Girls on the Bridge (Derek Mahon)

I found a copy of this chapbook on the giveaway shelf in our local library and brought it home, knowing only that the author, Derek Mahon, was a modern Irish poet of good reputation. It was published by Gallery Books in Dublin in 1981.

Mahon, who died in 2020, presents some initial difficulties for the American reader, for anyone, that is, to whom the names Rathlin Island or Roscoff mean as little as they did to me. If Mahon drops the name of Somhairle Buidh (as he spells it) into a poem (as he does), he's not going to gloss it for the uninitiated. But the poems repay the trouble. Several of the best (and most accessible) of them are responses to paintings by Pieter de Hooch (in the title poem), Paolo Uccello, and Edvard Munch. The last is represented by a scene of several girls standing on a bridge, which could be any of a number of canvases the artist created on the same theme, perhaps the one below.

Here are the first three stanzas:

Audible trout,
Bound to be midges. Beds,
Lamplight and crisp linen, wait
In the house there for the sedate
Limbs and averted heads
Of the girls out

Late on the bridge.
The dusty road that slopes
Past is perhaps the high road south,
A symbol of world-wondering youth,
Of adolescent hopes
And privileges;

But stops to find
The girls content to gaze
At the unplumbed, reflective lake,
Their plangent conversational quack
Expressive of calm days
And peace of mind.

Transcendental

A quick hopscotch from Sonny Rollins to Lope de Vega and back again.

When I think of Sonny Rollins the first thing that comes to mind isn't Saxophone Colossus or The Bridge, as fine as those records are, but his early work with the trumpeter Clifford Brown, first as a sideman in the Clifford Brown and Max Roach Quintet (Clifford Brown and Max Roach at Basin Street), along with the pianist Richie Powell and bassist George Morrow, and then as a leader (with the same line-up) on Sonny Rollins Plus 4. Rollins and Brown were close contemporaries, born just a few months apart, but Brown (and Powell, and Powell's wife Nancy) were killed one terrible night on the Pennsylvania Turnpike not long after those records were made. Rollins outlived him by almost seventy years.

I can't remember that Julio Cortázar ever mentioned Sonny Rollins, but he certainly must have known who he was, since he was a great admirer of Clifford Brown, about whom he wrote the following (in Thomas Christensen's translation):

When I want to know what the shaman feels in the highest tree on the path, face to face with a night apart from time, I listen once more to the testament of Clifford Brown, a wing-beat that rends the continuum, that invents an island of the absolute within disorder. And afterwards, once again the custom wherein he and so many others are dead.

Cortázar took up the theme of the "others" who have gone before late in his life, in Un tal Lucas, in a brief piece that in Gregory Rabassa's translation is entitled "Steady, Steady, Six Already":

After the age of fifty we begin to die little by little in the deaths of others. The great magi, the shamans of our youth, successively go off... Everyone has his beloved ghosts, his major interceders — the day arrives when the first of them horribly bursts out in the newspaper and radio scene. Maybe we'll take some time to realize that our death has begun on that day too; I knew it the night when in the middle of dinner someone indifferently alluded to a television news item that said Jean Cocteau had just died in Milly-la-Forêt and a piece of me fell dead too onto the tablecloth in the midst of the conversational phrases.

The rest have followed along, always in the same way, radio or newspaper, Louis Armstrong, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Duke Ellington, and last night, while I was coughing in a hospital in Havana, last night a friend's voice that brought the rumor from the outside world to my bed, Charles Chaplin. I shall leave the hospital, I shall leave cured, that's for certain, but, for a sixth time, a little less alive.

The perplexing title that Rabassa provides is barely more inscrutable than the original "Burla burlando ya van seis delante," but this turns out to be an allusion to a famous sonnet by Lope de Vega, the "Soneto de repente" or "Instant sonnet," an amusing bit of metapoetry in which the poet says that someone named Violante has asked him to write a sonnet, and he responds by writing a sonnet about writing the sonnet.

Un soneto me manda hacer Violante,
que en mi vida me he visto en tanto aprieto;
catorce versos dicen que es soneto,
burla burlando van los tres delante.

Yo pensé que no hallara consonante
y estoy a la mitad de otro cuarteto,
mas si me veo en el primer terceto,
no hay cosa en los cuartetos que me espante.

Por el primer terceto voy entrando,
y parece que entré con pie derecho
pues fin con este verso le voy dando.

Ya estoy en el segundo y aun sospecho
que voy los trece versos acabando:
contad si son catorce y está hecho.

There are translations available online and I won't attempt another. The relevant part for us is the first stanza, in which, roughly paraphrasing, he says that Violante has asked him to make a sonnet, that he's never been in such a quandary, that a sonnet, they say, is made up of fourteen lines, and that just playing around three have already gone ahead. Cortázar changes "three" to "six," since he's counting six "major interceders" who have gone before him. Although he may not have realized it at the time, Cortázar, already beset with health issues, would soon catch up with them, in 1984.

