The first two hundred pages of War and Peace were a bother, but then Natasha emerges as a life-force—oh the kind of unreal woman the unreal Tolstoy would love—and Pierre and Andrei have a conversation about what is good. Then you feel sure that Natasha will marry Andrei—though he seems to have died, you suspect he has not—but then, just at the sure moment of his recovery, he does die, with relatively few pages left in the book (no more than 200!) and you wonder what will become of Natasha, how could she be doomed to mourning. But, of course, she is not, but falls in love with Pierre, and you feel kind of relieved that she didn’t marry Andrei after all, given especially that her mother the Countess was always mysteriously uneasy about the match. You know that the Countess is wise about her daughter, because they love each other so much. Even Princess Maria is wise about her father, though they oppress each other so much. That, of course, is the other twist in the marital universe: Princess Maria marries the young Count, rather than Sonya, and Sonya is consigned to the existence of a kitten, of a flower that was not meant to bloom, of someone sterile, as she lives with Maria and her one true love, practicing her endless self-sacrifice. Maria’s self-sacrifice for her father, equally stifling, is forgiven because he dies, and she is allowed to live. Sonya earns no such release. She has been beautiful, is on a winter’s mummery quite ravishing. You feel a little betrayed, but you, like everyone, love Natasha more, perhaps wish that you didn’t. While the marriages are spun out surprising, Tolstoy moves to explain history as that which is beyond the power of individual men, that the most an individual can hope to do, like the good Russian general K, is to accede to fate with humility. At the same time, we learn that it is good, morally good, not to try to understand things like just or continental politics or an abstract freedom for the serfs. Good actions only come from caring for you, for your own, from carrying no pretensions to reason. If Tolstoy writes an encyclopedic narrative, he diverges from others on at least two counts. If such narratives normally include explication of at least one art and one science, Tolstoy, perhaps, boils everything down to a mysterious art. So, we learn of Masonry, we learn of war theory, we learn of medicine, of historiography—and all of these are but mean ways of trying to control the uncontrollable human spirit that is in thrall to God. Arts and sciences are reductive, they are small. Tolstoy, in essence, gives a theory of everything that boils down to our knowing nothing through theory. Natasha knows things best, as she cares for her mother, breathes in the night air, loves Andrei, saves the soldiers, laughs, cries, pines, sings.

Terry Eagleton argued yesterday that it is difficult for the literary critic to examine how language creates human subjects or humanely to critique culture, much less both at once (like Cicero!), because subjective experience is threatened by an inhuman consumer culture and culture threatens to not be humanely political.

The poem had done no "good" to anyone, but it was a passing reminder, a breath from the divine lips of beauty, a nightingale between two worlds of dust. Less explicit than the call to Krishna, it voiced our loneliness, nevertheless, our isolation, our need for the Friend who never comes yet is not entirely disproved. Aziz it left thinking about women again, but in a different way: less definite, more intense. Sometimes poetry had this effect on him, sometime it only increased his local desires, and he never knew beforehand which effect would ensue; he could discover no rule for this or for anything else in life.

--A Passage to India. 119.

A group of Indians listen to a recitation of poetry, "with pleasure, because literature had not been divorced from their civilization." The narrator suggests that they feel, especially, a pleasant unity, a United India, as they listen to a poem by Ghalib. It is the act of describing the effects of the poem, however, that leads the narrator from "their civilization" to the inclusive pronoun "our" for the first, astonishing time in the novel.

"All invitations must proceed from heaven perhaps; perhaps it is futile for men to initiate their own unity, they do but widen the gulfs between them by the attempt. So at all events thought old Mr. Graysford and young Mr. Sorley, the devoted missionaries who lived out beyond the slaughterhouses, always travelled third on the railways, and never came up to the Club. In our Father's house are many mansions, they taught, and there alone will the incompatible multitudes of mankind be welcomed and soothed. Not one shall be turned away by the servants on that veranda, be he black or white, not one shall be kept standing who approaches with a loving heart. And why should the divine hospitality cease here? Consider, with all reverence, the monkeys. May there not be a mansion for the monkeys also? Old Mr. Graysford said No, but young Mr. Sorley, who was advanced, said Yes; he saw no reason why monkeys should not have their collateral share of bliss, and he had sympathetic discussions about them with his Hindu friends. And the jackals? Jackals were indeed less to Mr. Sorley's mind, but he admitted that the mercy of God, being infinite, may well embrace all mammals. And the wasps? He became uneasy during the descent to wasps, and was apt to change the conversation. And oranges, cactuses, crystals and mud? And the bacteria inside Mr. Sorley? No, no, this is going too far. We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing."

