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George House wrote the following as a young man during his travels throughout Italy. The piece is both narrative and meditation.
The narrative is made up of variations on the 16th century Italian pastoral (pastorale), the popular form of poetry and drama that depicted the lives—often the love lives—of shepherds and other country people in spectacularly idealized, opposite-of-urban, settings. This “on the land,” rural life was lived, often for the benefit of city readers and audiences, most notably by two stock characters: the romantic shepherd and the naïve country girl, and often involved an insipid “moon or torch light.” I quoted George on the pastoral here:
George tells us this is drama in which the main part of the lover’s day is given over to entreating, sighing, longing, expecting, praying and serving. In the pastoral, when union between lovers is achieved, all of these activities begin to diminish. Love is always either increasing or decreasing.
All of this is so exaggerated that it invites parody of many kinds. In As You Like It (ca. 1599), when Rosalind and Celia flee the court to go into the sylvan forest, they not only encounter such a shepherd and such a country girl, but they enter into the pastoral dimension themselves, replete with truly dreadful poetry posted on every tree. When Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor escape the city for farm life in Green Acres (1965), it’s the pastoral life they’re hankering after and suffering from. At one farthest extreme, pastoral goings-on might morph into a stylized, rhetorical “death wish” such as we see below where, tired of life, the poet is sad enough to drown himself but too modest to tell us his age.
Pastoral variations here include one with a Freudian undertone—the tower that won’t stay erect—and the lover with no country girl to partner with, reduced to the un-poetic, graphic solo act. We also find an ode, rhymed and in 4/4, 4/3, 3/3 meter, in which everything happens minus the required moon. And the climax of the story will be, well, what he calls “neo-pastoral”—but more on that anon.
Along with his pastoral narrative, the author is engaged in a meditation on—a struggle with—language itself. At the opening, he is looking at his feet while working out the “feet”—meter or rhythmic pattern—of a poem, and ends up tripping. Language seems to him to be getting in the way of genuine experience, to be over-complicating things. He is at a peak of frustration with poetry—its euphemisms need to be breached with the starkest possible words, to shock us into reality. At the end, poetry induces in him a Sartrean nausea, and prose in a newspaper induces an emotional paralysis.
These twin threads—the pastoral and the struggle with language finally collide, in a be-careful-what-you-wish-for scenario. The author has been insisting on dragging the poetic into the corporeal, but he gets more than he bargained for when the pastoral lovers becomes real, right on his Italian vacation.
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Moonless
George Stillman House
What can I do but look down at my feet. There, I shall start as I look down. Feet. Feet walk. Metatarsal epidermis up and up phalanges—the Greek syllables creak and rumble joint after joint till the whole line slips under its obsure Asclepiad weight but the feet still walk, obedient to a complex biological mechanism, the exact nature of which eludes me at the moment. Much better just the smooth little e’s holding together at just the right length their tall, confraternal consonants. But, you see, there’s the problem. Words get in the way. I ought to have feet and I ought to walk, simply, unverbally, ungrammatically… but no, I? No. I’m forever sending down long strings of words—reasons, wonders, whys, ra-tion-al-i-za-tions—there, six of them, it’s enough to trip you. Yes, trip… I fall flat on my mouthy toothy tongue face, and my lovely words are broken like stringed pearls,
and I have to start all over again… diving and prying open those shiny shells, and fishing around in that soft, wet, gut. Salt water stings.
Reprise: He whyed his way to perdition
(to be sung in confused polyphony in any baroque cathedral currently available.)
He whyed his way to perdition
and answered the tide at three
and there drowned at the tender
age of—in the year of
our lord known only to god.
Walking simply, unverbally, took me to the park that night. Walking took me to the grass another night under gross and glaring stars, under the tower famed for its pendency. Look there, you wake up one cold Quattracento dawn, and your bell tower, your graceful monument to Him and the glory of your draughting table has sunk into the spongy ground, ruining your carefully constructed vertical composition, making the worshipful in the House of the Lord dizzy, and looking for all the world like a carnival fun house. Beware, Monsignor, god will refuse the gift, he will throw that woman from the 6th tier of your absurd wedding cake, and I shall laugh and wonder at the place on the grass where she fell, and not look up at all. But after all, and before all, I was heading for the park.
