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The House of
Counted Days: a Meditation for Bill Karlins
by Ron Thomas
- The Dutch air
is cold against my back as I read on the little single mattress
on the floor of the apartment in Amsterdam. It is 1999.
- Not finished
with Rimbaud, apparently. Reading again about Somebody Else….the
Master of Silence….The Red Sea “a blank page upon
which his future will be written”….
- I am leaning
against the opening under the door. A pillow, which my mother,
on the other bed in the room, has thrown me, wards off the
chilly blasts while the moon travels its October path, gathering
size on its way towards the West Tower nearby where, somewhere
within, Rembrandt is buried.
- Back in Thorndale,
a hot blast of Dutch tea meets my face as I lean over the
stove to stir a boiling pot of spinach and beans.
- Walking through
Philadelphia, city shapes and building fronts unfold along
my eyes and head, bodiless, they do not cling. Too numerous.
- Pleasures not
sweet enough, nor sorrows a standard of meaning can attain.
Here, invent; there, remember. Wandering in place, finding,
losing and giving away.
- Winter’s
two-part rondo, the chilly dark and the tree branch bearing
beings, winter’s General, (the wind) barking orders.
The sun’s warmth.
- The eyes I lift
from the open book in my lap, meet the day’s final light
washing the surface flat across the yard’s yellowing
pines, and the red brick wall next to the door of the shed,
watching me thinking on my couch through the patio doors …..my
position is fixed, I do not escape the fears of youth, they
return in season, emboldened, no longer hiding behind the
mask of feigned and fearless embezzled bravado.
- The tree branch
bears beings laughing through the commanding winter wind,
barking orders, the sun’s warmth, and the chilly dark,
the light on the red brick wall next to the shed….
- The
strength of the wild ox defers to the Shadow of Him by whose
Word, what was not, from nothing, came to be. The watching
dawn lowers its countenance averting the Lord of Heaven, mighty
and dreadful, passing by.An artistic work always achieves
its effects through the interplay of particularities. As it
unfolds it traps us in its own tangle of peripheral references
by way of chains of associations which often the observer
or listener constructs in a free association of his/her own….
The titles and authors
of two books remained in my notes for five or six years until
a month ago when I searched for, located and purchased (for
the second time) used copies online of: Stream of Consciousness
in the Modern Novel by Robert Humphrey and Stream of
Consciousness by Melvin Friedman. The subject surfaced with
a vengeance and I am once again immersed in it. From the beginning
it seemed blatantly obvious that “music” was itself
already a phenomenon richly connected with this literary type.
There is material in my essay Fragments about this connection.
My interest in stream
of consciousness literature began with a course given at the
Manhattan School of Music. A Professor from NYU, whose name
I no longer recall, walked us through William Faulkner’s
The Sound and the Fury with a key that he had prepared
with which to unravel the montage of the book’s multiple
narrators. I spent most of the summer between my Freshman and
Sophomore years at the Manhattan School of Music in a rocker
on the porch of our house in Montclair NJ surrounded by commentaries,
working my way methodically through Joyce’s Ulysees
and not long after that I even managed to read through two thirds
of Finnegans Wake.
The Counted Days Meditation is a Prose Poem. It is a group of
dream-moments or the dreams of a fever-state, or even free-associations
of wakefulness. It is a westernized piece of Haiku poetry which
the bamboo image of the graphics suggests. The following brief
analysis of the imagery will not too much diminish ,I hope,
the impact of the calculated complexity of the design. But first,
this quotation from p.239 of Harry Levin’s James Joyce:
“….David
Hayman in the Publications of the Modern Language Association
(March 1958), devotes some 15,000 words to explicating a single
sentence from Finnegans Wake, following its elaboration
through seventeen drafts, yet scarcely reaching an integrated
conception. Furthermore, the article argues, we ought not
to look for a core of significance; instead, we should seek
our reward in the interplay of particulars. I believe Mr.
Hayman may be right to the extent that we must not expect
to crack a code and find everything made luminously clear.
