in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance

Enough about Stevens' anthology, says Daniel Deniehy, yawning: wrap up with something, tie off with some remark about his selection, my god, I say looking startled, this is not a review -- what is it then? -- a unloved violation of clarity, I said: I think, well, bush ballads almost absent, and the 1800s section of Les Murray's New Oxford Book of Australian Verse (1986) is vastly different, convict ballads, bushranger epics (“Jack Gilbert was a bushranger of terrible renown | For sticking lots of people up and shooting others down”), translations of Aboriginal oral poetry, which of course Stevens didn't; but what if he had, and why should I expect him not to?

(Noticeable, when I read books of verse by the New Zealanders Bathgate and Wilcox, the melancholy and guilty poems about the romance of a defeated Maori, “Here once the mighty Atua had his dwelling | In mystery,” from Wilcox's Onawe in Verses from Maoriland, and no counterpart in any of the Australian books so far. Not so in Australian prose, where it appears quite early. Leakey in The Broad Arrow had a character make a speech about it. Ditto Louisa Atkinson in Gertrude the Emigrant.)

Murray will take poems from Anonymous (or: the Collective Mind) and Stevens will not, no, more of a poet-canon-builder, Stevens, asking who is there, who can I acknowledge, even when they are only “fairly good”?

No doubt sociological reasons for that, Deniehy says sagaciously, if you wanted to look for them.

Murray's choice from Mary Gilmore is a piece about a small dead girl, and so is Stevens', but Murray's is a less whimsical poem, though you can't blame Stevens for choosing his Little Ghost over Murray's The Little Shoes That Died, when you look it up and discover that the first publication of Little Shoes occurred in the Sydney Morning Herald on the 5th of November, 1938, and Stevens' book came out more than two decades before.

Banjo Paterson is in Stevens' Anthology because how could he not be; and yet as I write those words, I remember that Yeats left Wilfred Owen out of The Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1936, saying that “passive suffering is not a theme for poetry” after Matthew Arnold's preface to his Poems in 1853.

For the Muses, as Hesiod says, were born that they might be ‘a forgetfulness of evils, and a truce from cares’: and it is not enough that the Poet should add to the knowledge of men, it is required of him also that he should add to their happiness. ‘All Art,’ says Schiller, ‘is dedicated to Joy, and there is no higher and no more serious problem, than how to make men happy.' [So spake Leigh Hunt, says Daniel Deniehy] The right Art is that alone, which creates the highest enjoyment.

...

What then are the situations, from the representation of which, though accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived? They are those in which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in the description of them something monotonous. When they occur in actual life, they are painful, not tragic; the representation of them in poetry is painful also.

justice to the smooth narrow leaf

On Saturday as I was reading the introduction to The Incredible Journey by the Australian author Catherine Martin I copied down part of a paragraph, and on Sunday while the excerpt was still sticky in my mind I found Tom on Wuthering Expectations quoting a piece of speech from The Passionate Pilgrim by Henry James, "Out of England, it's but a garish world," which seemed so contrary to Martin that I added her to the comments on that post, since she said that the English countryside was "strong" and "metallic," and she supported the bushland and the eucalyptus leaf:

Eyes accustomed to the strong -- almost metallic -- verdure of Northern lands, to the picturesquely rent, cleft, furrowed and scalloped leaves of deciduous trees, could not do justice to the smooth narrow leaf, evasive in its hues of grey-green and grey-blue, ranging in shape from the faint crescent of a moon one night old to the round curve of a reaping hook. A leaf exquisite in its grave simplicity as a lotus bud on the shrine of Gotama.

Then she says,

It is as if all the contrasts in the life of European and Australian trees were gathered up in their leaves. Those that slip from their buds in Spring to fall in discoloured clouds in Autumn can well afford to indulge in fantastically ornate edges. But how far other it is with those that often have to face rainless years, to live through droughts that suck the life out of the earth, till it is barren as the sea-shore, bleached and sinister-looking as if overtaken by the fulfilment of the dark prophecy: “on tree and herb shall a blight descend, and the land shall become a desert.”

Deserts -- wrote John C. Van Dyke -- the Southwest American desert -- is beautiful -- and he supported it against the Old World too -- which makes me think that a prejudice against dessicated landscapes is not solely an Australian problem, it is in America, and maybe other places.