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They’ve built a gilt and crystal cage around some pincers used to torture early Christians, yet there is no gold to cage the baptismal fount, the gothic towers are unconfined. Why a silver reliquary for the bouclettes of the chambermaid of Saint Ursula and none for the Sacred Heart? And through the park I walked, my feet on the grass, my hands on the leaves. What do leaves feel like? If they’re close to the ground, they feel rough and green and yellow. At night the colors disappear, then there’s smoothness and ever so softly, roughness. And the finger goes down the center vein and feels the slightly abrasive leaf and the tough, fleshy stem and travels through pools of water. Now, to some people leaves are emerald and the dew pearl, or night-leaf agate or raindrop diamond. Foolish wordmongers. Leaf is leaf and wet the water, which leads to much less interesting prosody but to more truth. There, I’ve used that word. I saw it coming but I couldn’t stop its… its petulant velocity. Why, it’s enough to make me run to the next bush and put both hands on a leaf and my feet on the roots in sheer terror. A leaf doesn’t feel like anything. The sky feels like something because it’s too far away to put your hand on for very long. It can be thin like spring water or thick like lapis lazuli paste or rocky or soggy like ink wash or a sphere of ether studded with diamonds or a bowl of crystal or a dome of air which some English poet laughs at and keeps on building or unbuilding. You name it, that’s what the sky feels like to somebody.
Lerici 20 Aug. I sit on a rock, by the sea: stupid pretension.
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…Green like the center of a bush, moonlessness. Here’s another thing: not only do I have feet, do I have hands, do I have eyes, do I have a mouth, but I have between my legs a penis and two testicles. When I coax the penis he shoots out sperm—but it doesn’t go where it’s supposed to go—sort of like a devil without any hell to go to. It gives me a lot of trouble. But the best word jugglers do not, it seems, talk about what is between his legs, or they disguise it in all sorts of elaborate and really quite lovely metaphors—the tree of life, weapon of love… well, it’s as good a game as any. But I digress. Moonlessness—yes, that’s it—and the soft, ever so slightly wet lushness of trees and leaves, and the absurd little iron fence sticking up its staves, and the sounds of insects and my footsteps, and once and again between a cricket and a leaf-crackle the
voice of an automobile from that distant other world outside. Then—all of a sudden—or some of a sudden (the complete existence of a sudden has always been rather chimerical for me)—voices of people, just two indistinct babblings that sounded and were silent, again and again. And busybody that I am—or rather busy mind and aimless body… Dreadfully sorry to keep on correcting myself but I write these words that have been prepared for other occasions, and they simply do not fit. I walked toward the sound of the sometime voices and, peering through the foliage that surrounded a small clearing… Oh dear, my subject is approaching with alarming rapidity—perhaps there is some fortuitous digression I could hang onto… no… oh well… I saw a scene which to my objective sense was sort of a mixture of the Fragonardesque and Silenic—to my subjective Panic, which verified with remarkable accuracy of my prediction: the two voices belonged to two people, a boy and a girl, a male child and a female child of two sets of human parents—and assuming the mien of an unseen high priest at a green black mass, I watched them play at love. Today sylvan scenes are a bit more complicated: the vestment of the shepherdess owes its origin to Ship ‘n Shore and Playtex, and that of the shepherd to Sanforized and tee. Playtex lay on the grass beside the two as they sat or lay and Ship ‘n Shore unbuttoned, and ivy league Sanforized was quite forgotten on the grass. I watched their hands touching, caressing each other’s bare and breathing skin, and the sweat of love, or the wet of grass reflecting the light of the distant street lamp in lieu of moon or torch light on their rose and golden bodies. Her skirt and her superego were wrapped tightly around his loins, and S.E.-Lee still clothed in his—another new element in neo-pastorale—but
now Lee opened the door… through the open zipper of his pants, her hand held his stiff hot penis—the shepherd’s phallus then… His sperm didn’t go where it was supposed to, either—the white sperm bedewed the grass. Wendy in the grass alas. Will he cum again? Oh, never more. I walked away, clutching in my hands the leaves torn off at the cuming—I turned around, leaving the shepherd and his would-be mate on the grass by the sea of sperm. They, no doubt, stayed there forever, behind or before countless mountaintops and wooded parks—and they were turned to stone, with an identifying dedicated plaque, a roost for pigeons and a tower for squealing, scrambling children.
Poets: write odes in your masturbation fantasies. Sing me a song of Single Night.
Night above the Single Starry,
Green and golden Pastorale.
Never Seas of Moonful Splendor,
On the lovely litorale.
I shall drop my white dress tie
the laughing man find it
and slice it with his butcher knife
The while he laughs behind it.
I swam the black lagoon—
And still there was no moon.
Notice to reader: this next line planned in dimeters obviously needs a lacuna—therefore in the interest of avoiding impending nausea, assume that one occurs.
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It is difficult to understand the strangely moving power of the death of Marilyn Monroe. I have read the liquid prose of the Italian giornale.
You really must forgive me, I can’t write any more—my left hand has, with a will quite its own, grabbed the remaining pages of this notebook, and just won’t open it. Some sort of temporary paralysis, no doubt.
The End
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Note: Last month in Scene4, George went to Morocco.
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