Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

ANTAEUS BY Seamus Heaney

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I am reading North by Seamus Heaney, and love this poem: “Antaeus” symbolic of strength from being rooted, grounded, and down to earth.

Antaeus
by Seamus Heaney
When I lie on the ground 
I rise flushed as a rose in the morning.
In fights I arrange a fall on the ring 
To rub myself with sand.
That is operative
As an elixir. I cannot be weaned
Off the earth’s long contour, her river-veins.
Down here in my cave
Girded with root and rock
I am cradled in the dark that wombed me
And nurtured in every artery
Like a small hillock.
Let each new hero come
Seeking the golden apples and Atlas:
He must wrestle with me before he pass
Into that realm of fame
Among sky-born and royal.
He may well throw me and renew my birth
But let him not plan, lifting me off the earth,
My elevation, my fall.

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If Everything Happens that Can’t be Done by E.E. Cummings

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if everything happens that can’t be done 

 if everything happens that can't be done
 (and anything's righter
 than books
 could plan)
 the stupidest teacher will almost guess
 (with a run
 skip
 around we go yes)
 there's nothing as something as one

 one hasn't a why or because or although
 (and buds know better
 than books
 don't grow)
 one's anything old being everything new
 (with a what
 which
 around we go who)
 one's everyanything so

 so world is a leaf is a tree is a bough
 (and birds sing sweeter
 than books
 tell how)
 so here is away and so your is a my
 (with a down
 up
 around again fly)
 forever was never till now

 now i love you and you love me
 (and books are shutter
 than books
 can be)
 and deep in the high that does nothing but fall
 (with a shout
 each
 around we go all)
 there's somebody calling who's we

 we're everything brighter than even the sun
 (we're everything greater
 than books
 might mean)
 we're everyanything more than believe
 (with a spin
 leap
 alive we're alive)
 we're wonderful one times one

— e e cummings

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Litany by Billy Collins. Youtube videos of Collins reading this. And a 3 year old reading it

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Litany

BY BILLY COLLINS
You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine . . .
Jacques Crickillon 
You are the bread and the knife,   
the crystal goblet and the wine.   
You are the dew on the morning grass   
and the burning wheel of the sun.   
You are the white apron of the baker   
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.   


However, you are not the wind in the orchard,   
the plums on the counter,   
or the house of cards.   
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.   
There is just no way you are the pine-scented air.   


It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,   
maybe even the pigeon on the general’s head,   
but you are not even close   
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.   


And a quick look in the mirror will show   
that you are neither the boots in the corner   
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.   


It might interest you to know,   
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,   
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.   


I also happen to be the shooting star,   
the evening paper blowing down an alley,   
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.   


I am also the moon in the trees   
and the blind woman’s tea cup.   
But don’t worry, I am not the bread and the knife.   
You are still the bread and the knife.   
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVu4Me_n91Y
A three year old recites this poem.

Billy Collins recites his own poem.

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“The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy

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Hmm. I admire this book. It is exquisitely well-constructed. It is original. I love the way Roy plays with language and creates a language of her own. I love her vivid descriptions, and the exactitude and verisimilitude of her childhood memories. I can relate to what she mentions–the Indian childhood; the passion for “The Sound of Music;” the mean, very mean female relatives whose greed and pettiness eventually drove them crazy; the casual, mean and cruel bullying of children, especially free spirits; the repressive and pervasive smallness of mind that can drive free spirits crazy; the favouring of males. Oh overall, the sadness of it, the waste through repression and conformity of what might have been.


Having mentioned these things, it is not surprising that I found it very painful to read. The casual sacrifice and brutalizing of the lower-caste lover was unbearably painful, and then the subsequent ostracism of Ammu herself, which drove her to her early death; traumatized her son, so that he parted with his sanity; and left her daughter barely functioning, though traumatized. And then, the stereotypical vicious unmarried aunt, the villianness of the piece, who inherits all the gold–and wears it all at once, driven to a kind of craziness by her unrestrained greed. 


I do recommend it, but will probably not read it again myself. It rouses a flood of anger and inchoate memories in me, all of it painful!



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“My Grandmothers and I” A Memoir by Diana Holman-Hunt

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“My Grandmothers and I” A Memoir by Diana Holman-Hunt


Diana was the granddaughter of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, William Holman-Hunt,and the great-niece of Millais. A more interesting lineage than most, and one which provided her a more rarefied childhood than most.


Rarefied, not necessarily happy. She was abandoned into the care of these grandmothers by a childish, selfish father, who does suddenly appear from governing the Empire, and rescue her from the boarding school at which she was desperately unhappy–then vanishes again. Her paternal grandmother was entirely selfish, and stingy to a psychopatic degree, dissolving into tears when money was demanded of her, so that Diana often lets her off. Her other grandmother was too absorbed in her pleasant country life to take much notice of Diana.


But notice things Diana did, and little of Edwardian country life, or her grandmother’s manipulations, pretensions and little stinginesses escapes her eagle eye. 


