On a found marginalium to John Dryden’s "Song for St. Cecilia's Day"

I wrote this in 2023 for someone who's doing a project on found marginalia. In the event, he or his editor didn't like it enough to publish it (as I discovered after he'd ghosted me on the subject for nearly a year). I suspect he or they felt it was too "academic," or something. 

Following a Renaissance tradition that understood musical harmony as a paradigm of cosmic order, Dryden’s encomium to the patron saint of music and musicians rewrites the Creation as a symphony wrested by God from the cacophony of chaos. In an essay of 1961, Earl Wasserman remarks that the poem performs what it describes, transforming metrical chaos to order as it represents the Arch-Musician forming the universe from disordered atom-notes: “After six unrhymed lines the rhymes begin in perfectly systematic order, picking up first the fifth and sixth and then the third and fourth, and finally the first and second. Each of the second six lines, moreover, has the same metrical form as its fellow rhyme-line among the first six” (“Pope’s Ode for Musick,” ELH 28.2 [June, 1961]: (167). Here an unknown hand charts these correspondences in shaky black ballpoint. The notation “6 days” conveys Wasserman’s observation that Dryden’s “poetic account of the first six days of Creation is itself a structural hexaemeron, and the poet is the microcosmic Creator who uses the harmonic devices available to him to create his analogous verbal world” (loc. cit.). As in Genesis 1, Dryden’s musical cosmogony ends with the creation of Man, in whom, as one made in the image of God and thus a microcosm to His macrocosm, the full tonal range of Creation’s harmony is reflected: the diapason closes in Man. Human imperfection, however, enters already with Genesis 3. “But oh!” exclaims Dryden’s sixth stanza (not pictured here), following four melophrastic stanzas of all-too-human “loud clangor, […] anger / And mortal alarms, […] woes of hopeless lovers, […] jealous pangs, and desperation, […] Fury, frantic indignation, / Depth of pains and height of passion”: “But oh! what art can teach / What human voice can reach / The sacred organ's praise?” The poet lauds St. Cecilia for the gift of vocal music – and, by extension, also of poetry – to Man: “bright Cecilia rais'd the wonder high'r; / When to her organ, vocal breath was giv'n, / An angel heard, and straight appear'd / Mistaking earth for Heav'n.” Wasserman observes that here the penultimate line falls out of the rhyme scheme, but rhymes internally: “Angels, perpetually singing around God, are their own harmony.” Yet the harmony described is Cecilia's; it rests on an imperfection not angelic, but human. At a second remove, the singer of this song of praise is the man Dryden, its microcosmic Creator. Its reader, perforce, is no less imperfect. Following the Republic and the Timaeus, Renaissance theorists sought a Platonic Idea of universal order in music's mathematical proportions, only to be faced with the real divergence of current systems of intonation from the ratios of the Pythagorean scale (D.P. Walker, Studies in Musical Science in the Late Renaissance, London 1978, 1-13). Plato himself, of course, insisted upon the gap that persists between the realms of the perceptible and the intelligible, and upon ever striving to narrow that gap. To trace out order, even in tremorous ballpoint, is to aspire to sing like the angels along with the harmony of the spheres.

I took the dog out for his evening walk around 9:40. We went around the house and down the hill toward the storm runoff that leads to the creek and our neighborhood park. The sky wasn't yet fully dark: more of a lavender grey against which the tops of the old, tall trees were silhouetted in black. The slope behind our next door neighbor's house, with its carefully trimmed lawn, glittered with fireflies, which would shine on for a second here and there, left, right, low to the ground or six feet above it, then shine off, unpredictably. There, between the trees, it was almost totally dark, but I could vaguely see a stain down the slope, which resolved (though without losing any of its vagueness) into a stag. I was startled by it for a second, the time to make out what that black void was among the glittering fireflies, before I more intuited than saw it turn and run away.

Such brief moments of beauty can appear in our lives unprepared, unexpected, with no connection to any other moments before or after; this can make them heartbreakingly perfect but also useless, unprocessable.

(It is impossible to convey in words the precise quality of that scene: a verbal description at best relates to the thing described as a transcription of a jazz solo might relate to having heard it in person. But ideally it can become the score based on which the readers play their own music. Is it relevant to add that I was listening, on headphones, to L.T.J. Bukem's "Coolin' Out" -- not the most poetically resonant track, granted; "Devil's Theme," which kicked in a few minutes later, would have been more aesthetically right -- or that we are during COVID?)

Here are two photos I took minutes later, as we walked, on the street now, back from the park:

Kirby's Wilderness of Building

[Note:  this article was written for the catalog of the 2015 exhibition, Comic Book Apocalypse: The Graphic World of Jack Kirby, curated by Charles Hatfield and Ben Saunders at the art gallery of California State University, Northridge. That catalog is now out of print.  I am reposting the article here to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Jack Kirby's birth.]

