stag-headed men, winged lions

Will, will ... and now I'm re-reading E.R. Eddison -- the second of the Zimiamvia books -- whose characters have a more basic and elevated sense of will; they are kings and ladies waging war bravely, and very ruthlessly and gaily, staring calmly at death; and they are a little like Malory but less fallible, much less fallible, because the fall in this fantasy world, the end of this one form of the social order, is not the collapse of a loving clique. It is betrayal by someone whose utter nature is betrayal, as we have known ever since he was introduced, and the person he betrays knows it too, and ditto the betrayer’s sidekick, his family, other members of the nobility, the people he has made treaties with -- nobody trusts him -- and so you cannot say that it is a shock. And yet Eddison makes a similar point to Malory, that what he calls "beatitude" can't survive in the world as it is. His fantasy world "is like the sagatime, there is no malaise of the soul." So he said in a letter. "A very unearthly character of Zimiamvia lies in the fact that nobody wants to change it."

He lists lovely things in the fantasy world but not the real one (when his characters are in the real one):

Hedgehogs in little coats he beheld as household servants busy to bear the dishes; leopards, foxes, lynxes, spider-monkeys, badgers, water-mice, walked and conversed, or served the guests that sat at supper: seals, mild-eyed, moustachioed, erect on their hind flippers and robed in silken gowns, brought upon silver chargers all kinds of candied conserves, macaroons, fig-dates, sweet condiments and delicate confections of spiceries; and here were butterfly ladies seen, stag-headed men, winged lions of Sumer, hamadryads and all the nymphish kind of beck and marsh and woodland and frosty mountain solitude and the blue caves of ocean: naiad and dryad and oread, and Amphitrite’s brood with green hair sea-garlanded and combs in their hair fashioned from drowned treasures of gold.

And wants to enchant you with precision, which opposes him to the "always" that Dorothy Richardson was criticising in that quote a few posts ago. The always in his work is a now. Now there is a hedgehog. Now there is a hawk and it is hovering over a field where there are poppies. Now there is a diamond on a column. And seems to grasp hold of this presence so desperately, with these rows of notations, like gravestones passing by me as I read. So that it is like walking through a cemetery.

Richardson, on the other hand, wants to integrate a beautitudinous frame of mind into the world as it is, or perhaps I'll say that the fantasy is just better disguised in her book and not naked; Eddison's books with their longing on display are naked in that sense but not naked in other ways; the characters are invulnerable. They’re inclined to the fastidiousness that is a sign of will in Richardson as well, that casually hyperattentive ability to feel that a certain XYZ is right and therefore it must occur. One man, Lessingham, released from a dungeon, tells a servant to take his shirt away and burn it, because a shirt that he has worn in a dungeon is not a shirt that should exist. This is in the middle of a thousand other things that are going on and you’d think they were more important than the shirt but the detail of that shirt is necessary to his well-being – not just thrown away but eliminated. And these wills are holistically perpetual, and they need to endure as they are for the authors' peace of mind.

(How can I guess that? Because they both reinforce them so often, and they are both so aware that they are fragile events that need to be protected. The real world, in Eddison's book, exists in a zoo-cage bubble that can be popped with a hairpin, but the reader knows that this is the opposite of the truth. It is the book itself that can be closed away, and that will exist only in the memories of the people who have experienced it.)

In Villette though (going back to that), the invulnerable will is in danger of being melted and that is deeply exciting, not bad nor good but both and neither -- which in Eddison would be an unambiguous disaster, I think you can say, after reading that letter -- the will, in Vilette, is embattled from the inside of the body it lives in – it – may – concede to the outside – and then – some miracle -- the fall is not a fall but a swooping-up. (Will, character, and worldly pressure, are going to war in that book.)

alone, I grew calm

It might be simpler to say that perception in Dorothy Richardson's work is aligned with will, though this will never shows its real character to anyone outside the human being whose exercise is its life; to others it can be understood as stubbornness or as intelligence. It never tries to control or force anyone because it is the most undictatorial will in the world, and you could even call it anti-dictatorial, for freedom and calm are two of the conditions it is working for, and dictators are never free or calm.

Miriam knows that her job is perfect because it absorbs her intelligence and attention without asking her to be in command. The wage is enough to keep her living independently and that is what she wants. More money would be fine but not supremely important. It's not worth the price.

(This will is clear about its priorities, which translate themselves into all areas, so that the money-feeling, when she applies it to the women's independence movement -- this is in the very early 1900s -- becomes disquiet and conflict, because, a woman who has the vote, will she be distracted by the requirements of command, and drawn away from her essential absorption in the world, a problem that Richardson sees afflicting men, who are too tempted by grand sentences and falseness when they write -- their style -- she believes -- the elegant, forceful, exciting style and appealing contrived plottishness -- is a peacock symptom, "lollipops for children," and the only way to write closer to the world as it is, is to avoid it ...)

