A Sweet Unrest

#@!% Wordsworth

Not really. I mean, I am angry, but I'm angry with myself and taking it out on him. I haven't been paying attention, I've been coasting along and now I realize that I am six books into The Prelude and I have no idea what is going on. None. It was the passage about Mount Blanc and Chamonix that brought it home. Since I've been there I felt I could, finally, relate to one of his experiences so I stopped to think about it and that's when I noticed that I don't understand any of it. Here is the beginning of the passage:

That day we first
Beheld the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved
To have a soulless image on the eye
Which had usurped upon a living thought
That never more could be.

OK, what? It's one of the most jaw-dropping sights in the world, so what is the problem? So I reread this book, which is called Cambridge and the Alps, and I found this passage which I vaguely remembered. This is about his life at Cambridge, before the trip:

And not to leave the picture of that time
Imperfect, with these habits I must rank
A melancholy (from humours of the blood
In part, and partly taken up) that loved
A pensive sky, sad days, and piping winds,
The twilight more than the dawn, autumn than spring-
A treasured and luxurious gloom, of choice
And inclination mainly, and the mere
Redundancy of youth's contentedness.

I think I get this part, it's like choosing to wear all black and listen to a lot of Smiths maybe. So then I thought that his mopey reaction to Mont Blanc was a matter of teenage moodiness (actually I don't know exactly how old he is at this point, but that is the least of my worries and anyway it's post-university, so an angsty time). I was going with that, but then what he says next still doesn't make any sense to me. Here's the whole passage:

That day we first
Beheld the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved
To have a soulless image on the eye
Which had usurped upon a living thought
That never more could be. The wondrous Vale
Of Chamouny did on the following dawn,
With it's dumb cataracts and streams of ice,
A motionless array of mighty waves,
Five rivers broad and vast, make rich amends,
and reconciled us to realities.

So then to the OED (the two-volume Shorter- I once worked in a place that had the entire glorious 20 volume set and it was shelved right next to my desk, so basically heaven on earth as I spent slow periods happily reading away and it looked like I was working) to find out that 'dumb cataracts' means silent waterfalls. OK... I still don't know what he is saying here. Imagining Mont Blanc is better than seeing it, the waterfalls are silent, the water is frozen, the waves are motionless and.. what? What does this mean? Anyone? Bueller?

While I await your thoughts (please!), I am going to start the whole thing over from the beginning. I will understand this.

And later, when I'm not in a temper, I may admit that the language is rather beautiful whether or not I get it.

Contrast Podcast- Hot! Hot! Hot!

This week's Contrast Podcast celebrates summer, which is apparently a season of sun and warmth in many places. But who needs actual nice weather when we can listen to songs about the heat right here?

Cherries

This post was inspired by equal parts MJRC, who reminded me how much I love cherries, and Nat, who reminded me how much I love the John Mellencamp song Cherry Bomb.

I haven't taken many pictures this week but I had to snap these. We've had a lot of fires around here and the air is smoky so the light is strange. I haven't written much about The Prelude because Wordsworth and I are still slogging it out in the Alps. I was happy to get to this part because I've actually been hiking and camping around Mont Blanc and Chamonix, so now I feel like Wordsworth and I have a little something in common. In fact, it was while coming down from Mont Blanc that I discovered I have a touch of le vertige. I had to have my hand held all the way down but that wasn't so bad. I made it. The night sky there was incredibly beautiful- I'd never seen stars like that, and I haven't since. I would go outside my tent in the middle of the night and stare up at them even though it was cold. Wordsworth seems to have been less impressed but I'll write about that a bit later as I'm still puzzling it out. In the meantime, I will try to entertain. Once a showgirl, always a showgirl.

So, cherry songs! I started thinking about cherry songs and other than Cherry Bomb I thought of Warrant's Cherry Pie, which requires no elaboration, and also Cherry Tulips by Headlights, which I was on the fence about at first. But I like it, though not as much as I like Market Girl. Both are on their MySpace.

Any other cherry songs? What am I missing?

Even though it was not a warm a day today, I lay out on a blanket in the garden for a bit, eating the cherries and remembering so clearly what it felt like to be seventeen. I do still, truly, believe that holding hands means something, and that dancing means everything. Maybe more now than ever.

Sweet Thing

I wanted to highlight some of my favorite performances for Black Music Month but we can all see how far that's gotten (and if you haven't checked in for a bit, that would be nowhere). But I can make it all right with one song. This is originally a Chaka and Rufus tune, and that version is fantastic. It's the one I grew up with and would have been perfectly happy with all my life- if I hadn't ever heard this one by Mary J. Blige. The reason I like this one more is the intensity, the raw and ragged desperation in her voice that never lets up. I mean, that opening lyric puts everything on the line, right up front- 'I will love you anyway, even if you cannot stay... ' The vibe in the Chaka & Rufus version goes back and forth from desperation to laid-back funk. In Mary's version, the tension builds and builds, and I think it takes over in the second half of the song, from the 'you are my heat, you are my fire...' When Mary belts out that 'love me now or I'll go crazy' right there, you fear it may already be too late. I love the Chaka and Rufus, but Mary makes me break out in a cold sweat. Every time.

