But in fact this is wrong. The significance of Córdoba in the world's history springs from two things. First, it is the place where, for a few centuries, Islam and Christianity coexisted relatively peacefully, in the years before the more brutal fundamentalisms of the Crusades.  [This is a LIE.  Research the Christian persecution for centuries with documentations of the well-known persecution, torture and martyrdom of Christians.]

            It was here in Córdoba that Columbus obtained permission for his historical journey across the Atlantic.

            Of Cabbages and Kings

            "The time has come," the Walrus said,

"To talk of many things:

Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--

Of cabbages--and kings--

And why the sea is boiling hot--

And whether pigs have wings."

            "But wait a bit," the Oysters cried,

"Before we have our chat;

For some of us are out of breath,

And all of us are fat!"

"No hurry!" said the Carpenter.

They thanked him much for that. ~ From The Walrus and the Carpenter

            The Stoat and the Field-Mouse Revisited

Peering, peeking out from behind the withered grass of the fields, the stoat and the field mouse first eyed one another---predator and prey of ancien regimen.  Then it began to rain.

.  In July or August, when the wind blew from Africa, the entire town appeared dead. The sun beat down, giving a grey, almost ashen colour to the countryside; fine sand covered the vines and olive trees

b.  Typhoon: :  "Well, then I think you ought to know that there's something going on here."

Charge of the Ibex:  “Those dreamy spectators of the world’s agitation are terrible

               once the desire to act gets hold of them.  They lower their heads and charge a wall

               with an amazing serenity which nothing but an undisciplined imagination can give.”

            The Lapwing’s Egg Cracked Open:  So, from whence did the iconoclast controversy come?  And, what is The Discarded Image?

“Sometimes loss includes the loss of religious symbols, institutions, meaning and even the seeming loss of God.  So, ‘How will God share this burden…with us?’” [cf. Ps.81.7]

plus ça change, and all that..

The Reawakening demonstrates that liberation from the camps was just the beginning of a long voyage of return that did not always lead to the desired destination. Due to an absurd turn of events, the book's heroes, Italian war refugees, are brought to a closed camp in Soviet Russia instead of the shores of Odessa, from which they might have sailed home.

The thaw was bound up with death and suffering, no less than the freeze that preceded it:

In the meantime, the thaw we had been fearing for so many days had started. and as the snow slowly disappeared, the camp began to change into a squalid bog. The bodies and the filth made the misty, muggy air impossible to breathe. Nor had death ceased to take its toll: the sick died in their cold bunks by the dozen, and here and there along the muddy roads...[page 14].

Still, the choice of this title and not "Liberation," which seems to be warranted by the subject matter of the chapter, points to a symbolic thawing: a process of transition from war, and the horror that was Europe, to peace, and from the long winter to spring.

Canto 4: The North Face and the High Pass

“I’m walking the cliff blind.” ~From the Edge

(1)  It was yesterday that pillar and post came unhinged, door stoops and window sills shredded in silence, when stone-anvil-ed words swirled spinning and wrenched the covers of night from soul.  I am left still in the cleft of the rock, astride creeping ledge,  shivering, cringing, exhausted, immersed in high, cold streams of wind, on the mountain.   And where is that place, the place, that bridgehead from the sheer cliffs of the north face ?

Once, a very eon past, there was a beautiful palace cast in marble, ornate with fire-cast bronze urns of a throne adorned with gold, pomegranates, black silk and sword.  Its iconic presence tenders my soul, as gold peacocks guard the brocaded dome of tranquility.  I carry that sword---though I’ve tried in desperation to fling it headlong to another.  A sword made of gold, so dense-weighted, bloodies the mind, body and spirit deep, deep, deep.  Yet it remains gold.  On the high cliffs it is too heavy to carry.  The high winds and icy storms do not respond to such weapons, anyway.

……………………………

"It was a mystical reaching of a different dimension. I don't know what happens when you die, but there is a mystical presence in our lives that extends to people who are no longer around, and you can connect with them in your emotions. At the moment, I didn't understand it, but now I know: Damn, he was there."  ~ Oscar Hijuelos, Thoughts Without Cigarettes

……………………….

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil. It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

            Leaky Roofs: Elie Wiesel visited the Jews of Eastern Europe and the countries of the U.S.S.R.  One Holocaust survivor asked him to do something about the leaky roofs of the decaying synagogues.