True enough, there is much rich color at Venice, at Cairo, at Constantinople. Its beauty need not be denied; and yet it is an artificial, a chemical color, caused by the disintegration of matter -- the decay of stone, wood, and iron torn from the neighboring mountains. It is Nature after a poor fashion -- Nature subordinated to the will of man. Once more ride over the enchanted mesas of Arizona at sunrise or at sunset, with the ragged mountains of Mexico to the south of you and the broken spurs of the great sierra round about you; and all the glory of the old shall be as nothing to the gold and purple and burning crimson of the new world.

(The Desert, 1901)

Myself thinking then of the bushes I've seen while I was travelling through the burning Nevada desert, small bushes, miles of small bushes, brown-green creosote and roughly higher than your knee, sagebrush, sagebrush, spreading across the Big Smoky Valley and around the towns of Goldfield and Beatty on the long way south from Elko to Las Vegas through "a forever geology of heat and shale," to quote the Australian thriller writer Andrew Croome (I'm borrowing that from a post on Whispering Gums), though the portion he describes is fairly short; it runs between the city and the Creech Airforce Base; if he had driven further he would have seen things that were not friendly to a forever geology of heat and shale, he would have seen a pink trailer that is also a brothel, plastic bags on fences, multiple adulterations, for nobody is ever able to leave the desert alone, hurling mattresses into it, skulls of cattle, mine shafts; the small-town casinos where we stopped once, because, as M. pointed out, the handy thing about casinos is that you can use the toilets without anyone asking you to buy. We wee for free.

"Pee" they say instead of "wee" in the musical Urinetown, which had a run with the Nevada Conservatory Theatre in early May -- I think "pee" is the American version of the word -- "It's a privilege to pee," sang Joan Sobel operatically in the role of Pennywise -- she came to town to play Carlotta in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom at the Venetian; the man who played the chief of police had been Pumba in The Lion King at the MGM Grand -- and when I search the internet to make sure I'm getting the name of the company right I discover Carol Cling in the Review-Journal writing, "After all, you can still use a casino restroom without having to ante up in advance," surprising me with the time-delayed unity of our minds: it was an ordinary thought after all.

All the creosote bushes looking fundamentally identical from the window of car or train but if I opened the door and walked through them what differences there, the same with gum leaves. From the car what meditation on sameness, at close range what a zoo of different vegetable ideas, the same and the different under one roof or skin of floral cells, and people stood together in the desert like that might seem the same way.

Loveable singly or unmarshalled
they are merciless in a gang.

That's Les Murray on eucalypts.

the shortness of the time left me no opportunity for deliberation

Here's a quick idea: a plot is a question made larger with stories, or a story is a question made larger with plots.

The word "compelled" in the Olga Masters paragraph is a door to a side-story but that door never fully opens, which is an author's way of saying that it can't fully open, because if anything can be done in their book then they will be the ones who do it -- why does the aunt feel compelled? -- why does the ordinary desire to look at someone who is irritating you deserve this strangely powerful word? I can't get off the subject; it niggles at me.

I don't know how Masters (over years and years) came up with the tone of voice that brought her to the moment, raw and flaming, when she decided that "compelled" was going to be the perfect word to use there, with nothing else to support it in its work except hints: compelled would carry the main weight, compelled had to be strong.

There might even have been a time in her life when she would have thought about using the Charles Maturin approach to "compelled," which I've quoted before: "The precipitate vigour of Juan's movements seemed to impel me without my own concurrance, and as the shortness of the time left me no opportunity for deliberation, it left me also with none for choice." Maturin opens the side-story door wider without pretending to have opened it all the way, ie, without pretending to have explained everything about the character's compulsion, ie, he writes a long explanation but uses the word "seemed" to let you know that he isn't pretending to interpret, exactly, only to hint or sketch, or dramatise without commitment -- a tone that Gothic literature seems to like, I muse, remembering that none of the ghosts in Udolpho are genuine and that the ending of that book is a Scooby Doo or Hitchcock's Psycho, an entry in the annals of science-minded characters sitting down at the end of a tale to explain away its mysteries, because, you see, they say, sighing, strangers happen to enjoy wandering through the forest just there with sheets over their heads every night at three a.m., screaming and playing a lyre, and so everything is logical, your fear is due to ignorance, and if you knew everything down to the habits of the local amateur lyre-playing collective, then there would be no mysteries in the world; if we lived long enough to learn everything then Gothic literature would be impossible, and therefore Ann Radcliffe is uncontroversial proof of human mortality, not only in the fact that she is dead but also because she wrote as she did, with the ideas she did, and the horrors she did. Without death we would have to find different horrors.

