Szymborska, Tanning, and

I am left feeling a bit melancholy at the simultaneously reported (in the NY Times, anyway) deaths of Wislawa Szymborska and Dorothea Tanning. Tanning’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik was one of those paintings I cherished for decades, and though I never quite warmed to Szymborska’s poetry (warmth not being one of the things it was famed for), opening View with a Grain of Sand at random reveals a poem that Billy Collins could have written if Billy Collins had been an immensely educated Central European woman who came of age in newly Communist Poland. At least I hope the interminable catalogue of outlandishly named non-Roman peoples being encountered by improbably named Roman conquerors and bearers of civilization, who are clearly Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, is supposed to be grimly funny: “Heaps of Hernicians. Swarms of Murricinians. / …The farther you go, the more there are, dear Servius Follius. / These little nations are pitiful indeed / Their foolish ways require supervision / with every new river we ford, dear Aulius Junius.”

We live in Szymborska's world as much as we wish we lived in Tanning's in some other dimension than our dreams. Not that the unpleasant world we make for ourselves is not also hallucinatory in its own doubtful way.

Jung, the Red Book, and the anxiety of influence

I was thinking of cross-referencing when I publish a review of "The Sacred Round" to an essay I recalled posting on Jung and the Lindisfarne Gospels. But on looking back I find I seemingly never had the nerve to post such unwarranted speculation. It is worth putting it out there to be ridiculed and refuted, so here it is more or less as I wrote it two years ago. It is pure coincidence that a Bill Traylor show has just opened at the High Museum of Art so Atlantans at least can check my references there:

What would happen if we (okay, if I) approached C. G. Jung’s Red Book by way of Michelle P. Brown’s magisterial study of The Lindisfarne Gospels? (Hint: probably not what you think.)

This is preliminary, probably wrong, and above all, to most readers,

( bor-r-r-r-r-r-i-n-g )