Inflections and Innuendoes Friday, August 29, 2003

Item! I found out yesterday that an old friend of mine with a keen critical eye reads this blog, which made me go back over the old posts and see how they held up. I was struck by how unsteady they seemed. When reading a piece of text, I tend to judge it by how confident it is, how consistent the language and tone are. It's like judging somebody's driving; if he's always braking hard and fast or lurching to pass somebody, you know you're in trouble.

To my eye, a lot of these posts are the work of a student driver. I don't really edit them, of course, since the spirit of the forum seems to demand unfiltered prose. But I'm shocked at how low my baseline is most of the time. The classic reportorial failing: I think my point is so obvious that I never just come out and say it. At any rate, I'll try harder.

Item! A friend of mine, who once turned down the most satisfying job I can imagine at the moment, sends along the following addendum to "September Song" below, a quote from the movie "Gladiator":

"Sometimes I do what I want to do. The rest of the time, I do what I have to."

Good point, and much appreciated. If only I could mask my simmering rage with sexy vulnerability, like Russell Crowe does. Did you know Australia was settled by convicts?

Item! Another friend points out that my phrase of the moment, "grudging aesthete," is confusing. I gotta agree. I kept using it because it sounded good; what I was trying to get across was "somebody who appreciates the aesthetics of a situation, such as church, more than the stated intentions of an event" or even just "somebody whose aesthetics overwhelm all other judgments in certain situations, making them curmudgeonly." I can't tell if that makes me Jacques Derrida or Terry Teachout. I'll think of something better.

Item! We saw Mars last night. Just a smudge of color in the sky, like the sad little smear a bug leaves: So small and indistinct that you can't believe that just a moment ago it had legs and senses and intent. Mars looked particularly small given that I spent my entire day there. As ever, I'll skip the details. But the usual suspects left me hanging once again.

Item! Must get going shortly. I'll leave you with the poem that inspired the title of this post, the only verse I ever memorized:

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
by Wallace Stevens

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadows of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

A friend of mine told me once the poem was about the presence of death; I hope not. That would be ordinary. I think it's about the inexplicable. As mountains abide, as rivers run, as snow falls, there's a blackbird, knowing but mute. Or maybe perception: The blackbird is the agent of consciousness. Or maybe it's all just aesthetics, thirteen lovely verses. At any rate, it's an elegant poem that I used to know by heart.

In contrast, in high school, I couldn't summon up six hundred words about the guy who wrote these supremely muscular stanazs:

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Some aesthete. Discuss.

@ 7:13:00 AM,

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