I have seen the form of a will like this in characters before, I tell myself; and think of Louie in The Man Who Loved Children, who practises her self-determination without knowing why (anticipating that it will be useful), and Lucy Snow in Villette, who is watching everyone from a position apart, and aware of being apart, and feeling in herself the work that she does to defend that apartness, since it is her nature -- "Once alone, I grew calm, and collectedly went to work" -- but Miriam in Richardson's book is the one who invents an articulate purpose for the Lucy-like nature, though this higher calling is internal, and rescues no one except her; and is unable to rescue them.

So Richardson has two points to make about this kind of will: 1., it is the most precious thing in the world, and 2. it is useless.

accident stamped a character upon places

"Details give charm," writes Charlotte Brontë, placing a Romantic landscape in a room and transforming its details into her domestic items: the serene view is boring, the piqued spots of drama are vital, the grotesque detail is a treasure, the frightening vertigo element, the shocking grotto, or not shocking, it doesn't have to be shocking, it can be cattle and ponies as it is in Dorothy Wordsworth's Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A.D. 1803, after she decides that one lake is a disappointment because it has too much uniformity: "there is an uniformity in the lake which, comparing it with other lakes, made it appear tiresome. It has no windings: I should even imagine, although it is so many miles long, that, from some points not very high on the hills, it may be seen from one end to the other."

"Tiresome," is a word I have seen used about humans but never scenery, which leaves me with the impression that she is disappointed in this lake as if it is a person that has let her down. It is being that way on purpose. It refuses to give her a winding. An accident would have been enough for her, a cow could have done it. "We passed by many droves of cattle and Shetland ponies," she wrote later about a different landscape, "which accident stamped a character upon places, else unrememberable -- not an individual character, but the soul, the spirit, and solitary simplicity of many a Highland region."

The cattle and ponies chewed the grass; the spirit of Accident had passed through them. They had been manifest Accidents as they were chopping up the daisies. The carriage vanished over a hill. Ann Radcliffe's prose comes across the herd in The Mystery of Udolpho where they fill the same role: they "[stamp] a character upon places, else unrememberable -- not an individual character, but the soul, the spirit, and solitary simplicity" of a country region. Functionally they are the same cattle.

These tremendous precipices were contrasted by the soft green of the pastures and woods that hung upon their skirts; among whose flocks, and herds, and simple cottages, the eye, after having scaled the cliffs above, delighted to repose.

The cattle are restful signs of human civilisation, gentle stoics in a paddock; nothing gives scale to a landscape like a sign of human habitation, wrote young Ruskin, though he took it back later when civilisation seemed too industrial for him: these people would not stop at cattle, they'd be in there with factories next. But Dorothy Wordsworth not worried about that, earlier than Ruskin, never anticipating a factory in the field where there is today possibly a supermarket. So she is calm in her pleasure. The Australian women I've been reading -- all born before 1900, all out of copyright -- like to pick up on flowers, I have noted, they tend to see flowers, and they will spend their poems describing flowers.

Bring flowers for the wearied one,
The wearied one of pain;
Bright flowers from the glorious sun,
Will give her joy again.
But, oh! seek them not from gardens,
Nor from the gay parterre,
Wander far into the woodlands,
For blossoms hiding there.

(from VII, in Lyra Australis, or, attempts to sing in a strange land (1854), by Caroline Leakey)

Again above thy fragile flowers
I bend, to bring their perfume nigh;
For only in the evening hours
Thy odors pass thy blossoms by;
But when the ministering day
Deserts thee with the warmth and light
That lulled thee, -- waking thou wilt pay
For these, in sweetness, to the night.

(from To the White Julienne, from Where the Pelican Builds and Other Poems (1885), by Mary Hannay Foott)

Myrtle, myrtle lying low,
With the moss about you creeping,
With the torrent round you leaping,
And the grand old mountain keeping
Vigil as the seasons go,
Still to me your music comes
Set in chords august, specific,
When a storm-voice, weird, terrific,
Beats across the waste Pacific
Like the roll of muffled drums.

