Possessed by Memory
Page 43
Yet though we knew the course was hazards and nothing else
It was still a shock when, almost a quarter of a century later,
The clarity of the rules dawned on you for the first time.
They were the players, and we who had struggled at the game
Were merely spectators, though subject to its vicissitudes
And moving with it out of the tearful stadium, borne on shoulders, at last.
There is ambiguity in that last line: is a slain agonist or a victor carried out?
“Evening in the Country” is a poem of rehabilitation that commences in the tonal flatness of trauma:
I am still completely happy.
My resolve to win further I have
Thrown out, and am charged by the thrill
Of the sun coming up.
Ashbery gently wants to read the vista as a new signature of being, yet the menace abides. On an edge between traumatic event and turmoil to come, the poem tropes that edge as an “unblinking chariot.” The image fuses a Yeatsian pitiless blankness and what one might call the vehicular form of divinity. I think of John currently rehabilitating from severe illness and my own congenital struggle each morning with the consequences of heart failure. Ashbery with his acute clairvoyance, his noble far-seeing, catches the anxious expectation of trauma to come.
Houseboat Days (1977) was Ashbery’s seventh major volume and one of the three or four best. I introduced him in 1976 at a Yale reading and was startled by first encountering “Wet Casements.” I asked him for a copy after the reading and absorbed it during the next few days:
When Eduard Raban, coming along the passage, walked into the open doorway, he saw that it was raining. It was not raining much.
Kafka, Wedding Preparations in the Country
The concept is interesting: to see, as though reflected
In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through
Their own eyes. A digest of their correct impressions of
Their self-analytical attitudes overlaid by your
Ghostly transparent face. You in falbalas
Of some distant but not too distant era, the cosmetics,
The shoes perfectly pointed, drifting (how long you
Have been drifting; how long I have too for that matter)
Like a bottle-imp toward a surface which can never be approached,
Never pierced through into the timeless energy of a present
Which would have its own opinions on these matters,
Are an epistemological snapshot of the processes
That first mentioned your name at some crowded cocktail
Party long ago, and someone (not the person addressed)
Overheard it and carried that name around in his wallet
For years as the wallet crumbled and bills slid in
And out of it. I want that information very much today,
Can’t have it, and this makes me angry.
I shall use my anger to build a bridge like that
Of Avignon, on which people may dance for the feeling
Of dancing on a bridge. I shall at last see my complete face
Reflected not in the water but in the worn stone floor of my bridge.
I shall keep to myself.
I shall not repeat others’ comments about me.
The poem itself is an epistemological snapshot of its poet. Ashbery seems haunted by Shakespeare’s dark comedy Troilus and Cressida and by one exchange between Achilles and the dog-fox Ulysses:
ACHILLES: …what, are my deeds forgot?
ULYSSES: Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion…
Reflections, streaming, ghostly transparency, drifting, prepare processes crumbling and sliding until the poet’s name threatens to be lost. Time the overhearer has a wallet at his back wherein he puts bills for oblivion. In my frequent phone conversations with John Ashbery, both of us knowing we would not meet again, I sometimes concluded by quoting to him the direct credo of the closing lines of “Wet Casements”:
I want that information very much today,
Can’t have it, and this makes me angry.
I shall use my anger to build a bridge like that
Of Avignon, on which people may dance for the feeling
Of dancing on a bridge. I shall at last see my complete face
Reflected not in the water but in the worn stone floor of my bridge.
I shall keep to myself.
I shall not repeat others’ comments about me.
For me this is haunting. A few nights back, I had a singular nightmare in which I had walked too far and hailed a taxi to take me back to the Greenwich Village loft I am now forsaking. I had only a few coins for payment and was penalized by a grotesque incarceration. In the dream, I recited this closing passage of Ashbery’s poem to placate the irate driver, to no avail. I awoke bleakly and wondered whether I feared I never would see my complete face reflected in anything I could build. Ashbery’s glory is to have built an escape from narcissism into the haven of his constant readers.
Houseboat Days is rich and various. One of its splendors is the Orphic elegy with a difference, “Syringa.” “Syrinx,” by way of Latin, stems from the Greek for “channel” or “pipe” and can mean a set of panpipes. In relaxed mode and almost limpid, the poem opens with the myth rendered as a throwaway:
Orpheus liked the glad personal quality
Of the things beneath the sky. Of course, Eurydice was a part
Of this. Then one day, everything changed. He rends
Rocks into fissures with lament. Gullies, hummocks
Can’t withstand it. The sky shudders from one horizon
To the other, almost ready to give up wholeness.
