The World's Language -- Chapter 5, A Blaze of Light in Every Word -- Literature

To go to beginning of the book:  https://justpaste.it/3iquz 

 

Outline of Chapters 

 

1. The neighbours have taken over the house: how English came together as a language unifying people from different backgrounds.  The genesis of a non-tribal, open language.  

The history of English – Saxons, French and Vikings collide to produce two simplified English languages in one. The later importation of cougars, pumas and other words from almost everywhere.  The long reign of Latin for specialized talk and its replacement by acronyms.  From Futhorc to Fubar.

2. ‘Inglish speling: the nitemare beginz’  https://justpaste.it/6xek2

All the factors that went into making English spelling the bizarre hodgepodge it is. Reasons why changing it could be a ‘nitemare.’ A theory about how aversion to our own throats transformed our language.  The democratic underpinnings of illogic in spelling. 

3. ‘Never I will understand how the English’s grammar works’  https://justpaste.it/43xln 

The living fairy tale of the ‘strong verbs.’ Then, some canyons where linguistic dinosaurs roam even as English relentlessly simplifies its grammar, making itself a language that everyone can learn.  Some important quirks of grammar that are often left out of the textbook.

4. ‘English presents a more difficult writing style when compared to languages my parents spoke at home, respectively.’ English style.   https://justpaste.it/68yh8 

Even the national news is losing its ability to compose sentences logically. All over the world, English is being replaced in science, technology and newscasting by an ‘International Scientific Creole’ mixing English words with the formats and grammars of many languages.  The result can be mind-boggling.  How to disentangle the unreadable and make everything crystal clear. 

5. “A blaze of light in every word” (quote from Leonard Cohen) – English literature https://justpaste.it/1vsk1 

What makes literature work? What makes it excellent?  Can we really understand what the author was trying to say?  Is there a Zen of reading well?

 

 

Chapter 5   “A blaze of light in every word” – English literature

 

As I was busy editing my scientific journal in the 2000s, I was also devoted to a hobby – songwriting.  I had the mad idea, rejected by all professional songwriters, that most songs spent too much time repeating the same lyrics over and over.  I wanted to use each four minutes of singing time to tap deeply into the possibilities of things that could be said.  If I used any of the many clichés of popular songwriting, I wanted to do it as a deliberate and obvious quote, not as something I used because I couldn’t think of anything original to say.  Many years, then, after I had taken English courses where I was asked to write essays interpreting what authors were trying to say, I found myself in the position of the author who was trying to say things.

 

As someone who was interested in the processes involved in thinking and imagination, I also had those sorts of topics to think about as I looked around in my brain for places where good, new song lyrics could be found. 

 

The purpose of this chapter is to help anyone who has come so far in their study of English that they have become interested in English literature. (I am using ‘they’ here as a neutral pronoun, following an increasingly common informal convention.)  Perhaps you are like Joseph Conrad and have an ambition to write stunningly beautiful English yourself, or perhaps you are just taking a course and trying to pass. I hope that everyone who is interested in the imaginative and artistic use of language will find something useful in this chapter. 

 

I’m going to dig into this topic by talking about particular pieces of literature and how they are put together.  It may not be obvious at first which direction I’m heading in, but then again, that sort of low-key mystery is part of literature, so if you can bring some literary patience to bear and follow along with me, all will turn out well in the end.  At least, that’s the plan.

 

If you’re already familiar with literature, either in English or another language, I think you’ll still find some novel ideas here. 

 

Let’s start from pieces that are not complicated and work up to pieces that are more elaborate.  I’ll focus on lyrics and poems because they’re compact and can be reproduced here.

 

I admit that my choice of selections is partly influenced by copyright considerations: of the eight pieces I’ll talk about at length, four are in the public domain and three are pieces of my own writing.  No one but the author him- or herself has a fair chance to say exactly what an author had in mind with a piece of writing, so at least one piece written by me is essential to the explanation. 

 

I’m going to start with a short piece of my own writing, partly just to acknowledge that some literature can be very simple and straightforward.  It’s a short poem I wrote when I was a youth of 13 or so.

 

 

My dog is sleeping on my bed;

Upon my feet he rests his head.

I ought to kick him off, it’s said,

But happiness is fleet

 

And maybe in some life unsaid

He’ll let me climb up on his bed

And lay my weary canine head

Upon his human feet.

 

This poem was based on a real dog, Pal the chipmunk-chasing half-terrier, and to write the verses out still makes my emotions squeak out a chirp, after all these years.  This rush into feelings, however, would be the poem’s greatest flaw to many readers – the piece commits the literary fashion-crime called ‘sentimentalism,’ invading your privacy by pulling with child-like directness on your heart-strings.  As mature people, we are supposed to ‘put away childish things,’ as the biblical letter to the Corinthians says, and prefer literature that speaks to our more complex, adult emotions.  What this means in reality is that if we like something like this, we can keep it as a slightly naughty secret, or read it to our kids.  Or we can become collectors and amass great quantities of it as a literary kitsch collection.  Or we can put it on a card along with a lovely picture and sell it.

 

Looking at the poem itself, it has some strong points and some weak points.  To use 17^th-century phrasing like “upon my feet” right next to modern slang like “kick him off” could be seen as disorganized and random.  I remember that at the time I wrote the poem, my feeling was that as a kid, I had every right to use lines like “kick him off.”  In popular songs written by adults, stock, slangy phrases at the level of “I ought to kick him off” often interweave with more poetic bits, but if the poetic bits get into pre-20^th century phrasing like “upon my feet,” the author seems amateurishly pretentious.  As we saw in Chapter 3, Neil Diamond got away with archaic usage with his “I am, said I” – but then again, I don’t think you’ll find the song “I Am, I Said” compiled into any collections of great lyrics of the 20^th century.  In any case, Neil had already proven himself as poet with songs like “Brooklyn Roads” and “Shilo,” and he could afford to let himself go a little.  Using 17^th century phrasing in a modern song or poem is something like stuffing a handful of sweet icing cookies into your mouth in the middle of a meal – suddenly, you link your modest work to the richness of the ancient classics.  You’re better off staying true to your moderate, balanced diet, and picking a consistent literary time frame, preferably your own. 

 

My juvenile poem uses the archaic word ‘upon’ twice, partly because the word fits its rhythm. That sort of thing is said to be allowed as ‘poetic license’ to those who write rhyming verse.  Realistically, though, a poet is best off to use this license as little as possible.  It’s like driving – if you’re always being pulled over by the police and asked to show your driver’s license, something is wrong.  Similarly, you should minimize the need to pull out your poetic license.  The one aspect that helps out the ‘upons’ in my poem is the word ‘fleet,’ which is also distinctly old-fashioned.  In fact, the whole phrase “happiness is fleet” was an unintentional re-invention of a line that had been used in previous centuries, though it was less common than a phrase often used by writers of Christian sermons, “happiness is fleeting.”  Happiness is fleeting, but joy endures, they often say.

 

A play called “The Fatal Retirement,” written by Anthony Brown in 1739, has a character saying “Alas, our Happiness is fleet and vain; like Evening Clouds tinged by the Sun with Gold. The pleasing Prospect at a Distance charms; but when we approach the shining Scene, we find it all a Vapour hov’ring round us.”  A French poem by Louise Labé (1524-1566) was translated in the 1950’s to say “Out of my very laughter tears are born; My pain is pleasure; happiness is fleet.”  (The original is the slightly archaic “Tout à un coup je ris et je larmoie, Et en plaisir maint grief tourment j'endure,” that is, “At the same time, I laugh and I shed tears; and in pleasure, many a grievous torment I endure.”). Many more words in English rhyme with ‘fleet’ than with ‘endure,’ so Alma Lind Cook, the English translator, made a wise choice. “Happiness is fleet” may seem to introduce a thought that isn’t found in the original lines, but in fact, the next line of the French starts with “Mon bien s'en va, et à jamais il dure,” “the good that I know is fleeting and it lives on forever,” so Alma was simply shifting thoughts around as translators must do. 

 

I wrote my dog poem in circa 1969, while a respectable American poet, Elizabeth Spires, re-used “happiness is fleet” much later on, in 2004 (Only the last few lines of the poem are quoted):

 

And nature says what it always

says, what remains unheard:

 

Happiness is fleet. Like water running

over stones, the words repeat:

Happiness is fleet, fleet, fleet…

 

You can see that Elizabeth used some italics there.  They imply that she knew she was repeating an old line, something so basic that it could be used for what “nature always says.” 

 

This all shows that I wrote my dog poem at an age where I had some connections to literary culture, but where I didn’t know enough of it to avoid re-inventing or re-using old lines in a naïve way.  This situation led to a piece of what I call, for reasons I will explain in more detail later, ‘subadherent literature.’  My thoughts were stretching upwards and outwards in an artistic way, but I was small, and far below the vaulted mental ceiling where truly new literary thoughts arise. 

 

The reason I mention this is that a great deal of literature is produced in our world that falls into this category of subadherent literature.  My first task of this chapter is to help you recognize it even in a piece of work you may find likeable.  Such work is not necessarily bad; it may even be very good, or at least, very pleasing.  It just isn’t at the cutting-edge of literature, because it is written by someone who has no idea where that sharpened edge is busy cutting the literary hayfield. He or she may be too busy cutting literary stubble to go looking. 

 

My poem falls further into the subadherent by having an awkward phrase in it, a literary equivalent of what, in the previous chapter, I called “you-know-what-I-mean English.”  In this case, you could call it ‘you-know-what-I’m-getting-at literary English.’ I’m talking about the phrase “maybe in some life unsaid.”  We know that the boy author means “maybe in some hypothetical life, perhaps a future one where we’ve undergone Hinduistic transmigration,” but since when was a life “said?”  Biology isn’t a piece of language.  The idea of life being a speech is not a bad literary metaphor; in fact, it has a literary track record in a mystical passage I’d often heard from the biblical book of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made.”  In that quote, the whole universe comes into being via a ‘Word.’  So my “unsaid” line makes some sense, in that context, but it appears rather abruptly, with no philosophical support from any other part of the poem.  You may well suspect I used the word mostly because it rhymed, and indeed, you probably wouldn’t be wrong. 

 

On the other hand, the re-use of the same rhyming words in the two halves of the poem, making them something like mirror images of one another, is one of the strong points of the poem.  It’s a poem about alternate realities where roles are reversed; therefore, the poem also reverses – although not exactly.  The rhyming words don’t appear in exactly opposite order; you have “bed, head, said” vs. “said, bed, head.” But to leave the rhyme order unrestricted like that is perhaps better than neurotically lining the words up in exact opposite order.  It’s a choice.  In any case, this structure shows just enough, and not too much, of a skilled literary quality that I call ‘isomorphy’ – the ‘physical’ structure of the piece reflects what the content is saying (isomorphic literally means “equal in shape”).  Like a seaside building that an architect has designed to look like a wave-crest, the poem itself, in structure, reflects the natural item the designer finds beautiful.  In the case of this poem, the “natural item” is sympathy, sympathy between human and animal, between boy and dog.  The dog mirrors the boy; the boy mirrors the dog; the verses mirror each other.

 

The best moment in the poem lies entirely in the word “weary,” where the reader can see that human and dog both share that profoundly comfortable, wonderful feeling of lying down to sweet rest in love and comfort; their worlds fuse in that eternal, dissolving moment of sleepy bliss and they become, fleetingly, the same life.  The Hindu scriptures say ‘tat tvam asi,’ “that art thou,” meaning that spirituality begins when you see all existence as being one with you.  Ojibway and Cree art as seen in the paintings of Norval Morriseau, for example, often shows all animals and people connected by filaments of common life that flow between them in the spirit world.  My poem was a subadherent work, but it clearly had that theme. 

 

One can become very fond of such moments and hope that they may pass as real literature, but alas, they remain firmly set on the amateur level.  Let the writer beware.  Successful authors always tell young authors to read, read, read – read as much as you can.  Unless you possess such a startlingly original genius that you can’t, by nature, reinvent the common clichés and phrases, you are best off to have read them all already, or at least to have developed a sense of what they are likely to look like.  

 

There are more professional poems and poetic lyrics that are designed to be completely understandable on the surface.  A famous example is a 1913 ‘imagist’ poem from the American writer, Ezra Pound.

 

In a Station of the Metro

 

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

 

Pound was struck by the faces of people in the darkened tunnels of the Paris subway, and compared them to pinkish petals on the wet boughs of a flowering tree.  (These days, there’d be many more colours of petals in the Paris subway, thanks to immigration since 1913).  A person with wide-ranging cultural knowledge can see there, in that poem, that Pound was strongly influenced by the trend of the time to be fascinated by the arts of Japan: the poem is reminiscent of a Japanese haiku, and the image of petals on a wet bough is reminiscent of the many Japanese water-colour paintings and prints featuring cherry and plum blossoms. Pound is thought to have seen prints featuring cherry blossoms by a Japanese artist named Suzuki Harunobu prior to writing the poem.  Suzuki was an exacting artist whose faces were detailed, whereas Pound’s image of faces as ‘petals’ tends to reduce them to blurs that could be made by a single painter’s brush stroke, as you might find in the European impressionist art that was also highly fashionable in 1913.  Japanese art contained a highly impressionistic painting style pioneered by artists like Yosa Buson (1716-1784), and, in my imagination, Pound’s imagery is most strongly suggestive of that style.  Perhaps I’m on to something there; perhaps not. The reader, in any case, doesn’t need to consider any of this information to understand and appreciate the poem. 