(from Mountain Myrtle in the The Horses of the Hills (1911), by Marie Pitt)

They write about the larger items of the scenery as well, the cliffs and so on, "strange green hills and the glint of a far bay" (Marie Pitt again, Doherty's Corner) but they're drawn back to the tiny things in that huge continent, the flowers, always the flowers, little items; Leakey writes about violets, she writes about the primrose, she mentions bluebells, not the wattle, not an Australian flower. They miss British things in their colonial or just-Federated lives, they miss the peaceful cattle, they miss the village smoke coming up from chimneys, they want the churchbell but they see the bushland, Ernestine Hill in the 1930s saw the jungle gym of exhydrated cattle around a dead waterhole, and a character in Catherine Martin's Silent Sea wills herself to death in the salt brush because her mother has died. She loves her flowers, gardens of flowers, she cultivates them, she talks about them, she has opinions on the right colours for orchids, then she leaves the pocket of garden her mother has helped her to inhabit, she goes through the salt brush on a cart, she gets ill, she dies, poisoned by a landscape "gray, voiceless, sinister, for ever the same," or without windings, you could say: tiresome.

She could see the sky growing darker, even the sunset flush trembling into wanness, as the dust-storm raged with the fitful wails of a wind that rushes at its own wild caprice over boundless plains, without a solitary wall or hill, or even a line of trees, to impede its course.

"Not even herds," says Dorothy Wordsworth, passing in a carriage and looking, "it has neither cow nor pony." But Ernestine Hill journalistically struck and solemnly exultant about the hollow animals in the dead land.

for five minutes I held it

But in these Shirley pages there are other details that have nothing to do with entering and exiting, eg, "a silver pen, a crimson berry or two of ripe fruit on a green leaf." I look until I begin to doubt: I might be wrong, there might be no entering and exiting, it might be me, only me, entering and exiting stuck my mind maybe and not the author's -- why then not hers but mine: why mine? Dilemma, doubt, hands clutched.

Assume, imagining, that some earlier experience had primed me for it; was it the situation in the book itself that put the idea of erotic enterings and exitings in my head, the two evasive love-mutes coming closer but still hesitating, Shirley and her tutor, those two ripe fruits framed on their green leaf, they are on the verge of holding hands, and so I misread a chapter that had a totally normal number of innings and outings occurring, and thought these ins and outs were significant when really they had been happening at the same rate for the past two hundred pages. Nothing material has changed, only the surge of energy that came before the chapter; the flavour changed, of that surge: call that a theory but I doubt the theory too and honestly imagine that it is completely wrong and my first idea was right, namely, that enterings and exitings had come genuinely into the story for the first prominant time.

A pretty seal, a silver pen, a crimson berry or two of ripe fruit on a green leaf, a small, clean, delicate glove -- these trifles at once decorate and disarrange the stand they strew. Order forbids details in a picture -- she puts them tidily away; but details give charm.

Detail is excessiveness in this formulation, the presence of a detail is the sign of excessivity and wildness, the regular movement of the world is stopped up or diverted, maybe for a moment or maybe forever, until even the little detail of the hand-holding is wild in thought when it finally occurs, and on the surface it is not a romantic hand-hold -- his brother has been hurt and she is being sympathetic -- but the author electrifies the detail of that quick lay; the point was this electrification. "It lay like a snowflake," thinks the tutor, "it thrilled like lightning."

A thousand times I have longed to possess that hand -- to have it in mine. I have possessed it; for five minutes I held it. Her fingers and mine can never be strangers more. Having met once they must meet again.

The detail can't be revoked, the author says: the action is final, destiny has been pushed in a concrete direction, and with this small gesture a new explosive future has been triggered. And a degree of intensity in Brontë coming from this reminder, which happens over and over again in different ways throughout Shirley, that actions in her books do not happen, they are committed. The book has been written as if every movement is a fatal sacrifice to the future. I'm suggesting, then, that Shirley mimics the irrevocable forces that create a universe.

the keys are in the lock

The surges in Shirley (the surge in favour of Shirley, for example, the surge against the old main character Caroline), are all contained inside the thrust of the book, the frustration and thrust, but Amanda McKittrick Ros in Irene Iddesleigh does not have the overarching push that would absorb and thereby rationalise her surges, her bursts, her boats of dreamland; extravagance is not her problem I think, it is the absence of a field where extravagance is justified by the force-field of meaning or in other words the intention around the story.

So the surges are there in Brontë's book, the moments when one area of interest emerges onto the page that was not there before, and it has a rulership there; it has some domination for a short while, or a presence anyway.

This is a thought I had in Chapter XXVII, when a process of things entering and exiting came into the story: a sad lover left his room and went into another room, the desk was open, he looked inside, there was a bag, there were gloves. "A bag -- a small satin bag -- hangs on the chair-back. The desk is open, the keys are in the lock."