Then Apollo quietly told him: “Leave it all on earth.
Your lute, what point? Why pick at a dull pavan few care to
Follow, except a few birds of dusty feather,
Not vivid performances of the past.” But why not?
All other things must change too.
The seasons are no longer what they once were,
But it is the nature of things to be seen only once,
As they happen along, bumping into other things, getting along
Somehow. That’s where Orpheus made his mistake.
Of course Eurydice vanished into the shade;
She would have even if he hadn’t turned around.
No use standing there like a gray stone toga as the whole wheel
Of recorded history flashes past, struck dumb, unable to utter an intelligent
Comment on the most thought-provoking element in its train.
Only love stays on the brain, and something these people,
These other ones, call life. Singing accurately
So that the notes mount straight up out of the well of
Dim noon and rival the tiny, sparkling yellow flowers
Growing around the brink of the quarry, encapsulates
The different weights of the things.
Ashbery’s Apollo is unique. Current readers, a few birds of dusty feather, seem archaic, and even an Orphic agon hardly competes with the vivid performances of the past. Insouciantly, Ashbery asks, “Why not?,” embracing the Heraclitian flux. Orpheus and Apollo are mistaken. Ashbery places his faith in singing accurately, thus following Wallace Stevens in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”:
IT MUST BE ABSTRACT
IX
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
…But apotheosis is not
The origin of the major man. He comes,
&nbs
p; Compact in invincible foils, from reason,
Lighted at midnight by the studious eye,
Swaddled in revery, the object of
The hum of thoughts evaded in the mind,
Hidden from other thoughts, he that reposes
On a breast forever precious for that touch,
For whom the good of April falls tenderly,
Falls down, the cock-birds calling at the time.
My dame, sing for this person accurate songs.
Gentler than Stevens, Ashbery is slyly content to trace the origin of the minor man who steps aside knowing it must change:
But it isn’t enough
To just go on singing. Orpheus realized this
And didn’t mind so much about his reward being in heaven
After the Bacchantes had torn him apart, driven
Half out of their minds by his music, what it was doing to them.
Some say it was for his treatment of Eurydice.
But probably the music had more to do with it, and
The way music passes, emblematic
Of life and how you cannot isolate a note of it
And say it is good or bad. You must
Wait till it’s over. “The end crowns all,”
Meaning also that the “tableau”
Is wrong. For although memories, of a season, for example,
Melt into a single snapshot, one cannot guard, treasure
That stalled moment. It too is flowing, fleeting;
It is a picture of flowing, scenery, though living, mortal,
Over which an abstract action is laid out in blunt,
Harsh strokes. And to ask more than this
Is to become the tossing reeds of that slow,
Powerful stream, the trailing grasses
Playfully tugged at, but to participate in the action
No more than this. Then in the lowering gentian sky
Electric twitches are faintly apparent first, then burst forth
Into a shower of fixed, cream-colored flares. The horses
Have each seen a share of the truth, though each thinks,
“I’m a maverick. Nothing of this is happening to me,
Though I can understand the language of birds, and
The itinerary of the lights caught in the storm is fully apparent to me.
Their jousting ends in music much
As trees move more easily in the wind after a summer storm
And is happening in lacy shadows of shore-trees, now, day after day.”
Again Ashbery remembers Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida:
ULYSSES: Sir, I foretold you then what would ensue:
My prophecy is but half his journey yet;
For yonder walls, that pertly front your town,
Yon towers, whose wanton tops do buss the clouds,
Must kiss their own feet.
HECTOR: I must not believe you.
There they stand yet, and modestly I think
The fall of every Phrygian stone will cost
A drop of Grecian blood: the end crowns all,
And that old common arbitrator, Time,
Will one day end it.
Orpheus and Ashbery alike are chastened by the flowing and fleeting. With an eloquent shrug, each disavows finalities and subsides in acquiescence. Time renders regret otiose:
But how late to be regretting all this, even
Bearing in mind that regrets are always late, too late!
To which Orpheus, a bluish cloud with white contours,
Replies that these are of course not regrets at all,
Merely a careful, scholarly setting down of
Unquestioned facts, a record of pebbles along the way.
And no matter how all this disappeared,
Or got where it was going, it is no longer
Material for a poem. Its subject
Matters too much, and not enough, standing there helplessly
While the poem streaked by, its tail afire, a bad
Comet screaming hate and disaster, but so turned inward
That the meaning, good or other, can never
Become known. The singer thinks
Constructively, builds up his chant in progressive stages
Like a skyscraper, but at the last minute turns away.
