November Peaches

Here are three poems I especially like, the work of what anyone would describe as a very diverse trio of poets, but at the same time poetry that touches upon the human experience in the deepest sense. The poems speak so clearly for themselves, I would feel uncomfortable commenting upon any of the three in a pretense of interpretation or analysis. Most might agree that the written lines say it all.

Li-Young Lee is an American poet, though he was born in Jakarta of Chinese parents. He has published four collections of poetry, the most recent in 2008. The poem below comes from his 1986 collection, Rose.

“FROM BLOSSOMS” by Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes

this brown paper bag of peaches

we bought from the boy

at the bend in the road where we turned toward

signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,

from sweet fellowship in the bins,

comes nectar at the roadside, succulent

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into

the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Edna St Vincent Millay is a name already familiar to many lovers of poetry, and was the first woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Her life and her love affairs were often fodder for scandal, and her poetry unlike anything being written by either men or women of her day. The sonnet below is from The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1923). It can also be found here.

“SONNET XLIII” by Edna St Vincent Millay

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

Under my head till morning; but the rain

Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

Upon the glass and listen for reply,

And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

For unremembered lads that not again

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,

Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:

I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

I only know that summer sang in me

A little while, that in me sings no more.

Wendell Berry has published fiction, non-fiction, essays and poetry in volumes too numerous to mention. He was born in Kentucky in 1934. The poem below comes from his 1985 collection, The Collected Poems.

“THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS” by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

For those readers who would like to have these poems in one volume, I recommend what I believe is an excellent collection of poems selected and compiled by Garrison Keillor and called simply, Good Poems.

Souverän Revisited

Very rare that I ever see a review of a Pelikan Souverän in any of the many fountain pen related blogs. I myself wrote some lines back in February of this year about the 600 in the Souverän series, referring to the pen as the ‘top of the heap.’ To be honest, I am somewhat puzzled by the lack of opinion on Pelikan fountain pens in general and the Souverän series in particular, as far as American enthusiasts go. I’ve begun to believe that for one reason or another Pelikan has failed to impress the great majority of pen collectors (hobbyists, enthusiasts) in this country. In Japan, where I was introduced to Pelikan, all of the models, Souverän paramount among them, are wildly popular. I have no Japanese pen-enthusiast friends who don’t own at least two in the Souverän series.

This is a something of a mystery to me, because I know for certain, know as plain fact, that Pelikan is second to none in fountain pen design and manufacture. As most who are a little crazy about pens, I have pens of all makes, in all price ranges, and if you told me I had to give up all but one, the final decision would be down to the Pelikans, and would almost assuredly end with me choosing the Pelikan Souverän 600 as my buddy to the bitter end.

The single unchanging, never faltering characteristic of the Souverän series—and my 600 in particular—is its dependability. Pick it up and if there’s ink in the barrel, it will write beautifully every time, no question, whatever the ink, whatever the paper, no skips, drips or dryness. Ask me and I would tell you it’s the pen of the millennium.

Allow me to be redundant and repeat some of the 600’s specifics here. Like all Souverän models, the 600 is made of diamond ground acrylic resin. It is available in three colors: solid black with gold trim, red with black stripes, or green with black stripes. The red and green also have the gold trim. The gold plated clip is the traditional pelican beak-shape. The cap has the usual trademark of a gold pelican and chick against a black background. The 600 is 5.28 inches (13.4cm) long and weighs 16.4 grams without ink. This size is a good balance in either a small or a large hand. The nib is 14k with rhodium decoration, showing again the familiar pelican and chick.

My own Souverän 600 was special ordered from Fullhalter pen shop in Tokyo, and crafted by nibmeister, Nobuhiko Moriyama. Had to wait six weeks to finally get the pen, but from the day I picked it up, it became the standard against which I compare all fountain pens.

A Cold Radiance

Woke this morning to find that someone had flipped the calendar ahead about three weeks. No, I didn’t open my eyes to turkey and dressing and pumpkin pie, but rather biting cold and ferocious wind. Three steps from bed and I decided these tile floors are out of season, and jumped for the slippers.

Outside, over the water a special light show was in play, and despite the early morning cold and hard-blowing wind, I grabbed the camera and ran to take some photos. I did manage to get five or six pictures, but my state of half dress in the windy cold made it hard to get a steady shot. Not completely satisfied with the photos, but I believe the radiated light at least comes across.

