[Image: The Night Watch, by Rembrandt van Rijn. Click the photo for a larger view. For more information about the painting, see the note at the foot of this post.]
From whiskey river:
Desert Places
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.The woods around it have it — it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less —
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars — on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
(Robert Frost [source])
…and:
Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.
(Anne Sexton, from “Admonitions to a Special Person” [source])
…and:
If you think you’re enlightened go spend a week with your family.
(Baba Ram Dass [widely quoted, but I haven’t yet found a source])
Not from whiskey river:
When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be — I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
(Wendell Berry)
…and:
A Ritual to Read to Each Other
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider —
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
(William Stafford [source])
…and:
So it unfolded, year after year always the same, the precise stately clockwork of Christmas, ticking and tocking all the way down to tonight, the best night of all: Christmas Eve…
Here, upstairs, The Boy’s siblings slept peacefully, their breathing slow and measured like the imagined sound of all the massed snowflakes now sifting down outside the windows. Even the ghoul beneath the toy chest was quiet tonight, the clicking of his awful claws on the floor replaced, tonight, by the click of reindeer hooves slithering about for a foothold on the icy shingles. Looking from his bed out through the window at the front of his room, The Boy saw once again, this year as every year, the pale steady red beacon (surely from Rudolph’s nose) illuminating the exterior of the house across the street.
He lay back against his pillow finally, his eyes shuddering closed with the weight of a hundred anticipations. Outside, the snow continued to fall, picking up pitch and rhythm as The Boy’s soft breathing joined that of his brother and sisters. In his now-dreaming mind fluttered the slow easy snow angels of ten thousand memories past and memories yet to be, pressing into the deep drifts of The Boy’s imagination all the permanent outlines, the wonderful forms, of how it always and forever was.
(JES, from How It Was: Christmas)
_________________________________
About the image which opens this post: De Nachtwacht (The Night Watch, also known as The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq, after the patron who commissioned it) is one of Rembrandt’s most famous works. It’s also enormous — something like 10×14 feet in size — and maybe that is why it has attracted such spectacular acts of vandalism, despite the care taken to preserve it over the centuries.
In paranoid moments, if he has them, director Peter Greenaway might ascribe that vandalism not to the attention-seeking of random psychopaths, but to dark elements reaching forward through history to seek the painting’s destruction. In his view, after all, the painting not (just) depicts the decadent life of the upper class; it also allegorizes a conspiracy to commit murder, in which his patron may or may not have participated. Greenaway’s theory is explored in his 2007 film Nightwatching, and in the 2008 sequel, Rembrandt’s J’Accuse…! Here’s the trailer for the latter, a detailed “forensic examination” of the painting’s compositional elements:
An excellent — flattering, but ultimately disappointed — review of Rembrandt’s J’Accuse…! appeared at the Cineaste Magazine site, written by David Sterritt. UPDATE (as of 2018-05-28): Sterritt’s review is unfortunately no longer available at Cineaste’s site. Excerpt:
Like numerous Greenaway films, [Rembrandt’s J’Accuse…!] has little emotional resonance, racing along its intellectual itinerary with hardly a glance at matters of the heart and spirit. The reenactment scenes are weakened by jokey, hokey performances. Most important, Greenaway doesn’t address and clarify a central contradiction in the film — the esthetic tension that emerges from the effort to elucidate a painting (permanent, unchanging) in terms that are cinematic (fluid, mutable) through and through.
But if you have — or can create — an account at the JSTOR service, you can still read it here. Surprisingly, or not so much, you can also (for now) still find it at the Internet Archive — without a subscription to anything.
jules says
Merry Christmas, John! We are actually supposed to have snow on Christmas morning. My girls will like that, if they don’t spontaneously combust first.
Your ‘How It Was’ excerpt is wonderful…
cynth says
Okay, I sat down the other day and just re-read the “How it Was” excerpts from Winter again. This time of year is so sweet and melancholy. With the echoes of the past thrumming in our ears and the hope of the days to come flitting like snowflakes around us. Merry Christmas to you John, and thank goodness for your posts!
Nance says
Sexton and Ram Dass speak to me on the unattractive wrangling on the Left this week and the fact that we are all still simply in thrall to Americana on Christmas morning. A family Christmas: The Great Leveler.
Your How It Was is so tender, I may need to share it.
DarcKnyt says
Merry Christmas, John. May all the richness of the season’s blessings be yours and your family’s. :)
smitaly says
Ahhhh, grazie mille per farmi ricordare quel poesia di William Stafford…which, as you probably suspect, means ‘thank you for reminding me of that William Stafford poem.” It is one of my favorites, and particularly apt at this moment.
Thank you, too, for sharing the fabulous wanderings of your mind the whole year long. I very much look forward to more…
Pensieri di gratitudine da Roma,
Smitaly
marta says
That was Martin Freeman! I double checked. Mr. Freeman in J’Accuse.
Also on my mind–the dark. The (forgive me!) Doctor Who Christmas special had a lovely line about being halfway out of the dark. Wish I had written down so that I could quote it accurately.
Your bit from your story–the bit about the boy and the window and the snow–brought to mind that last scene in a Joyce novel…though I can’t remember which story…The Dead? Maybe.
You know, you are a writer.
A real writer.
May the new year bring you all you need.
fg says
‘I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.’