The song is engulfed in an instant in blackness
Which must in turn flood the whole continent
With blackness, for it cannot see. The singer
Must then pass out of sight, not even relieved
Of the evil burthen of the words. Stellification
Is for the few, and comes about much later
When all record of these people and their lives
Has disappeared into libraries, onto microfilm.
A few are still interested in them. “But what about
So-and-so?” is still asked on occasion. But they lie
Frozen and out of touch until an arbitrary chorus
Speaks of a totally different incident with a similar name
In whose tale are hidden syllables
Of what happened so long before that
In some small town, one indifferent summer.
Earlier in the poem, Ashbery plays on another meaning of “syringe” when accurate singing mounts notes that rival the tiny, sparkling yellow lilacs. Orpheus, transmuted into a lilac-like cloud, casts aside regrets and with Ashbery embraces a Whitmanian tally that may not be materia poetica. Whitman would have been appalled by Ashbery’s vision of a poem afire, a bad comet turned so inward that meaning is lost. Song and singer pass into blackness.
The Orphic poet that Emerson prophesied and Whitman fulfilled, like almost all poets, vanishes into libraries. I recall attending the last of a series of lectures given by Robert Graves at Cambridge University in 1954 that took the angry title “These Be Your Gods, O Israel!” in reference to the molten calf in Exodus 32:8. I winced as Graves denounced Yeats, Eliot, and other idols. Questions were invited. I had some acquaintance with Graves and felt free to ask, “What about Wallace Stevens?” Graves looked puzzled and then said, “Ah yes, Walker Stevens, I heard he was getting on.” I allowed myself to comment: “One would hope so. He is now seventy-five.” Graves confused the major American poet of our era with an advertising agency. Over a drink at the Anchor Pub afterward, the prophet of the White Goddess granted that some early Wallace Stevens gave him pleasure.
I cite this because I had told Ashbery this anecdote, since “But what about / So-and-so?” always reminded me of that Gravesian moment. The sadness of poetic demise is in the bleakness of lying frozen and out of touch until a mistake renews memory. When I think of John Ashbery’s style and ethos, I find them encapsulated in the hidden syllables:
Of what happened so long before that
In some small town, one indifferent summer.
That American closure leads me on to Ashbery’s tenth volume, A Wave (1984), which opens with the condensed menace of “At North Farm”:
Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?
Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
> That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?
The Finnish epic Kalevala has had a singular effect upon Ashbery. North Farm is on the border of hell. Heroes go there to win their brides, who resist since they are witches. John told me once that his farm upbringing gave him no pleasure. “At North Farm” opens with a courier who is somewhat Kafkan and unlikely to find you. There is an ironic allusion to the account in Herodotus of the Persian system of mounted postal carriers:
It is said that as many days as there are in the whole journey, so many are the men and horses that stand along the road, each horse and man at the interval of a day’s journey; and these are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed.
All of us recognize this as the origin of the motto of the American postal system, which is now a travesty.
This sestet has no immediate reference to North Farm. But we worry about the thing the messenger intends to give us. Can it be our death? The octave enhances the quiet terror of our waiting. Almost nothing grows, yet meal, fish, and birds are abundant. An open question doubles itself when we propitiate the impending with the apotropaic dish of milk. Will it suffice to hold off what is coming?
Sestet and octave abide as open questions. I have loved John Ashbery’s poetry and the poet himself for sixty years and wonder if that openness is the subtlest clue to his very American negative sublimity.
* * *
—
Those paragraphs were written while Ashbery was still alive. He died at the age of ninety. I had known him since 1956. In the sixty years of our friendship, we stayed in touch mostly by phone calls and letters, though I introduced him frequently at his poetry readings in New Haven and New York City. We also spent time together in Portugal and once or twice in Paris.
John abroad seemed very different from John in America. He was quietly joyous, and anxious only about hotels and schedules. When I think of him and Archie together, I realize that Archie, who looked serene, suffered considerably from anxious expectations at certain times. John on the surface might seem troubled, but generally was more at home in the world. I loved them both as poets and as persons, yet I was closer to Archie and more in awe of John. Both were major poets and central to American tradition. Now, in early January 2018, I realize that the Age of Ashbery has just ended, even as the Stevens era reached conclusion in early August 1955, a month before I started my ongoing teaching career at Yale.