 

The one complex feature of Pound’s mini-poem is the word “apparition.” Basically, the word refers to a sudden appearance ‘as if from nowhere.’ Many readers of English books for young people have seen it playfully changed by novelist J. K. Rowling to the magical word ‘apparate,’ describing a spell used by Harry Potter and his friends to disappear in one place and instantly reappear in another.  Though the original ‘apparition’ can be used in many situations, it is commonly seen in literature connected to ghosts, phantoms, and similar appearances of the supernatural. Rowling, therefore, was mutating a word that already had magical associations.  Pound’s use of this word may have just reflected the way his mind did an artistic, impressionistic ‘take’ of the scene, a sort of mental, impressionistic photo.  Some writers, however, have suggested he intended to refer to the temporary nature of human life, so that the subway riders can be seen as being as temporary as fallen petals, and as insubstantial, from the eternal viewpoint of spirituality and the arts, as ghosts. Again, the reader can appreciate the poem perfectly well without getting into these more far-flung kinds of verbal associations.  I’ll say more about the reader’s ideal relationship to such far-reaching speculations later on. 

 

Pound’s tiny, painterly poem appeared just after a time in history when many poets had been writing multi-verse ballads, full of tight rhymes and moral reflections.  As a brief example, I’ll quote the fourth stanza of Rudyard Kipling’s “If—,” from 1910, three years before Pound’s poem. 

 

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,  

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,  

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,  

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

 

In his attempts to write poetry with simple, directly understandable images, Pound was inspired by Japanese haiku.  Ironically, haiku, or at least some of them, are the most difficult form of literature to fully understand.  I’ll print the best-known example here, Matsuo Basho’s frog poem from 1686:

 

The old pond — ah!

frog jumps in —

water-sound

 

There are hundreds of different translations of this poem, but this one will do.  I’ll talk about what this poem is all about, as a piece of literature, after I’ve covered some more, simpler examples. 

 

I’m going to go on now to literature that needs some interpretation, or other mental work.  I call this mental activity “work” not because people all find it a chore, but because it requires some energy and thought.  Usually, though, this work is pleasurable, at least if you’re in the mood for it. All it asks of you is that you search around in delightful places to find clues that bring out the life of the writing.  One of these places could be labelled ‘arcana’ – the reader must look around in the treasuries of facts and knowledge in order to find the pieces needed to make the writing completely understandable.  Another of these delightful places is ‘internal knowledge and insight,’ where an author sends you into the attic of your mind to find misplaced experiences from your own life, or from the lives of people you know of, that fill out the whole picture of what he or she has written.  A third such place could be called ‘design appreciation,’ where you must use your mental faculties to behold the harmony and fine structure of something that is beautifully done.

 

I’m going to start off with a piece of literature that gets you looking into ‘arcana.’  This is a kind of writing for which your appreciation could be heightened by the use of footnotes or explanations of terms.  We’ve already seen part of a classic example, the Australian folk song ‘Waltzing Matilda,’ written in 1895.  I’ve printed it out in full, below. One of its charming features is that it collects a lot of colorful old-timey Australian farm and bush slang that would otherwise be lost.  Its writer, Andrew ‘Banjo’ Paterson, who wrote the song while staying at a sheep station in remote western Queensland, was clearly fond of ‘unofficial,’ popular English, as writers often are.  I’m going to use footnotes to help you ‘get’ the whole song.

 

Once a jolly swagman^a camped by a billabong^b

Under the shade of a coolabah^c tree

And he sang as he watched and waited 'til his billy^d boiled

"Who'll come a-Waltzing^e Matilda^f, with me?"

Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda

Who'll come a-Waltzing Matilda, with me

And he sang as he watched and waited 'til his billy boiled

"Who'll come a-Waltzing Matilda, with me?"

 

Down came a jumbuck^g to drink from the billabong

Up jumped the swagman and grabbed him with glee

And he sang as he stowed that jumbuck in his tucker^h bag

"You'll come a-Waltzing Matilda, with me"

Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda

"You'll come a-Waltzing Matilda, with me"

And he sang as he stowed that jumbuck in his tucker bag

"You'll come a-Waltzing Matilda, with me"

 

Up rode the squatterⁱ, mounted on his thoroughbred^j

Down came the troopers^k, one, two, three

"Where's that jolly jumbuck you've got in your tucker bag?"

"You'll come a-Waltzing Matilda, with me"

Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda

"You'll come a-Waltzing Matilda, with me"

"Where's that jolly jumbuck you've got in your tucker bag?"

"You'll come a-Waltzing Matilda, with me"

 

Up jumped the swagman, leapt into the billabong

"You'll never catch me alive," said he

And his ghost may be heard as you pass by the billabong

"Who'll come a-Waltzing Matilda, with me?"

Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda

Who'll come a-Waltzing Matilda, with me

And his ghost may be heard as you pass by the billabong

"Who'll come a-Waltzing Matilda, with me?"

 

1. Swagman: a migrant worker doing work when it is available, and carrying all his possessions (‘swag’) along with him in a bundle or bag
2. Billabong: a curved ‘elbow lake’ cut off from a looping, meandering river
3. Coolabah: a large water-loving tree, Eucalyptus coolabah, one of the many eucalypt tree species typical of the Australian landscape, and bearing an aboriginal name derived from the Yuwaaliyaay dialect of the Gamilaraay language of central New South Wales.
4. Billy: a can used for boiling water
5. Waltzing: travelling around the countryside in search of work
6. Matilda: a nick-name for the bag or bundle of belongings
7. Jumbuck: a sheep
8. Tucker: food.  Tucker bag, bag for storing food.
9. Squatter: farmer/herder working the land and living on it, but not holding legal title to it.
10. Thoroughbred: a relatively large breed of horse, imported from English stock, whereas many Australian horses were cross-bred with small, heat-tolerant Timor ponies from the island of Timor near Indonesia. The big, agile thoroughbreds would be suitable for patrolling the land and threatening trespassers.  Banjo Paterson sang about the Timor crossbreeds in another of his famous songs, ‘The Man from Snowy River.’
11. Troopers: policemen

 

Most of the song’s basic story explains itself when you know the content of the footnotes.  Let’s split the lyrics up, though, among two ideas.  One, you could call ‘mirrors’ – you can picture a scene exactly by looking in its written ‘mirror.’ ‘Down came a jumbuck to drink from the billabong’ – without fail, your mind pictures a sheep walking down, making footprints in the mud and drinking from the still waters of the lake.  Then there’s another kind of lyric – let’s call it a ‘prism.’ ‘You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.’ When you read this, your mind wants to split up into many possibilities of what it could mean.  Is the swagman just singing to his tote-bag? Does he have a woman in mind?  If so, is she a product of his imagination or is she someone he left behind? 

 

In the Ezra Pound poem, ‘apparition’ was the only prism in the poem.  Imagery and meaning could be brought to bear in the appreciation of other words, but that was the only word that was likely to make you think, ‘What exactly is he getting at there?’ and to start sifting through possibilities.  Your mind might do that very quickly, almost without your noticing it – or it might just say, as minds often do, ‘I don’t quite understand that one, so I’ll skip by it and see what else comes up.’  If your mind is very normal, it might be left, at first, with this conclusion: “A weird word for ‘appearance’ was used by that Ezra guy, probably because he was a poet. I don’t have time to look it up, so we’ll leave it at that.”  Pick up this prism and start turning it in the light of your further thoughts, though, and many colours will come out and start to play on nearby mental surfaces. 

 

 So let’s play with the ‘Waltzing Matilda’ prism.   A bit of footnote information for ‘waltzing’ is that there was an existing German expression, ‘auf der Walz’ – ‘on the waltz’ – that was used to describe the travels of a special kind of migrant worker, starting in medieval times.  Specialist practical trades like carpentry and precious-metal smithing had three educational levels: apprentices, who were raw beginners, usually young boys; journeymen, who were competent in their craft but not yet masters of it; and masters, who could own a shop and become full members of a professional association called the ‘guild.’ This system is still mimicked in the undergraduate, master’s and doctorate levels of university studies in the English-speaking world.  In the German system, journeymen in some fields, especially carpentry, were obliged to travel from place to place as migrant workers for a few years, building up experience in a variety of situations.  (We still have this phase in our system, as well; newly minted ‘doctors’ of science are obliged to do ‘postdoctoral fellowships’ in distant locations in order to be taken seriously in their craft.)  Such travelling journeymen were said to be ‘auf der Walz,’ ‘waltzing’ around the countryside in varying directions.  Australia was originally europeanized by English prisoners, but in time, immigrants arrived from many parts of Europe, including Germany.  The ‘waltzing’phrase was imported into Australia and became established in local culture in some areas.  It implied that the migrant workers had boundless skills and constructive qualities that needed only to be well employed to produce good results. 

 

‘Matilda’ itself also gets a footnote as an ancient German name originally meaning ‘heroic battle woman’ (‘macht’ = power; ‘hildr’ = battle).  It was used in Australian slang to indicate any female companion a swagman might be traveling with, just as the name Moll (derived from Mary as you saw in Chapter 2) became the British slang word for any woman becoming the companion of a criminal. The companion of such a travelling man could only be an equally heroic woman; and anyone who has read about pioneer times in newly europeanized countries can see many examples of hardy and indefatigable women who were key players in building up agricultural and commercial life. 

 

Looking beyond these historical associations, though, we can see that Banjo uses the phrase ‘Waltzing Matilda’ in different ways.  In the first verse, it suggests the swagman’s loneliness and his dream of companionship – who will join him in his wandering?  Could he be so lucky that there might be a loveable female equal who would join him?  In the second verse, it’s all about the triumph of bagging some food – ‘you’re coming with me,’ the swagman says to the dead sheep.  In the third, it’s the policeman who says it: in typical lawman irony, he tells the swagman ‘you and your Matilda bundle are dancing off with me to the prison cell.’  In the fourth, the swagman sings as a ghost, reminding everyone that someday, they too will dance the dance of his spirit, migrating into death and to an unknown destination, maybe nowhere.  As you can see, the jumbuck has already waltzed this waltz and twirled into mortality; verse 2 and verse 4 are linked.  There was a common theme in late medieval European art called the ‘danse macabre’ (French for ‘macabre dance’ or ‘dance of death’), and many paintings and drawings showed grinning skeletons dancing around, reminding the living of a party invitation that cannot be refused. Perhaps this is what the swagman’s ghost has in mind, or maybe he is still dreaming of the woman friend he never had – or perhaps both. 

 

Spookily, the 4^th verse includes some isomorphy, where Paterson says, “And his ghost may be heard as you pass by the billabong.” He could have written “And his ghost may be heard as you walk along the billabong,” or many similar phrases, so that the word ‘you’ would have been collapsed to a small sound: “And his ghost may be heard as y’ pass on by the billabong.” The way the actual lyrics run, though, the ‘you’ has to be emphasized.  You, yes, you – and yes, I – will pass by that billabong some day and join that waltz. 

 

This sounds sad, even depressing, but then you must wonder: how did a lively song about an unemployed, lonely, suicidal thief become the national song of Australia?  The answer may be related to the observation that the hardships the swagman endures are circumstances, pieces of bad luck that could happen to anyone.  In the midst of this bad luck, his brave spirit cannot be defeated. He never stops dancing. Yes, he is lonely, but he fantasizes a dance with an unknown woman who will someday be his real ‘Matilda.’ He is a thief, but so is the squatter, occupying land by force without owning it, and leaving nothing for the wandering newcomer.  When the swagman is arrested, he refuses to submit to jail or hanging, and seals his dignity forever by controlling his own death.  Then he emerges as a triumphant spirit to urge the living to dance the dance of someone who could not be defeated.  He has triumphed against the ultimate human loneliness; he is the archetype of a hero.  

 

‘Waltzing Matilda’ is strongly related in theme to the poem ‘Invictus’ that kept the hero of South African democracy, Nelson Mandela, inspired while he waited in a lonely prison cell for decades.

 

With permission from author William Henley, who joined the dance of skeletons in 1903, here is ‘Invictus’ for comparison.

 

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

 

In the fell^a clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

 

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade^b,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

 

It matters not how strait^c the gate,

How charged^d with punishments the scroll^e,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

 

1. nasty
2. death
3. narrow
4. filled up
5. religious record of lifetime bad and good deeds

 

Very inspiring, but Waltzing Matilda is arguably more fun. 

 

No doubt there is much more that you can see by twirling the ‘Waltzing Matilda’ prism in your hand and watching colours emerge as various lights within your mind strike it.  Imagine, then, the gallery of rainbows you would be in if you had a piece of writing that was nearly all prisms, from one end to the other. 

 

I’m going to talk about two pieces of writing that are full of prisms.  You and I will need to relax and go together into a quiet mental room where we can see all the lights combining, as in a planetarium, to make dazzling projected stories on a distant ceiling.  In these pieces of writing, our task will be to get into the writer’s head without losing our own head.  We need, or at least want, to find the musical harmonies of shared life that reverberate between the author’s thoughts and experiences and our own.  This is the process I mentioned previously when I said some authors needed to be appreciated with ‘internal knowledge and insight.’

