Time on the Erie Canal

The Erie Canal was completed in 1825, and improved westward transit in a dramatic fashion that can today can only be expressed by imagining the simultaneous introduction of stagecraft, Freudian playwrighting, Method acting, Romanticism, the invention of the pathetic fallacy and the suspension of disbelief, and Shakespeare.
Its glory was brief.
Above, the Canal in downtown Syracuse.
For soon trains became faster and cheaper, and the Canal’s utility was diminished, and only the stout hearts of mad dreamers held that the vision of truth resided in the pace of bicycles, skiffs, and canal boats.

Persons who have always lived by canals have become accustomed to the visual ruse by which in the wooded horizontal scene shows the top half of a boat gracefully plying a canal the water of which is completely invisible and about which one had, while bagging dogshit or composing the first intuitive fragment of a poem, or placing oneself in one’s home environment of fishgates and bridges and fish ladders and outlets and inlets and feeder streams, altogether forgotten. Yet that abiding and ultimate familiarity also attunes one to the overgenerous beauty and wonder of boats on canals, which ply at their own speed – which is slow, slowness is beauty quoth Binyon– apart from the pattern of the housy streets and according exclusively to turmoiled hydraulics or runoff’s erosion or an engineer’s digplan, and provides a nerve-deep orientation to what may be felt as a pastoral and idyllic milieu of one’s own, one’s very own.

Frederic Moreau’s epiphany embraces and suffuses his moist skin and lyric memory while his feet are balanced against the subtlest gravity of a dear hull tipping in the seiche of canalriver water; trees perform a gracewalk past him at six miles per hour; the marvel and savor of the cucumber sandwiches and the gin drinks catch the delicious brack of water reeds and fishy excresis, and also a breeze that has cradled the aroma of lavender crops and cabbage leaves crossing summery flanderen fields. [Freshwater fish should be accused of breathing, each scale is the lung of a bellicose tyrant, a javelin flung toward the faces of the common man, those children who affect to be discomfited by malodorous wafts.]

Frederic Moreau’s revelation believes, as so must he, that the obscure object of his affection is experiencing correlative swoons, or even more than absolute, should such a thing be possible, swoons that are his very own, and therefore the channels or canals of synaesthetic sympathy are open to the most mad torrents of his any devising, as packets or barges pass in the opposite direction and wake a brief instability in her legs and his, only to rectify as not on solid earth to the identical bouyance and two-step challenged by the packet or barge boring someplace.

People on the shore are mudders, snipers, axolotls; wage-slaves, malefactors, underfed; meat, bearers, doormen. The very air I breathe adeck is charmed and pickled with my glory. In college many of my professors eventually allowed that it was I who taught them this book or that. A thousand ashrams are called Phil.

There is a place vaguely located in the soul of the body that responds to the passion that is sometimes called headlong just as herding dogs respond to a disorganized scramble of disorderly lambs, and that place is located vaguely mid the torso and the abdominal generality, with fluid pipes gushing chemicals inward and jetting pleural fluids outwards, with tides of the body’s organs’ liquors tinged with panic and longing harmonizing with the salt of the moon and the gravity of the surges of the seas, and in that place the very same too was flung upon the vortex the shambling soul of my Hart Crane.

If you are pleasure crafting from Syracuse to Rome, New York, sailing singlehanded includes time to leave the rudder and make coffee, maybe time enough for a nap, or for reading a chapter. There are long miles of the Erie Canal along which you will not see either another boat or a campcottage. This is where the cows often come down in the summer to stand to their elbows in the shoreyard. A narrow two-lane bridge crosses overhead. [Yon ago with time sedated to a mortuary state by fifty years, isolated by blood in the family ferry, other voices and other rooms will have been saying that I grew up on the Erie Canal and the lakes of sylvan New York, the dearest upstate valley lakes.] This incidence of perplexing non-interruption is less possible by several measures in France and Holland, where canals are treated with the royal respect of a pre-Revolutionary era. In Paris with my benighted cycling friends (despite picnics at the Musee d’Orsay, and long dinners mid sumptuous wicker and exquisite waitress-devils from Shanghai) I was unable to coerce them to join me on a cruise up the Canal St. Martin, murderous regrets they must now bear like benighted burros. Long leagues and shallow fathoms of the Erie Canal south of and west of Rochester are peaceful and farmy; yachtspersons hold to an opinion that nears the quixotic, and so they have been historically there displeased. And the stone locks hold mute and indifferent as the epochs came and the epochs went.

