Sketches from the Campagna: The Chickens

One morning the sky was especially blue, and the lawyer decided he wanted chickens. Actually he had always wanted chickens, but now that his new house had space for a henhouse he could finally have some, and eat fresh eggs whenever he wanted. When he arrived at the office the first thing he did was make a couple phone calls; when he came home for one o'clock dinner he announced that he was buying chickens, that a hired man was coming over on Thursday to put together a nice henhouse, and soon they'd be eating fresh eggs.

His wife was delighted and began dreaming aloud of all the wonders she could cook up with fresh eggs, and laughed with triumphant derision at the store-bought eggs that they wouldn't be eating much longer. The tall, skinny boy twisted up his face and laughed at the idea of chickens, and the little girl clapped her hands in oblivious joy.

That Thursday the workman came. The lawyer took the day off to supervise, standing in the sun and dust, directing the old man as needed. There was a terrible wind blowing, and the palms shook, and all the olives that stood along the edge of the property wailed and threw their leaves into the air. By dusk the old workman had more or less finished, as good as done, and the lawyer dismissed him.

When all was done the lawyer drove back to his office and made another call, this time to a chicken farmer. He greeted the old farmer over the phone with extravagant courtesy, inquired after the price of a few good layers, and immediately set into bargaining. The farmer had little patience for it and invited him to come tomorrow, and then bid him good night and hung up. The lawyer was not offended; he was too pleased in his handiwork to feel resentful. He had knocked the price down a considerable number of lire, he was sure, and anyway he'd be eating fresh eggs within a few days. The next morning he went to see the chicken farmer on the latter's little holding in Marausa. When he arrived he parked his car on the potholed street and called to the farmer's son, who was just snapping up the kickstand of his Vespa to leave, to open the gate. He was a big hulking boy in his late twenties, wearing a mustache and a shiny jacket; there was a piece of flesh missing from under his eye, as though scooped out like a morsel from a block of cheese. The son obliged silently, and the lawyer made his way to the farmhouse, where the chicken farmer greeted him without wasting much breath and showed him what chickens he had for sale.

The lawyer walked down the short corridor of the barn, stroking his chin and hmming and scratching meditatively at his belly. He wanted big ones, he said, nice big fat ones to lay nice big eggs. He pointed to a great lethargic black hen on a top shelf; the farmer chuckled grimly and advised against it. They walked a few more steps and the lawyer, a bit desperately, asked about a second one: the farmer said no, that one laid very little. In the end the farmer chose two good layers, accepted the lawyer's offer without complaining, handed him the chickens and went back inside, coppola pulled firmly down on his head.

At the lawyer's house everyone crowded around to look at the chickens, to poke at them and admire their fine plumage, and the lawyer threw open a window that faced the sea and proclaimed how much he enjoyed living in the country, what a good contadino he made. The little girl clapped and danced in the excitement, the dog barked in the yard, the wind howled in the olives, the skinny boy tried to poke the birds with a stick. Neighbors passing along the road heard the ruckus and stopped by the open window, smiling and appraising the fine hens that the lawyer had bought. The chickens themselves clucked and twitched and blinked their round chicken eyes.

That night at supper the lawyer took second and third helpings of everything, put away almost a liter of wine, and had two glasses of bitters after dessert. He slept like a baby, curled up under the covers, his snores almost drowned by the sirocco that was shrieking through the fields, churning the sea and bending the trees.

He waited in breathless anticipation all the next day for news of eggs; he checked before going to the office, again when he came home for dinner, and even called his wife that afternoon. Nothing yet. The lawyer came home with his lip a bit twisted, yelled at his son for making too much noise, yelled at the television because Napoli had beaten Inter three to one, drank too much wine at supper and went straight to bed. The next morning he woke up before light, and wrapping himself in a bathrobe crept outside to the henhouse. The wind had let up for a moment, but the air was cold. The henouse itself, mostly finished, loomed in the dark like an apparition. The lawyer glanced around nervously, then retied the belt of the bathrobe around his belly and unhinged the little wooden door. There were the chickens, their open eyes unnerving in the dark. He slipped in his hand awkwardly under the first one, almost embarrassed to disturb her, and suddenly the ghostliness of the scene melted into joy: he felt an egg. Grinning he thrust his hand under the other chicken and felt shell. He chuckled to himself as he turned on the flashlight he had brought in his pocket. But he stopped short, his mouth open in confusion, because in the light he saw that both eggs had been shattered in the nest, that there were bits of yolk along the wood plankings, and that both hens had their beaks and breasts specked with mutilated egg. One even opened its mouth to squawk in annoyance, and he saw that there was more egg in the bird's mouth.