The small bag, softly satin, is the companion to the word "slightly" in Brontë's description of the conversation between Shirley and Caroline; because of the pushing author there is a pressure behind it, as there is in D.H. Lawrence when he uses a diminutive or decreasing word, eg "very" or "little," which he loves --

The little white feet nod like white flowers in the wind,
They poise and run like ripples lapping across the water;
And the sight of their white play among the grass
Is like a little robin's song, winsome

-- which he deploys like an exquisite pinch when he needs it, and he can strategically overload the last line there with "winsome," pushing the point and punching his pulpit till you understand: the feet are little and they are winsome, they are everything in that direction of meaning.

And I think that, in a story dedicated to power, these littles and slightlies are repressive and compacting agents, holding back the thrust for a moment and keeping it strongly in abeyance to let it come out again with uninhibited force when the word little has gone past. Power is being ignored, it will come forward and make a revelation. The bag will open, the desk will open, a beam of strength is waiting to surge out of the interior. The man contemplates: "A whole garment sometimes covers meagreness and malformation; through a rent sleeve a fair round arm may be revealed."

Entering and exiting and coming in and out, just here, as the climax between Shirley and this man prepares to happen, open-mouthed things coming into the story, interior secrets are inside the current mind of the story now, they are not only in concrete objects, they are in abstracts. "Indeed, through this very loophole of character, the reality, depth, genuineness of that refinement may be ascertained," thinks the man, then he ends the chapter like this: "He locked the desk, pocketed all the property, and went."

termed Hollow's Cottage

The characters in Shirley have been written so that they push, push, push, into a future where they will be better-known, better-seen, better-realised; even the obnoxious clergyman who insults Shirley in her home is trying to reach a better future state. The author has decided that this clergyman doesn't deserve to succeed, her opinion manifests itself fictionally in the hostess who tells him to leave. Charlotte Brontë is one of the condemning authors, like D.H. Lawrence.

They push steadily, either a thrusting shove or a stymied thrusting shove (see: Caroline in despair), and there is always more that could be revealed to the reader if these people could take another step in their lives, if Caroline could convince Robert to marry her, for instance, then the reader would be allowed to experience a relaxation of tension and a wedding. They butt against the frustration of being poor or being jobless, they thrust and stew until force is the main character in the book, it is there all the way through, it is there on every page; it even fills the clouds and the weather. "Rain has beat all day on that church tower."

This frustration and pushing is very steadily applied, "the revolt of its pride was seen in the heaving of her heart, stirred stormily under the lace and silk which veiled it," and Shirley is not spasmodic like Irene Iddesleigh, the author's sympathy doesn't suddenly come and go; her withdrawal of interest in Caroline after Shirley has arrived does not happen immediately, the newcomer gradually increasing her grip on the real estate of pages, she is rich there too and not only in her inherited property, "an excellent cloth-mill, dyehouse, warehouse, together with the messuage, gardens, and outbuildings, termed Hollow's Cottage;" O she gets chapters, page-property, Caroline shrivelling away in the background for the love of Robert until her long-lost mother decides that she is going to provide this weakening and declining part of the story with a modicum of filler. Darling, she cries, starting from her blind.

This mother comes so close to the land of utter revelation that all the characters are straining for that she goes from a mild character into a ferocious one and seizes her child carnivorously. "I am your true mother. No other woman can claim the title; it is mine."

But the love for Robert will be answered eventually, X will marry Y, the characters are galloping towards the end of the book, when they will be terminated, the pages are holding them back, the characters are trying to bite through, all Very Hungry Caterpillars, and shortcut their way, Caroline pining and trying to die because she is not allowed to reach the final chapter. She has to be restrained so that two engagements can happen more or less at the same time, hers and Shirley's: the author wants it that way, and holds her back temporarily from that oblivion.

I know that Brontë wants it that way because that's the way she does it, very starkly, not in a confused subliminal way but deliberately as if to plan, even though it means she has to fade her old main character out of the story nearly utterly. Caroline becomes sick, she has to go to bed, she receives her mother like a consolation prize or muzzle, keeping her so satisfied that she doesn't have a place among the strivers any more, surrendering with an exclamation, "My mother -- my own mother!" She can be left to her rest, which is like a small version of death, everybody gradually forgetting you.

so slender a basis for a lifelong friendship

I want to marry my tutor, thinks Irene Iddesleigh, and so does the title character of another book, Charlotte Brontë's Shirley, a fictional woman who made the name Shirley popular with the parents of real baby girls; those girls burped and farted in their bassinets, two feats that the fictional Shirley would never achieve, never burping herself, never associated by her god-author with the word fart, though she is allowed to claim the words "brilliant, and probably happy," "independent as to property," "surefooted and agile; she could spring like a deer when she chose," and she possesses other features or attributes that the real girls might not have possessed.

Shirley is the second-appearing significant woman in the book; the first is Caroline who lives in the neighbourhood where Shirley has her property. "The very first interchange of slight observations sufficed to give each an idea of what the other was."

