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Okay, Here’s the Solstice Story. Sort of.
—I would have preferred to tell you the whole story right away. Since that would take too long, here is the beginning.
I realize that the reason I find it difficult to write the tale of modernist symbolism on the summer solstice is that it would have to be written as an episode in a modernist novel, specifically the sort of novel that Malcolm Lowry or James Joyce wrote.
But it would require Joyce’s genius to hit the right tone of ludicrousness mingled with mythic undertones, and it does not require the recitation of Lowry’s tragic life trajectory to remind us that his modernist mythic project was an impossible one.
The great moments of Anglo-American modernism (“modernismo,” as I recall, is distinctly different) consist of making something up that the writer does not really believe is remotely true, but that he (or she?) wishes were true, and therefore is going to make into an invented truth: a correlation between the randomness of daily life and the great structures of world mythology: a correlation from which wisdom and ultimate meaning can be drawn that will replace the consolations of conventional religion.
Unh-unh. Not gonna happen. Not now. I add the "or she" interrogatively because I am reluctant to ascribe such obvious pathology to any gender other than my own.
Anyway, for some reason I found myself remembering Malcolm Lowry on the morning of the summer solstice, not that I assigned any significance to the fact. Some random event of the summer air reminded me of some passage or another out of Under the Volcano, but it was so fragile and fleeting that I have no idea what it was…probably some song lyric on the car radio, for the thought crossed my mind, I think, at the crossroads where Briarcliff crosses the road named for Ponce de Leon and changes its name to Moreland. (Such name changes, at least in Atlanta, formerly marked an economic dividing line as well as, if not more than, a racial one. The neighborhoods are gentrified and integrated, but the name change persists.)
A fairly emotionally bruising twenty-first day of June ended with a visit to Crape Myrtles and Cape Cods, the allusively alliterative theme of the Cocktails in the Garden events last month at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. I went with a woman friend I have known since we ran the literary society together in college (and therein hangs a tale that, thankfully, will not be explored in this post, since it would lead her, but not me, to Ireland, Amsterdam, and Alaska before ending up in the same Atlanta doctoral program as I).
And thereafter we went to hear the recently reunited Band of Desperate Men, or rather, the most recent recapitulation of a group formed thirty years ago by other friends we had gone to college with. The trio playing this night at the Graveyard Tavern included two doctors of philosophy, one of whom has written the first and perhaps last doo-wop song in Mandarin Chinese. (See: www.mandarinpop.com.) This is the Princeton Ph.D. in Chinese studies of whom I have written previously, he who translated The Tower of Myriad Mirrors and went on to a career with the Federal Reserve Bank in which his talents in Asian lore and languages went unutilized. (That was the essence of all of our stories, one way or another. I trained for my truncated career as an art critic by studying virtually every discipline of the humanities and social sciences except art history.)
When we joined Harriette’s ex-husband at a front row table, we increased the audience in attendance by a substantial percentage. So it came as a surprise when a young woman began dancing in front of the stage and was joined by two others. Each was dressed in an idiosyncratic yet perfectly balanced combination of clothing that seemed to derive from several decades, all of them prior to the one in which these young dancers were born.
Their dances were more or less improvised moment to moment, and I was amused to note that they briefly struck a posture reminiscent of the Three Graces. They danced for a couple of numbers (mostly Larry’s own songs, though the Desperate Men segued into a rousing version of the Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” to further refine the overall danceability). And then they were gone into the night, blowing kisses behind them while Larry ad libbed from the stage, “And there they go, ladies and gentlemen, the beautiful Graveyard Dancers performing live at the Graveyard Tavern with the Desperate Men.”
We agreed it had been a wonderfully bizarre moment of three very curiously compelling young women with an unusual fashion sense, who showed up out of nowhere and vanished almost as precipitously.
It occurred to me then that this was the sort of event out of which a modernist novelist like Malcolm Lowry would have woven a whole pseudo-mythic narrative, turning three ordinary dancers (though one might more rightly call them mundanely otherworldly) into the Three Graces. And I regretted having long since mislaid the Erwin Panofsky essay on what the Renaissance made of the Graces…quite a lot, as I recall, all of it even more mystical and metaphysical than classical antiquity had ever imagined. They have nothing to do with the summer solstice, but that never stopped a good modernist mythmaker.
I decided the tale deserved an oral recitation forthwith, and telephoned two friends who were in the process of moving out of their apartment. The husband answered the phone with, “Kerry just put a lot of good stuff out on the curb. If you want a free copy of Under the Volcano, it’s out there right now.”
Kerry had had some adventure of her own en route to tossing out Under the Volcano, and I reproached her for having cavalierly discarded a Malcolm Lowry novel that was the Inferno portion of his never-completed version of the Commedia, with Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid being, perhaps, the Purgatorio, and October Ferry to Gabriola possibly the Paradiso as foreshadowed in the short story “The Forest Path to the Spring.” (I hadn’t thought of all this in perhaps two decades, but it came back unexpectedly.)