 

When I was a young student, I was very worried that this attempt to do a ‘Vulcan mind-meld’ – to borrow a phrase from the Star Trek television series – between an author and myself was unrealistic, or maybe even rude.  Many students become indignant on behalf of authors, as teachers try to pluck ‘higher’ meanings out of writings that seem, at first, to be fairly simple in intent.  How much do we need to worry that interpreting literature will simply wipe a lot of self-indulgent intellectual finger-paint and glitter over an honest, dignified piece of writing?  I will come back to this question in detail after I’ve discussed the next two examples.

 

First, one of the most popular songs of the 20^th century – Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah.’

 

 

Well I've heard there was a secret chord

That David played and it pleased the Lord

But you don't really care for music, do you?

Well it goes like this:

The fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift

The baffled king composing Hallelujah

 

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

 

Hold up here for a moment before we go on to more of this song.  I find this one of the most remarkable pieces of writing ever brought to popular music.  Leonard Cohen, raised in the Jewish community of predominantly Catholic Montreal, Quebec, in the 1950s and 60s, was already famous, when this song came out, for songs that included religious ideas and imagery.  He seemed to be on a typical late-20^th-century spiritual quest, the kind where people tried to find higher meaning while they sensed that the traditional religions were crumbling all around them.  Time Magazine had already displayed the famous headline ‘God is Dead’ on April 8, 1966.  Quebec society, at that time, was undergoing a profound change called the ‘Quiet Revolution’ that removed the Catholic church from social dominance and gave power to secularists.  Many members of the Jewish community, as elsewhere in North America, also questioned religion, and some abandoned it altogether.  Cohen’s first major musical hit, ‘Suzanne,’ compared a girl who wore ‘rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters’ to Jesus Christ, and had him ‘sinking beneath her wisdom like a stone.’ Leonard later undertook Zen Buddhism very seriously, but never publicly devoted himself to it in the way that George Harrison of the Beatles, for example, publicly advocated Hinduism. The New York Times quoted Leonard as saying that he remained Jewish in religious outlook, and practiced a form of Zen that involved no conflicting worship. 

 

The ‘Hallelujah’ lyric, in any case, seems not to have religion as its main focus.  It’s also about love, or at least, about the passion of lovers. In the English-speaking world, the two situations where people are likely to use the words ‘faith’ and ‘faithful’ are in relation to religion, and in relation to love.  The lyrics seem to point towards places in our existence where worship and love fuse, or imitate each other.  As for Leonard’s actual experience of love, he had his triumphs and his troubles. His Wikipedia bio names four women who he was involved with for extended periods, but he never married.  ‘Hallelujah’ seems to question romantic faith as much as religious faith. 

 

So let’s review what happened to him in this six-line verse.  There is too much going on in the verse to express it all in a paragraph or two of text, so, let me make an artificial beginning that will do as an entry point.  Leonard begins to compose a song, and the lofty guitar chords that he starts to bring together are so magnificent that he is reminded of King David, the great songwriter-king of the ancient Judaean kingdom in the 1000’s BCE.  David’s songs were all about religious joy and ecstasy – he wrote many ‘psalms’ praising God for bringing him to triumph over pain and hardship.  Leonard feels, as songwriters do, that some of the same joyous magic is arising in his new pattern of chords.  Something in there is SO good that he feels he’s found genuine spiritual magic, a secret chord that only those inspired by God’s blessing can find. 

 

In a moment of inspired isomorphy, he writes “it goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift” while his chord progression in the key of C climbs through the 4^th (F) and 5^th (G) notes of the scale, continuing into a minor chord (Am), lifting into a major chord (F).  It goes onwards and upwards through a G and an E7, levelling out on the A minor chord in a cry of ‘Hallelujah,’ meaning ‘God be Praised.’ And yet, here he is, Leonard from Montreal, in the midst of his secular life, separated from God and the ecstatic plane, and living with someone – presumably a woman – who would find his glorious chords less-than-inspiring.  You can almost hear some equivalent of ‘that’s nice, dear,’ forming in the mind of Leonard’s lover, at least as he imagines her.  The devastating line, ‘you don’t really care for music, do you?’ sings out the pain of everyone who has ever wanted to share his or her deepest inner life with a lover or a friend, but who finds the beloved person yawning at the moment of hallelujah.

 

Here we have the opposite of a simple, sentimental verse – this song is full of one of the 20^th century’s most prized emotions, irony, as well as doubt and rage and joy and disappointment and frustration and hope.  The story of King David contributes some of the irony, since the king had some notably disastrous love affairs.  His great love, Michal, criticised him harshly for his wild, ecstatic dancing when he helped bring a sacred object called the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem.  On another occasion, he was brought, crying, to his knees on the floor by God as he received punishment for stealing the beautiful Bathsheba from her husband, the loyal general Uriah – something he’d done by scheming to have the man killed in battle. In a scene that is much quoted by atheists hoping to prove the biblical God is a monster, God took the life from the newborn baby that was the product of David’s illegal affair with Bathsheba; the “baffled king’s” crime could not be allowed to pay out, even when it created precious innocence.  Sympathy for David and doubts about God, then, both glimmer in the background in this verse. 

 

Let’s add in another verse now.

 

Well your faith was strong but you needed proof

You saw her bathing on the roof

Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya

She tied you to her kitchen chair

And she broke your throne and she cut your hair

And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

 

 

In the second verse of the song, Bathsheba actually appears, or at least, her story is told in the first half of the verse.  While Uriah was out on the kingdom’s north border battling enemies, King David was up on his roof terrace in Jerusalem and spotted a nearby roof where Bathsheba was bathing naked, thinking she could not be seen.  David already had seven wives, but was so attracted to Bathsheba that he had to have her.  Who can stop a king?  This monarch who had had such a strong relationship with God was about to indulge in incredible greed out of his fascination with a woman.  His faith was strong, but in that moment of erotic vision, the magical unity of a perfect sexual meeting seemed to be the high point of the spirit’s quest, the ‘proof’ of the ultimate.  Here you can see why the American singer Jeff Buckley, who produced one of the most successful cover versions of Hallelujah, described the song as “a hallelujah to the orgasm.” In the second half of the verse, Bathsheba suddenly turns into another biblical figure, the treacherous Delilah, who magically eliminated the strength of her man, Samson, by letting his hair be cut off by his enemies.  (Samson, who was Jewish from a very strict sect, had taken a religious vow that he would never cut his hair, and the removal of the hair broke that promise).  The second verse of this song, then, shows a man who will let himself do all sorts of disastrous and unwise things for the sake of the amorous ‘hallelujah.’  And yet, the word still emerges from his lips.

 

Cohen is said to have written up to 80 different verses for this song; most recorded versions include between three and five of them.  The official lyrics in the book Stranger Music (1993) include seven, three of which are labelled as ‘additional verses.’  I’m just going to reproduce three more.  The second one is ‘additional’ but forms the dramatic high point of the popular Jeff Buckley version of the song.  

 

You say I took the name in vain

I don't even know the name

But if I did, well really, what's it to you?

There's a blaze of light in every word

It doesn't matter which you heard

The holy or the broken Hallelujah

 

Maybe there's a God above

But all I've ever learned from love

Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya

And it's not a cry that you hear at night

It's not somebody who's seen the light

It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

 

I did my best, it wasn't much

I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch

I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you

And even though it all went wrong

I'll stand before the Lord of Song

With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

 

 

Four of the seven official verses end with the words ‘broken hallelujah.’ All of them do so in a way that clearly relates the idea to love.  One, not shown here, even says, “love is not a victory march. It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.”

 

Love, the song could be taken to say, fails us even as it satisfies us.  Even though it’s a union with the highest reality of our human natures, it fails to live up to the expectations set by religions, which promise eternal joy, or eternal freedom from suffering.  To achieve everlasting joy would be the ‘big’ hallelujah, while temporary sexual passion can only provide a broken piece of this hallelujah.  Perhaps, says the first of the three verses I’ve reproduced above, some people might accuse Leonard of the sin of ‘taking the Lord’s name in vain’ (using God’s name for self-serving purposes) by even associating the word ‘hallelujah’ – ‘praise God’ – with something as animalistic as orgasm.  Leonard gives a complicated response to this, one that plays with the traditional Jewish idea that the actual name of God was lost sometime after King David was alive, and now is unknown to everyone (We still have its Hebrew consonants, yhvh, but not its vowels.)  “I don’t even know the name,” he says – so how can you accuse me? In any case, Leonard goes on, even if he’s unknowingly misused ‘the name,’ his own usage has its ‘blaze of light,’ like ‘every word.’ This seems to introduce an interesting idea, then, that literature and writing have access to the same sacred, or nearly sacred, heights that passion and religion have access to.  Even hearing the earthly, fragmented ‘hallelujah’ gives you access to a piece of ultimate splendour.

                                          

Doubts about God emerge – “they say that there’s a God above” – as well as Leonard’s own self-doubts – “I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch.” Love becomes a gunfight from a cowboy movie, where Leonard’s partner always makes the first deadly move, but Leonard has learned to survive and shoot his own fatal shot. Yet, even though the song’s centre of gravity tilts heavily over toward the broken and the disillusioned, when it reaches the end, we find Leonard there, playing a triumphant chord and singing to the Lord of Song with a heartfelt ‘hallelujah’ Is it the holy hallelujah? Is it the broken one? Does it matter? Are they the same?  

 

This is prism you could play with over and over, every time you heard the song.  There’s a blaze of light in every word, as the man says, and some of of those beams of light can be pointed in many directions. 

 

Before I say any more on this topic, I’d like to introduce my other example of a poem full of prisms. 

 

Many readers will recognize it: it’s a much-studied poem in English classes.  The writer, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), had been an exceptional student as a girl, but, after suffering apparent depression over the deaths of several important people in her life, she became a loner who rarely emerged from her bedroom.  Despite her isolation, she wrote letters back and forth with many literary people.  She clearly shared some ideas with the ‘transcendentalist’ movement, associated with prominent authors like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Margaret Fuller.   Emerson was an admirer of some Hindu religious-philosophical writings, and Dickinson clearly absorbed some of this content or reinvented it spontaneously.  Zen Buddhist writer Shoei Ando, in his masterful Zen and American Transcendentalism (1970) praises Emily’s deep grasp of Hindu-Buddhist concepts by calling her ‘the most perfect flower of New England transcendentalism.’ 

 

Such concepts, however, are not immediately obvious in this poem.  It seems more connected to the Christianity Dickinson had practiced fervently in her early adulthood, and then in a muted, private way later in her life. The poem is about something Dickinson thought a great deal about – death.   

 

I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -

The Stillness in the Room

Was like the Stillness in the Air -

Between the Heaves of Storm -

 

The Eyes around - had wrung them dry -

And Breaths were gathering firm

For that last Onset - when the King

Be witnessed - in the Room -

 

I willed my Keepsakes - Signed away

What portion of me be

Assignable - and then it was

There interposed a Fly -

 

With Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz -

Between the light - and me -

And then the Windows failed - and then

I could not see to see -

 

Here, obviously, the fly is the main prism in the poem, and it’s introduced as important right at the beginning.  As a schoolboy defending authors against gushy interpretations, I would have been strongly inclined to take the fly as merely being a fly – here’s Emily in bed, dying, and the solemn occasion is interrupted by the buzz of a fly’s wings against a windowpane.  In this case, though, it would be hard for me to dismiss the knowledge that flies have a well known connection with death. Maaayyybe the fly was ‘symbolizing’ death, there.  That’s about as deep as I ever let my understanding get, as a youth. (Luckily, I was saved in my one university English course by an instructor with great insight, Tirthankar Bose).  Growing up and getting beyond labelling the fly a symbol, then, one can see that this insect intervention was hardly fitting in a scene where Emily and relatives were waiting in complete quiet for ‘the King,’ Jesus or God, to arrive and possess Emily’s spirit.  (Notice that he is given a subjunctive, ‘when the King be witnessed,’ so as not to dare presume upon his arrival.)  His presence was, as the line says, about to be ‘witnessed’ – the occasion was like a Christian service of communion.  And then, like a protester in a clown suit barging in when the president is expected to take the podium, the fly appeared instead, one of those awkward ones that bang into things and make fractured noises.

 

To me, the great prism in this poem is the one that sends the colour of the fly radiating toward our eye – ‘Blue.’ Flies do tend to have a metallic blue colour, especially the large ‘bluebottle’ flies associated with cadavers. But notice something odd about this ‘Blue’ – it is capitalized.  Throughout this poem, Emily has maintained an aura of classical serenity by putting capital letters at the front of all her nouns.  This custom, now mainly known from German, was followed by many early modern English writers.  We just saw an example in Anthony Brown’s 1739 play ‘The Fatal Retirement:’ “Alas, our Happiness is fleet and vain; like Evening Clouds tinged by the Sun with Gold.” Notice that even the noun-adjective ‘Evening’ gets a ‘cap.’  ‘Blue,’ as Emily uses it here, is not a noun of any kind; it’s a straightforward adjective, somewhat absurdly modifying the noun ‘Buzz.’  The word, however, can be a noun.  For example, there is an expression, ‘the blue,’ often heard in the stock phrase ‘it came at me out of the blue.’ This means, ‘I wasn’t expecting it at all, and it came like a flying object out of a clear, blue sky.’  The blue of the fly, in the poem, picks up this Blue of the endless horizon, the sultry blue of the long summer’s day where possibilities seem infinite. There is a lot of life in this Blue.

