These past days stretching into weeks of ice and snow have put me much in mind of that old “easeful” friend that Keats wrote of— . From about midnight until 3 or 4 each night I have been reading from Boris Pasternak— poetry, bolsheviks, siberia, beautiful women, war— the ideal antidote to days of mundane drudgery.
Every winter I read Dickens through the Christmas season, then something Russian until the spring. I suspect a good many male poets of a certain age received an impulse into poetry on some primal level, in their teens, from watching the David Lean production of Dr. Zhivago over and over again on a wide screen in some old theatre house. Yuri Zhivago in that otherworldly ice-enshrouded empty house, with his mistress Laura asleep in the other room, and he sitting alone at a table with a pen, a sheet of paper and a solitary candle, courting his half-frozen muse in the depths of the Siberian night. The archetypal poet.
Winter hangs on here. The backyard angels are ensconced in ice, sheltering among the spruces. The robins, who arrived some time ago, are lying low. In the frozen ground the bulbs are torpid, awaiting rumors of worms and rebirth. In the early twilight I place a candle in the window and watch as it warms a halo in the frost.
I see you are still amid the terrors and pleasures of literature–still ensconsed, I suppose, in your bookish citadel overlooking the cemetery–a subject for sibilance, and a scion of leisure. Winter here, to your North and West, so far from heaven and close enough as I want to Minnesota, has never left. There were only a few days of Testing The Spring Circuits, none of which drew me out of my little meditation cave, or my even smaller Notebook.
“a mind of winter”–is it Stevens? The books are long gone here, but I’m sure you’ll recognize it, be itched enough by it to scratch and look it up. I, too, read [past tense] Dickens at Christmas, and Chesterton, and Belloc. Now I sit, chanting 3 times a day, the sonorous Tibetan of Refuge and Bodhicitta, amid my dorje, drilbu, and damaru. and, in the late afternoon as it glides into early evening, burning the incense for the recently dead which is fortified with the 3 whites–flour, butter, and yogurt–and the 3 sweets–sugar, molasses, and honey–while playing the aggressively bell-sweet tingsha or ghost cymbals. The incense smells like baking oatmeal cookies, and I hope the dead enjoy it as much as I do.
I never did much with the Russians. They were just so…so…so Russian, brooding and bleak and fate driven.
I got to here this morning after a dream of Maid Marian, still wearing, as the women of our dreams do, a buttermilk colored dress from the 70′s and driving around in my old baby blue Ford Fairmont of the 80′s. At the conclusion of our discussion about Alfred Stieglitz, she walked away, as straight and swift as ever, leaving me, a fat Friar Tuck, huffing and puffing in her wake.
Then it all morphed into the Dalai Lama as a young boy in the Potala Palace in Lhasa in the 40′s, predicting the coming Chinese invasion to his tutors and ministers.
So how’s by you?
Joe,
Many thanks for all your comments. I’m slow responding because the flu and a killer migraine of several days duration make the very act of thinking impossibly painful. Very good to hear from you. I look forward to continuing our conversation once I am off my sickbed.
Bradley
All kidding aside, now that I’ve had a chance to browse it, this “experiment in autobiography and poetry” is really very exciting. Years ago I read some of these narratives in their early incarnations and I am very impressed at how well they fit the blog form, particularly how the pictures soften the intellectual
appearance of the “river” convention and make your use of it more intimate and convincing.
I am going to try to comment on some of the specific 12 narratives, as soon as I sink a little more deeply into them. My talents, such as they are, lie far more in the domain of literary analysis than creation and I am both pleased and grateful that you have put these in a form that offers the chance of a response.
I will give you my best.