The Dancer and the Dance: A Book of Distinctions

Notes

251 Notes Introduction 1. See http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/27/arts/music/27TARU.html. Cited July, 2004. 2. Willard Bohn, The Dada Market: An Anthology of Poetry (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), pp. xii-xiii. 3. Philip Pullman, “The Republic of Heaven,” The Horn Book (November/December 2001), p. 655. William Butler Yeats 1. In W.B. Yeats and Tradition F.A.C. Wilson writes, “the bird is the traditional symbol for the purified soul . . . and Yeats employs it consistently in this sense. One thinks of his manuscript reference to the ‘birds that I shall be like when I get out of the body’. . . .” In “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” the image of the “stare” is opposed to the image of the “honey bee.” (The word “stare,” which Yeats explains is the West of Ireland expression for “starling,” is echoed in “Two Songs From a Play”: “I saw a staring virgin stand. . . .”) Cf. “As at the loophole there, / The daws chatter and scream. . . .” Footnote 2 below suggests the meaning of honey bees in “Meditations.” 2. Yeats’ early poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” isn’t usually taken to be one of the poet’s more esoteric pieces, but a number of its details—the water, the honey, the bee and its hive, the color purple, the number nine, the beans—come straight out of Porphyry. Indeed, in the context of Porphyry, the repeated lines in “Meditations in Time of Civil War”—“honey bees / Come build in the empty house of the stare”—may well be ironic, even mocking. “The sweetness of honey signifies, with theologists,” writes Porphyry, “the same thing as the pleasure arising from copulation, by which Saturn, being ensnared, was castrated.” 3. In W.B. Yeats and Tradition, F.A.C. Wilson points out that, according to Thomas Taylor, Dionysus—who shows up explicitly in TheTower in “Two Songs From a Play”—“is a symbol for spirit in its descent into matter.” Wilson quotes Taylor: 252 The Dancer and the Dance Notes to pages 20­ –63 This fall . . . is very properly represented as a cruel dismemberment and a disaster, for life in the physical world is a curse. Dionysus could stand only to lose by abandoning his true nature. . . . In falling, the soul “‘becomes bound in body as in a prison.’” “The ceremony of cutting out the heart as a symbol of eventual resurrection,” Wilson goes on, “dates back to Egyptian funeral rites”: When Jupiter takes the body of the slain god from the Titans and commits it into Apollo’s keeping, the myth represents the rescue of the spirit of man from a merely material existence. . . . Two Modernists & A Beat 1. Remembering that language sometimes reverses letters, as in the cases of morphe/form or ciel/ceiling: An early form of “sparrow” is sparwa. sparwa / passer Take the s sound of passer and put it at the beginning of the word, so that it’s spaer or spaer —isn’t that close to sparwa and sparrow? Instead of pas-, we have spa-: a reversal. Language too has its dyslexia. (And this is to say nothing of the -wa / -ow reversal of sparwa and sparrow.) 2. In “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” James Baldwin rightly characterized such passages as “absolute nonsense . . . and offensive nonsense at that.” Like Elvis Presley, Kerouac seemed to express something like a “black” sensibility, but, like Elvis, he wasn’t black. At the same time, like Elvis, Kerouac was criticized (at times viciously) for being “improper,” “wild,” “anti-intellectual”—i.e., (in the racist sense) “black.” “There were people,” Norman Mailer told Bruce Cook in The Beat Generation, “who made a career out of attacking the Beats.” The ability of the Beats to survive such criticism depended on their considerable talent surely but also on the fact that they were, after all, white males living in a world which tended to empower and mythologize white males. The whole point of Mailer’s essay is to provide a way of empowering Mailer, and, by extension, other white people, particularly white males. It has nothing to do with African Americans. “I had tried,” Baldwin added, “to convey something of what it felt like to be a Negro and no one had been able to listen: they wanted their romance.” 3. There is a typo in Howl on Trial’s presentation of the text of “Howl”: line 9 of the opening section, “who got busted in their public beards...