September 21, 2011

Renaissance church music on CD, soothing me before there has been that much to agitate me. Still flat dark outside the windows.

I approached the pond to see if my frog is still in residence, and he is, known to me– like so much else–as a brilliant swirl disappearing into the depths before I have quite taken him in. This rain will fill the barrel to the brim and allow him easier access and egress.

First off-book in Our Town. I note these things as a stay against the looming clouds of senility– which do not loom yet.

Ultrasound yesterday to see if something is wrong with my kidneys. I never thought there could be until I was lying there, imagining horrible crabby masses in my thorax. I hope (and assume) this will be one of the prudent wild gooses chases my doctor has sent me on, trying to stay ahead of calamity. My own philosophy is “don’t look; don’t worry.”

Reading Eliot, then not reading Eliot. I keep coming to the conclusion that he’s not really very good, and that my passionate reaction to “The Four Quartets” has more to do with my own fanaticism than the quality of the verse. His correspondent Conrad Aiken is a better poet, I think, and almost never spoken of. His criticism is often wrong (and often transparently self-justifying) and even when it’s on the money, its effect arises as much from mandarin self-assuredness of expression as insight. I ponder why Pound honored him so much, and I think it’s in part the delight of a teacher in a bright pupil who has fulfilled one’s expectations without slavishness, without being deliberately too much like oneself. Certainly no writer ever built a century-dominating reputation on so little actual writing. I do, however, remember the electrifying moment when I discovered “The Hollow Men” in my 11th grade English text, unassigned, appearing as if my magic at the end of poetry I thought I knew and understood. It seemed a new world. I was confident that, in that room in Ellet High School anyway, I was the only person, or at least the first person, to plunge forward into it.

Much can be understood about Eliot if we realize that he wanted to be Henry James.