The surf was tumbling too close to the sea wall and walking wasn’t an option. Near lunchtime the tide receded and the water calmed enough to make a walk look good. And so it was for the most part. But walking south with the wind at my back turned into an almost jog. I felt like I was on a treadmill with the speed set too fast and the track running away from me. When I finally turned back, heading north, I was walking face on into what seemed like a wind machine in overdrive, a hand on my chest pushing me back.

A cold beach in driving wind still has its particular beauty, but it’s all a new scene for me, and a reminder that some winter shopping is on the horizon.

The Lure of Beauty

Three years after his last book, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Michael Cunningham has returned with a new novel titled, By Nightfall. Set in post 9/11 New York, the story—though rather short of plot—is one of mid-life crisis in the world of a semi-wealthy art dealer named Peter Harris.

Harris is a mid-forties gallery owner living in a large Soho loft with his wife, Rebecca, founder-editor of a failing art journal. Their daughter has quit college to tend bar and live a rather sad life with an older female friend. This daughter Bea, less than comfortable with her father, leads him to think that he has always been a less than supportive father. On another level, Peter regrets the lost opportunities that have kept him a mid-level art dealer who may never have the chance to handle name artists. Passion is scant in this man’s life, but what there is of it blossoms from his appraisal of art, and the eternal power of beauty. The role of beauty and its meaning is a virtual totem in Peter’s life, and his thoughts are an ongoing inquiry into the relationship between beauty and meaning.

His wife has a baby brother whom they call ‘The Mistake’ or Mizzy, a name fraught with symbolism of a lot more than just a late birth in Rebecca’s family. Mizzy turns up for a stay with his sister and brother-in-law following another of his vague uncertain passages from drugs to rescue and back again. Cunningham stamps this character’s emptiness and pretense at depth by showing him holding at times an open copy of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a book he never seems to read from. Mizzy’s place in the novel is as an ideal of physical beauty, a catalyst to jar the protagonist from his stagnation, or impasse in the concerns of family and work. Order in Peter’s life is thus undone by the arrival of this undependable Adonis. Perhaps he is a beautiful ‘work of art,’ but one with destructive potential. Peter finds himself mesmerized by the young man’s beauty, and though troubled by the implications, longs to stare at, to touch him.

Mizzy maneuvers the besotted Peter into a position that guarantees his continued drug use will remain a secret from his sister, Rebecca. Unsure of his own sexuality, Peter considers throwing away all to pursue his wife’s brother. Interesting here is the contrast here between the character’s mid-life crisis and his teenager-like infatuation with Mizzy. Beauty can make fools of us all. And perhaps this is the purpose behind Cunningham’s use of a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Duino Elegies”—‘beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.’ Having exhausted Peter’s usefulness, the boy rebuffs his declarations of love, cadges plane fare from his sister and flies off to his next destination.

Peter and Rebecca, having seen through the veneer of their marriage, decide to remain together with a hope of restoring meaning to their lives together.

In his prize-winning book, The Hours, Cunningham used Virginia Woolfe’s Mrs Dalloway as a framework for his story. In his last book Walt Whitman was the springboard for his story. This time, we find repeated reference to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, and the elder Aschenbach’s infatuation with the beautiful boy, Tadzio. Cunningham is more than merely well-read and his use of literature, film, music, art and movies to color his character’s words and thoughts is impressive, to say the least. This time we are treated to Shakespeare, Styx, Bette Davis, Tolstoy, Seurat, Beethoven, Damien Hirst, Rodin, Joyce and Mann.

Cunningham’s writing is intelligent and elegant. Dialogue is pitch perfect, and his use of idiom to fine tune his characters is almost delicious. He opens his character’s mind to us through an ongoing inner monologue that reveals the simmering angst and uncertainty, the fear that life has reached its apogee.

As indicated in the title, By Nightfall is something of a dark novel. Not everyone will enjoy the gravity of this protagonist’s dilemma, but let us remind ourselves that Michael Cunningham does not often do light and airy. There is plenty to laugh or chuckle over in this new novel, but you won’t find Gidget.

Athens 2

Yesterday’s browsing through the yellowed pages of an old travel journal has stayed with me, and for much of today the days and hours of those pages have been in and out of my thoughts. Morning following arrival in Athens…

National Archeological Museum… The garden is filled with the busy twitter and warble of birds. Their song plays against the roar and screech of traffic on the crowded road fronting the museum, and while such counterpoint may seem inharmonious, it is in fact, a pleasing combination of sounds. I have always loved the sounds of a big city, and in this case the unexpected mix of birdsong and traffic falls naturally upon the ear, just as in another context, the sight of a 19th century building snuggled up to a modern skyscraper is a picture that can please the eye. The mix is exactly what is so beautiful. My nearby hotel room offers a similar cocktail of night sounds, the dominant voice there however is the dozen or so stray cats who populate the small park below, and whose quarrels I found not so soothing.