He went back inside at a run to find the chicken farmer's number. He called immediately, not caring that it was barely six in the morning. It hardly mattered though, because the farmer was awake, having his first coffee after the early morning chores; as taciturn but uncomplaining as usual, he listened stonily to the lawyer's story and advised bringing the chickens back to the farm as soon as possible. The lawyer threw on whatever clothes he had on hand, and without his usual morning shower and shave and aftershave he seized the birds by the feet, threw them into the car, and drove to Marausa.

Light was leaking over the hills, but the sea was still dark; the farmer's son was just arriving home on his Vespa, the crator on his face twitching a little, and opened the gate for the lawyer. The farmer himself was outside smoking in overalls a size too big and his coppola pulled down over his eyes.

“This happens,” he explained. “There isn't much you can do.”

The lawyer was desperate.

“Well,” said the farmer, “we can try this.”

He went inside and called his son to fetch a saw. A moment later the big, broad boy was walking around the side of the house, not at all sleepy, with a hacksaw in his huge hand. Without a word he handed off the saw to his father and seized one chicken with his hands and laid it on a wooden bench. The farmer calmly sawed about half the beak off. The son grabbed the other one, laid it down, and the farmer sawed its beak off as well.

“Hopefully that stops it,” he said, and excused himself, flicking his cigarette butt onto the road and plodding back inside.

Back at home he explained everything to his wife, who nodded wearily because she knew of chickens who ate their own eggs. She was a country girl herself, and had grown up with all sorts of animals, and knew their vices. The next day the wind returned. The lawyer banished the chickens from his mind to concentrate on his work. But every time the windowpane in his office shuddered he lost his train of thought, and thought of the chickens and their vileness.

The next morning he went out after coffee with his wife to check on the eggs. There was nothing to be done. The broken shells lay on the floor, and the stumpy, mutilated beaks were covered in yolk and the clear drippings of the whites. The birds stared and twitched. The wife sighed; the lawyer ran clumsily inside to call the farmer. The farmer answered almost at the first ring and knew who it was. The lawyer explained in a rush, tripping over his words. The farmer cleared his throat.

“I knew it. When a chicken gets the taste of its own blood in its mouth there's nothing to be done. It gets the taste for it and the taste never goes away. All those birds are good for is eating. At least they're young, they'll be tender.”

The lawyer and his wife sat at the kitchen table, sipping coffee. The wife suggested they take the birds to her mother, who could wring their necks. The lawyer started and knocked over his chair. If anyone would be killing the chickens it would be him. He had bought them, he declared, so he was going to knock them off. It didn't matter that he had never wrung a chicken's neck before, or watched it done. How difficult could it be? He wasn't an idiot.

Imperiously he marched to the henhouse, followed by his young son, wheezing with laughter, and his weeping young daughter; the dog slept by the woodpile, and the wife lingered by the telephone, ready to call her mother. The chickens stared with their round chicken eyes, twitching their heads. The lawyer bit his lip and thought for a moment. He rolled up his sleeves and slid off his tie, draping it over the unfinished henhouse roof. He slipped on a pair of garden gloves. Then with his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth he grabbed the first one around the head and held it in the air. With his left hand, not entirely steady, he held the body with his thumb pressing into the chest, and he fastened his right hand over the bird's neck. It twitched and squawked once. Then with one tremendously exaggerated pull, far too strong, he twisted and yanked with his right hand. The bird screamed: all he had done was pull all the feathers from the bird's head. A cloud of dirty white feathers floated toward the ground as the bird, now entirely bald, screeched horribly. The dog woke up and began to howl, the wind whipped the olive trees and cut furrows in the fields, and the little boy laughed and laughed.

***
Postscriptum:  I have been told that this story's scientific accuracy is dubious.  I countered, and counter, that this is in fact a true story, related to me by one who saw it happen, and that whoever wants scientific accuracy can find it easily enough in a scientific paper.

