“Yellow Streak,” oil on watercolor paper, 16 x 20 in. (JMN 2024).
For preservation of decorum in public speech, generations of writers have stood on the shoulders of people like Sir Richard Burton, 19th-century translator of the Arabian Nights. He fathered workarounds with which to buffer readers from Anglo Saxon four-letter words, coining “futter,” for instance (from French foutre), to describe the commission of penetrative carnal abomination.
Since Burton’s time, the internet and American politics have legitimized and blessed coarse language in public discourse. A tried-and-true expedient for not giving offense to anyone, anywhere, anytime, however, remains the rhetorical device of circumlocution.
Fable
The Tyrant ordered a newly enslaved woman to **** off his **** [perform a vile act which would give him pleasure]. His command of the conquered dialect was imperfect. She figured he meant to request that she **** off his **** [an act described by a word similar to the one he had uttered — indeed, differing by a single letter].
If I do what he has asked, she reflected, it will not go well for him. I could perform instead the filthy service which he thinks he demanded. My life is lost anyway, though, along with my honor, so…
The good woman carried out the Tyrant’s command to the letter. We don’t know her fate, but the Tyrant is no longer the man he was.
Moral: Invasions by Russia can have unintended consequences.
“Frijol,” oil and acrylic on cardboard, 8 x 16 in. (JMN 2024).
Adjacency can have a downside when it sparks comparison. “Praise Song for Annie Allen” by Angela Jackson is published alongside Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Memorial to Ed Bland” in Poetry, September 2024. The juxtaposition drives home for me how brightly Brooks shines as a writer.
Jackson’s “Praise Song” pays respect to Brooks’s second volume of poetry titled Annie Allen. The tribute has movement familiarly endearing like that, say, of a butterfly.
Before you There was none so high Minded, So elegantly eloquent. You were high standing Fruit. […]
“Elegantly eloquent” is adverb heavy, but the text stays airborne. Showy enjambments with “minded” and “fruit” are their own reward. The tribute has a deft enough ring to it; it just happens to sit opposite a text that beats wing like a windhover.
Brooks eulogizes a fellow Chicago poet named Ed Bland killed in WWII. Her poem leads with italicized fact, as from a clipped obit: … killed in Germany March 20, 1945; / volunteered for special dangerous mission / … wanted to see action…
Her entry point has outrageous daring:
He grew up being curious And thinking things are various. Nothing was merely deleterious Or spurious. […]
It takes brass to elicit buy-in on the deadpan rhyming of a litany of Latinate words which conjointly nail a vast dimension of her subject’s character. The youth she knew was perceptive and connective and intuitive; he had an expansive, reflecting mind. All of that gets established in four lines memorably and with impudence. The spunky emphasis conveyed by the clipped, two-word finale of the stanza previews the knack for straight-ahead rhythm and phrasing that juices the poem’s unsentimental tenderness.
I feel I’ve already said too much. The practice of commenting on poetry is heartbreaking, and notoriously spurious; heartbreaking because you have to leave out most of what you want to say — you can’t quote the whole damn poem waxing rhapsodic at every turn; spurious because commentary devours readerly bandwidth which in all likelihood is better invested in the poem itself.
I’ll quote only the second stanza, then, and try to conclude quickly.
Or good. HIs mother could Not keep him from a popping-eyed surprise At things. He would Be digging everywhere until things gave. Or did not give. Among his dusty ruins, Suddenly there’d be his face to see, And its queer, wonderful expression, salted With this cool, twirling awe. […]
What resonates for me is the the early blush of a raging curiosity, a young sojourner’s unselfconscious demonstrativeness over the gains and setbacks of discovery. The language is eventful, unpredictable; it crackles and throws sparks. I have to exclaim how Brooks’s use of the verb “give” in this passage is straight from the beating heart of American vernacular, or at least from the dialect that raised me. When something “gives,” it cedes to probing, shows itself truly, reveals a bit of essence. A conundrum, in giving, yields ground to a curious young man’s unyielding gaze. Sometimes.