Masters might have decided that Maturin was trying to pin compulsion down too hard, "untruthfully," she might have thought: "A person who believes they can separate an emotion into its component parts like that is not being honest. I won't play these old games," she thought, "I won't pretend that I can do the impossible, I will be honest." I think this same frame of mind could be one of the inner differences between the work of John Kinsella and Les Murray, both Australian poets, though they separate themselves onto different sides of the continent. Murray, in his poetry, often inhabits another creature, or travels imaginatively inside a mountain but Kinsella's voice tends to stay in his own human throat, he doesn't often occupy the brains of animals, or put words in the mouths of creatures besides himself -- this is my impression, although I should point out that I haven't read a lot of Kinsella.

There is rectitude in Masters, there is rectitude in Kinsella too. The novelist in her rectitude omits any explanation except hints, she writes without splurge. And Kinsella too writes without splurge, but Murray splurges, and he even wrote a poem about splurge.

Argue that Masters' "compelled" might be the result of self-doubt. Thinking she can't do it, she doesn't do it. It's a shy literature, and the hints punctured by a blurt are shyness speaking, first withdrawn, sampling the sound of its own voice, then rushing forward awkwardly with too much power. The point of Maturin's long sentence is crushed down to "compelled," which swells there like a balloon crammed with helium because it is really three lines' worth of sentence stuffed into nine letters.

Here is a fantasy story. Every word in Masters' book is the severely compressed equivalent of a sentence in Maturin's. They are the same book.

see in the walnut

I'm going to put Spenser down for a minute because Fay over at the Read, Ramble blog wondered if I would look at a written item of Les Murray's, so I will. It's one of the poems from his latest book, Taller When Prone, a short riddle of a thing, only seven lines long. The first line is a question but that's not where the poem starts; it starts with the title, which is Manuscript Roundel, and this is where things get interesting, because it wasn't Manuscript Roundel when Prone was first published; in fact it was Medallion in the Australian version of the book (which was brought out in the April of 2010 by Melbourne's Black Inc) and then when it was published again two months later in a Christian magazine called First Things it was Knotwork Medallion. The Manuscript Roundel title didn't exist until the following year. Fay I believe is consulting the US Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition, published initially on March 15th, 2011, and by this time it has made its final change.

Knotwork Medallion is available online here. (I'm not going to copy and paste in case there are copyright issues.) There are three differences between this and Roundel besides the title. The word "in" has been added after "egg" in the fifth line, and the horse's straps in lines two and seven are now "red." "Horses all harnessed" in line two becomes "Horses red-harnessed," and "the horse-straps" in line seven becomes "red straps" with no reiteration of "horse."

When you stack the three titles up in chronological order I think you can see Murray's mind move in a clarifying direction, from a general idea of a circular picture-space to a more specialised one; the object described by the specialised one is probably what he had in mind all along. A manuscript roundel is a feature of illuminated manuscripts, a fenced-in area marshalling a discrete image. The word knotwork in the second title might point to the kind of illuminated manuscripts Murray had in mind, old Anglo-Celtic ones, decorated with knot-patterns of twining lines, animals, plants, and figures. The most famous example is the Book of Kells. These manuscripts are religious, written and drawn by monks, and Murray is a Catholic so devout that he dedicates each new book "To the glory of God," so it makes sense that these illuminated gospels are documents he would know and think about; this is a logical avenue for his mind to take.

(A roundel is also a form of poetry invented by Swinburne from the French rondeau, but Manuscript Roundel is blatantly not a roundel: it's too short and it doesn't have a refrain, so the word here has to be a coincidence, not a guide.)

It's easy to see in my mind's eye a relationship between the enclosed typically-circularesque pattern-space of a manuscript roundel and the enclosed ovoid nut-space of the walnut shell in line one with the crenellated wriggle-patterned meat nesting inside. Murray is magicking the walnut; with line one he opens it, "What did you see in the walnut?" the shell is lifted, I'm looking inside, and I know that the poet must be seeing it too because he completes the poem by answering his own question. He's already collapsed the nut together with an art object, an object with history, the manuscript roundel. There is significance in this walnut he suggests, it is more than just a present physical object, it contains pictures; it is an illustration.