Outer space is much too close.  Or rather (since space extends everywhere), its furniture, its stage props are.  Past a great spinning wheel, the technological purpose of which is hard to fathom—it looks partly like a state-of-the-art waterwheel ferrying, ensconced in each of its compartments, a sphere of some kind (a planetoid, perhaps?), partly like an arcing array of electronic circuits—rough-hewn asteroids hurtle by.  They are so near that the imagination boggles at why gravity doesn’t bring them crashing in.  Or, perhaps, it will?  That seems unlikely, however:  down on the glistening terrace of a municipal building designed in retro style (it rather recalls Earth visions of modernist architecture from the 1950s or ‘60s, and we’re in the future, aren’t we?) the inhabitants of the city stroll about unconcerned.

An exchange with Brian Aldiss

I have just learned that Brian Aldiss passed away two days ago, at the age of 92.  I will not recap here his achievements, or wax enthusiastically about his books, though I could, at length.  As a brief memorial, I will post excerpts from an email correspondence I had with him between April and June 2015.  His generosity in answering questions from a reader was exemplary.  Since these were answers to a scholarly inquiry, I feel that their publication here, as an interview of sorts, is appropriate. 

An Apocryphal Canto

Teaching Dante in Core this semester, I decided we'd all had enough with expository papers, so I'm having my students add their own extra circles to Hell. Once they're written, I plan to collect them under the title Hell's Hidden Rooms: The Apocryphal Cantos (though my students prefer Schwartz's Inferno). Here's one I composed as a pilot.

The Eighth Circle, Twelfth Pouch. The Pedants, who cannot keep from spitting into their cups.

  Pushing open the gate that led from the room                      

where unhappy souls had been kept awake                            

by endless paperwork, pointless tasks, gloom,                       

  (having asked for bread, we were given cake             

made from cornstarch and ketchup; wanting sun,                   

we were told to sit still and consume more cake),                 

  my vision opened out to a coffered hall, not outdone         

by the one by the man of Urbino. Sitting, standing,                

conversing, witty, women and men, every one             

  making noises – their discourse – resounding                      

from some kind of horn: oboes, trumpet,                                  

a shawm, clarinets, bassoons, french horns rounding,          

  trombones, a tuba (sometimes they’d thump it),                  

recorders and piccoli and a great flute,                         

every one poking from – where? Not the rump, it                    

  wasn’t like Barbariccia! Alas, if by their fruits                       

ye shall know them, then know that it was – the navel.        

From what seemed a Babel of indiscriminate toots               

  with time there emerged a symphonic fable              

of pride injured, pain at imagined slights                                

decisions made round wooden tables                          

  people’s blindness to extraspeluncular lights.                     

Such sweetness emerged from the conduits umbilical          

and such grace I perceived in their execution of rites

  that I did not notice, at first, their odd habits prandial.      

They seemed to be drinking moonlight, some spirit              

of truth, of wisdom mythico-mystical;                            

 yet each time they quaffed, with slyness implicit                  

their mouths left behind a slight drop, a thin trail,                

a small mucous swirl in the cup, or they’d lick it.                    

  Then, taking a mighty pull, they’d offer the ale                     

to their partner in tippling and tooting, who                            

did the same. In the end – so I thought, and I paled –           

  it must all be one swill; yes, the whole happy crew             

was supping from one keg of beer, not having realized        

its leaven was human. So tasty the brew                                  

  seemed to them that they fed it to smaller-sized                 

tooters, with less fulsome navels from which             

tiny woodwinds and brass had only begun to arise;              

  trying the mug on for size, these soon felt the itch               

to dribble along with the rest. Whereupon,                             

from his flute, one found his pitch                                             

  and declared in doggerel, getting his rhyme on:                   

“To the minnows, I shine like the Ichthus                                  

Heliodiplodokus – Pound’s very paragon                           

  of a poem, by which Louis Agassiz hoped to focus                

the finishing graduate. ‘Here’s a sunfish – look!                    

Please, no more hocus-pocus!                                         

  You cannot possibly make a book                                            

from five book reviews and two                                      

articles. Even allowing you cook                                     

  your data, and stew                                                                     

with a jigger of new theoretical wine,                           

you will still smell vinegar in the brew –                                  

  even packaged by Princeton, it’s brine.’”                                 

Next another strode up with an instrument                              

stuck out from her belly that shimmered in kind;                    

  I could not tell from its strange integument               

was it an oboe, euphonium, drum, an aeolian chime?          

Every moment, it altered its temperament,                               

  not to mention its key and its rhyme.                           

The cup she offered looked sweet, but the backwash           

was bitter. “I can take you to Cocytus for a good time –         

  I got friends there – we can picnic, pack a brioche – “          

But my Master said: “Bite that brioche, and Proserpina         

will pity you. Find something better to nosh.”             

  The last soul I saw wore a concertina                         

that pushed and was pulled without help from the hands;  

his chin in the air, he spat not just in vina,                                

  but everywhere, really – quite into the stands.                      

O wonder! The arcs his drool made formed a mass                

In the air; the product, a castle of strands                                

  that hovered an instant, then slid back into his glass.