It's the same way in Jeannie Gunn's 1908 book, We of the Never-Never, all of her stockmen so taciturn that an "interchange of slight observations" makes them friends for life with the author (not the author but the author's fictional substitute) when she arrives at their cattle station saying "How do you do" -- a stockman coughs and grins -- "It was a most eloquent grinning, making all spoken apology or explanation unnecessary; and by the time it had faded away we thoroughly understood each other, being drawn together by a mutual love of the ridiculous. Only a mutual love of the ridiculous, yet not so slender a basis for a lifelong friendship as appears, and by no means an uncommon one 'out bush.'"

Some of the men are so shy that they dodge her for days or weeks after she gets there but then they talk about horses briefly and the friendship exists: it lasts forever, the mob of them go cattle-mustering, the woman from the city camps under a tree with her swag, her husband owning the place, the cattle, and the trees.

This is almost the only point where I can put together a formula to make the two books touch, Shirley and We of the Never-Never, otherwise they are not alike; Shirley's essence is a pushing-forward movement being thwarted; We of the Never-Never wants its people to stay still, stay still, keep their attributes intact, and display, and reinforce -- "But a Fizzer without news would not have been our Fizzer." It has a deep love of the same event, in other words, nostalgia, the clock hand that always comes back to twelve.

These linkages appear like theorums in bureaucracy or physics, only regarding or explaining the points that coincide with their equations, then lighting a small aura-area around them, the rest of each book is dark matter, obscured even further perhaps if you put several titles together in a genre, listing Shirley next to Irene Iddesleigh in a list called, "Books about women who want to marry their tutors," or you could extend the formula by calling it, "Books about people who marry the teacher-employees in their families," which means you could include Ada Cambridge's Materfamilias, and add the first two lines to your list, explaining that if you cut off the rest of the book these two lines would be a short story by Lydia Davis. "My father in England married a second time when I was about eighteen. She was my governess." It was for the sake of those two lines that you changed the name of the list to get the Lydia Davis comment in there, which you think is a brainwave, then you have doubts, you wonder if it was really a brainwave, you think about changing the name of the list back again but by now you have already spent half an hour hunting down ten more names to justify the new title and you don't want to get rid of them -- anyway -- you think -- maybe somebody will be impressed -- but already you are lugubrious with regret like Eeyore and you haven't even put it out there yet.

capturing the incomparable life

Bob Rochester, diswived by the freedoms that have made this country great, decides that he is going to resurrect his personal morale with the help of a good deed: he will save the Devil's Hole pupfish. He puts it in a bucket and the pupfish is saved. "What else can I do for Nevada?" he wonders. He attends a Preserve Nevada symposium where a man insists that Las Vegas does have a history though nobody thinks so. "And you don't have to dig deep either to find it. It's sitting in the old part of town, in all the old casinos there. The bones are there. You just have to look under the shell to see what you can find," he says, and his speech is noted in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Las Vegas loves its old historical bones so much that it puts them behind walls where nobody can damage them. Lucretius tells us that sight is possible because all visible objects spew little balls, which we take in with the assistance of the wonderful dark pupils that have punched two holes into our faces with unnoticed efficient modesty. The concealed sections of Las Vegas have been saved from the wastage of atomic spewing. They can keep all their molecules. No one looks at them. Preservation! But the catwalks in the Imperial Palace ceiling are still visible from the blackjack tables. Security used to dawdle there and stare at the customers through darkened glass. The owners have decided to destroy the ceiling and rename the casino. History is everywhere! One of the metal accoutrements outside Planet Hollywood has rust.

Rochester decides to make up numbers at a cultural evening. He takes a forty-minute walk from Planet Hollywood down Harmon to UNLV where a biographer is giving a talk in a room attached to the museum. I know that he was there because I attended the same lecture. On the screen above the biographer someone has projected a picture of her book with this line printed above the blurb: "A biography capturing the incomparable life and times of one of America's finest writers."