That "egg" in line five has to be the seed itself, inside the walnut shell (which is curved and brown as eggs are curved and brown), waiting to grow into a tree. "Held ... aloft" in line six becomes the tree, holding up its branches and supporting this "buttery" at the end of line five. What is a buttery? It can be any of a few different things, but I think the definition that matters here is the medieval buttery, a room that used to be set aside in prosperous English households so that the family had a place to store its beer. (Pricy booze was kept in the cellar.) The beer was held in wooden casks or butts, therefore buttery, the room of butts. Those hand-branches in line six are holding up a collection of butts, that is, brown hard enclosed objects, that is, also, in the compressive language of Murray's poetry, walnuts. And the "egg" is both the holding-aloft and the butts and the buttery because all of these tree-components will come from this one nut, they're all coiled up inside, unified for now but preparing to spring apart.

Now, looking at the egg in line five, I thought, all right, we've described the physical qualities of this particular nut that the poet is holding in our hands, so lines two, three, and four are probably talking about something else. They're a separate sentence, they're not part of this egg-and-growth. They come before. What comes before an individual nut? The history of nuts. What's in this history? We have criss-cross harnesses, we have horses, and we have soldiers who are appearing in movies, we have actors pretending to be soldiers; there's no battlefield glory for this body of soldiers any more, only media fame. Celtic knotwork is made of criss-crossings; possibly Murray's criss-cross came from that, but what else? What about Celtic horses? There is the White Horse, there is Epona the Celtic horse goddess, who ruled, among other things, fertility, seeds -- nuts -- and she was rare among Celtic gods because the Romans worshipped her too. Now look at the etymology of the word walnut which in Old English was wealh-hnutu, meaning foreign-nut, and why? Because walnuts came from the continent, from Rome and Gaul, they were currency in the cultural exchange of an invaded British Isles.

What if the soldiers were Roman soldiers, and the "red" in the American version of line two is not only a response to the red pigment on the criss-crossings in the illuminated manuscripts but also a suggestion of blood, fire, and war; those criss-crossed harnesses are war harnesses, those vexed Xs are the mess of an invasion? I asked M. what he thought of that idea and he pointed out that Roman centurions wore red too. The Ancient Roman war machine has vanished, its exploits are movies, it's Russell Crowe in Gladiator, it's a rushing mob in Ben Hur, a centurion is an actor "wearing the credits / of his movie like medal ribbons." As far as soldiering goes the Roman legions have evaporated. But a large cast of historians and, popularisers, writers, and so on, teachers, poets, have kept the memory of the soldiers lively for centuries and today they can still be imagined, this is their current glory; and this line of people devoted to their memory, stretching back for centuries, might be their equivalent of movie credits. (M. came up with this as well.)

If I'm right then these three lines are there to describe the history of the walnut, the invasion that introduced them to the country where the manuscript roundels appear to be located. Other cultures used manuscript roundels too, but that "knotwork" in the second version of the title seems to connect the poem to the British Isles. As for the straps in the last line "pulling the nut shut" I suspect that they were conjured up from the butts in the buttery. Straps hold casks together, and Murray's usual poetic strategy is to mash several ideas into juxtaposition, making them coexist, a sort of hallucinatory multilayered effect, bringing the universe of notions around one object into correspondence with the universe of ideas around another, so why not take the harness straps of the horses, put them together with the straps of the barrels, and use them to close the poem by closing the nut? The poet pushes the two halves back together, click, the vision fades, the poem ends.

So, Fay, that's my shot at Manuscript Roundel, and thank you for that: that was a pretty fabulous crossword puzzle.

(I haven't even gone into the musicality of the poem, but it might be worth noticing how Murray kicks himself along on a regular s-s-s like a kid with a skateboard: orses, nessed, criss-cross, soldier, edits, eases into yawny vowels, movie, aloft, gives himself a relishable pop-pop with building a buttery and ends with the double-final click of nut shut: the sound itself is an ending, the same door being slammed twice.)