Some of her stuff can be too over the top for me but on this one, I think she gets it just right. It's from her first album, What's The 411, which I can't really recommend like I can her second, My Life, but I do have a soft spot for it. It's a little rough around the edges, not nearly as slick as her others. It's available everywhere.

Sweet Thing

Contrast Podcast- Babies

This week's Contrast Podcast is all about babies. Finally, some good parenting tips! Download or listen right here.

The Romantic Imagination

I picked this book up used and I like it. It's a collection of lectures given at Harvard in 1948-1949 by CM Bowra. The first and last chapters are about the English Romantics in general, and each of the middle chapters is devoted to one of the major Romantic poets. For each poet, Bowra looks at a representative poem in detail (for example, for Keats he takes Ode to a Grecian Urn) and he uses this as a departure point to discuss the poet's work, career and his place in Romantic thought.

I've found this book to be extremely helpful and a pretty good read too. I keep returning to it- it's the perfect companion to my project of reading through the Romantic poets. Here's a quote I love- Bowra is discussing how important the real, everyday world was to the Romantics:

"There are perhaps poets who live entirely in dreams and hardly notice the familiar scene, but the Romantics are not of their number. Indeed, their strength comes largely from the way in which they throw a new and magic light on the common face of nature and lure us to look for some explanation for the irresistible attraction which it exerts. In nature all the Romantic poets found their initial inspiration. It was not everything to them, but they would have been nothing without it; for through it they found those exalting moments when they passed from sight to vision and pierced, as they thought, to the secrets of the universe."

I can definitely see the truth of this in the Keats I read, and the importance of nature to Wordsworth is made very clear right from the beginning of The Prelude as well. But, say for us today, can this kind of inspiration only come from nature? Or is it possible to see whatever the 'familiar scene' is, even if it's a city scene, in a 'new and magic light'? Do you have to be in nature to pierce the secrets of the universe?

The Vinyl Villain

Just a quick note to wish my blogging hero, The Vinyl Villain, a very happy birthday. I can't recommend his 45 at 45 series highly enough. To me it represents what is best about music blogging. Not only does he have fantastic taste in music and lots of rare goodies, but he tells a great, heartfelt story about each track and it is really a joy to read. And the song he has at number one will not disappoint anyone either!!

Contrast Podcast- Pop The Question

This week's Contrast Podcast is made up entirely of songs whose titles are questions. You can download the episode or listen to it from the website by clicking right here. Why wait?

Meeting After Midnight Like We Do

This beautiful photo of Stockholm is by Diesmali.

Like everyone else I'm sure, I feel like there is never enough time. When I finally find a few minutes for myself, it's late. Or it's very early or it's the middle of the night. I never sleep all the way through anymore. There is always something to check. No matter how little sleep I've had, I wake up alert and ready to function now, not in a fog like I used to. That's a huge change- the completely unconscious, unending vigilance of motherhood.

But then sometimes when I'm up, it's nice. I have the house to myself and I can do whatever I want. Well, almost. Headphones and a flashlight and quiet movements and it works. I can see the city lights below from the front window and I love that. I think of the cover of Surf each time. It's a nice time to be up and doing things, writing or reading or listening. It's special and private and mine. It's important to me.

I start thinking about how hard that mouse had to work
night after night collecting all these things
while the people in the house were fast asleep
(From Workshop by Billy Collins)

It's hard to say which is more important, getting enough sleep or getting enough time. I guess it all depends on which need is most pressing at the moment.

When or where do you do your best thinking/reading/writing? How do you steal time?

Hmmm, Wordsworth

So, I'm not finding Wordsworth to be quite as immediately lovable as Keats. I'm a couple books into The Prelude (1805) and I'm feeling kind of eh about it. Maybe part of why it was so easy to fall for Keats is that Edward Hirsch's introduction to his poems is really informative, but also so admiring and exuberant that I couldn't wait to get cracking after reading it. The person who wrote the introduction to my volume of Wordsworth does not have Hirsch's joyous enthusiasm. It's super dry, academic writing and it makes me appreciate how lucky I was to start with Keats and Hirsch.

Then too, with reading so much depends on my own mood as well. I'm hoping to get a couple of uninterrupted hours to myself this weekend, and that I'll be mostly awake and really able to concentrate. That might do the trick. But right now I'm having a bit of trouble getting my footing.

In other news, I found a book of Billy Collins poetry. In my house! I have no idea how it got here. It appeared like magic and I'm so grateful for it. I can sneak a few lines of Billy Collins when I'm supposed to be doing something else and it resonates, it's not work. The language stays with me and then I have something to ponder while I go about the more mundane tasks of the day. And in this found volume, there is a even a poem called Lines Written Over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey which seems to poke a little fun at old Wordsworth.