Late summer: Between Two Worlds and Larkin, Auden, cummings & Cavafy

From Between Two Worlds: Juliette Binoche as Marianne Winkler, an uncover journalist working with people who clean luxurious ferries in the dead of night

Dear friends,

So here I am with the second part of this blog, only this time I begin with a good movie, again focusing on women, which I’ve just seen and want to recommend, and then go on to the four poems I want to share. Between Two Worlds is based on Florence Aubenas’s The Night Cleaner, a best-selling memoir of a journalist who presented herself as another near destitute person to an employment agency, where she is led to take a low paid gruelling job as a cleaning person in a team driven to do far too much for them in a brief period of time. Like The Miracle Club, it’s directed and written by women, with a nearly all women cast, and like them is getting mostly luke-warm reviews, which this time concentrate indignantly on the attention spent on the hypocrisy of passing and using other people’s trust and friendship to produce a book. (An English language version of this is Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, by contrast, curiously enough treated with real respect.)

I find the supposed discomfort with Binoche and the story-line as narrow and unfair as the reviewers find the POV of the film. It’s the experience itself, what it’s like to live such a life, and the knowledge that huge numbers of people in the world’s economies now are driven to such extremities (3 jobs with barely time to sleep), treated harshly and indifferently. I found myself remembering my 27 years as an adjunct and the snobbery and hard work for a derisory salary I was subjected to; remembering my daughter Laura’s two years working with a team of lighting and decoration experts who did the same kind of hard work in the dead of night at stop speed, pushed on harshly by supervisors; I saw it with two women friends, and they too when it was over, had been excited and moved to remember analogous experiences of their own. The gig economy now reaches millions of people in the US. Not only go see it, but vote to help unions, to re-distribute taxes so the wealthy pay their real share, and the money used to create reform, change and better working lives for all people.

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And now I have four more poems to share that I know Jim loved to read from poets who were his favorites. For Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, e.e. cummings and C.P. Cavafy Jim had several books each, sometimes it was just books of poetry (cummings 4 books), sometimes books of letters and a life (Auden and Cavafy), and sometimes studies of the poetry with just one book (Larkin).

The poetry by Larkin Jim inclined to most was not the famous shocker types (“This be the verse”) but more the longer ones drenched in history (around churches, chapels, buildings), but he quoted the most

High Windows

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Now Jim himself is gone into that blue sky. This is very much worth reading on Larkin’s poetry in general.

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I’m probably going to be quoting the famous poems here, for again with W. H. Auden I see some longer moving meditative pieces that are too long, but I cannot resist (with its very own picture)

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1555 (oil on canvas) by Bruegel, Pieter the Elder (c.1525-69)

His is a messy poetry.
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e.e. cummings Jim appreciated the love poetry, the erotic stuff, the lack of pomposity; many of them are impossible to replicate in a blog, for their effect is dependent on stanzaic playfulness, breaking with regular punctuation. Jim found cummings to be joyful, and I’ll copy one of those I think his best, very allusive:

anyone lived in a pretty how town

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did.

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that no one loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone’s any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
no one and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

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Penelope by Angelica Kauffmann

And now Cavafy where Jim had too many favorites but above all there was

Ithaca (so many translations, this by Edmund Keely)

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

For this I have a video of another poet reading aloud his response:

A response by Theo Dorgan

When you set out from Ithaca again,
let it be autumn, early, the plane leaves falling as you go,
for spring would shake you with its quickening,
its whispers of youth.

You will have earned the road down to the harbour,
duty discharged, your toll of labour paid,
the house four-square, your son in the full of fatherhood,
his mother, your long-beloved, gone to the shades.

Walk by the doorways, do not look left or right,
do not inhale the woodsmoke,
the shy glow of the young girls,
the resin and pine of home.
Allow them permit you to leave,
they have been good neighbours.

Plank fitted to plank, slow work and sure,
the mast straight as your back.
Water and wine, oil, salt and bread.
Take a hand in yours for luck.

Cast off the lines without a backward glance
and sheet in the sail.
There will be harbours, shelter from weather,
There will be long empty passages far from land.
There may be love or kindness, do not count on this
but allow for the possibility.
Be ready for storms.

When you take leave of Ithaca, round to the south
then strike far down for Circe, Calypso,
what you remember, what you must keep in mind.
Trust to your course, long since laid down for you.
There was never any question of turning back.
All those who came the journey with you,
those who fell to the flash of bronze,
those who turned away into other fates,
are long gathered to asphodel and dust.
You will go uncompanioned, but go you must.

There will be time in the long days and nights,
stunned by the sun or driven by the stars,
to unwind your spool of life.
You will learn again what you always knew —
the wind sweeps everything away.

When you set out from Ithaca again,
you will not need to ask where you are going.
Give every day your full, unselfconscious attention —
the rise and flash of the swell on your beam,
the lift into small harbours —
and do not forget Ithaca, keep Ithaca in your mind.
All that it was and is, and will be without you.

Be grateful for where you have been,
for those who kept to your side,
those who strode out ahead of you
or stood back and watched you sail away.
Be grateful for kindness in the perfumed dark
but sooner or later you will sail out again.

Some morning, some clear night,
you will come to the Pillars of Hercules.
Sail through if you wish. You are free to turn back.
Go forward on deck, lay your hand on the mast,
hear the wind in its dipping branches.
Now you are free of home and journeying,
rocked on the cusp of tides.
Ithaca is before you, Ithaca is behind you.
Man is born homeless, and shaped for the sea.
You must do what is best.

Here the poet is online reading aloud:

I never had this kind of courage; Elinor Dashwood is more my gravatar. You may note that all four of
these are bookish, literary, even cummings depends on our remembering Chaucer.

Ellen