We understand the verbal techniques and the underlying ideas
fairly well; but each new sentence enmeshed us in its own
tangle of peripheral references. Thus we can untangle sooner
or later, if they involve a passage from Quinet or a case-history
from Morton Prince or a figment of Hindu mythology or an Edwardian
music-hall song. Yet nothing short of telepathy with the dead
can reconstitute those chains of personal association which,
as we realize more and more, Joyce arbitrarily interwove with
his cultural fantasy. It is as if the monument were to remain
half-excavated, its outlines roughly marked, its texture admired
in fragments, some of its treasures assessed, while the secrets
buried with its sardonic artificer went on provoking conjectures
and speculations indefinitely.”
The style and substance
of the Meditation is, of course, an outgrowth of and a variation
on the musical ideas and themes in The House of Counted Days.
The Meditation evokes by poetic depictions (or at least
so I believe) the sensibilities of the music in the Counted
Days suite of pieces
Episodes 1 and
3.
The Dutch air is cold against my back as I read on the little
single mattress on the floor of the apartment in Amsterdam.
It is 1999. I am leaning against the opening under the door.
A pillow, which my mother, on the other bed in the room, has
thrown me, wards off the chilly blasts while the moon travels
its October path, gathering size on its way towards the West
Tower nearby where, somewhere within, Rembrandt is buried.
I traveled to Holland
twice in 1999, first in the Spring with my wife Mary Ann, and
again in the Fall with my mother Helen. Glenn offered to finance
my ticket if I would accompany Mom to Amsterdam for a visit.
Helen’s wrist was broken from a fall earlier that year
rendering my assistance of even greater value.
Episodes 1 and 3 refer directly to that visit. In his apartment
I sleep on the “little single mattress” while my mother
sleeps in the same room on Glenn and Pauline’s bed which
they have given up to her (they are on the pull out couch in
the living room). It is late and I am sitting upright, and reading
before retiring. I have a very bad cold. It is October and I
am thinking (among other things) about Rembrandt who was “moved
by the greatness of others” as I am. Pauline is a direct
descendant of Rembrandt.
One of the reasons
why Rembrandt was so financially stressed was that he spent
extravagantly on (among other things and, yes, you guessed it)
art works!!! I am reminded of Debussy’s pre-Peleas
obscurity when as a poor Parisian he (at least) once spent his
last bit of money on a Japanese print for his wall rather than
eat. The West Tower is nearby and can be seen from the living
room window and it is thought that Rembrandt is in fact buried
in there somewhere.
Episodes 4, 5,
7, 8, 9
Back in Thorndale, a hot blast of Dutch tea meets my face
as I lean over the stove to stir a boiling pot of spinach
and beans.
Walking through Philadelphia, city shapes and building fronts
unfold along my eyes and head, bodiless, they do not cling.
Too numerous.
Winter’s two-part rondo, the chilly dark and the tree
branch bearing beings, winter’s General, (the wind) barking
orders. The sun’s warmth.
The eyes I lift from the open book in my lap, meet the day’s
final light washing the surface flat across the yard’s
yellowing pines, and the red brick wall next to the door of
the shed, watching me thinking on my couch through the patio
doors …..my position is fixed, I do not escape the fears
of youth, they return in season, emboldened, no longer hiding
behind the mask of feigned and fearless embezzled bravado.
The tree branch bears beings laughing through the commanding
winter wind, barking orders, the sun’s warmth, and the
chilly dark, the light on the red brick wall next to the shed….
Three locations
figure in the poem. Amsterdam, Thorndale, where my home is,
and Philadelphia. I am brewing Dutch tea and cooking spinache
and beans .Amsterdam and Thorndale are joined (as my brother
and I are joined) by the twin images of the Dutch tea and the
spinache and beans. Later, I am sitting on my couch with a book
on my lap looking out my back patio doors. (Between these two
images: a memory of a previous trip to Philadelphia, and a sentence
formed as I walked past buildings through the streets on that
occasion.)
