by Nils Peterson
“…another kind of net, that language, the one the world gives us to cast so that we might catch in it a little of what it is and what we are, and we are, among other things, the poverties of the language we inherit.” Robert Hass, “Families and Prisons,” What Light Can Do.
These days when night and cold come so soon one wants nothing more than to huddle around a fire, read for awhile, then go to bed – but the world has its obligations.
I was walking the dog in the cold night air, almost remembering what I wanted to remember, and then it came to me, the opening paragraph of James Joyce’s “Araby.”
The first time I read it was magic, the feel and look of the winter air, the awareness of the intensity of one’s aliveness in it, and Mangan’s sister:
When the short days of winter came dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses, where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness. When we returned to the street, light from the kitchen windows had filled the areas. If my uncle was seen turning the corner, we hid in the shadow until we had seen him safely housed. Or if Mangan’s sister came out on the doorstep to call her brother in to his tea, we watched her from our shadow peer up and down the street. We waited to see whether she would remain or go in and, if she remained, we left our shadow and walked up to Mangan’s steps resignedly. She was waiting for us, her figure defined by the light from the half-opened door. Her brother always teased her before he obeyed, and I stood by the railings looking at her. Her dress swung as she moved her body, and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.
Yes, the paragraph described me too, though I was far in time and space from “dark odorous stables.” (Actually, there were some old stables around where I lived then, used for garages for awhile, but now mostly storage sheds filled with mysterious things.)
Then I remembered the girl next door, a year or two older than I who had once been the babysitter for me and my brother, but when I had caught up a little bit, passed puberty, and we were both going to high school, she walked ahead of me all the way while I shuffled behind and never said a word. But I certainly thought of her in my own way.
Joyce goes on to say:
Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs’ cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O’Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes…. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.
Years ago, remembering watching a girl in my 6th grade class doing fractions at the blackboard (her blouse always separated from her skirt revealing a little bit of flesh), I wrote:
I have never seen flesh
that I wanted more than that thin
triangle of light brown back. What
did I want? I did not know but
at night when I lay in bed the thought of her
doing simple fractions would crack me open
and I knew there was something I had to have
that not to have it would be like death
or worse than death because I would be
alive and know I didn’t have it – something
so huge, so tremendous, so wonderful my body
could not contain it and it surrounded me like
phosphorescence. This is my soul
something wanted to say but that was far
from what I had been taught and the word
was confusing – and what to do with these feelings
more so.
As we grow older, I think we forget the connection between soul and flesh, between body and spirit, and how the grown-world’s definitions can drive us to speechlessness. Well, when we can’t talk using the language of words, maybe we can speak with gesture.
You’ll remember Mangan’s sister almost casually asks the narrator if he’s going to Araby, a bazaar downtown, and he can do nothing but answer yes, and so he must go, though all the easily-made promises of the world conspire against his going being easy. But now it is a knight’s quest.
I recently found the following in a book I kept when trying to write a poem each day:
Mangan’s sister, the light from her house
shining through her hair. “Are you going
to Araby?” she asks – so “Yes,” we must say
and board the tram to Vanity Fair watching
the large Peterson and the small Peterson
looking at each other appalled, each asking
the other “How can you be so foolish?”
Yet now I say thanks be for holy desire,
and thanks to that young self for carrying
it through the marketplace because
he had said yes to one of “Mangan’s sisters.”
Though at the end the boy in “Araby” feels himself “a creature driven and derided by vanity,” and his eyes burn “with anguish and anger,” it was the right thing for him to have done, and when I finally allowed myself to be that foolish, it was right for me too.
As to the title of this piece. It is from Arthurian legend, a teaching story. Guenevere has been captured. Launcelot has gone off to rescue her. His horse is killed. A dwarf comes by driving a cart used to carry prisoners. Though he needs a ride, he hesitates for a fraction of a second before he gets on the cart because his knighthood will be tarnished from such a ride. Guenevere sees this, and for that slight hesitation puts Launcelot through all kinds of hell even as he goes about the business of rescuing her. That slight hesitation was an offense against courtly love, the putting of one’s reputation, what the world thinks of one, above one’s duty to the beloved. There is a lesson here larger than romance. I add, how human this all is.
P.S. Perhaps this piece is an elegy for what was called “courtly love.” I think we have reached the end of that way of thinking and acting. It was 79 years ago that I silently followed the neighbor girl to high school. I think the young are easier with each other now in many ways, which is not to say uncomplicated, though maybe I speak out of an old man’s ignorance. It seems to me that the legends of and songs about love are different. “I’d climb the highest mountain/ If when I climbed that highest mountain/ I’d find you.” The change is a good thing, mostly, but there’s loss too. Longing can be one of the great teachers.
P.P.S. When I was taking American Lit. in college, I also wrote a column for the college newspaper. I often wrote parodies of the poems I was reading in that class. Because this piece put me back in time and it’s now December, I remembered this from more than 70 years ago:
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Oh the room it was quite drafty. I was cold both fore and afty,
For I’d burned all the furniture and was working on the door.
Perhaps one of its functions was to catch the eye of a girl who sat a couple of desks away in that class.