He is chilled by the thought of this incomparable life, which would not be able to be described or measured, because, without comparisons, you would lose your place in the world: you would not be able to say, "My life is tempestuous," because you would not be able to compare it to a tempest, and you would not even be able to say that your life was good or evil, deprived of the ability to compare it to other lives. It can't be an impressive life, or a boring life, or any kind of life; if it is incomparable then you can't even describe it to yourself, and you never know how well or badly you're doing and can't guess, because every time your brain tries to make a comparison your estimations are blanks. Even the Elder Gods can be descr -- I want to stop mentioning H.P. Lovecraft, this is ridiculous, back to William Hope Hodgson: even the demon in Hodgson's short story The Hog can be compared to something, namely a hog, and a giant pig coming through the floor, and Carnacki, although he has found this comparison, is still desperate and keeps asking his friends if they see, if they understand? And Bob Rochester tries to imagine Katherine Anne Porter, who was the subject of this biography, desperately asking her friends what they thought of her, but she would not have any friends because they would not know what to think, and she would have to go through life like a black holes asking like Carnacki, "Do you see, do you understand?" but she would not be able to help or prompt them with even such a sketchy definition as, "My life is like a giant demon pig."

pathless with untrodden snow

Summer was almost all sunshine, now winter is sunshine again but colder and I swear it was like balm to have Jane Eyre sitting around staring out the window at the drizzle in Charlotte Brontë's book, a subterranean sensation arising in me as of real drizzle observed somewhere far away, down a tunnel, associating itself hazily with the English countryside, where I have never been, also with Melbourne, where I have seen most of my drizzle (wattle blotting it), and Oregon where the moss was damp; gradually, motivated by longing, I saw a picture of her countryside as as I have seen it in films, trees black-trunked because they are soaked (why black though?), the grey clouds, "rooks" because there are rooks in these scenes (I have to insert crows, I don't know rooks), long green lawn, damp muted light, perfect for sheep wrote John Dyer in his poem about sheep, The Fleece which is only available online in a scanned version that makes every s an f so that the glassy sea is the glaffy fea, and I love this rain, said Geoffrey Hill once to an interviewer as they sat in a room somewhere in Britain, but a poet being interviewed in Las Vegas would rarely and by mad fluke have the chance to say that they loved rain (looking out the window at it as G.H. was in the interview, the interviewer perhaps remembering that The Triumph of Love begins with these words that are attentive to rain: "Sun-blazed, over Romsley, a livid rain scarp" and the poet talking to himself throughout the poem, then realising the particular existence of phenomena more concretely at the the end; to show you this he repeats the line and changes the a to the or that is my interpretation: Sun-blazed, over Romsley, the livid rain scarp.); it would be a significant event and a huge drama, the air beforehand not so much freezing as thick with rain-smell, thicker than I have smelt it in places where rain is normal. So thick the other day that it was if the atmosphere had rotted. (It is not like that when wind blows.)

A character in a novel set here would not spend the first portion of the book looking out the seeing rain, rain, coldness, rain, over weeks and months and years, as Jane Eyre does while she is a child having a bad time, the weather improving when her times get better, a disaster presaged with a lightning bolt, and her despair described with ruined weather.

A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hayfield and cornfield lay a frozen shroud: lanes which last night blushed full of flowers, to-day were pathless with untrodden snow; and the woods, which twelve hours since waved leafy and flagrant as groves between the tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and white as pine-forests in wintry Norway. My hopes were all dead -- struck with a subtle doom.

There would have to be some other way for a Las Vegas novelist to show you misery in the weather over months and years; they would have to use the opposite of rain, so I'll say heat, and then we have to make it terrible not warm so flat heat, years of hardbaked sky, and then, when the character is happier, modulated cool weather, a mist scene on Mount Charleston with fog coming up the long ravine as the character makes her way down the hiking trail by Cathedral Rock. Clouds, mist, a change, relief: we are meant to reflect on the character's changing circumstances, now not relentlessly bad but improving.

She has been employed on a horse ranch where she falls in love with the owner, Bob Rochester, who manages a small chain of suburban hotel-casinos. He is devoted to her. He is ferocious. Shania Twain had her chance with Bob but she gave him the cold shoulder when she heard that he did not in fact own a controlling share in Caesars Entertainment.

Brontë's Eyre in England sees spring, birds, blossoms, and her life is opening, her love is awakened, but the weather in this Vegas novel has a different character, not so gentle, green, and blossoming, the light is rarely muted, normally bright, and this difference changes the course of the story; events and thoughts become appropriate to a desert, the heroine's thoughts are not like the thoughts of Jane Eyre even in translation, she has developed in a way that is the opposite of the way that Jane Eyre has developed, the dryness and the heat have reversed her, the curled plastic spines of the barrel cactus rather than the short thorn of the roses like the fingers of tiny starfish; she is directed by these changes until she decides she will murder Mr Rochester and stab his mad wife who has been sequestered with a pony in one of the stables on the ranch.

The mad wife Bertha catches her, chops her up instead in self-defence, rescues Mr Rochester from the pit of Jane's death trap which I am associating now with Eli Roth's Goretorium (corner of Harmon and the Strip, second floor, find Walgreens and look up), is cured of her madness by explosive bravery, sees the light, becomes sane immediately, becomes the hero, refuses to stay married now to Mr Rochester, obtains a quick divorce downtown, and is recruited by one of the ten dozen bail bondsmen who live there in the area around the Stratosphere where everybody wants to sell you meth. Your mother may have been a Creole loon, says the bail bondsman, but I have a non-discrimination policy.

