In memoriam: the author of a poem called "In Memoriam James Joyce"

Scowling out from a review of his correspondence with a fellow Scottish nationalist poet, the photograph of Hugh MacDiarmid comes before us saying, "Clothes make the man." The bard poses for the camera in the full garb of a national poet, with his stockings pulled up, his sporran tidily centered, his tie tied, and every hair on his massive head decisively oiled into place. In one hand he holds the emblem of a man of letters, a pipe; in the other he holds the emblem of a man of the Scottish soil: a mess of fish, caught without getting a drop of water on the dry-clean-only costume. The effect is of Marie Antoinette modeling a statue of Kim Il Sung: heroism tastefully restraining itself from the vulgarity of verisimilitude.

Click to enlarge.

But the photograph's proportions are wrong. Perhaps because the camera may have been aimed downhill at MacDiarmid, his height appears to be less than six times the length of his head. Those are the proportions of a child's body, not an adult's.

 

However, a Photoshop edit can increase the ratio to about 7, and with a smaller head and longer legs the poet begins to look more like a man.

But a heroic poet deserves to be looked at through eyes made heroic by a visit to the optometrist, like the one who fits Dorothy with green glasses in the Emerald City. So let's change the proportions horizontally as well as vertically.

Or, with the distortion-revealing words erased and the contrast made dramatic:

MacDiarmid's fish are still fish, but Photoshop has transferred them to the public viewing area of their aquarium. Now at the front of their image and proportionally larger than they ever were in what's called real life, they have become what the Milton of Areopagitica thought of when he thought of the idea embodied in a good book: something "embalmed and treasured up to a life beyond life." Holding the Photoshop technician's great spoil in his large new place, the bard triumphantly enters a new domain of literature: the domain whose tenancy he holds on art's terms, not his own. There, the dead fish are part of an array of symbols, and the national bard who shares his emblem with them is a MacDiarmid avant ses lettres: a visible notion of the Celt as such, like James Joyce's Citizen.

The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freelyfreckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero. From shoulder to shoulder he measured several ells and his rocklike mountainous knees were covered, as was likewise the rest of his body wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse (Ulex europaeus). The widewinged nostrils, from which bristles of the same tawny hue projected, were of such capaciousness that within their cavernous obscurity the fieldlark might easily have lodged her nest. The eyes in which a tear and a smile strove ever for the mastery were of the dimensions of a goodsized cauliflower. A powerful current of warm breath issued at regular intervals from the profound cavity of his mouth while in rhythmic resonance the loud strong hale reverberations of his formidable heart thundered rumblingly causing the ground, the summit of the lofty tower and the still loftier walls of the cave to vibrate and tremble.

One more of the intentions latent in a poet's costumed pose may now have been fulfilled. In this iteration the poet is seen saying, among other things, "Pity the national bard of a vegetarian culture."

Words not seen, tears not shed

The other day some posts I had written in an older version of Blogger were rendered unreadable by a software upgrade which removed all the paragraph breaks. I stayed up all night restoring the breaks. When I went to bed it was 7 AM and broad daylight, and the mynah birds who nest in the crawl space under my roof were rehearsing their morning croaks and coos and whistles and bill-clacks. To them my missing blank spaces didn't matter. When I woke back up at 10, I belatedly realized that at any time my restored text could disappear again. To the rest of the universe, too, my missing blank spaces didn't matter.

A few days before that event in my nightlife, the conservative thinker Glenn Beck, whose specialty is crying on TV, stood up before a live audience in Salt Lake City and announced that he is going blind. Then he cried.

John Milton took his medical news a little differently. He probably wrote Samson Agonistes about his own blindness, and he certainly wrote three sonnets about it. Here's one of the sonnets, "To Mr. Cyriack Skinner Upon His Blindness."

Cyriack, this three years day these eys, though clear
To outward view, of blemish or of spot;
Bereft of light thir seeing have forgot,
Nor to thir idle orbs doth sight appear
Of Sun or Moon or Starre throughout the year,
Or man or woman. Yet I argue not
Against heavns hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bear vp and steer
Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask?
The conscience, Friend, to have lost them overply'd
In libertyes defence, my noble task,
Of which all Europe talks from side to side.
This thought might lead me through the world's vain mask
Content though blind, had I no better guide.

One difference between this performance and Beck's is that there's a continuity between Milton's words and his medium. Milton is writing in words, about words and for words. But the medium of the TV performer Glenn Beck isn't really TV. Before the camera, Beck takes on the pretext persona of an old-fashioned professor, lecturing with an old-fashioned blackboard. But the blackboard isn't his medium either -- or at any rate it isn't the medium of his language. No; the tearful announcement of a personal misfortune, as if that mattered per se, is a speech in the language of Facebook. That language is a tiny lingua franca consisting only of a single phrase: "ME ME ME ME ME, per se." It isn't even a sentence, because it doesn't have a verb to make it a statement of doing, being, or occurring. It's only a pronoun: ME.

As to my vanished blank spaces between paragraphs, I've been caring about them as if they were destined to outlive me. But the medium of Blog reminds me that it too is reserved for the language of ME ME ME ME -- a verbless language which after all has to be as ephemeral as Glenn or I. Undoing, unbeing, un-occurring, both Glenn and I live only in the intervals between words, and the intervals will soon enough reappear between other people's words. Ubi est Lou Dobbs?

But Milton's language is another matter. Between those words there are no tears.