The museum building stands just fifty feet from where I sit. It is a huge museum and will require two or three short visits rather than one long and tiring marathon walk through. I expect too, the coolness of the museum interiors will also be a welcome relief from the August sun, and hopefully a balm to an already sun-reddened face.

I spend almost three hours inside the museum. After the first hour, seasonal crowds of tourists begin to dominate the galleries and my concentration wanes. Hard to see why national museums allow booming guided tours in the galleries. This is contrary to the very nature of art appreciation. Why not read a few pages from a book in order to glean some hint of what the art might be, or what it might mean?

The Mycenaean collection is impressive. The death masks, which are shaped from thin sheets of pure gold, are interesting in their lack of true portraiture. They are not portraits at all and are suggestive of only the most general facial features. A guidebook tell me that the splendid golden Mask of Agamemnon was named based upon mistaken identity. The actual king of that name lived 300 years after this death mask was made. There are also some gold drinking cups, simple in design and starkly beautiful—if solid gold can be described as stark.

Wandering through a gallery devoted to grave sculptures I come across an excerpt from Plato’s dialogue, Phaedrus. I am unfamiliar with this dialogue, so scribble the words in my notebook. Sophocles is speaking:

‘O beloved Pan and all other gods of this place

grant me that I be made beautiful in my soul within,

and that all external possessions be in harmony with my

inner man. May I consider the wise man rich, and may I

have such wealth as only the self-restrained man can bear or endure.

Do we need anything more Phaedrus?

For me that prayer is enough.’

Later in another gallery, a sculpture from the 3rd century BC holds my attention. It is a statue in marble of a small boy, five or six years old, stroking a goose with his left hand. The guidebook calls it ‘delightful and sensitive,’ and yes, it is that. But it is also enchanting in the subtlety of its modeling. Because it is a child, the strong, sharp lines of muscle are not visible. The figure glows with an almost tactile softness.

Outside the museum a still climbing sun beats down on sidewalks painted in sheets of glare, but I can’t allow myself to be a pantywaist and hide too long inside the cool galleries. Too many things to see, too many things to do. With sunglasses and cap in place, I push on with the sights of a sizzling Athens. Sometime today I must also look for another hotel. I’ve had enough of blood-crazed mosquitoes, yowling cats and rumbling motorcycles, and am ready to pay for air-conditioning.

Upon Arriving

Short of thoughts today. Rummaging through old files I came across a day in Athens, the first of about ten, and was pulled back to that very hot evening not many hours after my arrival there in August some years ago. My thoughts and impressions at the time were certainly through the eyes of a neophyte still puzzling out the what of Greece and its fabled capital.

From streetside on the Oktovriou-Patission Road…

Athens…The plane was about two hours late leaving Istanbul. From Izmir in western Turkey to Greece’s capital, the 175 mile distance is a complicated journey. Turkish airports, I found, are not quick with information on incoming and outgoing flights. During the two hours of waiting for departure from Istanbul the boarding gate shifted from 104 to 106 and then finally 103, changes not announced by loudspeaker but rather by security policemen standing in prominent places and shouting, in Turkish of course, that boarding would now be from a different gate. Confusion was compounded by an airport layout which has none of the switched gates in sight of the other. Other travelers were as rattled as I, an uncertain crowd of frantic faces, milling about fearing the plane might leave without us.

But here I am none the worse, seated at a sidewalk café sipping iced cappuccino. Haven’t yet gotten my bearings in this large city and can’t tell very well where I am exactly, other than to say it is across the street from the National Archeological Museum. In any case, it is near my hotel.

The hotel, appropriately enough, is called the Museum Hotel. Have some worry now that I might have made a mistake in the choice of a hotel here in Athens. But the reservation was made weeks ago in a distant country. On arriving, the reservation was in place, but now I’m not at all sure about sleeping six nights in a room WITHOUT air conditioning. The early evening temperature in Athens is ninety-nine degrees. My assigned room is bare enough to qualify for ascetic training; two small beds, a table, two chairs, bare walls, an uncarpeted floor illuminated by three naked forty-watt light bulbs. Arriving hot, tired and sweaty I wanted nothing more than a cool shower. There is a shower, however it includes neither curtain nor hook to hang the long, ropy shower nozzle on. In a clumsy attempt to be neat about it, I had a difficult shower and finished with the bathroom floor swimming in an inch of soapy water. Each time I let go of the nozzle it jumped and careened about like an angry snake, spitting water to all four walls.