In a statement released upon his death, Rollins said “I think when the creative person ends, he continues in the next existence. I’m a person who believes this life isn’t the be-all and end-all of everything. A spiritual person doesn’t feel like that.” I'm not "a spiritual person," but I'm content to give him the last word.

Views of Iceland (Updated)

Fourteen years ago, during a week in Iceland, I visited the Listasafn Íslands (National Gallery of Iceland), which was then housing an exhibition entitled Inspired by Iceland. The exhibition covered various styles and periods, but one of the highlights for me was a group or fifteen or so dramatic landscape scenes executed by an unknown painter or painters, probably in the eighteenth century. Though somewhat crudely done, the paintings were fascinating, especially when one realized that they were essentially works of fantasy. Though they bear inscriptions connecting them to real places in Iceland, their topographic infidelity makes it likely that the artist had never visited the country. (Earlier post here.)

It's been difficult to find reproductions of the paintings — there are said to be twenty-four in all — or more information about them, but the Listasafn has now put them back before the public eye, with the collaboration of the Icelandic Folk and Outsider Art Museum, in an exhibition entitled Iceland from Afar, which will run until October 2026. The reproduction above is from the Listasafn's Facebook page; the version on the museum's website is drabber and murkier, and I suspect that the former is more faithful to the original.

Notebook: Chloe Dalton

It's become a bit of a commonplace in contemporary natural history memoirs that the subject can't only be the natural world; there has to be some kind of personal dysfunction that can be healed or at least moderated at the same time. This is true even in the very good ones, like H is for Hawk, where Helen Macdonald describes her depression and grief as well as her goshawk, and Amy Liptrot's The Outrun, which is about out-of-control alcoholism as much as it is about the wildlife of Orkney. By comparison, the author of Raising Hare seems fairly stable. Chloe Dalton has been a longtime foreign policy advisor to British politicians (mostly to Tories, apparently) and has spent much of her life abroad, but she doesn't tell us much about herself, her romantic life, or her choice of substances.

If I had an addiction, it was to the adrenaline rush of responding to events and crises, and to travel, which I often had to do at a few hours' notice. I avoided fixed plans that would remove the flexibility to take a bag and go, and what I missed of holidays and family occasions I believed I gained in novel, unrepeatable experiences and exposure to parts of the world I might otherwise never have seen: glimpses of Bamako, Baghdad, Kabul, Algiers, Damascus, Ulaanbaatar, Tallinn, Sarajevo and Siem Reap.

The precipitating factor in her book is the COVID pandemic, which grounds her, exiles her from her urban rounds, and confines her to a converted barn somewhere in the countryside that she has been slowly restoring. She finds a leveret — a baby hare — that has apparently been abandoned or orphaned, and decides to take it in, although no one seems to have much information about how to foster a leveret or even about whether it can be done at all. Though she feeds it with a pipette, she refuses to regard it as a pet and never names it. Surprisingly, the animal survives and soon makes itself at home. Eventually allowed to come and go at will, it wanders the nearby garden and fields, bears several litters of young (we — and Dalton — only then learn that it's a female), but still likes to come in and lie by the fireside. Apparently hares are notably clean and instinctively house-trained, and the greatest damage it does is to chew through some computer cables.

I see lots of rabbits in my perambulations, but my only experience of hares — except, perhaps, in a zoo — was during a bus ride one spring through the Berkshire Downs, where I witnessed from a distance the sparring and dancing of their mating season that gave rise to the expression "mad as a March hare." Anyone writing about hares is quick to point out that they aren't rabbits, and are very distinct in form and behavior. Oddly, the staff at the Library of Congress doesn't seem to have gotten the message. Here is the CIP (Cataloging in Publication) subject data from the copyright page of the Vintage Books edition:

Subjects: LCSH: European rabbit—Great Britain—Popular works. | European rabbit—Great Britain—Anecdotes. | European rabbit—Behavior—Great Britain—Anecdotes. | European rabbit—Infancy—Great Britain—Anecdotes. | Human-animal relationships—Popular works. | Dalton, Chloe.

I've been somewhat skeptical about attempts to cross the human-wildlife divide (see earlier post), but Dalton's book effectively makes the case that the divide isn't necessarily absolute, if one respects the fundamental nature of the animal in question. She doesn't domesticate the hare (it can't be done), and only partially "tames" it, but it accepts and values her presence and, perhaps of equal importance, re-centers her perspective on the relationship between human beings and the other inhabitants of the planet.

Notebook: The Use of Learning

Henry Fielding:

Booth, as the reader may be pleased to remember, was a pretty good master of the classics; for his father, though he designed his son for the army, did not think it necessary to breed him up a blockhead. He did not, perhaps, imagine that a competent share of Latin and Greek would make his son either a pedant or a coward. He considered likewise, probably, that the life of a soldier is in general a life of idleness; and might think that the spare hours of an officer in country quarters would be as well employed with a book as in sauntering about the streets, loitering in a coffee-house, sotting in a tavern, or in laying schemes to debauch and ruin a set of harmless ignorant country girls.

Amelia

Notebook: The Green Children

Thomas Keightley:

"Another wonderful thing," says Ralph of Coggeshall, "happened in Suffolk, at St. Mary's of the Wolf-pits. A boy and his sister were found by the inhabitants of that place near the mouth of a pit which is there, who had the form of all their limbs like to those of other men, but they differed in the colour of their skin from all the people of our habitable world; for the whole surface of their skin was tinged of a green colour. No one could understand their speech. When they were brought as curiosities to the house of a certain knight, Sir Richard de Calne, at Wikes, they wept bitterly. Bread and other victuals were set before them, but they would touch none of them, though they were tormented by great hunger, as the girl afterwards acknowledged. At length, when some beans just cut, with their stalks, were brought into the house, they made signs, with great avidity, that they should be given to them. When they were brought, they opened the stalks instead of the pods, thinking the beans were in the hollow of them; but not finding them there, they began to weep anew. When those who were present saw this, they opened the pods, and showed them the naked beans. They fed on these with great delight, and for a long time tasted no other food. The boy, however, was always languid and depressed, and he died within a short time. The girl enjoyed continual good health; and becoming accustomed to various kinds of food, lost completely that green colour, and gradually recovered the sanguine habit of her entire body. She was afterwards regenerated by the laver of holy baptism, and lived for many years in the service of that knight (as I have frequently heard from him and his family), and was rather loose and wanton in her conduct. Being frequently asked about the people of her country, she asserted that the inhabitants, and all they had in that country, were of a green colour; and that they saw no sun, but enjoyed a degree of light like what is after sunset. Being asked how she came into this country with the aforesaid boy, she replied, that as they were following their flocks, they came to a certain cavern, on entering which they heard a delightful sound of bells; ravished by whose sweetness, they went for a long time wandering on through the cavern, until they came to its mouth. When they came out of it, they were struck senseless by the excessive light of the sun, and the unusual temperature of the air; and they thus lay for a long time. Being terrified by the noise of those who came on them, they wished to fly, but they could not find the entrance of the cavern before they were caught."

The Fairy Mythology (1828)

The incident described, which reportedly took place in the 12th century, has prompted various explanations, all of which seem superfluous. The town where they were found is today known as Woolpit, a corruption, but what connection if any the story may have with wolves is unclear. A laver, according to Merriam-Webster, is "a large basin used for ceremonial ablutions in the ancient Jewish Tabernacle and Temple worship."

Wild Thing

I found this tiny red eft in the street in front of our house one rainy morning a few days ago. It was torpid and I didn't much like its chances against car tires, so I managed to flip it gently onto the only thing I had available — a plastic bag — and carried it off to a safer location next to a seasonal runoff stream. The delicacy of the animal was remarkable, considering that it was, after all, a fellow vertebrate and distant relative, though less than two inches long. There are brawnier insects, some of which might well have made a snack out of it, though efts do produce a formidable neurotoxin.

It's become a thing in the northeast to go out on rainy spring nights and help migrating amphibians across the road. As far as I know no one does this for earthworms, vast numbers of which wind up squashed or dessicated on the pavement. Chalk it up to "vertebratism."

I may have saved the salamander's life, but I don't expect that it felt gratitude or even consented to being moved. Its ability to conceptualize cause and effect or make rational decisions is presumably limited. As with most wild animals, its attitude towards us is grounded in simple fear.

There's a group of five or six deer living in the woods around us, and some days they come grazing within sight of our kitchen window. They may benefit from our presence, in that young vegetation prospers where we've created a clearing, but they beat a hasty retreat if we step outside. I've seen deer and owls, when I encounter them on a trail, hold their ground with something that might border on curiosity or at least indifference, but there's no reason to think that my presence is valued or welcome. Our domestic animals, of course, are capable of feeling most or even all of the emotions with which we regard each other, and this can also be true of some animals that haven't been "domesticated" but merely tamed, but these are exceptions. Timothy Treadwell, the subject of Werner Herzog's film Grizzly Man, captured some entrancing footage of a wild fox interacting with him with something like mutual joy, but Treadwell's misjudgment of his ability to cross the boundary between the human and animal worlds led to his being eaten by a bear.