Here is an example of red criss-cross knotwork in the Book of Kells. I'm more sure of a link between this poem and Kells now ("now" is a few days after I made this post originally) that I've looked up one of Murray's poems from the 1970s, The Figures in Quoniam, and noticed that, one, it is directly inspired by the Book, that, two, it associates the word "knotwork" with the Book ("This orphidian knotwork around us, this gold on the I, / surely this is the art of barbarians" he imagines one figure saying), that, three, he also thinks about red lines crossing through whiteness ("You say the High One used Time / and Chance to knit the red veins through the white sinews? / Now this is complexity compounded, and druidical entirely --"), that, four, it's a poem about people and things contained inside shapes on a Kells manuscript page, and that, five, other poems in the same book (Ethnic Radio, 1977) suggest that he has, or had, an interest in Celtic and Gaelic-British history.

It might also be useful to think of Roundel as a modern version of those ancient British, Anglo-Saxon riddles, the ones that present the object, whatever it is, as a series of mysterious objects and actions, not obviously related to the answer. A riddle like that, writes S.A.J. Bradley in Anglo-Saxon Poetry, "challenges the mind by paradox and by signalled ambivalence to seek a correct solution veiled in ambiguous statement, and thus to seek the truth veiled in the metaphor and the spiritual and eternal veiled in the corporal and temporal." If you think of the way Murray's positioned this walnut in time, space, and history (it's here now, but it's also a tree in the future, giving birth to new itselfs and new futures, and it's part of a religious manuscript as well -- rebirth a theme here -- and connected to events so far gone they're practically mythical -- etc) then describing Roundel as an exercise that wants to veil the spiritual and eternal in the corporal and temporal isn't a bad summary.

Here's a translation of an Exeter Book riddle whose answer is rake

I saw a thing | in the dwellings of men
that feeds the cattle; | has many teeth.
The beak is useful to it; | it goes downwards,
ravages faithfully; | pulls homewards;
hunts along walls; | reaches for roots.
Always it finds them, | those which are not fast;
lets them, the beautiful, | when they are fast,
stand in quiet | in their proper places,
brightly shining, | growing, blooming.

(Englished by Paull Franklin Baum)

give me the greatest possible pleasure

Reading Evan S. Connell's Points for a Compass Rose I began thinking about tautness in poetry -- why? -- because I was trying to work out why this poem (book-long, but that wasn't the reason) seemed so idle, and why my attention kept floating away while I was reading it.

Oddly, it's a busy poem on the surface -- a full, full poem. Connell, American, who published the Compass Rose in 1973, has taken his cues from Pliny and Robert Burton* and chocked the work full of historical anecdotes, quotes, facts, for example, "Eggs laid by the roc, or Aepyornis, / measure 13" in length, 9" in width, / each shell holds two gallons of fluid" or "truly ancient bronzes, / those which have lain in the earth for centuries, / acquire a pure blue color like that of the kingfisher" or "The Derbikkai who inhabit the Caspian littoral / punish every crime with death, according to Strabo" or "William II of England felt a cold wind pass through his side; / the next day Tyrell's arrow killed him" or "Jean Fouquet / commissioned to paint the king's mistress, Jeanne Sorel, / depicted her as the Virgin Mary with an aureole / of angels," and so on. I can open to any page and find four or five or six interesting stories. So why (I wondered) am I not riveted?

I thought the answer might lie with his narrator, who is a chatty man, prissy, with a habit of summoning your attention. "Look," he says, or, "Listen," or

Now come closer. Sit next to me.
What would you like to hear?
I deal mostly in mysteries and fables

The prissiness, or aloofness, or verbal self-protection, comes through in his throwaway words and phrases: "indeed," "You may know or you may not," "I don't presume to know," "I must say," "Quite a few years," "What I'm getting at," "If it pleases you / to believe them, very well," "I consider," "Permit me," "I would perhaps suggest." He has a personal story too: he is American, the Vietnam war is on, he is afraid that his son is going to be called up, and he is angry at the politicians and journalists who are promoting the war. Here, perhaps, is a reason for his self-shielding language, which acts like a verbal padding: he is hurt and depressed, as well as learned, and so his agitation expresses itself pedantically.