I went on at great length before remembering that I had recalled Under the Volcano that very morning for the first time in quite a while. After I remembered the role the book had played in our respective lives, I wondered why the hell I had insisted that she go out and recover something she had finally gotten rid of after all these years.
And it was even later when the phrase “Graveyard Dancers” (actually, I suspect Larry said “Graveyard Tavern Dancers”) summoned up a mental image of a Tibetan devotional painting that Tibetologist and Irish-Canadian trickster Glenn Mullin titled “The Dancers in the Graveyard.” It depicts the theme of the Dance of the Skeleton Lords, which the Drepung Loseling monks also incarnate in one of the performances in their ongoing Mystical Arts of Tibet tour. (I have often wondered how the younger monks deal with the temptations of being part of a traveling road show, but that too is quite another story.)
The young women in the tavern on Glenwood Avenue were not the least bit skeletal, though they were assuredly ætherial and more than a bit sylph-like. The Tibetan dancers have nothing to do with the summer solstice, and there are only two of them. We are well on our way to those scholarly strand-motif “versions of the myth of Oedipus” in which he is not blinded, does not kill his father, does not marry his mother, encounters no one at the crossroads, is not asked a question at all, and by the way, has no royal lineage, either. This is my grandfather’s hammer; my father broke the head and put on a new one, and I broke the handle and put on a new one. But it’s all the same thing.
The point I had originally wanted to make with the post, as I had conceived it, was that it is we who project mythic meaning on events that in themselves are perfectly ordinary. Nothing magical happened that night of the solstice; nothing even terribly mysterious. I suppose the event was parallel to the sorts of epiphanies that Eliade talks about that are such striking moments of aesthetic arrest (Joseph Campbell’s term for them) that they provoke the elaboration of stories and symbols.
I now seem to recall, however, that Malcolm Lowry was so habitually given to self-mythologizing that strange coincidences started to happen to him above and beyond the stories he made up about such things. These would have had to be coincidences that other people noticed, since Lowry would not be the most reliable of narrators even when he was reciting purportedly true tales of events and their entanglements.
I don’t want to go there. That is where I started thirty-five years or so ago, and we are all agreed that we don’t like novels in which the protagonist encounters in the second half, in more or less reverse order, all the main events and characters that he encountered in the first half.
—I would have preferred to tell you the whole story right away. Since that would take too long, here is the beginning.
I realize that the reason I find it difficult to write the tale of modernist symbolism on the summer solstice is that it would have to be written as an episode in a modernist novel, specifically the sort of novel that Malcolm Lowry or James Joyce wrote.
But it would require Joyce’s genius to hit the right tone of ludicrousness mingled with mythic undertones, and it does not require the recitation of Lowry’s tragic life trajectory to remind us that his modernist mythic project was an impossible one.
The great moments of Anglo-American modernism (“modernismo,” as I recall, is distinctly different) consist of making something up that the writer does not really believe is remotely true, but that he (or she?) wishes were true, and therefore is going to make into an invented truth: a correlation between the randomness of daily life and the great structures of world mythology: a correlation from which wisdom and ultimate meaning can be drawn that will replace the consolations of conventional religion.
Unh-unh. Not gonna happen. Not now. I add the "or she" interrogatively because I am reluctant to ascribe such obvious pathology to any gender other than my own.
Anyway, for some reason I found myself remembering Malcolm Lowry on the morning of the summer solstice, not that I assigned any significance to the fact. Some random event of the summer air reminded me of some passage or another out of Under the Volcano, but it was so fragile and fleeting that I have no idea what it was…probably some song lyric on the car radio, for the thought crossed my mind, I think, at the crossroads where Briarcliff crosses the road named for Ponce de Leon and changes its name to Moreland. (Such name changes, at least in Atlanta, formerly marked an economic dividing line as well as, if not more than, a racial one. The neighborhoods are gentrified and integrated, but the name change persists.)
A fairly emotionally bruising twenty-first day of June ended with a visit to Crape Myrtles and Cape Cods, the allusively alliterative theme of the Cocktails in the Garden events last month at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. I went with a woman friend I have known since we ran the literary society together in college (and therein hangs a tale that, thankfully, will not be explored in this post, since it would lead her, but not me, to Ireland, Amsterdam, and Alaska before ending up in the same Atlanta doctoral program as I).