This summer has brought my band of opaque appreciations the warmth of radium, with the sunlights and rainshowers of the melancholy of farewell, and I have fired two thousand tiles bound for wally tile art murals, eternity, and the piquant twist of the memory for those addressing a lover standing in front of my Alfred Sisley, my Auguste Macke, my Tamara de Lempicka. I do not recall when exactly it was that I became aware of and interested in the sword in the stone of the futur anterieur, but thereafter holding close my dear Swiss guard chickens in its regard, I felt myself finally safe in the stalwart stone bosom of unassailable self-assurance, masked and basked in the sound of Miles Davis, blue and cool, certain William Carlos Williams poems, Merce Cunningham’s revelation of movement, together fundamentally in the topography and elevation of our water table. In a manner of rustication, in a manner of repose, I am soon verily to have taken a week to drive along and sleep by the canal, the Erie Canal extant, the Barge Canal not less hushed, reading and drinking coffee in canalside sidewalk cafes until the sun goes down, then eating and reading in canalside restaurants and bars, and then lingering with cocktails until there will have been the finding oneself tipping a view over the edge of the embankment toward the surge of the currents, the eight or ten hours before waking in sunlight in the camper van, and finding a café where I can taste coffee, and read, and watch the boats go by, and such current as there is, an almost imperceptible drift.

Ken Chowder - DELICATE GEOMETRY

artwork (c) Anthony Falbo reproduced with appreciation

There are streets in Portland, Oregon - neighborhoods under the rainy trees, houses, sidewalks - where the utterest peace resides. Equanimous folk, in love with dogs, nurse-cradled by certain forms of music, rendered ablissed by certain wines and fulsome conversation. Add as one may: currant spreads and morning toast, a quiet half hour with coffee and newspaper, the sound of rain and the light of sunbeams. Here live Carrie and Evan and Rice. Napping in a hammock.
From cracks in the flooring seep:
invidiousness,
hate,
blackmail,
inheritance,
desecration,
and slaughter.
so that unusual love is murdered once again.

It would therefore appear that Ken Chowder has stopped writing novels.

War dead

I have mentioned that one of my successes-of-intuition (I call it that, but I feel it within me more as a liberating triumph) was to drive to Mississippi as a reaction/personal solution to 9/11. There my bearings were my own, in the dizzying delight that comes from finding oneself in a place where no one knows your name (Shamrock Texas, Mount Tamalpais, the second deck of an RER train leaving Paris) and I could breathe the air of Clarksdale and Strayhorn, Savage, Sarah, Sledge, Falcon, Darling, Jackson, Tupelo, Hattiesburg, and Greenville indifferent to the ways in which the state was declared repulsive by outlanders, and immune to the ways in which the Civil War was wrung bloodless with sentimentality.

In the Great War, The Battle of Verdun resulted in a quarter-million deaths, with perhaps another 200,000 “missing.” At The Battle of the Somme, also in 1916, on the first day, 19,000 British soldiers were killed. The Battle cost well over 300,000 British German and French lives. There were three engagements at Ypres, a small Belgian town near the coast, the third of which included the Battle of Passchendaele; 600,000 men died.
There are today 137 British cemeteries in the Ypres vicinity.
Beyond these interments, 90,000 bodies were never found.

Ezra Cornell’s brother was a Union soldier. I visited the ravine in Vicksburg he had described. Earlier, in Ithaca, he had fished in the gorges that formed the southern and northern boundaries of his brother’s farm, that is to say, Cornell University, where, one hundred years later, Pynchon, Farina, and Nabokov acted out theatrical exuberances or chased butterflies.

Daniel wrote:
"I received my wound on the 19th of May at the first charge on the works in the rear of Vicksburg, our Brigade charged on what was called Fort Hill. my position was colour bearer and I had to go down a small ravine which was in the hillside. I was struck directly under and about 3/4 of an inch from my left eye --I did not fall, nor did the colours go down. I then went and lay down behind a fallen tree expecting to bleed to death. the ball had apparently struck the limb of a tree and was comeing diagonaly down as it passed through my hat rim over my left temple, it passed through the roof of my mouth cutting an ugly gash on the inside of my right cheek and lodged at the angle of my jaw shattering it severely."

In addition to Thoreau's "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them" the thousands of war dead - boys, mostly, inexperienced, never in love, stillborn, and jetsam - lead to the inevitable conclusion that some persons require long lives to tell their whole story, but many hundreds of thousands of them dying young had no story or song at all, and long life would only have rewritten many times over their epitaph as a neglected wage-slave and brute, loved by no one save their family, which in many cases, was in name only.