AND THUS IT IS IN THE LAND OF THE FREE.

spent with heat, and dissolved

In Hillgarth's book I see a letter from Bishop Daniel of Winchester to Bishop Boniface the missionary, one man telling the other how he should use logic to argue the pagans out of their paganism. "When they have been forced to admit that their gods had a beginning, since they were begotten by others, they should be asked whether the world had a beginning or was always in existence ..." (Translated by C.H. Talbot.) Time will pass and vindicate his cunning; time will make it necessary; the present will have become the only conclusion of the action. For centuries there were monks trying to establish that Aristotle and Virgil were really Christians, as they should be. They were Christians, at heart, somehow, Christians. This is recorded by Haskins. Earlier, earlier, Greek philosophers of the first few centuries AD decided that Plato had been a kind of Moses. "What is Plato but Moses speaking Attic Greek?" asked Numenius of Apamea. Jeremy Taylor in 1651 quotes Pindar and St James together; he praises first Lucien in his Rules and Exercises of Holy Dying and then "God's mercy or God's anger," all of these sources in his essay agreeing with him and supplying him with sayings. They are a united group, Homer, St James, God, and Jeremy Taylor, a Church of England bishop, dead of fever in 1667 with a portrait in Cambridge, the eyes of this portrait looking back over the shoulder, and the hands disembodied against the black cloth of his cape like Egon Schiele flippers.

There was once an Ephesian woman, he says in Dying, who was so miserable after her husband's expiration that she "descended with the corpse into the vault, and there, being attended with her maiden, resolved to weep to death, or die with famine, or a distempered sorrow: from which resolution nor his, not her friends, nor the reverence of the principal citizens, who used the entreaties of their charity and their power, could persuade her." But passion had wrung her out and her feelings were "willing to be gathered into order at the arrest of any new object, being weary of the first, of which, like leeches, they had sucked their fill, till they fell down and burst," so that a soldier came down to see how she was, wound up "married" (writes Taylor) to the mourner on her husband's grave.

For so the wild foragers of Lybia, being spent with heat, and dissolved by the too fond kisses of the sun, do melt with their common fires, and die with faintness, and descend with motions slow and unable to the little brooks that descent from heaven in the wilderness; and when they drink they return into the vigour of a new life, and contract strange marriages; and the lioness is courted by a panther, and she listens to his love, and conceives a monster that all men call unnatural, and the daughter of an equivocal passion and of a sudden refreshment.

The Catholic character M. Paul Emmanuel in Brontë's Vilette accuses the Protestant narrator of paganism but loves her anyway.

Contradictions are reasonable as long as they're kept inside the brain, but bring them out and try to state them logically in public and the soft coexistence of gods or ideas is cut apart; the private God is willing to relax while you burn your magical turf or "immolate a victim for the purpose of a sacrifice, or to consult the quivering entrails" (Theodosian Code (392), translated by Clyde Pharr) but when someone unsympathetic draws hard lines then no, the relaxation vanishes, there's no relaxation, they can't coexist publicly though in your head why not -- in public don't ask don't tell -- and yet what a surprise, I bet you, for many people, to have this pointed out, the private universe cut and prism'd, and themselves forced to choose, a logical toughness is proposed, ancient tourist, if you really believed you were unworthy would you have put those names there? No but the word meant something else when I said it.

squirming facts

Clues, clues, Charlotte Brontë, knowing the mental tendencies of her mortal audience, which needs to recognise things quickly thanks to a short lifespan; if immortal they could contemplate "vaster than empires and more slow," etc, and no wonder vampires get dolorous when they're switched so quickly from one state to the other -- the author plants clues, the banshee is a clue, the volcano is a clue, put it together with the wind, this is all a clue to the wind, which is a clue to the scene after the wind, and another clue to add to my ideas about Lucy Snowe's character generally, and it affects my ideas about the death, the dead woman Miss Marchmont looking "all calm and undisturbed" but this calm is a contrast to volcanoes.

