Schadenfreude

Chaïm Soutine , The Table, Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris (ca. 1923)

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

Who, squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

I said, “Is it good, friend?”

“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it

“Because it is bitter,

“And because it is my heart.”

—Stephen Crane, “In the Desert”

There’s no word for Schadenfreude in English,

That feeling with which obsequious sigh

I thank the Fates it’s you—But who knows why!

Not me, that's skewered on the carving dish.

Maybe it's too frank for us Anglophones,

Much as we sense it in our Saxon bones,

Who likewise are reluctant to agree

That murder's suicide—with the wrong ID.

November 8-10, 2024

Opus Postumum

Woodrow Cowher, Unfinished Kant (2019)

1.      Stephen Crane

"Darkened his eye, his wild smile disappeared,

inapprehensible his studies grew . . . "

—John Berryman, “Op. post. no. 1,” in Dream Songs (1969)

The last thing he thought of at Badenweiler in their rented room

on the edge of the Black Forest, far from the Hotel de Dreme,

was, I'd like to think, wading in the Raritan River as a small boy, notThe Red Badge of Courage.

Every death is a sudden death, it seems.

"What a catastrophe!" said Henry James.*

2.      Anton Chekhov

"Chaliapin burst into tears and cursed: 'And he lived for these bastards, he worked, taught, argued for them.'"—Maxim Gorky.†

In their Badenweiler hotel a few years later,

Chekhov's doctor ordered a bottle of champagne,

as German medical etiquette prescribed for a dying colleague.

Drinking a glass, Chekhov murmured: "'I haven't had champagne for a long time,' lay down on his left side, as he always had with Olga, and died."‡

3.      Ça va !

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)

Climbing Table Mountain quite early one morning

moving slowly upwards through the drifting scraps of fog;

then sitting on a ledge, legs dangling over the drop

three hundred feet down,

he suddenly became afraid of heights!

Fortunately, he didn’t realize it until later.

That was very long ago.

Now as I climb the gray-carpeted stairs

past the Unitarian bookcase, Muggs (the cat) underfoot,

I try not to spill my mug of tea.

Ça va !

*"What an unmitigated unredeemed catastrophe!" James wrote. Crane was only 28. Cited in Paul Auster, Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane (New York: Holt, 2021), 730.

†Gorky on the mob at Chekhov's Moscow funeral, cited in Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life (New York: Holt, 1997), 599. Chekhov was 44 when he died in 1904.

”‡ Ibid., 596.

Thursday, November 8, 2024

Velocity

“How miraculous and wonderful, hauling water and carrying firewood!”—Layman Pang (740–808 CE)*

Though the handcart travels faster,

direction down is still the same.

Arrival's probability—

as it has always been—is 1.

No matter how you work the sum

(acceleration, kinetic

energy, our great momentum),

we evolved to devise the gun.

The changes in the passing scenes

don’t add up to a lack of means.

(Fools who dream of surviving Mars,

should swill their drugs in smarter bars.)

No sense wondering if you're good;

draw the water and tote your wood!

Envoi

    The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

    Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

    Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

    Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.†

*https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layman_Pang

†Omar Khayyám, Persian poet, astronomer, and mathematician (1048–1131), trans. Edward FitzGerald (1859).

Wednesday, November 6, 2024