"The character," you might say, "feels overwhelmed by the past and the present, and so he tries to control the only thing left to him, which is speech. "I consider strict control essential," he says at one point. (Here his creator is poking fun at him: the rest of the poem lets us know that strict control is impossible.) He refines his meaning by qualifying it; at the same time he makes it baroque with stock phrases. Perhaps he is numbing himself with these cushions. Perhaps he is full of self-doubt. He sees the massive complications of the past, and its viciousnesses, and he says to us, Look! Listen! We do this over and over again. Vietnam is the contemporary version. He tells us about Mongols who slaughtered their enemies, and about ridiculous instances of humankind trying to identify an enemy so that it can be punished -- "A host of beetles that ravaged the vineyard / of Saint Julian were commanded to appear in King's Court" -- and then stories about witches hanging themselves in their cells, and about German soldiers carrying bat wings to protect themselves from harm, and from this he concludes that people are irrational, volatile, and superstitious."

But this is nonsense, the character feels nothing and does nothing, he is being written by a poet, and the poet is overdoing it -- overdoing the interjections, I mean; there are too many of them -- or (I think now, remembering Ezra Pound's Cantos) underdoing it, in other words, he is not utilising the possibilities of the character as a character. When Pound brings in a voice that takes the long way round, as Connell's narrator does, he gives the roundaboutness a comic point. He exaggerates the fussiness.

So far as I can concerned, it wd
Give me the greatest possible pleasure
or be more acceptable to me,
And I shd. like to be party to it, as was promised me,
either as participant or adherent.
As for my service money,
Perhaps you and your father wd. draw it
And send it on to me as quickly as possible

Under all the politeness we're talking about money. (It's interesting, as an aside, how writers who acknowlege the power of money -- Christina Stead, Balzac, Pound here -- are often so meaty and funny as well as acid, despairing -- look, they say, people have such elevated pretensions, but living thwarts them. Money to these authors is like food in Rabelais, it's an earthy, dirty need.)

And looking at Pound I think of something else about Connell: he doesn't have the puns and wordplay of other poets -- he lacks the basic element of surprise, an elementary pleasure. Les Murray in his recent short poem The Conversations draws on the same mass storehouse of folk tale and Aubrey-fact, but he does it brusque and crisp:

A full moon always rises at sunset
and a person is taller at night.
Many fear their phobias more than death.
The glass King of France feared he’d shatter.
Chinese eunuchs kept their testes in spirit.

…

The heart of a groomed horse slows down.
A fact is a small compact faith,
a sense-datum to beasts, a power to man
even if true, even while true—
we read these laws in Isaac Neurone.

In "The glass king of France" and "Isaac Neurone" I see the creator's alert joy-with-words that I was expecting from Connell (my brain saying, "This is a poem, therefore it will be like this …" an expectation that comes from exposure to other poets besides Murray and Pound -- opening the Selected Gwen Harwood I find her punning -- "Dad the Impaler!" -- and opening the Selected of Geoffrey Hill I find him riffing on "lilies of the field" with "lilies of the veldt." Opening Milton I see him rrrolling on words like a fat seal on a rock: "Restore us, and regain the blissful seat," "To mortal men, he with his horrid crew"). There are moments when his train switches tracks from one thought to another -- surprises there -- but these moments are softened by the long relaxed feel of the thing, those throwaway "indeeds" and "If you wills," and other words that have nothing to do with the character of the narrator, but seem to be there for no reason at all, like this "countless" and "the very finest:"

In Peru is an aquaduct of hewn stone and cement
Extending countless miles across sierras and rivers. .
There is also an artificial garden whose soil
Is composed of the very finest flakes of gold

Prose can cope with that kind of chatter (the reader more likely to expect expansion and length), but in poetry even a small unnecessary word is a roadbump. "Poems are short fast religions," says Murray, and "In expressing the inexpressible poetry remains close to the origins of language," says W.S. Merwin, but those null-words and stock phrases are something other than the origin of language, perhaps they are a return to a state of pre-origin -- for if words were invented to describe objects and state intentions then those throwaways do neither; they establish empty space, describe nothing, state no intention, and fill the role of grunts and ums, pre-language space-fillers and gropings -- and the brain of the character seems introverted; it shrinks back and flops its hands out in despair.







* He mentions both of them, and Herodotus too I think. Here's his Burton:

What next? Burton asked leave to establish before us
a stupend, vast, infinite ocean of incredible madness
and folly -- a sea of shelves and rocks, sands, gulfs,
Euripuses and contrary tides clogged with monsters,
uncouth shapes, roaring waves, tempests and Siren calms,
Halcyonian seas, unspeakable misery, such Comedies
and Tragedies, such preposterous ridiculous feral and
lamentable fits that he knew not whether they were more
to be pitied or derided, or be believed