The café I sit in now is very stylish and apparently one of a chain of cafés in Athens, called Flocafé Espresso Bar. I’ve had two coffees, practically gulping the first, so parched was I with the heat. The menu also lists beer, whiskey and sandwiches. Good to know that such a place is so near my ‘grand hotel.’

Trolley cars pass along the street in front of me, now and then igniting a flash of bluish electricity from cables over the street. Can’t remember the last time I was in a city of trolley cars. I am told that tickets are sold at kiosks near the trolley stops, a one-way fare of 100 drachma. Tomorrow will be my day to try them out. Taxis seem difficult to flag down. The custom appears to be for the driver to slow down with open window and the prospective fare shouts out a destination. If the driver feels it convenient, he stops, even though there might be another passenger already in the cab. Both passengers pay separate and full fares. I imagine this experience is in my future, perhaps as early as tomorrow. I took a taxi in from the airport, which proved a painless operation. Probably overcharged since the fare was negotiated rather than metered, but it didn’t impress me as exorbitant, though I haven’t yet gotten much of a handle on the value of the currency.

Cooler now, and sated with iced coffee, I figure a short stroll will be good, gradually making my way back to the hotel.

In the shower later, I manage on this second attempt to keep most of the water in the right place. I pass an uncomfortable night in my spartan room in the Museum Hotel. Much too hot to sleep without air conditioning, but I am bothered more by a swarm of insects coming in through the open veranda doors and plaguing me with bites and stings. There is also a gathering of motorcyclists in the park below who hang about racing their engines. Will look for a different hotel tomorrow. Sometime after 1:00 a.m. I finally drift off to sleep, my head tickled by thoughts of the Parthenon and Greek salad.

The Floating Mouth

Seems like a lot of people see a jellyfish and get the heebie-jeebies. On that account, there are certainly times when walking on the beach or swimming in the ocean are definitely not something those folks want to do. Jellyfish don’t bother me very much, and I’m not particularly concerned I might be stung when swimming in the ocean. Though I’ve been spared, it does happens on occasion; people get tangled up with a jellyfish and come out of the water none too happy. Where I’m situated on Florida’s eastern coast, it isn’t a problem that anyone need worry too much about. Painful encounters with jellyfish are not that frequent. More often than not, the jellyfish one sees on this stretch of beach are washed up onto the sand in a very visible blob, and easily avoidable. The photographs here are what you see a fair amount of on the beach, depending on currents and tides. There must have been a huge colony of them in the drift last night, because I passed a hundred or more of them on my walk this morning.

The common jellyfish in these parts is the Aurelia aurita, more commonly called the moon jelly or jellyfish, sometimes the saucer jelly. It is from five to forty centimeters in diameter, and depending upon the stage or phase of life, either clear jelly throughout, or colored by pink or purplish patterns. Most conspicuous are the four reddish gonads forming a clover-like shape in the center of the body mass.

The jellyfish is capable of only limited movement on its own, and even when swimming gets most of its movement from ocean currents. The animals’s primary aim is to stay near the water’s surface, whether by current or its own swimming. Food is most plentiful near the surface. Jellyfish are carnivorous animals and feed on plankton, which includes mollusks, crustaceans and young worms. They will also feed on other jellyfish. The tentacles, with their stinging cells are sometimes used to catch small fish.

Like anemones and corals, the moon jellyfish is an invertebrate, with a sac-like body, mouth and tentacles. It is made up of more than ninety-five percent water, and basically just a floating mouth and digestive system. They have no brain, no blood and no nervous system; have neither lungs or gills or tracheal system of any kind. They get oxygen by diffusion through their thin membrane. Aurelia jellyfish rarely live more than several months.

Fishermen do not always appreciate the presence of jellyfish, because they eat the larvae of commercially important fish. Jellyfish can also cause an outbreak of algae blooms, which neither fishermen nor tourists like.

Remember that the bell-shaped body of a jellyfish cannot sting, though it may be sticky with mucus. Should you be stung while swimming, aside from the pain, the sting is usually harmless. The best treatment for a jellyfish sting is household vinegar or—of all things—urine.

The movement of these strange creatures is truly beautiful to watch. Take a look at the short YouTube clip below.