And thereafter we went to hear the recently reunited Band of Desperate Men, or rather, the most recent recapitulation of a group formed thirty years ago by other friends we had gone to college with. The trio playing this night at the Graveyard Tavern included two doctors of philosophy, one of whom has written the first and perhaps last doo-wop song in Mandarin Chinese. (See: www.mandarinpop.com.) This is the Princeton Ph.D. in Chinese studies of whom I have written previously, he who translated The Tower of Myriad Mirrors and went on to a career with the Federal Reserve Bank in which his talents in Asian lore and languages went unutilized. (That was the essence of all of our stories, one way or another. I trained for my truncated career as an art critic by studying virtually every discipline of the humanities and social sciences except art history.)
When we joined Harriette’s ex-husband at a front row table, we increased the audience in attendance by a substantial percentage. So it came as a surprise when a young woman began dancing in front of the stage and was joined by two others. Each was dressed in an idiosyncratic yet perfectly balanced combination of clothing that seemed to derive from several decades, all of them prior to the one in which these young dancers were born.
Their dances were more or less improvised moment to moment, and I was amused to note that they briefly struck a posture reminiscent of the Three Graces. They danced for a couple of numbers (mostly Larry’s own songs, though the Desperate Men segued into a rousing version of the Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” to further refine the overall danceability). And then they were gone into the night, blowing kisses behind them while Larry ad libbed from the stage, “And there they go, ladies and gentlemen, the beautiful Graveyard Dancers performing live at the Graveyard Tavern with the Desperate Men.”
We agreed it had been a wonderfully bizarre moment of three very curiously compelling young women with an unusual fashion sense, who showed up out of nowhere and vanished almost as precipitously.
It occurred to me then that this was the sort of event out of which a modernist novelist like Malcolm Lowry would have woven a whole pseudo-mythic narrative, turning three ordinary dancers (though one might more rightly call them mundanely otherworldly) into the Three Graces. And I regretted having long since mislaid the Erwin Panofsky essay on what the Renaissance made of the Graces…quite a lot, as I recall, all of it even more mystical and metaphysical than classical antiquity had ever imagined. They have nothing to do with the summer solstice, but that never stopped a good modernist mythmaker.
I decided the tale deserved an oral recitation forthwith, and telephoned two friends who were in the process of moving out of their apartment. The husband answered the phone with, “Kerry just put a lot of good stuff out on the curb. If you want a free copy of Under the Volcano, it’s out there right now.”
Kerry had had some adventure of her own en route to tossing out Under the Volcano, and I reproached her for having cavalierly discarded a Malcolm Lowry novel that was the Inferno portion of his never-completed version of the Commedia, with Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid being, perhaps, the Purgatorio, and October Ferry to Gabriola possibly the Paradiso as foreshadowed in the short story “The Forest Path to the Spring.” (I hadn’t thought of all this in perhaps two decades, but it came back unexpectedly.)
I went on at great length before remembering that I had recalled Under the Volcano that very morning for the first time in quite a while. After I remembered the role the book had played in our respective lives, I wondered why the hell I had insisted that she go out and recover something she had finally gotten rid of after all these years.
And it was even later when the phrase “Graveyard Dancers” (actually, I suspect Larry said “Graveyard Tavern Dancers”) summoned up a mental image of a Tibetan devotional painting that Tibetologist and Irish-Canadian trickster Glenn Mullin titled “The Dancers in the Graveyard.” It depicts the theme of the Dance of the Skeleton Lords, which the Drepung Loseling monks also incarnate in one of the performances in their ongoing Mystical Arts of Tibet tour. (I have often wondered how the younger monks deal with the temptations of being part of a traveling road show, but that too is quite another story.)
The young women in the tavern on Glenwood Avenue were not the least bit skeletal, though they were assuredly ætherial and more than a bit sylph-like. The Tibetan dancers have nothing to do with the summer solstice, and there are only two of them. We are well on our way to those scholarly strand-motif “versions of the myth of Oedipus” in which he is not blinded, does not kill his father, does not marry his mother, encounters no one at the crossroads, is not asked a question at all, and by the way, has no royal lineage, either. This is my grandfather’s hammer; my father broke the head and put on a new one, and I broke the handle and put on a new one. But it’s all the same thing.
The point I had originally wanted to make with the post, as I had conceived it, was that it is we who project mythic meaning on events that in themselves are perfectly ordinary. Nothing magical happened that night of the solstice; nothing even terribly mysterious. I suppose the event was parallel to the sorts of epiphanies that Eliade talks about that are such striking moments of aesthetic arrest (Joseph Campbell’s term for them) that they provoke the elaboration of stories and symbols.
I now seem to recall, however, that Malcolm Lowry was so habitually given to self-mythologizing that strange coincidences started to happen to him above and beyond the stories he made up about such things. These would have had to be coincidences that other people noticed, since Lowry would not be the most reliable of narrators even when he was reciting purportedly true tales of events and their entanglements.
I don’t want to go there. That is where I started thirty-five years or so ago, and we are all agreed that we don’t like novels in which the protagonist encounters in the second half, in more or less reverse order, all the main events and characters that he encountered in the first half.