Death is a topic on which people are willing to let poetry have a say — mostly they’re too busy for it. What Auden wrote on the occasion of Yeats’s death is gold standard in the genre. Gwendolyn Brooks’s elegy is from the same vein.
When I write, I say words in my mind. I’m pretty sure I can type words as fast as I can think them. Sometimes it seems I’ve typed them even faster than that!
I wash and slice an organic Ambrosia apple for breakfast. It’s pretty, though it won’t be tree-sweet. I notice how it has so much yellow mixed with the red. I think, I ought to paint one of these.
On the speakers, improbable flurries of notes issue from Dexter Gordon’s horn. How do jazz artists do that — paint the air with neon sound?
Wait, he’s blowing statements out his instrument the way I blow them out my keyboard! The dexterity’s so internalized, no conscious effort intervenes.
Sweet. We have stuff in common, Dexter and me. He was a saxophonist. I’m a typist.
“Jagtime Rag,” oil and acrylic on cardboard, 7 x 9 in. (JMN 2024).
Like the King James Bible for Judaism and Christianity, the Holy Quran is for Islam a monument to luminous language in a spiritual setting. As a student of Arabic I study Quranic texts to strengthen my grasp of the language and gain inklings as to its culture. The venture has sparked a desire on my part to sample the scriptures of other faiths, such as the Book of Mormon, as well as writings that are foundational for Hindus, Buddhists, Native Americans, and communities of belief I may not even be aware of.
The above prefaces my registering here an associative episode in my reading and contemplative life of the sort this blog is more or less built for. It’s unruly enough that I feel pressed to assert it’s devoid of irony. In a nutshell, the psychic blip I’m exercised by is this: Verse 3:78 of the Quran made me think of JD Vance.
Here’s my own English for the verse, as literal as I can make it: “And truly among them there is a group who contort their tongues with the Book so that you think it to be from the Book, and it is not from the Book, and they say it is from God, and it is not from God, and they speak the lie about God, and they know it.” (My emphasis. See note below.)
JD Vance said the following on September 15, 2024: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do…”
There’s nothing objective about juxtaposing these two utterances as if one illuminated the other. What it does is document an intempestif belch from the parlous mass of associative gases which rotates in my particular cognitive firmament. Vance’s admission that he will make things up to get attention from the media is unsurprising on top of appalling. It’s an end stage in the metastisizing cancer that started with Trump’s “fake news,” advanced through Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts,” and now reaches toxic bloom in Vance’s “created stories.” They speak the lie… and they know it. Vance’s malignant fictions predict organ failure for the body politic in the mold of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.
Note I don’t pretend remotely to capture in my paraphrase the essential meaning of the verse from a theological, devotional or historical standpoint. I stick close to the words themselves, with respect and deference, to the end that I be able to parse their grammatical relationships and ascertain what they state in elemental fashion, and thus be informed and gain insight overall into the linguistic structures of this glorious corpus of expression which underpins the modern literary language to this very day. As a scholarly sidekick for my Quran reading I keep at hand the published Spanish translation of my mentor Julio Cortés: El Corán, Editora Nacional, Madrid, 1979. It figures among the translations into many languages listed at www.quran.com, and is useful for its notes as well as for its rendering of the text. Here is Cortés’s reading of verse 3:78: Algunos de ellos* trabucan* con sus lenguas la recitación de la Escritura para que creáis que está en la Escritura lo que no está en la Escritura, diciendo que viene de Dios, siendo así que no viene de Dios. Mienten contra Dios a sabiendas.
Flaming June. Frederic Lord Leighton. 1895. Photograph: SJArt/Alamy. [Guardian caption and illustration]
It’s a tricky business this amateurism. Progress consists in putting a non-realistic spin on scenes and objects. Ideally, the subject should be rigorously interrogated, stripped to its essences, warped or scuffed up past anodyne mimesis. Seen, not depicted. Stamped with affect, changed by observation like quarks. Marks are made, goddamn it!