E.M. Forster, A Passage to India. 1924. Ed. Oliver Stallybrass. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1980. 58.

It was an obscure and wretched situation, in which his knees were pressed together to avoid skirts, but of which, soft suggestions were overflowing.

As she breathed, it did seem almost as though she was no longer the victim of her clothes.

And avoided further explanation under cover of the difficulties of language.

Sometimes he would breathe upon the glass of those instruments, and rub it with the cushiony part of his hand, of which the hard whorls of skin and fate were, by comparison, indelicate.

May we never walk when the road waits, famished.

Like flies you prove it. Like Rhamaddan you prove it.

From what cesspit was this object dragged that you set it against the select harvest of a faithful gleaner?

A shadow in the valley of the shadow of!

Truth my friend, is scum risen on the froth of wine.

A driver must have sensitive soles on his feet. Unlike his buttocks.

Rambling...is an absolute challenge to narrative...Mallarme, who experienced, of course, the temptations of elsewhere, spent his energy solely on producing this totality of language.

The real unvoiced fear is: will this protagonist survive confrontation with forces that exist within the dangerous area of transformation?

The most important thing, as far as I can tell, is knowing how to let go.

I am a bit afraid: still a fear of letting myself go for the next instant is unknown. Is the next instant made by me? Or does it make itself all by itself? It puts us together by way of the breath.

What kind of change is possible for the solitary figure surrounded by space?

has to elaborate out of her own entrails as she writes

NO in thunder

globules of anguish strung together on memory

From the middle of his iris beds I could clearly see the accused through his window. He had a bottle of Victoria Bitter and a meat pie for his dinner. I also live alone and know what it is to spend these hours of solitude when I would rather have a wife and baby and the smell of stew bubbling in the pot. But what civilised person can sit down to a meal like this and not pick up a book to read?

If you don't think before you sleep, you break your head

he spent two years in training and after he had qualified as a full dead man

a really human being

to see the mountain-creatures was not dangerous but to dance with them was the most-dangerous

The startling combination of colors and splendor not only transfigures the subject; it plunges him into a whirlwind and transforms him into a whirligig

may your tongue of deception be rotted in pestilence from the enigma of the Inviolate Word

inly blind

A multitude of camels shall cover you, the young camels of Midian and Ephah; all those from Sheba shall come.

swill...whisper

stupid as a movie star I was someone else's idea

I am seeking that life-giving sorrow. If you have seen it--in a tree branch maybe--please comment. I think, though, that it is probably hidden away, like motives and feelings and the three billy-goats gruff. Or, like those unexpected lasts or firsts. Like the first blink on January 2, 2009, or the last blink. Or any firsts and lasts that depend on other human beings--the exact blinking moment is always unexpected. Truth be told, though, I am not seeking anything very energetically. I am tired.

Here are some solid language probabilities for your tiredness. In ancient Egyptian, feminine names end with a "t." If you think that you have a feminine name, and it does not end in a "t," then it has been Greekified. Or Hellenized. Whatever. If you want to know which direction the hieroglyphs go, then read into the birds' mouths. If you want to say "cat," try "mea." Read into the birds' mouths. There is a little pleasure in onomatopoeia, direction. Sometimes, it is hidden.

In October I ask in a kitchen a woman:
How has your fall been Grace?
Origins forgot for the way of it all.
But Grace answers with eloquent belly

dancing across the barefoot tile.
Grace's fall has been busy, she says,
popping with concord grapes.
I fall then for Grace, hips
like fish, in a kitchen
in October. Be-mused,
I write for the way.