A Message from Letters From Caliban

Dear readers,

The output has been a little less than prodigous these last few weeks.  Allow me to explain.

Before I started this blog I kept much of my writing on my computer.  Computers, as you know, can be temperamental -- especially mine.  Out of what I imagine must have been pure spite, my laptop some how did away with dozens of my documents a few weeks ago.  (An IT guy can probably help, but that would mean a lot of work that I'd rather not do.  The lazy will inherit the earth.) 

Among those documents were two or three short stories and several finished poems.  Luckily, I had printed copies or rough drafts of most of them; the task of late has been to dig them out of file drawers and backpacks, transpose them onto the computer, and tidy them up so as to be presentable.  Don't worry, you'll see them soon.

So this week, if I can offer you nothing else, at least let me give you an idea of what the editors here at Letters from Caliban are reading.  The mood here has been decidedly modernist:  Ulysses (at the point where Bloom encounters the Citizen-Cyclops); the Cantos (having left the thirteen hundreds, Jefferson and Adams are writing each other about money and freedom); Isak Dinesen's Winter Tales; and a little bit of Baudelaire.  And also Tad Szulc's Chopin in Paris.

I admire Pound, but I don't see much that I can borrow (read: steal) from the Cantos for my own poetry.  That's not to say I haven't learned from him.  My poem "7 September" is based in part on Pound's explanation of Chinese characters in the beginning of ABC of Reading.  But those choppy, heel-pounding Poundian rhythms (pound Pound pound), such as you see later in Gary Snyder and some of Robert Lowell, are not a key that I can sing in. 

As far as Joyce goes, I have found in Ulysses a voice from heaven, a complex of word and feeling and thought and image sublime in its dimensions.  Only once have I ever read anything like it, and that was the Divina Commedia.  Faust comes close, but is too fragmented in its form and its music, not nearly as perfectly controlled a vision as Dante's or Joyce's. 

In practical terms, I have the most to learn from Dinesen.  At first I didn't like Dinesen.  She struck me as too artificial, overwraught.  But I've read more craefully this time around.  What primal power!  She is a teller of tales, the voice of all the legends of childhood - the Arabian Nights, Robin Hood, the stories from Homer and Ovid and the Eddas.  More importantly she is a surgeon and a craftsman of the highest grade.  She presents a story; but she has already dug deep into the weird, murky, eternally dark cavity of the story and found its mad beating dreamheart.  Having seen this strange subterranean soul, she returns to the surface story and dresses it with such elegance that the reader has no conscious idea of its primal force.  But she does.  That's the sly smile that characterizes Dinesen.  It's not the postmodern wink that promises emptiness beneath the gilding.  It's the opposite.  The gilding is unimportant.  There is a heart in the story, buried but beating. 

My dear readers and friends, don't hesitate to comment or ask questions.  And expect more stuff, soon.

-Carlo

To ride; to string a bow; to tell the truth

Dream of the Angel

I dreamed an angel in the desert,

astride a horse. The stars were piercing,
so many that the sky burned more in icy white
than dripping dark.
An angel in the saddle in a diamondbright night.
Arms bare, head wrapped,
black skin like rivermud shining with silt
holding a gun like a bolt
of miscarried lightning, his waist wrapped
in constellations
tucked in belts and piercing in the night. The horse was white
in the face, like its head were just a skull,
some long-toothed totem, some mask
fixed to four hairy legs
brown and clay-stained and liver and white
tail sweeping like the river of the stars.
And after he vanished, I saw only stars,
stars, stars
and a long white ladder where he'd stood,
soaked by a rain that I hadn't seen fall.

From a Line in Callimachus

Dawn came like a black horse.

I had not slept the night for fear of day.

Now the sunlight crept in cold
and I thought of you:

Your smooth hips, your horseblack tresses,

of how I might lay silent in your arms.
What more could I have asked than that, if not
six pips of a pomegranate
from your soft white hand.

The City of David

I never saw his city but in dreams

the tall block towers of his crownèd head

stone sinewed walls along the ridge of his arm

and between the spires and his hard bent knee (the foot

planted flat in the desert)

the valley of his beard, dark with pine trees

and white with smoke.

And the city, steady on his shoulders,

shines dully, burnished

though his eyes on the rooftops burn golden.

