The White Lotus Eaters

Friday, August 13, 2021

Like many, I’ve been completely sucked into Mike White’s dark satire, The White Lotus on HBO.

In the penultimate episode of the first season, “The Lotus-Eaters,” the hotel manager of the Hawaiian resort, Armond, recites four lines of part of Tennyson’s poem, “The Lotos-eaters.” Here is the part in full:

Hateful is the dark-blue sky,
Vaulted o’er the dark-blue sea.
Death is the end of life; ah, why
Should life all labour be?
Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,
And in a little while our lips are dumb.
Let us alone. What is it that will last?
All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.
Let us alone. What pleasure can we have
To war with evil? Is there any peace
In ever climbing up the climbing wave?
All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave
In silence; ripen, fall and cease:
Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.

More about the poem here.

Illustration of Tennyson’s “Lotos-eaters” by W.E.F. Britten

The story of the lotus-eaters comes from a tiny little section in chapter 9 of Homer’s The Odyssey. Most of the chapter is about Odysseus’s encounter with the cyclops, but before, they hit the island “of those who live on food from lotus flowers.” Odysseus sends his scouts “to find out / what kind of people lived there on that island.” Here’s the Emily Wilson translation:

The scouts encountered humans. Lotus-Eaters,
who did not hurt them. They just shared with them
their sweet delicious fruit. But as they ate it,
they lost the will to come back and bring news
to me. They wanted only to stay there,
feeding on lotus with the Lotus-Eaters.
They had forgotten home. I dragged them back
in tears, forced them on board…

The mariners in the Tennyson poem are a little different than Odysseus’s men: they know what they’re up to.

Armond himself is a kind of lotus-eater, in two ways: his job is to help his guests forget all their troubles, but he himself has been ingesting substances to escape his own circumstances. Who the hell is Armond, anyways, and who was he that he can recite Tennyson by memory? I guess we might find out Sunday.

* * *

Related reading: Fleabag’s Titian

Clichés, puns, and hooks

Tuesday, August 3, 2021

kay Ryan limelight

This morning’s copied and marked-up poem is Kay Ryan’s wonderful “Lime Light,” collected in The Best of It.

Ryan’s poems will often start by thinking about clichés:

Her poems, she says, don’t begin with a simple image or sound, but instead start “the way an oyster does, with an aggravation.” An old saw may nudge her repeatedly, such as “It’s always darkest before the dawn” or “Why did the chicken cross the road?”

“I think, ‘What about those chickens?’” she says, “and I start an investigation of what that means. Poets rehabilitate clichés.”

Some do, perhaps, but many wouldn’t dare to enter such familiar territory. Ryan, however, adds depth and so many surprises that the silliest clichés become fertile ground.

She expanded on this rehabilitation of clichés in her interview with the Paris Review:

I often find myself thinking in clichés. I’ll urge myself on with various bromides and chasten myself with others. When I want to write they’re one way to start thinking because they’re so metaphorically rich. For instance, take the word limelight, or being in the limelight—not really a cliché but a cherished idiom. Before electric light, they heated lime, or calcium oxide, to create incandescence for stage lights. In my poem, “Lime Light,” the limelight comes from a bowl of limes. It’s ridiculous, but it’s not nothing, not just a joke. It’s thinking about how limelight doesn’t work very well. You can’t do anything by limelight.

(Emphasis mine.)

After I copied out “Lime Light,” I found this clipping of George Clinton talking about recording Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain:

Pool poems

Tuesday, July 20, 2021

When I was a kid, my mom and I would played “The Alphabet Game.” We’d pick a theme and then try to come up with words for each letter of the alphabet. My eight-year-old and I have started our own alphabet game, only we use it to make dada-ish nonsense poems together in the pool. (I jot them down in my waterproof notebook.)

Copy a poem and pick it apart

Thursday, July 15, 2021

When I don’t know what to write in my diary I copy a poem by hand or with the typewriter. (I like copying prose by hand, but I like typing out poems so I can see how the lines play out cleanly on the page.)

After I’ve copied the poem, I get out my paper dictionary, and I pick the poem apart, word by word, looking up all the words I don’t know, but especially the words I sort of know, or think I know, as these words are sometimes the trickiest. You’re rarely aware of all a word’s various meanings or its origins. A word you think you know is often a word you don’t really know at all.

This activity almost always gives me something new to write about — in this case, the idea of “stealing near,” or getting close to something, stealthily.

Copying is how we learn.

Cherish, conserve, consider, create

Thursday, April 22, 2021

“‘Cherish, conserve, consider, create’: you could do worse than to live your life according to the principles propounded by the composer Lou Harrison,” wrote Alex Ross.

I fell down a rabbit hole yesterday, listening to Harrison’s music and reading about his life. In addition to being a musician, composer, and maker of musical instruments, Harrison was also a poet, a painter, and a calligrapher.

In my quest to find out if he ever actually explained his motto, I came across a scan of his wonderful Music Primer, a 50-page booklet of his ideas about music, full of calligraphy and diagrams. Here’s a sample page:

The primer is full of little nuggets of wisdom, such as:

“The path to silliness nowadays is to allow one’s self to become indebted to a silly society — do not do it. Find out what you yourself can and will afford — do only that.”

“Originality, personality, or style can neither be encouraged nor prevented. Forget the matter.”

“Always compose as though there were plenty of paper.”

Alas, I have yet to find any explanation of Harrison’s motto: “Cherish, conserve, consider, create.” I’m curious as to whether the 4 Cs are linear or non-linear. I have a bad habit, when someone lists principles or elements, to assume they unfold one after the other, chronologically. I’m not sure if Harrison’s motto unfolds in any particular order, but one order the items are listed in is alphabetical: in fact, “conserve” is followed directly by “consider” in my American Heritage Dictionary.

I have my own ideas:

Cherish, hold dear, treat with tenderness and affection.

Conserve, save what’s worth saving, protect it from harm or loss, use it carefully, avoid waste.

Consider, think carefully about it all, form an opinion.

Create, produce, bring new things into being.

Poet Dana Gioia brought up Harrison’s motto when discussing the “conservative” nature of poetry. He says he sees the whole notion of art as one of “conservation,” of “looking at all the achievements of the past and figuring out what it is we save and what it is that we need to add to move forward.” The really great poets, he says, are conserving culture, and you get the sense when “reading these wonderful poems that everything that was worthwhile and usable in the past somehow found a place in these poems.” Like in math or science, Gioia says, the poet shouldn’t just throw everything out, but should “take it and you would build on it to make something that was meaningful for the moment.”

“Conservative” is a word with loaded meaning and heavy connotation, especially in America and in the crews I run with, but one of the reasons I think Steal Like An Artist is so popular is that though its seems completely radical at first, there is a conservative — in the good sense of the word, the sense of saving what’s worth saving — element running through the book: its message, essentially, is to know what came before you so you can turn it into something of your own.

Because, perhaps counterintuitively, one of the beset ways to “make it new,” is to steal from places alien in space or time, often into the deep past. Here, for example, is Gioia’s advice to students:

Pay attention to what interests you, not into this kind of novelty-driven commercial culture we’re in…. Punk yourself out of the daily ephemeral culture and immerse yourself into things that are going to be still there 10 years later or 100 years later. I think the distractions for younger people today are so extreme that they learn very little about the past. Therefore, they learn very little about the present, because you can’t understand anything unless you have a point by which to judge it as a point of perspective.

Or, in other words: “Steal old stuff.”