I hear birds as
if in laughing-conversation with the sound of the wind which
is personified as a General barking orders to his troops (a
two-part rondo); the cool evening and the warm light of the
sun, another two-part rondo; the red brick wall and the light
upon it , another…. and of course “me-on-the-couch”
and “the-scene-upon-which-I-gaze” an overall two-part
rondo….there are other pair-chains too ……Thoughts
and speculations alternate with and are adjacent to, places
and things……
Episode 10
The strength of the wild ox defers to the Shadow of Him by
whose Word, what was not, from nothing, came to be. The watching
dawn lowers its countenance averting the Lord of Heaven, mighty
and dreadful, passing by.
Old Testament imagery
comes at the end , an Epiphany-of-the Word as a spiritual coda
to the whole meditation. Biblical references pile up even from
the New Testament. The world came to be from nothing by way
of the Word. That Word became a “Him” (with a capital
H) (a metaphor for Immortality) however the “Shadow of
Him” clearly indicates a pre-Christian incarnation. He
is mighty and dreadful and all creation bows in His presence….There
is something of the mannerisms of Emily Dickinson’s work
here. This climactic image is suddenly surprising. Scrolling
through the words and images, is it not ia breathtaking little
film breaking forth upon the screen of mind’s eye ? The
fragile reality of a man (obviously the writer) seated on his
couch gazing at the fading light on the red wall of his brick
shed just beyond his patio doors, listening to the sound of
birds in the evening, with a book opened upon his lap is rendered
all the more poignant by its sudden juxtaposition with the intensely
charged biblical imagery…..mortality in juxtaposition with
the eternal.
The House of
Counted Days: a conclusion of miscellanies
With the exception
of Code Red and Here, the titles come from American
Frontier Lore.
Most of the musical titles came from Pat Jahns’ The
Frontier World of Doc Holliday, a “novel with footnotes”
whose primary intent seems to have been to denigrate the reputation
of Wyatt Earp. The book is arguably inaccurate yet very beautifully
written. The early onset of Doc Holliday’s Tuberculosis
was of course the defining factor in his life. Reacting to this
death sentence he abruptly abandons his fledgling career as
a Dentist for life on the frontier as a gambler and adventurer,
waiting for death to come.
Page 49: “….Doc
Holliday had built his life on a volcano…the house
of counted days.” A metaphor for mortality.
Ones and Eights:
a reference to the poker hand Wild Bill Hickock was holding
when he was murdered (shot in the back) by Jack McCall in the
Number 10 Saloon in Deadwood.
Page 75 “Aces
and eights with a queen kicker----the Deadman’s hand…which
gambling superstition said would never let its holder leave
the game alive”. Another picture of mortality.
Page 95. “….Knowing
his reprieve from death to be but a whim, a fancy of fate, no matter how careful he was.”
Tough Nut and
Lucky Cuss:
Names of two thriving silver mines in the vicinity of Tombstone,
Arizona. Blue Glass Country: a craze during the 1870s
in Tombstone (and perhaps elsewhere on the frontier) for tinted
blue glass (for eyeglasses) alleged to have healing and mood
elevating properties. The title is also a word-play on (Kentucky)
Blue Grass Country.
Page 74. Jahns
quotes the Wyoming Weekly Leader from June 21st, 1877.
“….here,too [Deadwood City, Denver], was Calamity
Jane Canary with her sweeping raven looks, gaiters instead
of boots, beaded and fringed buckskins and a wide brimmed
hat. [Jahns quotes from the Leader] ‘She is still in
early womanhood, and her rough and dissipated career has not
altogether swept away the lines where beauty lingers.’”
“For what is
the meaning of a poem after all, but a pretext for fine poetry?
If that meaning be involved in haze, may not the poetry be all
the finer for it?”
-- Logan Pearsall Smith On Reading Shakespeare
“…to dream,
to meditate, to lose ourselves in thoughts beyond the reaches
of our souls, to love the gay appearances of the world and know
them as illusions---this temper of an ironic mind, of a happy,
enjoying, and yet melancholy nature, expresses itself in a secret
rhythm, a cadence, a delicate and dream-like music which is,
for me, the loveliest poetry in the world.”
Ibid
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