As a viewer of art I’ve admired Chardin, Gauguin, Klee, Kandinsky, Mondrian. Winslow Homer and Maurice Prendergast. The Ash Can painters (Bellows… who are the others?). Jasper Johns. Why does my practice resemble that of a costive fanboy of Frederic Leighton?
Looking back over the fallout of my amateurism, I realize how straitened and dessicated, stodgy and hedging, servile and obdurate, it has been — the dawdling over eyebrows, cheeks and buccal fissures. These aren’t discouraging words to myself, hear me well. They animate me to stumble toward more assertive treatments.
No need to disturb Lord Leighton in his grave. He was of his time and place. (Who isn’t?) I’ve only just met him through an article in The Guardian. Three paintings illustrate the piece.
“Flaming June.” Shown above. This cloying painting induces a visual nausée (only the French word will do). It feels like a contrivance of exotic feathers simulated in meringues and fashioned into a faux corsage for a cake decoration.
“Bay of Cadiz, Moonlight.” The swoonish title of this attractive flourish, which Leighton is said to have “adored,” gives it away. Moonbeams glistening off the swine lagoon of a Carolina pig farm are just as pretty. But to its credit, the painting isn’t flaming.
Frederic Leighton, Bay of Cadiz, Moonlight, c. 1866, will go on display this November Photograph: Image courtesy of Christie’s. [Guardian caption and illustration]
“Nocturne Blue and Gold Southampton Water.” Whistler’s watery nocturne feels more serious than Leighton’s. It helps that Whistler never painted the likes of “Flaming June.”
James McNeill Whistler. Nocturne Blue and Gold Southampton Water. 1872. Photograph: Alamy. [Guardian caption and illustration]
“Sapphire in a Ruby Setting,” Apple Pencil (JMN 2024).
DJ, my lord! The grail from which you sup runneth over, sir, with fulsomeness. By your leave I’ll tell it like it is: JD, as well, sips from a frothy cup.
DJ, JD, a mirror’s dream times two, chosen well you have, each one the other. Musk and myrrh anoint you, sir and sir — claw with which to rake, and tooth to chew!
In nineteen hundred forty-six, this land birthed a baby swathed in currency. That hero now courts Lady Liberty with touch from his exploratory hand.
Hell yes to thee, my Chief! Our Flag receive thy kiss, virgins reciprocate thy tongue! My MAGAnificent, be thee self-sung by NFT’s surpassing make-believe!
“Fruit,” oil on cardboard, 8-1/2 x 6 in. (JMN 2024).
Christian J. Collier publishes three poems in Poetry, September 2024: “God,” “Case Study” and “The Compline.” Spoken cleanly, rhythmically, hotly, they orbit around experience gleaned from the crucible of propagating life.
Formal religion can be heavy on bone and light on meat. Collier’s poems flesh out the argument with God that makes faith flicker for me as a kind of alive thing in others. The poems emit sparks of light from the human clash with a theology swaddled in hoary patristics, with the unendurable meant to be endured. Paradox’s alter ego is the Great Indefinite, the Hidden-yet-Revealed eidolon which demands abject submission on top of dogged adoration. It has to be unreal and otherworldly to cohere, if at all, in the human psyche.
I’ll write only of Collier’s “God.” It starts here:
I used to think there was only one of You before the miscarriage. Now I am not so sure. Maybe there are a number of Gods to wade through before falling at the feet of the last true one:
In an indented block, the poem cycles through a divine catwalk of temporizing avatars attached to primitivistic epithets and reductive seductions:
the jade God we pray to who does not come or answer & and the plum one who appears to offer salvation; the opal God who offers a limited extent of His kingdom and the olive one who only offers condolences; let us not forget the violet God that is bad with man because He is deeply holy.
