growing thin

A line is a dot that has gone for a walk, said Paul Klee, allegedly, somewhere or somewhere else, and as a matter of fact I can't discover where. Everybody quotes it, nobody tells me the source, or I can't find the source; the source is somewhere and I do not have it, or it was somewhere once, the words appeared, there they were, and now exist and were disseminated outward from that long-ago point of composition, if outward is the word.

Here is this statement of an idea and take it, you, said one person, and all right, said the other, and on it went, and was streamlined, as things are streamlined, Sherlock Holmes for example, who never said a certain famous phrase and of course actually never said anything, being fictional and what's more, silent, and as silent as the gramophone in Magritte's painting of the murderer who is listening to a gramophone while three men stare at his back, the body lies on a stiff chaise-lounge, he may be detained soon by two other men nearby but of course not: he will listen to the music forever, which does not exist, and he did not commit the murder either, nor did Mr Dawes in For the Term of His Natural Life, neither in the story nor out of it, and whatsername, Sylvia, did not draw the words Good Mr Dawes in the sand of the beach, "with the sceptre of the Queen," where they were shipwrecked, poor Mr Dawes who was scourged but never really scourged, chained but never really chained, and so you can erase anything that happened in a book by pointing out that it never did and yet a memory in the reader nonetheless and not erased.

But that would be one way to write a blog post, starting with a dot, a book, and taking it for a walk, wondering if one day there might be a moment of cohesion and insight or whatever word you want to use (although concentrated thought might do the job better, and strictness, I concur, rather than this hoping), so that I am thinking of de Quincey with his English Mail Coach rather than the English teachers at school who told us, when we were writing essays, to restate your initial point in the final paragraph, and fasten it down with the information you've introduced in the middle; if you asked a question in paragraph one then have you answered it? If no then rewrite.

De Quincy here I reckon, or Victor Hugo and his William Shakespeare, which is not about Shakespeare (and which I discovered through Wuthering Expectations), or say even Geoffrey Hill, who I'm told described his essays as "vortices" during an interview that was published in the Times Literary Supplement. There are those writers who set their essays out in short parts and change with each part, and fall pregnant between each part with the next part. Helen Garner wrote about the ice floes that way once, I think, but my copy of her book is on the other hemisphere of the earth inside a box and I hope not eaten by the silverfish who follow the natural imperative toward nourishment and thereby propagation of the species, that the society of silverfish be proved eternal, a plan that is probably not conscious within them.

Now I'm going to finish this post with two paragraphs that were both originally part of the first post on Browning and Eliot. They stayed for a while, then they were estranged from the beginning of the post by a sentence that expanded into longer passages until finally they were not related to the start of the post in any powerfully connective way at all.

"[Meeting at Night is] an encounter of two characters who do not criticise one another or themselves; in Eliot the physical appearance is critiqued by the mind, the two hearts are in disparate bosoms, there is no spiritual communion: an ideal is not met, the person can't prove itself in any significant way through its appearance, or else you could say that its appearance disconcerts it or pollutes it: my personality is narrow and so are my legs, thinks Alfred J. Prufrock, and he imagines the women looking at his head and saying, "How his hair is growing thin." But whether the people in Browning's poem are bald or thin or ugly we don't know, he doesn't mind, he doesn't think about it. His man is crossing the fields on legs that are long or short or fat or thin; he has no legs, he is movement. One narrator is concentrated, one is diffused, one moves urgently, the other says, "There will be time, there will be time," and hesitates, he thinks of everything else, he thinks of the ocean, he thinks of Shakespeare. One narrator knows where he aims and drives toward that aim; the other has a rough idea of what his aim might be if he could find it but doesn't know if he is about to look in the right or wrong place or what the outcome might be: the power of certainty to make me move, says Browning, the power of uncertainty to hold me still, says Eliot.

But "each to each" in both cases. Words have friends everywhere, duplicates everywhere, doppelgängers back and forth through time or is it the same word, travelling to each point of time in an instant; what is a word? the word is the thing in the ink or something else, the ink and not the ink, the stock phrase is here, is there, it is a thing, it is not a thing, it is mine, it is not mine, you can take it but you can't steal it; I still have it but I don't own it, it's been stolen so often that it hasn't changed. It is the same but it isn't the same; it's different but identical, and the question then, since words evidently have a changeable condition and a static one, does this make them comparable do ourselves: do words have souls, or could they be a model of the body and the soul, or do they have souls and we don't, as we can see the static and eternal conditions of a word operating in front of us, whereas in the case of humans we have evidence of only one state, the changeable, and the immortal has to be taken on trust. The existence of souls in words can be reasonably observed and explained, which doesn't mean that they have them."

shy buds venture out

-- resuming main point again after parenthesis -- if main is the right -- hello -- done --

-- although (resuming) I'm guessing that when you read the sentence at the end of that post, the sentence that was written in a trance, then it doesn't look different from any of the other sentences, even though to me it's completely different and like a visitation, written (though I'm assuming this is not obvious, as I said) when I was in a different mood, and it can't be read now by me (but no one else) without a memory of that mood, tired, itchy, annoyed, my lips peeling in this weather, my mind looking for a sentence and hoping that something would occur to me, because "it's a useful invention, very Victorian," wasn't an ending, I thought, and what more, what more, something needs to come I felt, but whether it was destined to come, or whether it would have come in that form even if I hadn't wished -- one last sentence, one ending, was what I wanted -- whether it would have formed itself like that, or whether I might have gone away on a longer speculation I don't know.

Ruskin as he looked at tree leaves wanted to write about the intricacy he saw, these things constructed in their complicated way, and in his writing he congratulated God on this effort, which he believed was obviously His, but as for these inner trees, I'm not even sure that I make them, or where the praise should be aimed, if anyone wanted to aim praise and say, "O Pykk, I have read many thirteen-word sentences recently and yours at the end of that post was the nicest" -- which possibly it was because anything might be possible, and if you happen to look at the world like that, says Browning's Middle Eastern sage Ferishtah in the poem Mihrab Shah from Ferishtah s Fancies (1885), then it should be a constant source of wonder to me that my head doesn't fall off for if anything is possible then why not that, additionally hands, knees, and other parts, a rain of pieces, immediately all at once, or one by one; or complete instant disintegration and back to molecules, whose ambidextrous capabilities and other talents, if possessed, go unloved?

There are forests of these inner trees, perishing from view, these shapes and networks with their roots running wherever and their branches ending wherever, impossible to see, coming and going, time passing faster than dog years in this atmosphere of the brain, or wherever thought takes place, not a place but the idea of a place (which I invent now specifically for this post: an area with shapes representing trees, therefore something like a countryside with an open sky), inventing it with what of course but more ideas: the thoughts building houses for themselves, and proposing a vision, saying, "I picture myself like a tree in a piece of nice scenery, say I'm near a mountain, because you have mentioned Ruskin, who walked in the Alps. He described their geography in Modern Painters and stood on the heaves of their rocks looking at the clouds, beauty, he said: science. 'I have often seen the white, thin, morning cloud, edged with the seven colours of the prism.'"

The only conclusion I want to extract from this windering-wandering, is that the immaterial thoughts do take their apparent substance from the district of actual substances outside the body, since every place I can picture exists as places exist in the solid world: even an imaginary space with no walls, walls or ceiling or boundaries is still discernible as though existent and hard, having a colour, texture and a temperature, myself not alone in this inescapable mental habit I see when I read one of the last poems Browning wrote, Reverie (1889), in which he wonders if godly "Power" will "come about" "amid whirl and roar / Of the elemental flame / Which star-flecks heaven's dark floor" or whether it will happen in some other location, with flowers and grass. "Is it here, with grass about, / Under befriending trees, / When shy buds venture out."

The denseness or false denseness or temporary clotted bit of the medium of language (which is killing the imaginations of readers, say the characters in one book by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, which, fair enough, you can't die if you don't have a body, and what else is a word to a thought but a body or maybe just a suit) brings the hard world to immaterial soft thought -- example -- room, floor, ceiling, and so on; no space can fail to have these items or else not have them. and one word is added or another substituted, the space has grass but no floor, it has no walls, it has mountains, it has the sky and the sun but no moon or moon but no sun or else heavy cloud cover hanging mattress-like over the whole environment -- the different parts, like head and hands and knees; removable it's possible, but if some other body part, ie sentence-part, is not substituted then the paragraph dies into the Invisible, poor thing.

enigmas which we all in our innocence believe

I didn't know that I was going to end that last post with a question about Prufrock's soul; the sentence didn't come to me until I'd finished the one that's now before it, and then it presented itself intact and was written down as presented, a sentence that came through trance --

-- (though if I had stopped to reason out an idea I might have said that his creator hadn't given him a soul to ignore, and that was one difference between a Browning and an Eliot, or a Victorian and a Modernist, etc, etc in other words my opinion would have been a simpler and more received opinion, since it would have come more or less from vague memories of places where I'd heard that Victorians were more religious than the Modernists -- and that T.S. Eliot was that thing known as a Modernist -- and Browning a Victorian -- and so forth -- and I have seen what these sort of vague crusts of received thought are worth, I saw it two weeks ago in fact, when I was talking with someone who said that certain smart people in Israel were identifying prophetic codes in the bible with computers and working out the messages therein, himself being serious about this as does one who knows information pertaining to the matter, but when I said, The way they do in kabbalah, he looked blank -- he had never heard the word kabbalah -- and he repeated strongly, You have to know Hebrew, no, you have to know Hebrew -- on reflection I felt myself like a veneer most of the time -- or wing of moth, easily obliterated by brighter fires -- but he was not embarrassed or extinguished and explained that these methods had prophesised famines. Which famines? I asked, but he said, Just famines.

I would have been drawing my conclusion more or less from rumourish info and would have not considered the idea of a concealed soul in Prufrock, even though Eliot converted devoutly to the Anglican faith in 1927 and was therefore, as I should have guessed, interested in the correct mode of spiritual perpetuosity -- liking the Catholic side of Anglicanism, he said -- for he possessed, in his opinion, "a Catholic cast of mind" (On Poetry and Poets, 1957).

Think of Prufrock's guilt, I could have said to myself. Think of that sense of sinning and being punished and of pinnacles unreached. "I am not Prince Hamlet," he says. My own memory of Anglicanism is mainly the paint splatter machine at church fetes along with the Sunday School teacher who confiscated my rubber kangaroo; a long time ago but the desire for vengeance lives in me, lives, lives, lives, which places me I believe temperamentally in the Old Testament rather than the New, though I did get my kangaroo back and so there was no hammering of tent pegs through anyone's head as per Jael, wife of Heber, Judges 4: 21. "Then Jael Heber's wife took a nail of the tent, and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died." King James version, and makes me think of E.R. Eddison, who was large on the violence and the smoting, yet more about castles than tents; in fact no tents whatsoever but rather stone and gardens, the hard and the soft, peg versus head, and much, as I said, of the smoting. Anglicanism involves cake said Eddie Izzard and that was pretty much my experience.

Then reflect that I don't know anything about Modernism besides reading bits of it, then reflect that I don't know anything about most things, forests, deserts, trees, ovens, etc, which reminds me of a sentence I saw months ago in a post at the good tumblr named Writers No One Reads: "Amongst so many strange things: the predictable sun, the countless stars, the trees that resolutely put on the same green splendor each time their season mysteriously comes round, the river that ebbs and flows, the shimmering yellow sand and summer air, the pulsating body which is born, grows old and dies, all the vast distances and the passing days, enigmas which we all in our innocence believe to be familiar, amongst all these presences that seem oblivious to ours, it is understandable that one day, in the face of the inexplicable, we experience the unpleasant feeling that we are just voyagers through a phantasmagoria" -- from The Witness, by Juan José Saer, translated out of Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa and the translation published by Serpent's Tail in 1990) --

-- end of parenthesis --

we shall each meet each

Say for fun that Browning's characters are migrating towards the Prufrock point of view, which is, I cannot explain myself, I cannot understand others, we are all separate, but they still have action, they're not Alfred standing still on the stairs, they still act, they have a kind of faith, or action itself (in Meeting at Night) gives them faith, or faith gives them action, or allows them to have it. The narrator of Fifine charges at the problem of doubt as if he thinks he's going to reach a solution. And does not, but the poem still ends with the optimistic concluding statement, "Love is all and Death is naught," which is the same as, "The soul exists" (more on this in a second) and "Hope exists, hope supersedes doubt."

Prufrck is charging at doubt as well, but this is so that he can describe his failure and redescribe it several times, not working towards Browning's soft positive conclusion but trying to refine his despair and prove it; Browning worries the question of soul, Prufrock worries the question of hopelessness: I'm an irritant, I'm boring, my legs are too thin, I am "an easy tool

Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous --
Almost, at times, the Fool"

-- stalls, mourns, won't talk, gets into the past tense and regrets peaches. They don't understand me, they won't understand me, I don't understand them, "That is not it, at all," they'll say, it's too much, I wilt, physically speaking, though my thoughts are active; I can't absolve myself of myself, I try, I will not be forgiven, I dissolve myself through different characters and ideas, I am multiple, I am the Fool, I am really a crab, I am Lazarus; this corse is a cage.

Browning's characters aren't free from despair but they have action, they move, they pursue, the poet getting them over their separation dilemma with the help of a presence he calls the soul. Everyone has a different point of view in Browning, he makes it an ordinary theme, but points of view belong to the material world, they're acquired because no two bodies can exist in the same space at the same time; meanwhile your true self, which is also your soul, can come into very close contact with other souls, and it can transfer the intimacy of itself to others through the eyes, or through hearts "beating each to each," or, in his later poem La Saisiaz (1878), after death, when the poet hopes he will meet once more Miss A. Egerton-Smith, who died in her hotel room while she was on holiday. "The next morning she did not appear, and Browning and his sister waited for her," explained Lilian Whiting, in The Brownings Their Life and Art (1911). "They sat out on the terrace after having morning coffee, expecting to see the 'tall white figure,' and finally Miss Browning went to her room to ask if she were ill, and she lay dead on the floor."

The words "tall white figure" come from the poem.

But, for once, from no far mound
Waved salute a tall white figure. "Has her sleep been so profound?
Foresight, rather, prudent saving strength for day's expenditure!
Ay, the chamber-window's open: out and on the terrace, sure!"

Then Browning the poet rearranges her, the words of the poem are searching for her again in the next verse, slightly refreshed yet essentially the same, the poem restates her, it stares twice, nothing there, puzzlement increases: "No, the terrace showed no figure, tall, white, leaning through the wreaths."

In La Saisiaz it seems Browning believed that the soul contained, or was, the true character or personality-essence of the person, it was her he was going to meet again, Miss Egerton-Smith. If souls existed (which he couldn't prove but hoped for), then there would be recognition and reunion, not of two inhuman postdeath energies (which is another way to envision the soul), but two people. "Grant me (once again) assurance we shall each meet each some day," he wrote.

The soul in his work is only theoretically a sublime substance; he treats it like a human being who happens not to have a body, it is described in human terms, it is addressed as if it still interested in Beethoven and Mozart, it can "Walk -- but with how bold a footstep," its supreme purpose was to go through experiences that are purely material and human ("Soul was born and life allotted: ay, the show of things unfurled / For thy summing-up and judgment"), it is not separated any longer from other souls by flesh and the privacy of brains, a soul can mingle with other souls; this mingling in Browning is a human noun, it is love.

How can a person be a person as we understand people and be also immortal, which is precisely inhuman, I do not know (but this is a consequence of the living trying to find words for unlife, an inbuilt conundrum, perhaps the other way around too, when one soul asks another, "What did you do while you were alive?" -- and the other soul replies with death-appropriate words that we would not recognise as descriptions of living behaviour -- among the living, the horror of the grave is described as the horror of a dark cold sealed hole when the real horror is that you are not in the dark cold sealed hole -- any description of an afterlife is necessarily dishonest, as far apart from life as a written representation of thought is from thought, by which I mean that it's made of a whole different substance), but somehow this refinement is achieved by undescribed mechanics in which Browning has unconscious faith, and this belief in the true, fixed self, existing somewhere, somehow caught in the body during its lifetime, propels the narrator of Meeting at Night across the sea in a boat so that his immortal self can commune with the self of another. Soul in Browning is a practical resource, like a locomotive, or like the taurine in that drink I had a couple of days ago, it gets you going, it's a useful invention, very Victorian. What is it that Prufrock's behaviour betrays or abandons, wonders Browning. Is it his soul?

beating each to each

Robert Browning incorporated the phrase "each to each" in more than one of his poems. When I came across those three words in Meeting at Night (a poem he published in 1845; I rediscovered it a while ago in the Cambridge Editions' Poetical Works of Robert Browning, published 1974, edited by G. Robert Stange) I heard in my mind, as if someone had pronounced the words, "I heard the mermaids singing, each to each" from T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock (1915).

Then I began to wonder if the word coincidence could be applied to the fact that Browning is in the middle of some sentences about sand, coves, waves, and beaches, while Eliot is mentioning mermaids, crabs, beaches, and waves, and that the action in each poem is the opposite of the action in the other one, Browning's narrator travelling across the sea and crossing fields to meet the person he loves, while Alfred J. Prufrock is so strangled by indecisiveness that he can't make himself step across a dry doorway and say hello to the women in front of him: not strangers, he knows them.

He worries about conversation, "And should I then presume? / And how should I begin?", but Browning's narrator is eager, he thinks that speech is less important than the material encounter --

A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!

-- the encounter will solve everything if there was anything to solve, this point of view more described but also more doubtful in a poem Browning wrote and published nearly three decades later Fifine at the Fair (1872) (and he brings up the same point in other poems along the way so might as well assume it was a constant idea). The Fifine narrator concludes that the important thing between people is the glance or active encounter (there's that Victorian faith in eyes, glances, and orbs, a British faith and not only a British one, "It was a fatal glance she gave him with her Aldebaran-like eyes," writes Hugo in The Man Who Laughs, as translated by someone anonymous, and Chrétien de Troyes was using the eyes as long ago as the twelfth century: "The eyes, which channel love and send the message to the heart, renewed themselves with looking" he wrote in Erec and Eneide, which was Englished by Carleton W. Carroll and published by Penguin) -- "to me, one glance / Was worth whole histories of noisy utterances," writes Browning in Fifine but qualifies himself, "At least, to me in dream," since the narrator at this point is explaining a dream of masked Venetians.

Fifine (two thousand four hundred and sixty-three lines), which is longer than Meeting (twelve lines), gives Browning more room to doubt and explain but since he himself chooses the length of the poem (whether this is conscious or subconscious, never mind which for the moment: the poem itself dictating the length of the poem perhaps, this fits, this doesn't: here, it's done, no more now, rhythm subsiding, finishing, gone slack, ended, says the subconscious to the hand with the pen, whereat the poet surfaces and blinks) conclude that he didn't want doubt in Meeting at Night and did want it in Fifine, and guess for one moment that doubt developed in him as he aged. Call it a theory: doubt began to seem necessary, he had written The Ring and the Book (1868 - 69), a poem two hundred pages long in this Poetical Works, small font, double column on each page; and it spends its length moving from one point of view to another around the subject matter of a triple homicide, encouraging the reader to doubt, since the opinion you are reading at any given moment might be contradicted later.

Nothing is ordained, suggests this poem: a small change could have changed everything, say the characters, people do not understand you, explains the poet. The elderly Pope who orders the murderer's execution goes on for pages reasoning out his decision to himself, the good, the evil, and the possible outcome -- weighing it out -- but no one else in the poem has the faintest idea of the work he's put in: they assume the sentence of death was the one-second spiteful careless spasm of an old man who was going to die himself pretty soon. I notice also, in Prufrock, that the reader is asked to believe that the women in the room will never know or care about the intricacies of the man's thoughts, instead they will be satisfied if they can judge him by his hair and legs.

to peruse it

[continued from the last post]


It's a nightmare of dying for the small thing, everybody stands there, nobody reacts, the player character runs on unconcerned, the non-player characters go on shifting their feet or bouncing on their toes, and yet the scenery the little creatures run through while they're living (call that living) is sweetly fresh, O the green slopes, O the high silent trees on their beautiful roots, and the little morsel collapses with a squeak, gone, gone, gone -- I once shot a moth and it flew on with the arrow emitted upwards for at least three seconds, distressing even now.

The wild joy depends on the presence of the second rock, and then an implied third rock, a fourth rock, and unnumbered other rocks, infinite rocks, untold wildness, limitless joy, freedom promised to Saul, who feels glum and impermeable, a brick wall sitting there, depressed in spite of David's singing and his lyre: depressed when the younger man came into the tent to cheer him up, his chest heaves, he folds his arms, he pushes David by the hair and and stares at him.

Lifted up the hand slack at his side, till he laid it with care
Soft and grave, but in mild settled will, on my brow: thro' my hair
The large fingers were pushed, and he bent back my head, with kind power --
All my face back, intent to peruse it, as men do a flower.

But my point, which I was going to reach sooner or later, is that ideas might come from corporeal instances, we hear a description of death and so we think of death, or we see something else and think of death, as in Proust, or we see death and think of something else, eg, spoons, letter-openers (one string of our internal web has been touched), we see a stork chase a bat away from its nest and conclude that the bat must be damaging the eggs (though why the Ancient Greeks and Romans thought it made them sterile I don't know -- there's an unanswered mystery) -- and so we have to wonder where this love of pairs comes from, we think, we consider, we look around, and the conclusion comes with massive logic:because we have feet, and how many feet?

Two feet -- which require maintenance, and which reward us by carrying us here and there, the brain understanding its situation and developing an innate respect for pairs as it feels those two feet moving parataxically, ie, constantly near one another yet not intimately connected anywhere along their length. The hip bone bridges the gap between the legs but it doesn't remove that gap. So we love pairs, it's very natural. Which leads me of course to think of the mysterious recurrence of threes and trios in fairy tales, and my brain is conducted to a further conclusion -- which is? -- that in the past we must have had three legs, and developed a love of threes, and either jolted across the earth like mobile tripods on three staffs or else rolled like the triskelion in the story that one character tells the others in Christina Stead's Salzburg Tales. Possibly a fossil record of this somewhere, quint-limbed in the lava.

leaping from rock to rock

"Pairs," I say, "pairing," I say, thinking back to the end of my last post, and then I wonder if all ideas come from the physical world; something is heard, something is seen, and an idea comes afterwards. Each sense a reef and the wilt and sprout of coral. Perhaps people like to put two remarks together for emphasis, to make each one seem stronger and more influential than a single remark on its own -- each friend draws attention to its neighbour; together they're a larger target, better fighters, more thuggish, four fists instead of two; and on some occasions they can make a singsong --

The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low.

-- writes Robert Browning in Meeting at Night, putting asymmetry inside the possible symmetry of the first noun-pair, first one adjective, grey, then two, long and black then another rearrangement in the next line, making little sonic upticks with the letter L; and so he keeps the reading citizens awake with his irregularity -- or perhaps the writer of the hypothetical pair puts the phrases together to create a frisson when the two disagree (those two sentences in the Hangover Heaven advertisement, for instance: such close friends and yet they fight) or for the pleasure of creating a suggestive lacuna, which may or may not be filled invisibly by an association (which might depend on a single connective noun, adjective, verb, or occurrence, as in W.G. Sebald's poem Poor Summer in Franconia, which has been translated, for the book Across the Land and the Water, by Iain Galbraith, who writes these three lines, "In the afternoon / my crazy grandfather / torches the fields," followed by this new verse, "My last aspirin / dissolves gently / in a glass," the two scenes, one large-scale one small-scale, connected by things dissolving, burning, and disintegrating (and containing, like two parentheses, everything in the middle ground, which I will imagine is disintegrating sympathetically as well -- the world in other words, is irresistibly getting away from you -- O --)) or by the expectations of the reader. And the singsong itself is a habit and a pleasure for many.

The biblical David in Browning's Saul tells the sad King that "leaping from rock to rock" is one of the "wild joys of living" and I notice that he doesn't say, "from one rock to another rock," or "from rock one to rock two" -- does not tell us that "rock" in each instance means a different rock -- instead he lets us know through the certain ordinary phrasing of this absence (from x to x, he says, a shorthand so embedded in the English language that it must have come to him automatically; it has to be an agreed-upon group-thing because it omits a significant piece of information yet he is confident that the reader will fill the gap without his help) -- that there are two rocks, and that the person is not leaping from the same rock to the same rock, or in other words just prancing or bouncing up and down the way the night elf women do in World of Warcraft, bouncing lightly on their toes when they have nothing else to do, and visible sometimes doing this, through doorways, and out of the corner of your eye, mysteriously unmotivated by anything except what you imagine to be boredom and childishness, -- childishness, even though they are grown women and capable of fighting demons, wizards, ogres, and the magical embodiments of water, wind, fire, and earth, as we so often see in our travels across Azeroth and other planets: those monsters they fight, the otherworldly powers in the shapes of whirlwinds with burning eyes, fire-spirits wearing shackles on their wrists, and also the ordinary bears, wolves, angry deer, even the small harmless animals if she wants to, squirrels, skunks, beetles, moths, anything can be murdered, an idea that has been taken of course from the physical world, where, if I hit a squirrel with an axe, it changes forever, and so does the computerised one but does it die?

real brows turn smoother for our sake

Aelian's myth is the myth of sudden action, it is a dream, it is nature by advertisement, his strange bird takes the place of the child, his triton is the mother with the crumpet, his gods drive the car that is too efficient to be real, his stork is the sad customer whose life is affected by one primary misfortune, which is this: the bats won't stay away from its eggs.

[O]ne touch from the bats turns them to wind-eggs and makes them infertile.

The solution is a leaf. "They lay the leaves of a plane-tree on their nests and and directly the bats come near the storks they are benumbed and become incapable of doing harm." Aelian is revising Nature into the shape of a machine, with a leaf for a button or lever, the stork presses that button, the machinery glides into action, the end product appears, and the bird writes Nature a letter that ends with the words, "From a satisfied customer."

Swallows are faced with almost the same problem but their enemy is the cockroach. You notice in Aelian's lists of animals hating each other that the hatreds normally occur in pairs, not threesomes or complicated integrations of dislike, not the bat hating the -- say the dog -- and then the dog hating the mouse, the mouse hating the cockroach, the cockroach hating the bat, the mouse also hating the bat, but the bat not hating the mouse -- nothing tangled like that, it's very straightforward.

Nature fits beautifully together, for each reaction an equal and opposite -- and so on -- this idea sensed and extrapolated by Aelian in the early Anno Dominis, everything fits, and this is far away from the sensibility that created Balzac's Paris, with its jumble of objects piled up, and the excitement of that jumble, though there is no reason why a nineteenth-century guide-book to Paris might not be as clear as Aelian, and a different author writing about nature in Aelian's time might make the trees and animals sound like Paris in Balzac, with its clotted alleyways, small rooms, astonishing secrets up wooden stairwells, etc, all of this understood as the rugged forest path, the tree bole, the white maggots hugging in a corpse, and so forth, long ago, in the early Anno Dominis.

If you can state your problem in the Aelian universe you will be provided with a solution. Then the problem becomes, how do I describe the problem? Simple problems are the best. To state is to ask the universe a question, the universe sends back an answer, eg, celery leaves for cockroaches if you are a swallow. "Therefore the mother-birds protect their chicks with celery leaves and hence the cockroaches cannot reach them." A book is a problem for the author, the answer is sometimes first-person narration, or the right character, and Robert Browning on the opening page of Sordello says that dead people are useful when you are a poet looking for characters to carry your theme.

Confess now, poets know the dragnet's trick,
Catching the dead, if fate denies the quick,
And shaming her; 't is not for fate to choose
Silence or song because she can refuse
Real eyes to glisten more, real hearts to ache
Less oft, real brows turn smoother for our sake:
I have experienced something of her spite;
But there 's a realm wherein she has no right
And I have many lovers.

The city of Las Vegas, where I live, looked for a way to advertise itself and came up with the slogan, "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas," which worked as they wanted it to, the tourist numbers went up, though this slogan was not always the solution to that problem; in the 1980s they decided that they needed to appeal to families with children and hence the city built its themed hotels, the ones like fantasy parks, but now the aesthetic is nightclub, a little secretive, a little what the newspapers would call quirky, therefore the Cosmopolitan with its Art-O-Matic vending machines, and the towers of the Aria with its chairs like metal pigeons, so that I once saw a man sitting on the back of an unconcerned pigeon; he was wearing an expensive suit and holding his forehead in his hands as if he'd heard bad news.

But he was probably drunk, and for that there is Hangover Heaven, a mobile service staffed by medical practitioners who will attach an IV drip to your arm and feed you chemical solution for forty-five minutes, removing the ache in your head to some degree so that your attention can be shared among other phenomena and not concentrated there, on the pain, although when you are a child it is often beautiful, the way you feel when your attention is claimed by specifics; and they have an ad for this cure too, a photograph of a handsome man, mostly naked, looking in a mirror under these two sentences (Aelian and this copywriter are both under the influence of pairs): "The good news: you're alive. The bad news: you're alive."