 

Even the awkwardness of the fly, its uncertainty and ‘stumbling,’ seems to suggest a normal life in progress, a regular confused creature, hitting one of life’s invisible obstacles, like a child who realizes that she will never be able to flap her arms and fly.  Moreover, if we let the blue of the fly fully come into our mind, as the prism rotates, it comes with its steely, metallic sheen, suggesting the mechanical power, even the monstrosity, of death, a ploughshare that has arrived to turn us up out of existence.  Is the fly life, or death, or both?  As you turn the prism of ‘Blue’ around, it can be life – or death – or life-and-death –

 

I hope you don’t mind me borrowing Emily’s breathless punctuation style for that last phrase.

 

Many commenters have talked about the fly as an indicator of mortality – of the temporary nature of life – or even as a messenger pointing towards evil – the macabre, life-despising self-indulgence of Satan as the great opponent of God in worldly life.  (That idea holds in traditional Christianity; other people have varying concepts of Satan.) There is a vast complex of religious imagery that the poem may seem to nod at.  Does a loving God truly rule if we must die?  Or is the gritty disappointment of existential failure the true tone of our lives? The church service of Emily’s deathbed is interrupted by the crackling, cackling laughter of the energetic force that loves cadavers and decay.  This limiting force is what comes between Emily and the light from the windows, and cuts her off from consciousness.  But – turn that prism slightly further – maybe, since Emily was so familiar with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendentalism, the poem is partly using an image of her death as a metaphor for the day-to-day failure of our healthy minds to perceive the transcendent infinities of reality.  Maybe, as in Hinduism and Buddhism, it’s the ‘fly’ of ordinary cares and passions that blocks us from enlightenment, and causes the death of our transcendent consciousness, even as we go on living.  We live, stumbling and uncertain, dead to the deeper reality. 

 

At this point, if you have some love for finding similarities among abstract things, this poem may start to remind you of something you’ve seen before.  I bow to you with my head touching the ground if you said “it’s like ‘Hallelujah.’” In Emily’s poem, the big Hallelujah of closeness to God is set up against the ironic entry of a broken hallelujah – the lively buzz of sometimes-ugly reality arriving in the midst of a perfectly composed deathbed scene.  How ugly is it, though – this element of life that the fly embodies? What have we truly had to call our own in this world, other than the same imperfect life that animates that stumbling fly?  It is just a silly creature, but, in the Blue of its appearance, it carries every possibility of existence.  The fly on the windowpane sings the hallelujah of life going on, even as it symbolizes death and rot. Indeed, life, like the fly, perfectly shares an affinity for ongoing energy mixed with decay.  If you accept evolution, as I imagine Emily did, the death of outdated creatures clears out competition against the slightly newly evolved children of those creatures, so that the new ones can provide renewal to the breeding line.  Death is just a part of life’s renewal.  Everything the fly represents is essential to existence as we know it.  To take this analysis to its maximum level of craziness, Emily’s poem is, to paraphrase Jeff Buckley, ‘a hallelujah to the orgasm of biology.’ A French expression called the orgasm ‘le petit mort,’ ‘the little death,’ presumably because the sensation tends to lift us beyond anything we feel we can be in control of.  Love and death, the two great obsessions of hundreds of artists – filmmaker Woody Allen comes to mind – come together in an endless variety of literary forms. 

 

Now let’s turn our prism to transcend one step further.  Into any perfection, you could say, there interposes a fly.  Whenever we are expecting something of absolute, classical elegance – the perfect Bach fugue on a perfect day – something comes along to remind us of the restlessness of life.  We sit listening to the organist, but suddenly, we are suppressing a cough.  Our foot itches.  Our mind refuses to focus on the music and we start thinking about whether we have enough green onions to make the dish we were planning for dinner. Emily’s non-ideal moment of death is certainly the way life is, you could say.  But if we’ve transcended that far, then let’s turn the analysis on me – maybe my interpretations are the buzzing of a fly in the serenity of Emily’s poem.  How much of what I’m saying Emily might have intended to say is real, and how much is purely my fiction? 

 

Here is the point where I’m going to make the Bold Statement (B.S.) of this chapter. 

 

Bold Statement (BS) number 7.  A top quality artist composes in a way that addresses all possible meanings that could be derived from his or her artwork. 

 

There is also a small follow-on to this.

 

An excellent artist composes in such a way that all meanings internal to his or her artwork meaningfully address all the other meanings internal to the same work.

 

“Richard,” you may be saying now: “You’ve really gone over the wall with this one.  Surely wild and crazy people could look at a piece of writing and dream up all kinds of meanings that the artist never intended.” 

 

I don’t dispute that – however, I would suggest that the artist has still addressed those crazy meanings, or at least, their foundations. 

 

To explain this, I need to say something about how I think people write and read literature. 

 

For hundreds of years, people who think about human thought have proposed that it proceeds in diverse modes.  A few years ago, as I mentioned in Chapter 3, a bestselling popular science book called Blink, written by Malcolm Gladwell, recounted some of the scientific evidence for the existence of what some people have called ‘intuitive’ thought.  Malcolm called it ‘thin-slicing,’ based on the idea that it produced major results in a thin slice of time.  He found that a top expert, for example, could instantly recognize a purported ancient Greek statue as a cleverly produced fake, whereas for regular experts, the decision required weeks of forensic work.  The term ‘thin slicing’ reminds me of salami, and I prefer not to use it – even though I am fond of salami on occasion.  ‘Intuitive,’ as a term, also has problems.  It has drifted into different meanings, many of which people are dogmatic about.  To some people, it implies direct communication from the world of ghosts and spirits; to others, it bears no such suggestion.  Its word-roots imply that you are teaching yourself something internally, but unless you’re psychologizing, or writing a complex character into your novel, that scenario is unlikely to apply.  Most ‘thin-slicing’-type intuitive thought deals with information you see, hear, feel, and smell in the world.  Long before Malcolm came along, I had invented and published my own term in an attempt to describe this type of thought: I called it ‘adherent’ thought.  It was roughly opposed to ‘reductive’ thought, which is otherwise known as logic, cogitation, ratiocination, and other, ever-longer words.  The idea is that our adherent thought mirrors, or adheres onto, the patterns we see in the world, and does so in an immediate way, often without applying much prejudice from our pre-existing thoughts.  The word ‘adherent’ suggests that our perceptions, to some extent, can act like the old ‘marbling’ process used to make painted book covers: in this process, paint was poured into patterns on the surface of a pot of oil and then the paper surface of the book cover was gently laid on the oil, taking up the pattern of the paint.  Before we even focus on things we’re especially interested in, our senses receive patterns of input and transmit them to a part of our memory that has very limited access to words and description. 

 

The adherent thought process takes in, very roughly, two kinds of information: patterns that are seen or otherwise sensed in a small slice of time, which I call ‘sensory screens’ (purely visual ‘screens’ can be called images) and patterns seen or experienced in things changing over time, which I call ‘protocol screens.’  (A protocol means a recipe for action).  This set of thought processes can do an outstanding job of finding similarities, differences and trends among the screens and protocols it has experience with.  It can also conjure up imaginative scenarios by rearranging the real scenarios or interlinking them in speculative sequences. 

 

While we are involved in the process of experiencing life with our adherent processes, we also use mental techniques for narrowing down the complexity we’re in contact with.  One of these techniques is the focus of attention, a natural device we use in order to harvest information that is especially relevant to some protocol of action we have in mind.  For example, we may look outdoors in the morning and see that there are a few thunderclouds in the west.  We may focus on them because we are running a protocol called ‘let’s see how the weather is today because I’m trying to decide if I should take my umbrella.’  While we are doing our focus thing, though, our adherent mind will have taken in many other impressions.  For example, it may have registered that there were some signs of powdery mildew on the nearby roses, and that there were a pair of starlings on the sidewalk, even though we paid little or no attention to these phenomena.  Under the right circumstances, such ‘hidden’ memories can be triggered and drawn out.  Artists, I would argue, are artists because they are especially adept at making use of these adherent impressions.  They are skilled at recovering reality for us in ways that let us ‘see it through new eyes,’ and they can also put together sequences that seem more complex and ingenious than anything we can ordinarily think of.  And you’ll notice that when they do so, they are usually unable to say anything that gives much insight into how they did it.  In fact, it’s very common for artists to be told by their fans or by professors what their artworks mean, and for them to reply with something like, “I suppose you’re right, actually, but I had never thought about it that way.”  In my view, this doesn’t usually mean that the commenter has made a new interpretation that the author had never intended.  It means the commenter has managed to find, and then draw down into reach of verbal thought, insights and connections that the author has worked with, but was only ever adherently aware of. 

 

It is via the adherent processes, then, that the competent author “addresses all possible meanings that could be derived from his or her artwork.”  For example, in relation to other literature, the author would hardly be able to draw up a complete list of every work his or her writing consciously or subconsciously (= adherently) reflected, repulsed, avoided echoing, and so on.  Nonetheless, like a whitewater kayaker instantly avoiding hundreds of half-hidden boulders, logs and whirlpools on the way downstream, he or she has written in a way that navigates through the cultural forces generated by all these other works.  Via the same process, he or she has consciously or subconsciously zipped through all the reasonably imaginable prism rotations of all the words and sentences in the text, mostly at the time they were written, but also in later revisions.  The author is adherently satisfied that the text says what it is intended to say, reflects whatever fascinating associations it is intended to reflect (even if the author can’t ‘put his or her finger on’ exactly what they are), and reasonably excludes grotesque re-interpretation.  From the point of view of the author’s attention focus, the text seems just seems to have a glow of wholeness and suggestive magic about it; it ‘feels right.’ Seldom does any feeling have more information content in it.

 

Ironically for writers, the mainstay of the reductive process is words.  Words are not primary impressions by any means.  They are what we scientists call ‘taxa,’ that is, classifications.  Every word is based on a massive grouping of things (like ‘dog’) or actions (‘jump’) or perceived qualities (‘blue,’ ‘quick’).  Every thought involving words has to deal with these grouped concepts, and thus logical thought (‘logos’ = ‘word’) tends to be relatively slow and heavy-footed.  To make such a labour-intensive project efficient, we develop a strong tendency to focus on tried-and-true protocols and procedures.  This partially explains why hundreds of people will spontaneously say ‘Practice makes perfect,’ when introduced to a dog named Practice (see Chapter 2).  The protocol associated with the word ‘practice,’ meaning to do something over and over in an attempt to improve one’s skill, comes along in the English speaking world with the slogan ‘Practice makes perfect.’  Say the word ‘Practice’ while you are activating the other person’s protocol for ‘now say something pleasantly conversational about the dog,’ and you will get ‘Practice makes perfect.’ Whether we like it or not, there is a great deal of robot mechanism operating in our ordinary verbal life. Monitor yourself to see how often you say something radically unlike anything you’ve ever said before. 

 

The good side of logic is that, unlike the adherent processes, it can be critically and objectively examined by different people.  Sometimes adherent impressions and imaginings can group together in unrealistic ways. A common example is when people in a majority social group start selectively grouping imagery, perhaps with the help of their leaders or news media, so that they ‘intuitively’ see members of their local minority group as ugly, devious and creepy. Flat-footed, steady logic may be needed to demonstrate that these opportunistic ‘gut’ impressions (‘gut feeling’ being another expression for adherent thought) are simply wrong. 

 

Although words tend to be heavy with fixed associations and chained together like prisoners by standard procedures, there are ways in which they can take wing.  Part of writing poetry, song and imaginative prose is to use metaphors, where words bring two or more images together in a comparison.  For example, if I say ‘that man’s reptilian glare makes me nervous,’ the image of a man’s face is modified by a comparison that highlights all the features that remind you of a reptile: the firm set of the jaw, the staring eyes, etc.  Parts of the image that don’t correspond are automatically subtracted out by the adherent mind, so, when we say ‘his reptilian glare,’ we don’t automatically see the man with a forked tongue flicking in and out.  We probably can’t say exactly why we think the man has a ‘reptilian glare’ rather than a ‘leonine glare’ (a hard look like the one a lion gives you when sizing you up for possible attack) or a ‘bullish glare’ (the look of the bull considering charging you.)  Nonetheless, the ‘reptilian’ metaphor works – we can sense that the person has a cold and alien stare that suggests no sympathy for humans. 

 

Likewise, this metaphor works:

 

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

 

Petals map to faces, and the wet black bough to the subway tunnel of Paris.  As we envision the scene Ezra shows us, adherent screens from our own life showing flowering trees in the rain, colourful paintings, urban scenes, and crowd scenes may clap together in our minds in a way that gives us pleasure.  The adherent mind seems to be connected to some of our most pleasure-filled moments of thought, and Ezra’s simple comparison, evoking the beauty of a Japanese cherry tree in urban life, has enough magic in it to establish the poem as a miniature classic of literature. 

 

Words themselves, in a way, are like very dense metaphors – the word ‘dog’ maps any given dog you see to many and diverse other dogs.  At some point, the process of reduction that gave rise to this word separated the ‘dog’ cluster of images and protocols from the ‘wolf’ cluster of images and protocols, even though these two groups of animals can interbreed and have sometimes been considered to be the same species.  There isn’t really a category for an animal that’s exactly half wolf and half dog, except to say a ‘wolf-dog cross’ or something like that.  Reduction by nature tends to trim off reality with slightly artificial boundaries, which may then generate ‘grey areas’ between the categories.  Recently, the social media site Facebook added over 50 new gender categories, apart from male and female, to accommodate people who felt neither fully male nor fully female, or whose X/Y genetics and self-impressions were discordant: transgendered, intersex, pangender, and so on.  These terms were all, in a way, attempts to refill the missing information that the terms male and female left out when they were used as a duality.  The process of reduction is good for creating useful, manageable concepts like ‘dog’ and ‘wolf’ but it can go too far and erase the intervening ‘grey areas’ – which are actually as bright as anything else in life. 

 

Readers who are reading Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah,’ if they are strongly inclined towards reduction, can easily mentally erase some of Leonard’s ambiguity, or nuance.  They may form a compact theory and use it to sort and re-interpret all the lyrics.  It would be very easy, reading ‘Hallelujah’, to ‘prove’ that Leonard didn’t believe in God at all.  “Maybe there’s a God above,” he says – God is hardly supported, apparently.  Even love, supposedly the evidence of God, is a “cold and broken” fraud.  The ‘broken hallelujah’ of false hope is all we will know in our human lives. Life is combat and we are here to get a quick, vivid orgasm and shoot our lovers before they can shoot us. 

 

On the other hand, we can also ‘prove’ that Leonard is completely religious, but humble.  He feels that he has failed at human love, or that love has failed him. Lovers who didn’t share his divine ecstasy had nothing good to say about his music, and metaphorically ‘cut his hair,’ removing his power.  He himself was a klutz, who ‘couldn’t feel’ – maybe his insensitivity, his creative ego, made the women he loved feel like they’d been given second priority.  Maybe the lovers tried to compete with his worship and fell short.  In the end, after all Leonard’s misadventures with love and human failings, he’d still be full of praise and song for his God:

 

I’ll stand before the Lord of Song

With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.

 

In my Bold Statement, when I say that the artist “addresses all possible meanings that could be derived from his or her artwork,” clearly I can’t mean that Leonard supports both the contradictory reductions I’ve just laid out for this song.  What I am claiming is that he will have been aware of both viewpoints, and will probably have fine-tuned his writing so as to undercut such easy simplifications.  Religious faith, like faith in lovers, is fundamentally a toggle switch – it can be turned on and off.  “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for,” said St. Paul in the Christian bible, clearly ruling out instant, hands-on certainty.  One can be full of enthusiasm (literally meaning, ‘having Theos, i.e., God, inside oneself’), or one can be dejected, disillusioned, or even cynical.   Technically, faith is what could be called, using scientific terms, a ‘bootstrap affirmation’ or a ‘positive do-loop’ – you simply have to pick yourself up and decide to place faith in the deity or person involved.  I’d suggest that Leonard’s lyric plays with that on-off switch, acknowledging its existence, without making any obvious resolution that would allow us to say “Yes! He turned faith on!” or “No! He went back to ‘safe mode’ and left that dubious faith switch in the ‘off’ position!”  As a top-level artist, Leonard knew, firstly, that the toggle switch has a natural tendency to wiggle back and forth, and, secondly, that modern audiences find a complete commitment to faith or cynicism dull and unsophisticated.  To be faithful to reality, then, as well as to fashion, he left the switch in wiggle mode for the listener to play with.  What he bequeathed to us as a legacy, without any ambiguity, is his sense that life contains moments of the highest joy.  Hallelujah. 

 

The advice old authors give to young authors – read, read, read – partly derives from the idea that everything a good author writes should be written in the awareness of as much existing culture as possible.  This not only prevents embarrassing repetition of previously used ideas, but also allows the emerging young writer to fine-tune his or her work to as much culture as possible. He or she can speak to the heart (another allusion to the adherent mind) of everyone, without seeming to be an ignoramus to anyone.  If reductionists come along and try to make the work propagate fascistic ideologies, or religious fanaticisms, or nihilistic suicide cults, there will be subtle blocks built right into the text that allow non-fanatics to argue successfully against the fanatics.  The use of the adherent mind requires maximizing the openness of one’s perspective, and in this openness, one can foresee the possible twisting of one’s thoughts, and build in barricades against those who would do the twisting. 

 

This means that my youthful defense of authors against gushy, overstated interpretations of their work was of little value.  The authors were already aware, at least adherently, of possible overblown sentimentalizations of their ideas, and built the work to withstand the attack.  Therefore, we can all feel free to suggest sophisticated overtones in works that are simply worded.  If the author was any good, he or she had already ‘listened to’ those possible overtones, and responded by consciously or subconsciously adjusting the writing to allow or deny them. 

 

I deliberately multiplied my Hindu-Buddhist interpretations of Emily Dickinson’s ‘Fly’ poem to make it look as if I might be getting lost in a post-hippie, magic-mushroom fantasy world after I was exposed to the lethal buzz of Emily’s insect. Possibly my approach seemed outrageously far-fetched.  I had the advantage, however, of owning Shoei Ando’s relatively rare book in which multiple connections are traced between both famous and less-known Buddhist writings, and the themes pursued by Dickinson and other writers associated with ‘New England transcendentalism.’  Early on in his book, Ando quotes some Buddhist writings about the ‘deep well’ of human consciousness and then mentions Emily for the first time:

 

As suggested by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was well acquainted with the inner world of man, if we exhaust the contents of the conscious self and arrive at its bottom, we can get in touch with the eternal.  In other words, what Ralph Waldo Emerson called “the eternal ‘One’” is showing its face at the bottom of the heart.  Emily Dickinson sang of it in one of her poems:

 

If my Bark sink

’Tis to another sea—

Mortality’s Ground Floor

Is Immortality—

 

(A ‘bark’ is a kind of large sailing ship with three or four masts.) 

 

The philosophical content of Zen has nothing to do with picturesque or exotic Asian local culture.  Rather, it attempts to describe and awaken universal realities of the human mind.  Emily impressed Ando-sensei, a sophisticated Zen practitioner, as having an especially deep awareness of the realities Zen attempts to access. As I said before, she may have contacted these ideas in her reading or re-invented them via personal insight.  Either way, she wrote poems that intelligently addressed the issues Zen Buddhism is interested in.  She kept her distinct New England vocabulary: words like ‘atman,’ the Hindu term for the “Immortality” that forms a “Ground Floor” for mortal life, are never seen in her work.  She has, however, addressed the issue that this word refers to.  I will say more about this trend in her work presently.

 

Let me now deal with two literary side issues, sentimentality and immaturity.  First the former.  Many people, upon considering the way Emily’s work stands up to worldwide examination, might say she was a “great artist.”  I’ve resisted this temptation because, to me, that phrasing evokes a problem in human thought, namely, the tendency to sentimentalize, hyperinflate, ‘pump,’ ‘puff’ or idolize people who manage adherent thought well.  There are many situations in which people first diminish someone to a role (‘the artist,’ ‘my son’) and then hyper-inflate the glory of that reduced role (‘that great artist,’ ‘my brilliant lawyer son’).  They are then confounded if the artist does something unexpected, or the son suddenly quits the law firm and joins the local theatre company.  I technically call this gushing, controlling mental practice ‘adherent-in-reduction’: it’s an attempt to bottle up the magical, pleasurable, transcendent aspects of the adherent into a small, easily manipulated unit.  The main reason sentimentality, as seen in my little dog poem, is out of fashion in modern literature is that it so often reflects this gushing version of reduction.  Sentimentality was very popular in the Victorian era in the English speaking world, and writings and paintings of the time often represented children, women and animals as wonderful, nearly angelic beings.  At the same time, child labour and animal cruelty were common, and women were considered to be largely mentally incompetent, denied the vote and, in most cases, forbidden higher education.  Sentimentality and pop-star idolization are the positive side of adherent-in-reduction: it also has a negative side where intuitive dreads are assembled together so that people can be demonized, dehumanized or made objects of superstition. 

 

We are best off to appreciate well-prepared literature without alienating ourselves into concepts like ‘she was a great artist and people like me are just ordinary folk who can’t go there.’  A writer like Emily probably has advantages in intelligence, but her work also shows that such a person prepares herself – by being an enthusiastic student, by writing to many other writers – and, moreover, that she takes on the fearlessness that allows people to spend time looking into topics that most people find impractical.  Emily apparently cooked meals very well, but she still set aside chunks of her lifespan to think about mortality and consciousness.  I’m sure that some who knew her thought her a great time-waster rather than a great artist.  We need a few such time-wasters if we’re to appreciate the time we have in this life. 

 

Now, a few words about immaturity.  Looking back at my dog poem, I think you can now see where the term I used to describe it, ‘subadherent,’ came from. I can tell you, from the perspective of someone who can instantly recognize thousands of fungal species as well as a vast range of microbial ecological situations, that adherent consciousness works best if it’s trained by massive amounts of input.  Yes, practice makes perfect.  Mind you, the working adherent needs to be heavily proofread by logic to weed out false matches among impressions, and it needs to be fitted against theoretical and imaginative scenarios (for example, in biology, the theories of natural selection or kin-selection) in order to give it depth of understanding.  Still, an expert can’t get along without it.  At times in one’s life where it is doing all the right things, yet lacks enough information to do an expert-level job, it functions as a low-level version of itself – a sub-adherent.  Even the most amazing geniuses tend to produce ‘juvenilia’ for a time when they’re young – youthful works that show promise but are too naïve to be considered top quality work.  

 

Part of the writer’s process of reconciling the writing with everything it could possibly connect to is the process of ensuring it connects well within itself.  To recap the ‘bold statement’ that made this point: “An excellent artist composes in such a way that all meanings internal to his or her artwork meaningfully address all the other meanings internal to the same work.”  In my analysis of my dog poem, I mentioned that the line “maybe in some life unsaid” had no support elsewhere in the poem.  Well, the poem is extremely short, so why should it?  The answer, really, is that the phrase puts out an impression of being an awkward statement brought together for the convenience of the rhyme and the poem’s self-mirroring scheme, and there is no alternative impression available to defend it against this first impression.  An author can’t just hope the readers won’t notice or care about this sort of awkwardness.  The best writing addresses all possible impressions because the readers, as a group, are expected to experience them all.  If a piece is only written for generous or oblivious readers who are willing to overlook a few teen pimples in the text, then it’s not at the height of beauty.  And by ‘beauty,’ I don’t mean adherent-in-reductive, ‘worship it’ beauty, so that it has to suggest love, butterflies, and waterfalls.  I mean the beauty of artistic integrity, even if the writing itself is a horror tale that turns the reader’s bone marrow white.

 

So far, apart from my dog poem, we’ve only looked at literature from the outside in. I’ve speculated about what authors seemed to be saying, and what connections their works might have had to complex realities and to other writings.  To complete our survey of what literature is all about, though, we can go one step further and look at a couple of pieces of writing from the inside out.  I’m going to talk about two sets of my own song lyrics.  This choice isn’t based on any notion that these lyrics are in the same league as anything written by Leonard Cohen or Emily Dickinson.  But since I know these works inside and out, I can say more about what they meant to say, what they said accidentally, and what they said without my being fully aware of it. 

 

The first one has a typical pop song theme – teenage love.  (It can be heard online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kge8ivKfI1c)  (or Spotify link
https://open.spotify.com/track/4OOvIuBMvf1iLvuRih63AA) 

 

Don’t Worry About Yourself

 

Your friends call you "hey stupid" and your acne blows out volcano craters

but some valentine card Cupid speared you, that old dictator love –

It reached out and gave the shaft a little shove.

You think “nothing's going to come of this” but still you're praying.

 

You've always flinched at plastic spiders,

you faint on fast moving elevators –

Now you're rising faster than a glider plane on a thermal swell.

Suddenly you don't feel so well –

Yet somewhere in your head you hear music playing

and the song says

 

"Don't worry about yourself, don't worry about yourself,

don't worry about yourself, you'll be fine."

 

The words swim around your head like wine.

“It's worth a chance,” you hear yourself softly saying.

 

You dance with him one night in a haze of question marks

and lights spinning slowly

and suddenly a bright explosion burns a hole in your old lives –

only the meeting of your minds survives.

The walls are burning down, the whole building's swaying

 

and you hear him say:

 

“Don't worry, don't worry, don't worry about yourself no more.

Don't worry about what they say ‘cause I've said it all

when I tell you you're love's own solar core.

Don't worry about your skin – I see the stars within,

I see all the worlds that make you up.

When I looked inside your heart, a curtain tore.

 

Don't worry about yourself, don't worry about yourself,

don't worry about yourself, you'll be fine.

Don't worry about yourself, don't worry about yourself,

don't worry about yourself, you'll be fine.”

 

The words swim around your head like wine.

 

 

This song is made of far more mirrors than prisms.  It clearly features a teenaged girl or gay boy who feels awkward and unattractive; some jokes like “your acne blows out volcano craters” stress the intense embarrassment teens can feel.  The playfulness of the first part of the song also features some musical isomorphy – “Now you're rising faster than a glider plane” features a series of rising notes, and “thermal swell” contains a glide up into a high note and back down again.  The overall mood is not as heavy as the topic.  Am I engaging in satire, here, making fun of this poor teen’s angst?  As a school book would say, “what’s your opinion?” 

 

The song gets serious when the awkward teen actually gets to dance with the person she or he is attracted to – the whirl of dance hall lights combines with the abstract whirl of hopeful questions to produce a highly romantic atmosphere.  Suddenly, a nuclear fusion reaction takes place in the metaphoric plane: the two dancers understand they find each other special. You can tell this song was written by a scientist: it compares the romantic moment with the two kinds of nuclear fusion reactions we know well – the light and heat reaction making up the sun and the stars, and the explosion of a hydrogen bomb. As the explosion moves outward, we also get a trace of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the cosmos, turning the spotty skin of our awkward teen into constellations of stars – everything being transformed into beauty by the explosion of love. 

 

At that point, the lyric has said enough about thermonuclear reactions, and for freshness, it turns to a completely different image to describe the sudden closeness of the dancers: “When I looked inside your heart a curtain tore.” 

 

This is the main prism of this lyric.  What is it getting at?  Since when did hearts, even in metaphors, have curtains inside them?  The idea of cloth inside a heart is a little icky.  Still, clearly we’re working on too symbolic a level here to worry about lint in the bloodstream.  You might think, “the heart means the deepest feelings, and the worried teenager was curtained off from realizing her true inner beauty – now, the interest of the other person has torn through and unveiled that brilliant reality.”  And in saying so, you would be perfectly right, but if you keep turning the prism, there might be something more. 

 

This line about the curtain tearing might remind some listeners of a story.  Here it is, from the biblical book of Matthew, chapter 27, with my footnotes. 

 

Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost^a. And, behold, the veil^b of the temple was rent in twain^c from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many. Now when the centurion^d, and they that were with him, watching Jesus, saw the earthquake, and those things that were done, they feared greatly, saying, Truly this was the Son of God.

 

1. ‘yielded up the ghost’ – died; literally, ‘sent away his breath of animation.’ (αφηκεν το πνευμα)
2. King James version. Many modern translations say ‘curtain.’ This veil, the ‘parochet,’ separated the holiest part of the Jerusalem Jewish Temple, destroyed in 70 CE, from the main area of worship.  No one was allowed to enter beyond the veil except the High Priest, who could only enter once a year on the holy day Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).
3. ‘rent in twain’ – torn in half
4. centurion – Roman soldier

 

Now, this story, if it applies, brings the tearing of the curtain veiling our teen’s heart up to an epic scale.  To make allusion to a sudden spiritual event that exposed the holiest inner region of ‘the sanctified house’ of worship – not to mention shaking the ground and bringing some dead people back to life – is much more on the scale of a thermonuclear explosion than is the tearing of some symbolic cloth.  The budding love of the two dancers now appears to release as much spiritual energy as it does physical energy.  So, the question for us as students of literature is: did the author intend to refer to this story, or was it coincidence?  Maybe he was just motivated by needing a word to rhyme with ‘more’ and ‘core.’  I can tell you that when I wrote this lyric, I wrote it line by line with no ‘conscious’ advance plans of how its images would fall together.  My rhymes are usually exact, so my choices of words are limited.

 

Now here, as the author, I have the advantage of knowing the answer to this question, more or less.  Much to the shock of my author-defending teenaged self, yes, I did intend to refer to the biblical story.  Possibly, the fact that it yielded the rhyme ‘tore’ was an influence, but it seemed very right.  Moreover, it connected to an isomorphy.  The music in the ‘bridge’ part of the song where this lyric occurs shifts noticeably into a middle-eastern mode, with some semi-tones occurring where a rock song would ordinarily have whole tones.  The music here was written prior to the lyrics.  Thus, as I was casting for a rhyme for ‘core,’ I was already mentally flickering like a fire across hot coals of middle eastern ambience.  But one of those magical creative moments came together; the very word ‘curtain’ itself, the main prism and metaphor, includes one of those Hebraic semitones as the second of its series of four notes.  Admittedly, I sometimes westernize this note by raising it half a tone when I sing the piece, just to make it friendlier to the audience.  Nonetheless, it’s there as a concept.

 

In the broader context, the chord structure of this song owes a debt to the musical genre called ‘heavy metal.’  This long-lasting genre, essentially invented by the band Black Sabbath in the early 1970s, has often played on religious themes.  Although many artists playing heavy metal concentrate on ‘dark’ and ‘sinister’ themes like hell, Satan and godlessness, I don’t have any personal affinity for writing such material.  On the other hand, suggesting that our teen’s love had a major spiritual dimension as ‘true love,’ rather than just attraction, is well within the scope of things I might say.  So my acknowledgment in this lyric of heavy metal’s play with Christianity was more on the side of life than death.

 

And, yes, this sudden nod to spirituality does have interconnections within the song.  Most notably, it connects with “those words spin around your head like wine.”  Although this basically just refers to the sensation of being ‘drunk with love,’ in a song where a curtain tears to reveal the holy place of the heart’s temple, it also picks up an overtone of another religious theme, the service of communion with its sacramental wine. 

 

Did the song also intend the tearing of the curtain to be the answer to the teen’s ‘praying,’ mentioned in the first verse?  People who have no religious beliefs at all often say “I am just praying that will happen” and similar statements, just to emphasize strong wishes.  “Now you’re praying” isn’t a specifically religious lyrical line.  This question of whether it causally connected to the curtain line is something I’m not certain about.  Perhaps it’s coincidence, or perhaps writing a lyric with the mention of ‘praying’ cued my adherent consciousness to come up later with a spiritual answer to the prayer.  The middle eastern ambience in the music and the prior mention of prayer may have adherently suggested the Jerusalem temple, just at the moment I was considering ‘tore’ as a rhyme for ‘core.’  Your guess about this is as good as mine. 

 

The important thing is to know that, once written in, the word ‘praying’ could have acted on my adherent to influence me towards adding later religious motifs. As soon as a word starts spinning in the quantum field of the song’s matrix, every possible meaning that spins with it is being ‘heard’ throughout the rest of the writing. Or to go back to my metaphor about white-water canoeing, the currents and swellings caused in the water by any one word may exert an effect on how I navigate through writing any later part of the song. This is a good thing; it gives the piece unity.

 

Now, perhaps the most obvious question for the baffled student of literature, at this point, is ‘did Richard write this song so that the listener would have to know a particular biblical story and bring all this religious stuff into the interpretation?  Is this a religious song?’  But based on what I’ve said in my Bold Statement, you now know that this can’t be true if I’m a reasonably competent lyric writer.  Part of the process of “addressing all possible meanings that could be derived from the artwork” consists of making the song work for people who have never heard about this biblical story, or who are put off by religion or uninterested in it.  Some authors do write in a way – you could call it ‘recherché’ – where the reader has to decode literary references or other cryptic details in order to understand the text.  This stiff and unfriendly writing format seldom generates high quality results.  I like people, and I would never intentionally write a song that would only speak to those from a certain social and educational background.  But I admit there may be some extra bonus metaphors planted there for some people who have read widely and listened to a lot of music.  Where these exist, though, they will be superimposed upon words that are perfectly understandable – I hope – to most or all English-speaking listeners.  I believe that most writers of stories, songs and poems have much the same attitude (unless they’re having fun with mystical mystery phrasing or with wild wordplay, as seen in Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky.)  Just as a reader can appreciate Ezra Pound’s subway poem without knowing anything about Japanese art, he or she should be able to appreciate my song without having read the bible.  For anyone who doesn’t catch this aspect of the song at first, another dimension is waiting, ready to give the work renewed novelty later on, whenever it is recognized.

 

You can see that this song promises that it will not be recherché by doing what most songs in its genre do – using some slangy street grammar.  You have “Don’t worry about yourself no more,” instead of ‘any more,’ and “Don't worry about what they say ‘cause I've said it all,” rather than ‘because I’ve said it all.’ It’s not a Shakespearian sonnet – it’s a pop song. The schoolyard grammar – besides tying in with the teenaged theme – also promises the listener that the song is on the side of the real people they are, not the ideal people their education frames them to be.  So I can’t then break my promise and drag the whole audience to a church service. They might not be dressed for the occasion.  The temple imagery is there to serve the interests of the love song; the love song isn’t a disguise placed upon a religious hymn.  And yet, having said that, I have to acknowledge the joy of songwriting that Leonard Cohen gave such a fine expression to, and I can very much feel his conclusion (one word is changed):

 

I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you

And even (if) it all went wrong

I'll stand before the Lord of Song

With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

 

Now, to answer the one question I left unanswered above, my best guess is that I was not taking our teen’s anxieties lightly in the first half of the song.  The comedy was meant as back-handed reassurance for anyone in that situation.  By the end of the song, we can see that the person was recognized as beautiful and loveable. There was a ‘before and after’ contrast, and the ‘after’ allowed me to treat the ‘before’ light-heartedly.  I did, in fact, hope that my song would pass on the message to anxious young people that they, too, could be loved.  I will never forget the shock I experienced when my new boyfriend, now my partner of 39 years, looked at me and said, “you’re adorable.”  I’d always felt I was very ordinary and not especially attractive.  Perhaps this song was my attempt to pass a miracle along. 

 

I’ll now talk about another song of mine that illustrates how far you can legitimately go in interpreting literature.  The obvious theme of this song is a familiar topic, dogs.  As the song goes along, though, it picks up a second topic that becomes ever more obvious.  See if you can see what it is. 

 

There may seem to be a lot of lyrics here, but most of them are comedy and need no explanation. 

 

 

 Thank You (For Being My Dog) (Hear at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpGoMnC0RYk) (or Spotify link
https://open.spotify.com/track/30hh9sCbuD2FvYg0o6bdyD) 

 

 

Think of those rainy afternoons in the muck and in the mire,

I wouldn't have had the abandon to splash about.

Think of those winter days I could have been vegetating by the fire

instead of getting my snowboots on to take you out.

You are a mystery in an enigma in a big ball of fur,

an irresistible magnet to every child and flea and burr.

Your nose is high resolution while I live in a near‑scentless fog;

You run at high speed while I just have to slog – but it's a good old slog, so

I just gotta thank you for being my dog.

I just gotta thank you for being my four-footed crazy creature.

Thank you for being my dog, I just gotta thank you for being my dog –

 

You know just where you're heading – there's garbage ready for shredding.

That'll teach me for letting you follow your nose around.

You're escaping into the alley, ‘cause there's peanut butter and jelly

in a week-old sandwich smeared along the ground.

Without you – I would surely have overlooked this,

so what can I do but thank you?

 

Think of the sunny summer trails I would have missed completely,

probably stayed at work and pushed those computer keys.

Think of the way I'm fitter than the out‑of‑breath creature I would have been

if not for the constant walking to community message centres on poles and trees.

You've got it made, you live the life, and all I can do is be

your escort and butler and chef and maid, but it isn't slavery.

In fact, I'm so dedicated my friends all say that I've slipped a cog

except for the ones who own a quadruped analogue

and they understand when I thank you for being my dog.

It's an excellent vocation to be a slightly simple furry genius.

Thank you for being your dog.  What can I do but thank you? –

for being one of those

 

classic canine fellows, whiplash tail attached to a bellows,

and did I mention that amazing smell‑nose that you twitch?

You hear every word that I say and understand and disobey

because you know the important thing is to scratch that itch.

Whatever that itch is, that's where the zen is.

Teach me to be that spontaneous – hmm … or maybe not;

maybe I'll just keep letting you specialize in that dog thing

but still I want to thank you for the wonderful job you do

of being a digitigrade quadruped, omnivorous, carnivorous, pizzivorous^a

creature with a friendly head...I wanna feed that head.  Have I been programmed?  Who's got who on the leash around here, anyway?  I don't wanna think about that.

 

I just want to thank you for being my dog.  I just wanna thank you … What more can you ask?  Now, don't give me that big‑eyed look.  I can't stand it any more... Aw, hell, have another pizza crust. Why not?

 

1. pizza-eating. Not a real word.

 

There are some playful pokes at other literature in there, the most obvious of which is the parody of Winston Churchill’s 1939 description of Communist Russia “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”  Less obviously, “Your nose is high resolution while I live in a near scentless fog” isn’t just a scientifically accurate description – it also remotely references a famous G.K. Chesterton poem about dogs, the Song of the Quoodle. That poem is written from the viewpoint of a dog marvelling at how incompetent humans (‘the fallen sons of Eve’) are at smelling things.  Here are the four relevant verses out of the five Chesterton wrote:

 

They haven't got no noses,

The fallen sons of Eve;

Even the smell of roses

Is not what they supposes;

But more than mind discloses

And more than men believe.

 

…

 

The brilliant smell of water,

The brave smell of a stone,

The smell of dew and thunder,

The old bones buried under,

Are things in which they blunder

And err, if left alone.

 

The wind from winter forests,

The scent of scentless flowers,

The breath of brides' adorning,

The smell of snare and warning,

The smell of Sunday morning,

God gave to us for ours

 

And Quoodle here discloses

All things that Quoodle can,

They haven't got no noses,

They haven't got no noses,

And goodness only knowses

The Noselessness of Man.

 

As you can see, amidst all the fun in this poem, there are many fewer rhymes for ‘noses’ in English than there are for ‘dogs,’ as seen in my song lyric. Although Chesterton wasn’t well set up to use some possibilities, like ‘poses’ and ‘hoses,’ the omitted second verse featured an ambiguously antisemitic-looking remark, presumably there to facilitate the use of ‘the Law of Moses’ as a rhyme.  This abrupt turn into religious head-butting, for the sake of one rhyme, seems to violate my Bold Statement supplement, “An excellent artist composes in such a way that all meanings internal to his or her artwork meaningfully address all the other meanings internal to the same work.”  Therefore, I’ve treated the verse as a lapse in judgment and edited it out here; if you want to read it, just Google Quoodle.

 

My dog lyric sends out a few additional waves toward science, most notably in words like ‘quadruped’ and ‘digitigrade’ – which means walking on the toes.

 

Apart from such random salutes, though, there is also a possible consistent secondary theme in my dog lyric.  It may not be obvious at first.  I’ll highlight the relevant words to help bring it out.

 

Thank You (For Being My Dog)

 

Think of those rainy afternoons in the muck and in the mire,

I wouldn't have had the abandon to splash about.

Think of those winter days I could have been vegetating by the fire

instead of getting my snowboots on to take you out.

You are a mystery in an enigma in a big ball of fur,

an irresistible magnet to every child and flea and burr.

Your nose is high resolution while I live in a near‑scentless fog;

You run at high speed while I just have to slog but it's a good old slog, so

I just gotta thank you for being my dog.

I just gotta thank you for being my four-footed crazy creature.

Thank you for being my dog, I just gotta thank you for being my dog –

 

You know just where you're heading, there's garbage ready for shredding.

That'll teach me for letting you follow your nose around.

You're escaping into the alley, ‘cause there's peanut butter and jelly

in a week-old sandwich smeared along the ground.

Without you ‑‑ I would surely have overlooked this,

so what can I do but thank you?

 

Think of the sunny summer trails I would have missed completely,

probably stayed at work and pushed those computer keys.

Think of the way I'm fitter than the out‑of‑breath creature I would have been

if not for the constant walking to community message centres on poles and trees.

You've got it made, you live the life, and all I can do is be

your escort and butler and chef and maid, but it isn't slavery.

In fact I'm so dedicated my friends all say that I've slipped a cog

except for the ones who own a quadruped analogue

and they understand when I thank you for being my dog.

It's an excellent vocation to be a slightly simple furry genius.

Thank you for being your dog.  What can I do but thank you? –

for being one of those

 

classic canine fellows, whiplash tail attached to a bellows,

and did I mention that amazing smell‑nose that you twitch?

You hear every word that I say and understand and disobey

because you know the important thing is to scratch that itch.

Whatever that itch is, that's where the zen is.

Teach me to be that spontaneous – hmm… or maybe not;

maybe I'll just keep letting you specialize in that dog thing

but still I want to thank you for the wonderful job you do

of being a digitigrade quadruped omnivorous carnivorous pizzivorous

creature with a friendly head...I wanna feed that head.  Have I been programmed?  Who's got who on the leash around here, anyway?  I don't wanna think about that.

 

I just want to thank you for being my dog.  I just wanna thank you … What more can you ask?  Now, don't give me that big‑eyed look.  I can't stand it any more... aw, hell, have another pizza crust. Why not?

 

Did the author really intend to work up a theme here other than dogs and dog humour? 

 

It seems he discovered, or decided, that another topic was just as much fun as the dog itself.  Call it what you will:  deliberation, intentionality, free will, spontaneity.  Mental freedom – what is it? Who has it? How much is too much?  The song’s title is odd to start with, because it implies that the dog has chosen to be my dog.  Yet has he?  Should I completely trust the idea that instinct forces the dog-master bond to form automatically?  If I had a three-year-old child – well trained dogs are often suggested to function at about the mental level of a three-year old human – would I credit his or her love for me to voluntary spirit or to instinct?  The song, as it goes along, goes ever further, in a fun way, into the topic of how much of the dog’s motivation is spontaneous and how much is dutiful or instinctive.  And it also comments about the owner and his ideas about whether he is being freed or enslaved by his dog companionship. 

 

Finally, the owner deliberates about whether he should try to be as spontaneous as his dog – and spontaneously decides “maybe not.”  That decision has an air of contradiction, if you choose to ride along in the logic of it. 

 

Everyone who has studied or otherwise read up on basic philosophy knows that ‘free will’ poses a conundrum, or a paradox.  Everything we do can be thought to have a cause or a set of causes, and yet, we often feel as if we’re perfectly free to choose our own course.  Suppose our friend says something that gets our anger up – we feel a choice coming on about whether to give an angry response or to take a more peaceful route. If we had chosen to become angry, we could perhaps trace causal factors in our biological temperament, plus our upbringing, plus the fact that we were tired, plus a look in the friend’s eye that seemed challenging, plus the muggy weather – and so on.  Likewise, taking the peaceful route could also be seen as having been stimulated by past and present factors. How much freedom is there, really?

 

This can all be seen as a heavy philosophical question, or as something that’s intrinsically funny.  In this song, I seem to be saying that it’s more in the spirit of modern dog ownership to take it lightly. 

 

A theory of mine, arrived at long before this song ever existed, is that dogs these days, for most city dwellers in the English sphere, serve a social function that is also one of the main incentives for having children.  Our adult lives often get settled into habit.  Even if we are unsettled in our day-to-day circumstances, our thoughts begin to settle into regular patterns, often moulded by practicality and ‘the school of hard knocks.’  Children suddenly provide a fresh perspective that sees all thing as new. Often, they are full of joy, and when they switch to being sad or angry, the change is so sudden that it still sings of freedom. It may be a good idea for us to deny ourselves this much freedom, but we can still appreciate it, and take part in the joy of newness.  Children and dogs – and cats, among others – give us the ability to refresh our mental perspective on familiar things by seeing them ‘as if through new eyes.’ I’ve coined a word for this mental refreshment – ‘alluminance’ – literally, the ‘bringing of light to things.’ Those of us who don’t have young children may take to owning dogs as the main source of alluminance in our lives.  This is all very well, but it again raises the question of how much of this loveable freshness and immediacy we should try to bring into our own attitudes and actions. 

 

My song doesn’t try to answer this question – it merely plays with it. The play reaches its height of absurdity at

 

Whatever that itch is, that's where the zen is.

Teach me to be that spontaneous – hmm… or maybe not;

maybe I'll just keep letting you specialize in that dog thing

 

As originally written, the last line said ‘dog dharma,’ using the Hindu-Buddist word for built-in natural duty, but I decided that went too far.  In any case, ‘dog thing’ has essentially the same meaning.  There is a little stack of paradoxes in these three lines. In the lyric, I ask the dog to teach me to be more spontaneous, so apparently, I feel relatively fixed in what I do.  Yet, that request is seemingly made spontaneously.  Then, apparently, with completely immediate spontaneity, I abruptly reconsider, perhaps thinking about what I’d be like if I was as spontaneous as a creature that can roll in a dead squirrel’s carcass or hump the leg of a house guest. So what could be more free than my sudden decision to say “or maybe not?” Except that this is all a fixed part of a previously written lyric, so in reality, it’s not free, even though the decision to write this as a lyric was free.  It followed a tune that had already been written – not free.  And yet, the structure of the tune was an invention – free.  Am I free or unfree here?  The freely written song obliges me to sing a fixed lyric in which I seemingly freely express my desire for more freedom and then, seemingly exercising maximal freedom, freely decide to reject that freedom. 

 

In the end, the dog has the last laugh, with its determination overwhelming my free will and forcing me to give it a piece of human food it has its eye on. 

 

Now here’s where my student self would have truly been shocked at me.  As I was piling up these paradoxes, I was indeed thinking, “let’s have a little fun with Aristotle here.”  Aristotle, the Greek philosopher who lived from 384 to 322 BCE, didn’t write about the paradoxical nature of free will – that challenge was first undertaken by a philosopher in the next generation, Epicurus.  Still, I had read some Aristotle and had had fun puzzling through some passages like the following, which you may skim if you find it too hard to get through.  As you can see, it touches on the topic of animals and their spontaneity.  (Aristotle distinguishes a deliberate action, done by someone trying to achieve a goal or purpose, from a chance action, which is something done incidentally to the person’s prior purpose.  For example, a man may go to a lake deliberately to go fishing, but if he happens to rescue a drowning child when he arrives, he is said to have been there by chance, in terms of that action. Then, for creatures or things that can’t set purposes for themselves, there is what Aristotle calls ‘spontaneity’ in what they do when they seemingly initiate actions.)

 

Chance and what results from chance are appropriate to agents that are capable of good fortune and of moral action generally. Therefore, necessarily, chance is in the sphere of moral actions … Thus an inanimate thing or a lower animal or a child cannot do anything by chance, because it is incapable of deliberate intention; nor can ‘good fortune’ or ‘ill fortune’ be ascribed to them, except metaphorically, as Protarchus, for example, said that the stones of which altars are made are fortunate because they are held in honour, while their fellows are trodden under foot…

 

The spontaneous, on the other hand, is found both in the lower animals and in many inanimate objects.  We say, for example, that the horse arrived ‘spontaneously’ because, though his coming saved him (presumably from some catastrophe like a fire – RCS), he did not come for the sake of safety.  Again, the tripod fell ‘of itself’ because, though when it fell it stood on its feet so as to serve for a seat, it did not fall for the sake of that.  Hence it is clear that events that (1) belong to the general class of things that may come to pass for the sake of something, (2) do not come to pass for the sake of what actually results, and (3) have an external cause, may be described by the phrase ‘from spontaneity.’ These ‘spontaneous’ events are said to be ‘from chance’ if they have the further characteristics of being the objects of deliberate intention and due to agents capable of that mode of action…

 

I believe that my thoughts, in making my spontaneity paradox in the dog song, were also having a friendly giggle at the expense of a later philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804), who got so tied up in knots about free will that he ended up inventing a whole separate, unseen plane of existence (called ‘things as they are in themselves’) for it to subsist in, separate from the experienced reality where all things seem to be caused (called ‘things as they appear’ or ‘Nature’).  Again, you can skim or skip if the text is too dense. 

 

Now I can explain why the failure to distinguish things as they appear from things as they are in themselves would bring us a great loss·. If we didn’t have that distinction, the principle of causality would hold for all things in general; everything would be part of the (deterministic) causal mechanism of Nature. In that case, it would obviously be self-contradictory to say of a single human soul that its will is free and yet at the same time subject to natural necessity, i.e. not free; because without the great distinction we would be taking the soul in the same sense in both propositions.

 

Basically then, my little stack of paradoxes around ‘should I roll in the mud like a dog? Hmm, maybe not’ was a deliberate satire of this sort of complex and involved philosophy about free will.  But there is nothing there to impress a philosopher – it’s all just fun. 

 

So now you, the student of literature, know how far into bizarre stretches of improbability an author’s thoughts can go, even when he’s even writing something so trivial as a comedy song about a dog. 

 

It’s truly legitimate to expect that anything that you can reasonably connect to an author’s state of mind was likely to have been considered in the author’s writing.  Your idea may have been adherently or deliberately considered by the author and then eliminated as not worth thinking about, but then the writing should subtly, somehow, reflect this exclusion.  There is nothing an author can do to completely eliminate the possibility an oblivious reader will impose reductive or adherent-in-reductive distortions on the work, but anyone whose thought process is not trying to hammer or inflate the work into a new shape should be able to get the feeling (that is, the adherent consciousness) of what the author was up to.  That process may ask some slowing down and relaxing, turning prisms around and looking at the different lights, but it isn’t hard.   And if you don’t have all the background information the author had, he or she should still have given you plenty of good content that you, as a reader, can take away and call your own.  You don’t need to read Kant to appreciate a few lines asking ‘should I be more like my dog?’

 

Now, that’s about enough about dogs.  Let’s now return to frogs.  Seriously, there is just one more dimension of literature that I think is worth talking about in this chapter, if we really want to do a reasonable introduction to the subject.  That’s literature that actually requires a change in your mode of thinking before it can be properly understood.  This is a difficult topic to explain, but I’ll do the best I can.  The best approach seems to be to come back around to Basho’s frog haiku.  I’m going to do that in a roundabout way. 

 

I described, in chapter 2, the ‘epistemic adducts’ that lead people, in different cultures, to filter the things they see in a way that leads to stereotyped action.  One example was the ‘Practice makes perfect’ response to my dog named Practice – a response that, as you may recall, was usually followed up the next day by ‘How’s Patience?’ Another example was the tremendous struggle people had – only in primarily English speaking cultures – to spell my surname Summerbell without changing the end to –ville or –hill or –belle. (There is also a typographical version of this – the error Sumberbell is nearly irresistible to those with their fingers on keyboards, typing while looking at my correctly spelled name).  What these phenomena illustrate is that even our adherent minds, the rapidly operating ‘intuitive’ part of our thinking process, can embed protocols – procedures for doing things – that are generally functional, but fall short of fully dealing with reality.  The same problem can also occur in our understandings of things as they are.  We can get short-circuited into consistently mis-recognizing patterns – an extreme example being racial prejudice, where normal, everyday actions carried out by the target group can be perpetually filtered as showing low intelligence or devious untrustworthiness.  Buried under these obvious examples is an entire mode of living based on mental models of the world that are often slightly off-kilter.  One of the realities that often gets exaggerated in this mode is one’s sense of oneself and one’s separation from other components of existence.  I call this mode of thought ‘epistemic presumption’ (or, at a very technical level, ‘the momentum of epistemic self-fulfilling prophecy’).

 

There is a worldwide, millennia-old project of ‘mystical’ philosophy, associated with various religions, that is designed to allow people to free themselves from these mental constrictions. Christian Orthodox meditation and Sufi Islam have been associated with this sort of project, but it is perhaps best known in the English speaking world as the core project of Zen Buddhism.  There’s nothing intrinsically religious about Zen philosophy and practice, which is why Leonard Cohen could be a practitioner and remain religiously Jewish at the same time.  In Buddhism and Hinduism, epistemic presumption is known by the Sanskrit word maya, and I’ll continue to use that well known term from here on in. 

 

Zen has a collection of riddle-like traditional stories called ‘koans’ that are used to help students make the first big step in disentangling themselves from maya.  As stage one in my explanation of Basho’s frog poem, I’m going to tell you one of these stories and then, *spoiler alert*, I will ruin it for you by explaining it.  This is a spoiler because if you contemplated the story until you understood it, all by yourself, you’d then probably understand all the other koans as well and have a very happy moment. However, there are plenty of other koans you can look at if you want to achieve this effect. 

 

There is a Japanese style house with a large window – no glass – and just inside of the window is the traditional paper screen, the shoji screen, used to diffuse the light.  Suddenly a huge bull that was inside the house comes crashing out of it, through the screen.  Its sharp, sturdy horns easily burst through the paper, and then its head emerges, then its massive shoulders and its long, muscular torso.  But then wait – the tail is not able to go through the screen.  Why can’t the tail go through?

 

It’s obvious the bull is a metaphor for something, here.  Given that this is a Zen koan, it probably has something to do with perception and ‘enlightenment.’ If you spend some time thinking about your own thought processes, or meditating in order to quiet them, you may start to see the equivalent of the bull crashing around in your mind – it’s your conceptualizations of things.  To pick up an example I used before, you may conceive of dogs as completely different from wolves, even though, from many biological viewpoints, they belong to the same species.  You may also waver the other way and see dogs as ‘just domesticated wolves,’ a concept that may blur some of the developing differences between the wolf and dog populations.  So, when you think ‘dog,’ your concept of a dog crashes out from your stockpile of recognition concepts, and snorts its way into your active thoughts.  This is the bull coming through the screen.  When it does so, 98%, let’s say, of what you’re thinking about dogs is accurate.  But your concept probably omits some of the reality.  There is some trailing fuzziness about what is a dog and what is not that can’t quite fit into the concept.  This is the tail of the bull – it can’t pass through the screen of what you accept and work with as a thought.

 

The project of mystical philosophy is to get people to recognize these crashing bulls and see beyond them, all the way to their tiny, trailing tails and beyond.  We can even learn to have a laugh at these bulls. 

 

This recognition is harder to put into effect than it sounds. There are certain dearly beloved concepts like your own personal identity and your group identity that start to shake, and to flicker on and off, when you fully ‘get’ this idea.  Zen people and their Hindu philosophical forebears found that what helped many people out with such realizations was the practice of meditation.  People were trained to sit cross-legged for periods of time while mentally repeating nonsense words or brief phrases, or humming, or, in Tibet, singing in very low-pitched overtones.  This activity was supposed to quiet down the mind and stop the crashing of all those mental bulls so that people could begin to see – to put it one way – that there is a great deal of life going on when the bulls are all at rest.  There is much Zen literature, however, that suggests that even when meditators become successful at quieting their minds, they don’t immediately change their way of interacting with their concepts – they just turn the concepts off successfully and experience peace.  Then, when they stop meditating, the bulls start crashing around like normal.  What seems to push some people over the edge, in addition to meditating, is suddenly seeing a single event, something that happens around them, as truly being a single event.  Prior to any concept classifying the event, it is deeply experienced as a thing in itself, just as it is.  There is no bull there to greet it, and it stands alone – as exactly itself, and, therewith, as a chance representative of anything whatsoever –  ergo, as everything.

 

Shoei Ando tells the story of a Chinese Zen practitioner from China called Xiāng Yán (died 840 CE; the ‘X’ is pronounced ‘Hs’) who was asked a koan-like question by his teacher: “What is the original Self prior to the birth of one’s father and mother?” Xiāng Yán was very puzzled by what this question was intended to lead him to, and went off to live a meditative life in a wooded, mountainous area while attempting to find the answer.  “One day,” Ando says, “when he was sweeping the garden in front of his hut, he saw a piece of tile which he swept away with his broom towards the edge of the bamboo thicket.  The piece of tile rolled on the ground, and finally struck against a bamboo stalk at the edge of the thicket, making a sound.  At this very moment, he, all of a sudden, became awake to the essential Self through the medium of the sound; driven by the sound piercingly into himself, he hit upon the original Self, the master of the sense of hearing.” 

 

Xiāng Yán said, “At one stroke everything already known was ousted; there is no need of cultivation at all.”  I interpret ‘cultivation’ here to mean the learning of concepts. 

 

Ando also recounts a similar event that happened to an unnamed Zen student, who was brought to the same realization by the sound of rain water dripping off the eaves of a building. He wrote a poem about his experience: 

 

Water drops from the eaves

I clearly heard now,

when I broke through the universe

and became peaceful-minded. 

 

I think you may now be starting to see where the frog fits in. 

 

Here’s Ando on that poem, starting with his own preferred translation. 

 

The old pond!

      A frog jumped into it;

           The sound of water.

 

Basho’s haiku poems are expressive of his inspired experiences of sudden awakening to the real Self through the medium of the senses of hearing, seeing, touching or smelling… The world of Basho was one of serenity…He was standing by the old pond, surrounded by the atmosphere of serenity. He was one with the surface of the pond. In the essential Self, the outside and the inside were entirely one.  When we are in such a mental state, it seems to us that we are amidst white clouds.  There is no distinction between the outside and the inside. There is just a self-oblivious, enchanted state of consciousness…

 

Opportunely, a frog jumped into the pond; the absolute silence was suddenly broken.  Because of the sound of the water when the frog jumped into it, Basho was naturally and instantaneously guided to the Essential Self by the sound of the water through his purified, calm, serene consciousness.  His sense of beauty was freshly aroused. Thus this poem was naturally born.

 

So, then, just as my dog song could be seen as a spontaneity song, Basho’s frog poem is most commonly interpreted, by people informed by Japanese culture, as a piece about mental awakening.  It fits into a long history of Zen stories about sudden sounds and sights – and sometimes even a whack from the teacher – leading students to enlightenment.

 

You might argue that that’s not really English literature – more Japanese literature.  I might counter that widely beloved poems in translation are as much a part of English literature as native poems are.  A good example would be the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which is far more popular among English speakers in its translation by Edward Fitzgerald than it is among Persian speakers who are able to read the original.  For one thing, its constant references to drinking wine are controversial in its native Iran, a country where alcoholic drinks are illegal. 

 

But surely, you might say, no native English author would echo the same themes as are seen in Basho’s frog poem.  But wait – there might be something:

 

The Soul's distinct connection

   With immortality

Is best disclosed by Danger

   Or quick Calamity—

 

As Lightning on a Landscape

   Exhibits Sheets of Place—

Not yet suspected—but for Flash—

   And Click—and Suddenness.

 

I think the capital letters and the dashes give that one away.  You can tell who it is.  Shoei Ando says “It is an indisputable fact that as soon as we arrive at the bottom of the heart, exhausting the contents of the conscious self, the inner world becomes all of a sudden enlightened.  It seems to us on such an occasion that we are in a world of light…”

 

And then there’s the ‘click’ of suddenness about the illumination.

 

Emily Dickinson, arguably, sang about moments of Zen-like sudden inner enlightenment. 

 

This raises an interesting issue. 

 

Let’s re-examine a familiar verse. 

 

I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -

The Stillness in the Room

Was like the Stillness in the Air -

Between the Heaves of Storm -

 

The Eyes around - had wrung them dry -

And Breaths were gathering firm

For that last Onset - when the King

Be witnessed - in the Room -

 

I willed my Keepsakes - Signed away

What portion of me be

Assignable - and then it was

There interposed a Fly -

 

With Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz -

Between the light - and me -

And then the Windows failed - and then

I could not see to see -

 

Or, in other words,

 

The old, quiet Room

Fly bumped on the Windowpane –

Blue Light! – the Mind dies – 

 

Emily had obviously not experienced death when she wrote her Fly poem.  She could have based it entirely on her imaginings about death.  But there’s another way of looking at such a death scene.  One of the events that happens to you when you begin to see the tails of all your mental bulls is that you perceive the potentials within yourself that could have made you seem to be someone else.  I was raised in Canada, but I could just as easily have been raised in – let’s spin the globe here and point at random – Kurdistan, and then I’d have been a loyal Kurd with many Kurdish tastes and interests.  Is that unrealized Kurdish person not, in a way, the equal of the present-day me as a true representation of who I am?  As another New England transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau, put it, “I am a parcel of vain strivings tied by a chance bond together.”  The bouquet of cultural flowers we pluck to form our identities is not, fundamentally, who we are.  Part of the Zen experience, then, is what I call ‘throwing down the reduced self,’ an action called ‘ton-go’ by Shoei Ando.  This is like a death of one’s specific self, and, with the co-occurring loss of maya, also an end to one’s habitual way of perceiving things.  One cannot see, in the usual way, to see. So perhaps, Emily’s mortal death in this poem is to some extent a metaphor, and ‘the flower of New England transcendentalism’ has written not just about death but also about – transcending.  The fly is the frog; its buzz is the eruption of life’s motion. 

 

If not, it’s strange to see that Emily was willing away her keepsakes, her possessions, after everyone had gone quiet and was awaiting her imminent death.  In a real death scene involving a real will, all the disposing of keepsakes would have been done long beforehand, and Emily would have had to say ‘I’d willed my keepsakes.’ It’s very disruptive to the poem to imagine someone coming up to Emily, in her bed, at the very brink of her death, and handing her a pen and a document to sign.  I think we can rule that idea out.  Perhaps, you might argue, she had legally willed away the keepsakes earlier, but was only now mentally doing so.  That’s possible, but it makes her seem oddly possessive.  On the other hand, the transcendental reading of these lines is perfectly straightforward.  Emily’s ‘keepsakes’ were all her precious concepts and protocols, the mental ‘bulls’ I’ve been describing.  As the last stage of releasing herself from her conventional mind, she ‘willed away’ all these ‘assignable’ (pigeonholed) encumbrances.  Then her frog jumped, her fly buzzed, and she stumbled on, in a flash of blue, to another world.

 

There may be any number of pieces of writing in English literature that reflect the ‘ton-go’ state of mind.  I included one of my own in the science-fiction novel This Moonless Sky.  It was the poem from which the title was derived.

 

This moonless sky

Is the mind of someone else.

No legend of mine

Lives there.

 

The ‘moonless sky’ was ostensibly the physically moonless sky of the distant planet where the story took place.  You can now see, though, that there is a dual meaning here, involving a clear mind that has freed itself of imposing fictional stories on things.  The moon was often seen as a goddess, as something with a face on it, as a bowl of cheese curd or ‘green cheese.’ Then it became a symbol of scientific prowess, of the progress of humanity, as it took on footprints. We can scarcely see it without imposing our stories on it. Therefore, it makes a good symbol for that tendency to impose stories, to send mental bulls out crashing at things. 

 

Paradoxically, though, the ability to recognize such a zen-like literary theme may require the prior ability to restrain recognition. 

 

In summary, the range of readable, approachable, likeable English literature is extremely broad.  Prepare yourself for unending adventure if you go there, into the endless forests, caves and cities of our storytelling.  Authors may take you to magical places that even they are only dimly aware of. 

 

Did I know when I started writing this chapter that Emily Dickinson’s fly poem was going to tie in so well with Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and also, plausibly, with Basho’s frog poem?  Was I aware that a theme of interconnection among beings was going to thread throughout, going right from the first awkward dog poem, continuing via a zig-zag stitch into Leonard Cohen’s Zen interests, and ending up in Emily’s flashes of immortality at the end?  Was the Japanese art of Ezra Pound’s mini-poem deliberately connected to the Asian influence in New England transcendentalism?  Or did these harmonious choices come together more or less randomly, but I was so glib that I managed to manufacture connections among them?  And then what about Waltzing Matilda?  Is it just a coincidence that the swagman found spiritual transcendence after jumping into the water – like a frog?  Am I joking with you now, or was this absurd contrast planned from the beginning?

 

You start off with a few Saxon words about ship keels and knives and this, ultimately, is what you get.  You get a living linguistic companion, an array of words that is so expressive that the reach of its reverberations can’t be measured. 

 

May it guide you – and may you guide it – well. 

 

 

 

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