The poem alights on the ostensibly desirable God: “We all seek the one of manna though, don’t we?” Three stanzas evoke with ambiguous edginess the God “holding all we hunger for / like butterscotch in His palms.” The speaker, traversing inky moments of mundane days and nights, dreams “with eyes open of goading Him into halting my child’s rest, / guiding his or her tiny light close to the brushfire / flickering in my breath.”
Goading Him! The verb is explosive. Indefinite binary “his or her”; light that’s “tiny”; anomalous “halting” of a child’s “rest”; these are stinging formulations. The rest in question is death. An unrealized life form is being sucked back into the impossibly capacious bosom whence it came, or whatever. Where are “mercy” and “justice” in this sorry transaction? The poem voices a despairing piety that seethes to rescue an imperiously snatched entity from “that God.” Here’s the ending:
That God? That great and swollen orange storm? That’s the God haunting me. The God who keeps His distance. The God whose star-draped hands I envy. They come at day’s end to tuck my baby, my ember, into its infinite, feathered bed.
“My ember” calls back piercingly to the “brushfire flickering in my breath.” I’m rarely reached as acutely as this by poetry in which faith and grief tangle with such expressive fury.
EthicalDative 
Quran 3:78 —> Vance
“Jagtime Rag,” oil and acrylic on cardboard, 7 x 9 in. (JMN 2024).
Like the King James Bible for Judaism and Christianity, the Holy Quran is for Islam a monument to luminous language in a spiritual setting. As a student of Arabic I study Quranic texts to strengthen my grasp of the language and gain inklings as to its culture. The venture has sparked a desire on my part to sample the scriptures of other faiths, such as the Book of Mormon, as well as writings that are foundational for Hindus, Buddhists, Native Americans, and communities of belief I may not even be aware of.
The above prefaces my registering here an associative episode in my reading and contemplative life of the sort this blog is more or less built for. It’s unruly enough that I feel pressed to assert it’s devoid of irony. In a nutshell, the psychic blip I’m exercised by is this: Verse 3:78 of the Quran made me think of JD Vance.
Here’s my own English for the verse, as literal as I can make it: “And truly among them there is a group who contort their tongues with the Book so that you think it to be from the Book, and it is not from the Book, and they say it is from God, and it is not from God, and they speak the lie about God, and they know it.” (My emphasis. See note below.)
JD Vance said the following on September 15, 2024: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do…”
There’s nothing objective about juxtaposing these two utterances as if one illuminated the other. What it does is document an intempestif belch from the parlous mass of associative gases which rotates in my particular cognitive firmament. Vance’s admission that he will make things up to get attention from the media is unsurprising on top of appalling. It’s an end stage in the metastisizing cancer that started with Trump’s “fake news,” advanced through Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts,” and now reaches toxic bloom in Vance’s “created stories.” They speak the lie… and they know it. Vance’s malignant fictions predict organ failure for the body politic in the mold of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.
Note
I don’t pretend remotely to capture in my paraphrase the essential meaning of the verse from a theological, devotional or historical standpoint. I stick close to the words themselves, with respect and deference, to the end that I be able to parse their grammatical relationships and ascertain what they state in elemental fashion, and thus be informed and gain insight overall into the linguistic structures of this glorious corpus of expression which underpins the modern literary language to this very day. As a scholarly sidekick for my Quran reading I keep at hand the published Spanish translation of my mentor Julio Cortés: El Corán, Editora Nacional, Madrid, 1979. It figures among the translations into many languages listed at www.quran.com, and is useful for its notes as well as for its rendering of the text. Here is Cortés’s reading of verse 3:78: Algunos de ellos* trabucan* con sus lenguas la recitación de la Escritura para que creáis que está en la Escritura lo que no está en la Escritura, diciendo que viene de Dios, siendo así que no viene de Dios. Mienten contra Dios a sabiendas.
(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved