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Friday prose
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“I must make you one confession,” Ivan began. “I could never understand how one can love one’s neighbours. It’s just one’s neighbours, to my mind, that one can’t love, though one might love those at a distance. I once read somewhere of John the Merciful, a saint, that when a hungry, frozen beggar came to him, he took him into his bed, held him in his arms, and began breathing into his mouth, which was putrid and loathsome from some awful disease. I am convinced that he did that from ‘self-laceration,’ from the self- laceration of falsity, for the sake of the charity imposed by duty, as a penance laid on him. For any one to love a man, he must be hidden, for as soon as he shows his face, love is gone.”
(from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1880)
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A matter of life
That one I will have to mull over throughout the weekend and into next week to understand and parse and of course enjoy the immense beauty of the words.
Thank you, Harrison, for reminding me yet again that I need to read The Brothers Karamazov.
“For any one to love a man, he must be hidden, for as soon as he shows his face, love is gone.”
Well I’m pretty obviously going to disagree.
I do hope that LLAMA, DRILL, and the other friendly poiemaphobes around WMB will appreciate my posting this prose paragraph instead of a free verse poem today. This is not, however, a concession to their argument that all free verse poetry can be prose, and vice versa. It is simply an attempt to satiate them from bringing up the topic ever again. Which, now having said that, means I have failed.
HSK–sometimes prose is prettier than poetry. I like it, if that makes you happy.
This makes perfect sense. It’s all about how you define love. To love does not always mean “to feel tender fondness for” or even “to desire the company of” It can mean to respect, to defer to, and to act with charity towards.
I think he’s also speaking to the fallenness of man. “as soon as he shows his face, love is gone”. I think he means his TRUE face, the face that God sees. Those of us like to have the company and esteem of lots of people only do so through displaying a well-crafted mask. For some people this is easy, for others, hard. But the very thing that makes the company of others tolerable is the way we mask our true selves.
I’m always wary of a person who claims “with me, what you see is what you get”.
It’s too true. I work in a “medically underserved area” and I’ve got to say that many days my loathing of ghetto culture exceeds my love for its participants/victims.
Beautiful, HSK. It really captures the paradoxical impossibility of the second greatest commandment.
Chesterton said much the same thing, with less poetry but more wit:
“The Bible tells us to love our neighbours, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.”
HSK,
Well, Your rehabilitation is nearly complete my little grasshopper.
Your wise choice of this beautiful prose, if that is what it is, is nearly equal to my wife’s loving goodbye as I leave home to go out of town for an extended period of time. Softly she whispers “How can I miss you if you won’t go away?”
My reply is a lovely rejoinder “Wouldn’t you work out of town, if you were married to you?”
Distance does make the heart grow fonder especially if it is great and long lasting.
Your carefully chosen wishes
make no difference
to my fondest Friday dream.
Looking forward
to your Poems
I fret and sweat
What if….
If you never ever posted
prose as poetry again?
Would there no longer
be a reason to
gladly leave home
for long stretches
In hopes my wife will
not forget to fondly
miss me once again?
Miss me more
than I would miss
you and your Friday posed
efforts of hope.
Your liberal hope
of change that I
will after all
give up reminding you
of your continued failures.
YOHSIYAHU, (That’s a hard name, mind if I call you Yohsi?) If you haven’t read The Brother’s Karamazov, you need to do so. It’s a typyical Russian novel, so it isn’t easy. But a true classic.
We have to remember here that Ivan is an unbeliever who argues with, no, he ridicules the faith of Alyosha. (Rant: I looked for, but can’t find my copy of Dostoevsky’s book anywhere, so my quotes may be off.) I think he’s implying that even the most selfless acts of love are tainted. And that may, in a spiritual sense, be. However, when the Good Samaritan faced the wounded Jew, his love was not gone when it was revealed. “Love never fails.”
For those of you who are pastors or spiritual leaders. Read the Brother’s Karamazov, more specifically, The Grand Inquisitor for the best commentary on the temptations of Christ that I’ve ever seen. Again, Ivan is lecturing Alyosha, but he has great insight.
I would comment more, but I’m afraid I will be kicked out of the post.
LLAMA,
The quality of your poem, above, is ample evidence for why you continue to misunderstand poetry.
Love,
HSK
Llama, your poem would have made nice prose if you hadn’t hit the “enter” button too many times.
I do not THINK I EVER said that all free verse can be prose, and vice versa.
If I DID say that, I was wrong. But I do not THINK I ever said that.
I DID say that all WELL-DONE POETIC LYRIC prose can ALWAYS be turned into (excellent to good) free verse poetry.
However I would NEVER say that ALL free verse poetry can ALWAYS be turned into well-done prose.
By the way, I would not consider the selection you gave above as an example of poetic, lyric prose.
Masterfully wonderful intelligible thought-provoking deep prose, but not really what I consider poetic or lyric.
So, I would not even attempt to make a free-verse poem out of it, if I was Dostoevsky, which I am glad I am not, since he is dead and I am not.
Well, at least I am not dead until some callous poetry expert utterly breaks my poor yearning heart.
Most Presbyterians (if I understand correctly) will have a problem with the premise of Dostovsky’s Grand Inquisitor, because as the introduction in Milestones of Thought says, “The Grand Inquisitor promises man, as Satan promised Christ in the desert, everything in exchange for the one thing that makes man man: Freedom, this terrible absolute freedom of man’s will to choose or reject at any and every moment what his own conscience shows him to be a mortal good.”
Chas, feel free to call me Yoshi. Yoshiyahu is the Hebrew pronounciation of “Josiah,” (which is my name) so if you want to call me Josiah, I’m fine with that too.
I’m going to have more time on my hands after May 5th (my last day of work with my current job) so I’ll have some time on my hands before I leave for Air Force BMT on June 17th. I’ll probably use that time to finish the four or so books I’m reading at the moment and borrow my roommate’s copy of The Brothers Karamazov.
If even a fraction of it is written like the sample Harrison presented us with, I think it will be one of my favorite novels.
I think Llama and Harrison need to arrange a meeting.
When it comes to free verse poetry, (in reference to the Llama Saga) I can’t really comment. I prefer traditional metered rhyme, but my few attempts at poetry are and were nothing to be proud of.
I always figured that if I can’t write decent poetry, I’m probably not all that qualified to critique the works of others. My limited experience with writing however, has convinced me that it’s extremely difficult to write quality free verse, making it very rare.
For that matter, writing quality poetry that rhymes is a difficult thing to do.
Sometimes it’s just a matter of sorting the quality from the dreck.
But, but, but, there are still five more days of Poetry month left! The Brothers K is OK, but poetry! Surely it is true (as William S Gilbert had it):
Yohsiyahu,
I do not think you will be disappointed with the Brothers Karamazov. It is a large part of the reason Dostoevsky is my favorite author. It has well written, deep characters, a great storyline, and then periodically some character will go off on a philosophical tangent, but without breaking the continuity of the story. Dostoevsky, in my opinion, is one of, if not the best authors ever when it comes to combining great storytelling with great philosophy.
Harrison: Perhaps you are right. I AM poetically crippled. After reading your comment above, I decided to find out EXACTLY why I am so poetically crippled. This entailed a painful voyage of self-discovery, even into my earliest childhood memories.
So I HYPNOTIZED myself with a large flashlight tied (using an old piece of baling twine I had in the pocket of my overalls) to one of the blades of a rotating ceiling fan in the living room. It worked AMAZINGLY fast – why I had just barely managed to flip the switch on the ceiling fan to the HIGHEST setting , turned around to look at the ceiling fan, when WHAM, it COMPLETELY hypnotized me, with a DIRECT hit right between the eyes. It is quite effective, this method of hypnotism, and I encourage YOU to try it sometime.
So, while I was lying on the floor, completely hypnotized, I went ahead and foraged back into the grim corridors of my distant past, attempting to unlock the tragic secret behind my poetic problem (the problem which you so eloquently keep harping on and bringing up at every opportunity).
I finally found the data, but only after searching through about a dozen mental filing cabinets – the files are all scrambled and in a state of complete higgledy-piggledy, you know, due to the bizarre chemical effects of too many thousands of Mountain Dews and Hostess Ding-Dongs filched over the past decade from the vending machines at the feed store in town, while Roy (the guy who stocks them) has the doors of the vending machine open, and is cleverly distracted by one of my buddies.
Anyway, it seems that when I was but a wee lad, there was a particularly nasty gang of older boys who terrorized me. They were thugs of the worse kind, brutal, remorseless, with nary a drop of the milk of human kindness.
They would chase me down and corner me against the stone and mortar walls of the grimy alleys and warrens which ran through our neighborhood (Oh – I can still feel the sharp cut of the rough stones, cruelly gouging into my back as they approached, cracking their knuckles and spitting contemptuously upon my patent leather shoes – no where to run, no where to hide, no place of refuge, nothing, nothing, nothing!)
Then – the brutes, the insensate beasts would laugh wickedly and hold me with unkind hands, regardless of HOW I writhed, and pleaded, and tried to escape.
Finally, when the terror was full upon me and the world was whirling before me and my knees were buckling, they would sneeringly pull from their pockets and boots sheaves of POETRY, really, really BAD poetry, mostly modern, a lot of free verse, but some rhyming (and once even a butchered translation of Beowulf which I shudder even now to recall – it left me nauseated for a week). And then, I swear to you, they would READ it in monstrous torturing monotones, inflectionless monotones, lifeless monotones – lovingly lingering over poor structure, poor similes, pathetic analogies, the works! Once, before they were finished, they even pummeled my poor broken frame one last time by standing over me and reading a long boring monograph on Freudian influences in Belgaic poetry, written by an obscure European professor in the early 20th century.
It was horrible beyond description, Harrison. I just barely remember running from them finally, my very mind screaming, hands over my ears, tears of outrage and terror flowing down my face, my world shattered.
Well, anyway, after this mental excursion into my distant past, I eventually woke up, crumpled on my living room floor, with a broken flashlight lying beside me, a piece of twine still whirling enthusiastically on the ceiling fan, and a big painful knot developing on my forehead – apparently some strange side effect of hypnotism.
But it is GOOD to finally know the deep suppressed TRUTH about my poetic problem, by golly.
And to think I owe it ALL to you.
VS,
Llamas and poets don’t rhyme.
I’ve read The Grand Inquisitor, but never the whole book. I wanted to wait till I was ready. Part of my problem is I have a hard time keeping characters straight if there are too many, and I’ve heard that in this book (as in those of most Russian novelists) there are many. But it is on my must-read list, and I own it. One day it will come off my shelf and I’ll savor it.
I read The Brothers K last summer when flying to and from Prague. I’m not going to pretend like I understood everything, but it was amazing.
Dostoevsky is one of my favorite authors ever.
DRILL,
My apologies. Yet, I do disagree with this statement: “[A]ll WELL-DONE POETIC LYRIC prose can ALWAYS be turned into (excellent to good) free verse poetry.” Given all the special reasons for creating unique rhyming situations (assonance, alliteration, internal rhyme, etc., see the link below), one can turn lyrical prose into a bad free verse poem, but it’d be rare that it could be good. Free verse poetry isn’t random; it simply lacks end-rhyme and conventional meter. It may have other kinds of rhyming at play.
http://www.public.asu.edu/~aarios/formsofverse/furtherreading/page2.html
What in the world? I come on here to get my weekly dose of poetry and I find a .. paragraph? What is the world coming to?
Harrison: Thanks for the link regards rhymes. It was interesting.
Not sure we are in great disagreement except that I would disagree with your statement that a lyrical/poetic prose piece could RARELY be turned into ‘good’ free-verse - I would say always, or almost always, with judicious tweaking.
It may hinge on ones perception of what is lyrical/poetical prose; it is fairly specific to me (I know it when I see it) but I have noticed that people vary widely on this.
I would agree, however, that there are some poems that only work well AS free-verse poetry; due (I suppose) to the effects you mention.
Note that I never said that free-verse poetry (at least when it is well-done) is random.
That is, in fact, my (occasional) issue with SOME modern free-verse - it would seem there IS randomness in its structure, which is why I sometimes remark that a particular piece might work BETTER as simple poetic prose, probably after some tweaking - OR perhaps with a rearrangement of structure to something (still in free-verse) that I simply like better, as a free-market consumer of poetry.
I have ridden pretty hard on structure issues with (some) modern free-verse (on occasion) on your poetry threads, I suppose; I will do so no more, as that horse is dead, so to speak, maybe even long-dead, and in fact may have decayed away to yellowing bones, scattered hither and yon in the pasture.
But I think I have promised that before, and failed to keep my promise - when the imp of the perverse whispers in my ear, I sometimes go far far astray.