“…because it knows so much it knows nothing…’
‘…though we could fool each other, we should consider –
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.:’
Powerful stuff. It isn’t my festive perception that these chosen pieces are as dark as midnight?
What a dark parade ground it can be, where the band plays too loud and we all collapse into mulled wine and sofas. And when better to see it than at Christmas time. And we are not victims, it is,
‘…cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.’
So this time of year maybe more than most reminds us of who we are, where we have been and the way we think we must continue to parade. I do not feel it over here so keenly because millions of hearts have millions of other concerns on 25th December but in London. In London deserted but for the lonely you could cut the air with the poetry and lines you refer to.
However, the imperative to go on is a powerful and winning force and children dream of Christmas wishes asleep and awake. And the possibility of being lost makes the home fire warmer and we tolerate the confused and angry because we know they are only a little way down the line. And it becomes a glorious celebration because we make it that suspecting what the alternative might be.
And this why I think you have put in here your ‘How it was.’ It is the counter, to remind the reader of the dreams we have and the rest that is possible?
Reading here is a pleasure, because of the welcome and hopefulness imparted.
I hope you had a very Happy Christmas. all my best wishes
John says
[General aside: I love the people who comment at RAMH. It’s true: the odds that my blog will ever have a lot of commenters probably resemble the odds that the New Yorker will ever attain the circulation of People Magazine. I don’t care. The people who return here week after week to gnaw on this stuff with me — from the trivial to the perhaps less so — just knock me out.
Okay. Returning you now to the regularly scheduled broadcast…]
John says
jules: …and a Merry (belated) Christmas to you, too! Hope you got your snowfall — and no more than you (and your family) wanted… I checked newspaper Web sites for your area and it looks as though you indeed got the White Christmas.
(‘Round here, some people reported snow overnight Saturday-Sunday, although it didn’t stick.)
Glad you liked the How It Was excerpt!
John says
cynth: “Sweet and melancholy” — yeah, why is that? Just the change from sorta-kinda winter to winter in earnest, maybe?
Ah well. Whatever the reason, I’m always glad for it.
I trust that you had an excellent Christmas, too, with all the right people around you… despite the weather!
[Hmm. ReCaptcha is resorting to exotic languages (although, true, to me just about anything other than English is exotic): istainta svâdhînam.]
John says
Nance: Wasn’t that Ram Dass line good? Drove me crazy that I couldn’t pin down its source — I’d hoped to find a surrounding context to be likewise amused by. My favorite thing about it was that it came from someone “famous,” a “philosopher” or “teacher” at that… someone normally associated with matters of the spirit. Just as with elementary-school teachers, I don’t normally think of the Ram Dasses of the world as having, y’know, Real Lives — let alone Real Lives which bemuse them.
John says
Darc: Thanks, man. Hope you had a nice Christmas weekend, too — a very nice time to celebrate blessings, hmm? :)
John says
smitaly: Good to hear from you! I’m happy you landed here and have found things to your liking. Lord knows, I don’t know what I’m doing — just make it up as I go along — so it gratifies me that anybody detects a pattern. Let alone a good one. Even a pattern of random wandering. :)
John says
marta: Ooooh, good catch on finding Bilbo in that clip.
I love Joyce’s “The Dead” and, some time ago, quoted here those last few paragraphs. The film adaptation (directed by John Huston — his last film, with his daughter Angelica Huston as Gretta and Donal McCann as Gabriel) is just about as wonderful as the story itself, including the voiceover which recites that closing passage in the film’s final scene.
No apology needed for mentioning the Dr. Who Christmas Carol. I loved that, too: very ingenious juggling with time, and with the Dickens original of course, but also a solid heart to it. I found a transcript of that line you mention, and yes, I remembered it too:
(There’s a very good review of that episode here — lots of spoilers, though, so anyone who hasn’t seen it might want to wait.)
(And thank you so much for your comments about the How It Was excerpt.)
John says
fg: Merry (and again, belated) Christmas to you!
I didn’t think of this post’s clips as dark themselves, although they all revolved around darkness of one kind or another — and although your interpretation is pretty convincing. (Sometimes writers sneer or laugh when readers find stuff in their words and choices which the writers didn’t put there. And sometimes writers — some writers — get all paranoid when readers demonstrate that they know the writers’ intentions better than the writers themselves do.)
“You could cut the air with poetry” comes awfully darned close to poetry in its own right, y’know?
I got a digital Christmas card from a friend last week. It was “just” a photograph with a superimposed greeting, but what a photograph (and, especially in context, what a greeting). It depicted a night scene somewhere — I’m not familiar with the locale — where some large-scale ice or snow sculptures had been set up on what looks like a grid, a chessboard, itself of ice. Each sculpture is backed and topped by a bright light source, so bright as to nearly wash out the sculpture’s very visibility. A small cluster of people is gathered in the right foreground, facing the sculptures, and they too are almost overwhelmed with the light. The message: “Happy Christmas & a bright New Year.”
I thought: How perfect is that? Yes, a dark night. Yes, snow and ice and cold. But the important thing in the photo was the light and warmth, which made all the dark and cold irrelevant.
Thanks as ever for stopping in. And a bright New Year to you!
marta says
@John – Just want to say that I watched J’accuse the other night. Quite liked it, too. Thanks for the ref.