Though she escaped somehow, not unscarred, but free.


Her memoir is written in little vignettes, building up detail by detail, through significant and well-remembered episodes. Its construction is brilliant–a memoir that reads as charmingly as a novel!

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The Folly of Speed-reading literature!

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Blurred text
Get all that? … the closing lines of Pride and Prejudice given a speed read. Photograph: Frank Baron
YOU CAN’T SPEED-READ LITERATURE!
EVAN MALONEY

The celebrated academic Harold Bloom is a lightning fast reader; blink and he’s probably turned the page – twice. In his prime he could churn through 1,000 pages an hour, which means he could have digested Jane Eyre during his lunch break and still had time to chew through half of Ulysses before returning to classes. I don’t know about you, but that makes me feel like a slow, slack-jawed simian struggling in the frontal-lobe department.
The average reader snails through prose at a rate of about 250-300 words per minute, which roughly equates to about one page per minute. Bloom is surely cut from a rare cloth of reading comprehension because he whips through more than 16 pages per minute and still remembers almost everything he reads. For the rest of us, it’s not so easy. In the World Championship Speed Reading Competition the top contestants typically read around 1,000 to 2,000 words per minute, but only manage about 50% comprehension. That’s just not good enough for literature. What’s the point if you’re reading, say, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, with its panoply of characters, and you only understand 50% of the text? You wouldn’t be able to understand anything much at all.
Do people really attempt to speed read literature? If so, why? I guess, most simply, it is so a person can boast about how much they’ve read – or how often. Andrew Marr claims to have read War and Peace “at least” 15 times. Not 12 or 13, but 15. I read this and thought, well, if you took out all the passages he’s skimmed over, he’s probably only read it 10. Even so, it is a remarkable achievement. I found it difficult to concentrate on certain passages of War and Peace the first (and only) time I read it. I can’t imagine reading over those same passages 15 times and paying attention.
Most speed reading courses teach people to read the words off the page without imagining the corresponding sounds in their minds (called subvocalisation). Skim reading is slightly different; it teaches people to read the keywords in a sentence and ignore all the smaller words, creating some kind of semantic register in shorthand. Anyone who has read that other Tolstoy tome, Anna Karenina, has probably been tempted to skim read certain passages, such as Levin’s theories of Russian agrarianism. I know I was tempted, quite recently, but in my efforts to pick up the reading pace I found my attention was divided: part of my mind was thinking about Levin’s thoughts and actions, as described on the page, but an equal part of my mind was devoted to the novel process of speed/skim reading. What are the keywords? I wondered. Sometimes my mind was entirely distracted by this question, and while debating which half of a subjunctive conditional I could ignore while retaining the sense of the clause, I would speed read two or three more paragraphs without taking anything in.
There is something quite unseemly about the notion of skimming over the literary canon. In some inverted, abstract sense it reminds me of liposuction: you’re putting on intellectual weight without acquiring the mental health benefits, and there’s always a downside to cutting corners.
Did the world’s great novelists really spend years agonising over the pitch and rhythm of their sentences so some time-efficient post-modern reader could skim over the text like a political spin doctor searching for soundbites in the transcript of a ministerial speech? I don’t think so. Speed reading might be an effective tool for office documents, textbooks, and letters of unrequited love, but the prose of great literature should be savoured, should it not? Part of the joy of reading comes from “hearing” our psychic palates pronouncing the words in the mind’s ear; the imagined speech, “richly flavoured like a nut or an apple”.
Compare this classic Dickensian opening line with the skimmed version that follows, and ask yourself, is it really worth tearing through great prose like Gordon Gecko tearing through the assets of a newly acquired company?
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

 
– Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Best times/worst times, age wisdom/foolishness, epoch belief/incredulity, season Light/Darkness, spring hope, winter despair.

 
Charles Dickens, the skimmed version.
Notwithstanding the aesthetic pleasure derived from reading, how well can one appreciate the nuances of character and circumstance in a novel if one is reading 10 pages per minutes sans Bloomian comprehension skills? I’m not convinced that the average person can ever learn to read at speed and contemplate at leisure. Speed reading is a bit like trying to appreciate the sights of Paris while racing through the streets at 200 kmph.
I know this is the era in which we measure internet connection speeds in fractions of seconds and thumb SMS sentiments like “gr8 2 c u”, I know this is the era of speed-living and 20-20 cricket, but I’m not convinced that we should adapt our reading habits to fit in with the speed of modern life. Rather, reading should be seen as a pleasure where time is forgotten, if only for a moment.

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Woman Much Missed, how you call to me, call to me!

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I love this poem, especially its haunting use of repetition! 

 
 

151. The Voice
 
By Thomas Hardy
 

 
WOMAN much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
 
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,         5
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
 
Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,         10
You being ever consigned to existlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?
 
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward         15
And the woman calling.
 


 

    

 
 
        10
        15
 


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