Any reader, coming across the wind paragraph, probably begins to anticipate a quick concrete doom in the book, not believing that the author will let these volcanoes tootle away to nothing, the grammar of the situation demanding a response, as one part of language follows another in a sentence, as a The is followed eventually by some noun, so the predicting wind is followed by an event for it to have predicted, which will seem associated with the wind by its proximity to the wind, as the number 1 is associated with the next number that comes after the plus sign -- say a 2 --

1 + 2 =

-- and not another number that floats around two lines below, say a 4 -- the 4 gets ignored, like this --

1 + 2 = 3
8
4

-- when it could have been loved, like this --

1 + 2 = 5
8
4

I (reading) don't think this wind is having an intimate effect on an event occurring on page three hundred if it only blows on page forty-five (unless the author reminds me deliberately once again of that wind, which Charlotte Brontë does, actually, much later, in association with another death, but that's a different story) -- these things, when they're close, they cuddle -- and if Miss Marchmont had waited for two hundred pages before dying then would I associate her with the wind, even if that was what the author had in mind but never told me, ah, behold, says Brontë in my hypothetical world, behold, she says, this is a significant wind, and then the hypothetical book wambles off on another topic and everybody has a picnic, then they go on an adventure with a panther, and then they have a bike ride, then another picnic, this time with chocolate ice cream, and then the woman decides to pack it up and die all calm and undisturbed and Lucy Snowe must go to notBelgium with the Catholics.

One of Languagehat's readers looks over that Herbert Fiegel post and makes an association between Fiegl's point and two poems by Wallace Stevens, the quote was one shoe falling, now there's room for another shoe and Wallace Stevens is that shoe, one clue leading to another, the second clue provided and the circuit begun; room now for someone else to suggest a third poem, or a biography of Wallace Stevens, or a critique of the poem -- ourselves on the ground floor here -- primed for further thumps --

The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,
If one may say so. And yet relation appears,
A small relation expanding like the shade
Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill.

(Connoisseur of Chaos, Wallace Stevens, 1942)

but, as night deepened, it took a new tone

"The wind was wailing at the windows," says Lucy Snowe, the representation of a young woman who is narrating Charlotte Brontë's Vilette, "it had wailed all day; but, as night deepened, it took a new tone -- an accent keen, piercing, almost articulate to the ear; a plaint, piteous and disconsolate to the nerves, trilled in every gust" -- but this is not enough for the author, she is impassioned, this wind should not be ignored, and so she makes a paragraph around it; this wind will not be an absence, this air needs to be noticed: "Three times in the course of my life, events had taught me that these strange accents in the storm -- this restless, hopeless cry -- denote a coming state of the atmosphere unpropitious to life" -- and now if the reader is asking O Ms Brontë, what kind of unpropitiousness do you mean? she tells them, she answers the unasked question, she makes the damage specific and not vague -- she fills a crack with epidemic diseases -- "Epidemic diseases, I believed, were often heralded by a gasping, sobbing, tormented, long-lamenting east wind" -- and if "I believed" seems too solitary, then she will attach this wind to other people's beliefs not only hers, it will be a legend that flies everywhere nebulously and it will have a mythical dimension. "Hence, I inferred, arose the legend of the Banshee."

Then she will enlarge the effect by attaching the wind to concrete things, hard, huge things, deadly fires, massive destruction, identifiable and romantic, scientific horrors, and inescapable global terrors: "I fancied, too, I had noticed -- but was not philosopher enough to know whether there was any connection between the circumstances -- that we often at the same time hear of disturbed volcanic action in distant parts of the world; of rivers suddenly rushing above their banks; and of strange high tides flowing furiously in on low sea-coasts." The character does not usually talk to herself in print but now she does, she breaks briefly into a new style, she is punctuating the end of this idea. ""Our globe," I had said to myself, "seems at such periods torn and disordered; the feeble amongst us wither in her distempered breath, rushing hot from steaming volcanoes.""

Yet the wind is not necessary: a woman named Miss Marchmont was already frail and sick, and then this wind blows and the next night she finally dies of a stroke that does not seem to have been caused in any medical way by the blowing of any wind anywhere.

We were prepared for that death pages ago but the wind is a moody poison running into the atmosphere and killing her; the reader sees this description of doom and they probably decide, since this woman's death is the most obviously bad thing that is likely to happen -- they believe, "That's it, she's going to die," or at least, "Something terrible is going to happen, she'll probably die although something else might happen too." But the woman's death will probably feature in their reasoning somewhere.

This emphasis on the wind has turned the wind into a clue.

A post at Languagehat quoted this from Herbert Fiegl: "The attempt to know, to grasp an order, to adjust ourselves to the world in which we are embedded, is just as genuine as, indeed, is identical with, the attempt to live. Confronted with a totally different universe, we would nonetheless try again and again to generalize from the known to the unknown. Only if extended and strenuous efforts led invariably to complete failure, would we abandon the hope of finding order. And even that would be an induction." A book is a ghost of that totally different universe; it's not the one where the reader lives, yet the rules of the known universe are the base rules by which the other one is judged: each book is the judgement of a mystery.