Art tile murals

Loudeac Tile Studio - Ithaca
me fecit
artwork by Jo Dunnick, Oregon USA

Έκανα αυτό το
Gaudi

我在此
Rothko

John Singer Sargent

My Marxist friends see in the Sargent the homicide of millions kept from the leisure work of the arts and sciences. My Freudian friends recall the tidal forces trumping all others, not failing to conjecture that she has chosen to be eternally powerful. Dancers faint away with delicious envy for her slenderness and lines. Pigment canvas colorant memory sunbeams. Offal, sweat tangs, boils, necropsy, sewage, grime, muck, scat, compost, mildewed yeasts, screeches, horses’ neighs of excruciation, children’s howls of execration.

In college, L and I would visit and talk after midnight. It seemed useful to declare that we would talk until exactly 1:00 AM or exactly 2:15 AM, so difficult did it seem to part at what we did not then really know were a thousand roses blooming. Often 4:30 and 5:00 would come. Later we were reading THE GOLDEN BOWL at the same time, though in far cities on the Erie Canal, and were also feeling the way in which as yet unknowable forces were presenting themselves to our various senses as the person to whom he was married was becoming the person to whom I would come to be married. During those times the three of us would sit at the dinner table with gin long after the plates were filling with stubbed cigarettes, waves of awful and fleshy sentiment wafting through and among and around us. To prevent our asphyxiation, we would try to lighten a few moments by book reviewing James.
Though he thereafter stultified his life for thirty years trying to lift trainloads of iron ore from the bottom of a dark pit in a high school in yet another village on the Erie Canal, I returned to Aurora and Ithaca on Cayuga Lake and for thirty years sublimely awing sailed with the ethereal spirits of prose fiction. Soon it will be forty years since the ice cubes in the gin melted in the August heat, yet I am unchanged in the fashion of believing that he would see more that was human and charming in the Sargent than I.

Jordan Baker

It is not Gatsby’s book, it is a Nick Carraway’s book.
Often so - they often say.
Yet the only truly still center is Jordan Baker, whose eyes see plainly the doomed space between Jay and Daisy.
Whose eyes peer in steel about the trashlands of Long Island, near enough to the thing we have traditionally called omniscience.
And it is she who makes and quits the scene,
she who pities Nick his rube’s erudition.
Jordan is Fitzgerald’s only confidante, whose story it is, and she is more than he aloof, detached, cool.
Wiser than Scott?
Willing to dance mid flames.
Jordan is in the wings, as we (readers) frittel and pombel our chere bloopers in gluttonous manes of musical chairs:
on our stage and on our stages,
in our despoiled and pathetic present tense.

More Chowder, Ken

BLACKBIRD DAYS is a beautifully-patterned language machine that immerses our memory in pools of anomie and acedia, the shadows of ambiguity, and the eccentric humor of Buster Keaton, as three brothers walk blindly through minefields of their own devising and the more normal sloughs of complexing parents, half-wrenched romantic-emotional situation comedies, and the damnable absence of an unwavering pivot. In matters of craft, the book has welcomed into the conspiracy we build with Chowder: bright lights of felicitous syntax, new movie locations and sets, and a Giotto of harmony (by way of rhetorical taleteller person shifts, happy tropes, and a significant enhancement of the world’s prose literature art). We are thanking Ken, tankards swinging recklessly above our heads to the choppy and catchy music!
In the earlier birdscenes of the book, it is suggested that we, like the boys, can take our cues from things, positions, shades, stations, perspectives, shapes, and from hue and light, speculating that the ways things only look and appear, really are the touchstones of the deepest meanings of our life; as if at any moment the feng shui of the things in the aquarium, in which we endlessly circle, is going to animate, to speak, to direct us as might a square dance caller, to form the patterns of our living lives in acceptable, desirable, and anguish-free ways.
Where resides the soul?
“The brush of artifice.”
“Deliberate delusions.”
“Time lost.”
“More to life than can be despaired of.”

Then: a true inflection towards equanimity appears, a slowly materializing rosy dawn: there is the allowance and possibility that Will‘s backyard picnic with reading Lucy and gamboling Sarah will include an eminently peaceful nap in a hammock, and a potato salad that does not include some neighbor’s or friend’s wildly estranging ‘extra ingredient;’ Delsey and Neal will laugh simultaneously at a joke that is nothing like Neal’s; and Howard abandons his profession and writes language philosophy based on his discovery of synonym paragraphs, those fluid bridge-tunnels dwelling in the space between metaphor and denotation. All of this is by way of our extended afternoon of café beers with amiable Chowder, though “a more objective chronicler” might have made us drear along the way.

Bonus punt:
A lot of guys might wish that the boys had been able to take to their heart the Karenin sections of UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING. KC’s unwavering faith in narrative (circa 1979-1980: typed) may be quaint, but a few barks and ruffs and woofs might have sprung the diffuse woes into the stick chased to exhaustion and the drooling, lapping tongue.