A thousand cobbled wrinkles run their maze

Palms and arches shade his countless courtyards,

the craggy men of his narrow lanes,

the pearl-fingered daughters of his dusk

and the Cave of Kings in the cavity of his chest.

דוד מלך ישראל, חי וקיים‎

 

***

 

Postscriptum:  I was in San Diego, taking coffee and a paper after a walk through Balboa Park, when I saw nearby a young mother and her infant child.  The mother was singing in Hebrew, to the delight of the child.  The song had only one verse, the line quoted at the end of this poem, transliterated as David melech yisrael hai v'kayam.  I didn't know what it meant.  Neither did a certain other young mother, who asked the first what she was singing.  She responded, "David, King of Israel, lives forever."

Welcome to Letters from Caliban

Generally this is the first page in a blog to be published. Not here.

My name is Carlo Massimo. For the record, I am the Caliban from the title – more of that anon. This blog is where I'll be posting my completed work, and any of you who write know that for every work you complete about a dozen embryos and half-constructed pieces lay buried somewhere in your notebook. The content will change periodically: expect a book review and an essay about poetic form in the next few weeks. You might also find film reviews or essays about matters not strictly literary (though I would argue that films are a kind of visual literature), or academic papers like “Dionysus in the Fin-de-Siecle.” Mostly, however, I hope to put up poems and stories.

Do feel free to leave comments or to contact me by email. If you have any questions I will be happy to answer them; if you have requests I will try to accommodate them. If you are a publisher I will invite you to my house for a bottle of wine, and we can speak further at our leisure.

So: why Caliban? Well, I like the name. It was also Robert Lowell's nickname, or rather Cal, and so I chose it in Lowell's honor as well. But mostly Caliban symbolizes my own aesthetic, my own view of life. He is ugly and monstrous:  am I not?  (Are we not?)  But he is a child of the Earth, a creature of flesh and dirt, and given the magic of the spoken word he howls and swears with it. I have howled; I have sworn; I worship the body and the soil in an age of plastic magic and computerized Prosperos.

Let me tell you a brief story to illustrate what I mean. Maybe you know a folk group from Ireland called The Dubliners. They happen to be a favorite band of mine. Sometime in the sixties they were invited to play the Ed Sullivan show. Now generally, the musicians who played on Sullivan's stage fit neatly into one of two types. There were the “good boys,” like the early Beatles, who wore suits and ties and smiled and wanted to hold your hand. And then there were the “bad boys,” wild and long-haired, who jumped around like animals and leered at girls in the audience and did everything that bad boys must to distinguish themselves from the good boys.

The Dubliners arrived at Sullivan's studio and started warming up for the evening's show. Sullivan came in to meet them, and was dreadfully confused. For here before him were not pseudoadolescents but mature men; moreover their hair was wild and bushy, and they sported long beards, and they were all wearing suits and ties. They were not the good boys or the bad boys. They sang about drinking and courting, and played with careful virtuosity. They wore beards like the bad boy rock'n'roll stars, and suits. They would never not wear a suit. It would never have occurred to them not to wear a suit.

These were children of the Earth, singers of the flesh and blood of man, who needed no disguise, no wild uniform. On Prospero's island they were mooncalves. Really they were Parzifals. They had no agendum but to follow those words of Herodotus, and later of Nietzsche, and Isak Dinesen, which are now inscribed at the top of this page:

To ride, to string a bow, and to tell the truth.

Welcome to Letters from Caliban.

The Romantic Past

I first learned the last stanza of Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” as a young boy, from an encyclopedia. That was some thirteen years ago; and for thirteen years I had misunderstood what Keats was saying. The last stanza’s sixth line reads, “When old age shall this generation waste.” I had always interpreted “this generation” as being the line’s subject, and “old age” as being the object. In other words, I thought the line referred to a time when this generation, having been given the gift of old age, would waste it. Only recently did I realize that what Keats meant, more likely, was for “old age” to be the sentence’s subject and “this generation” to be the object– referring to the time when this generation becomes old and loses its vigor. Upon reflection, however, my former, mistaken interpretation rings strangely true. The Romantics uniformly placed high value and honor on the ancient past: the very fact that Keats composed an ode to a Greek vase reminds us of this. This aspect of Romanticism is crucial: by understanding the Romantic fixation on the past, we can better place Romanticism as a historical movement, and better see how the poets and writers of its pantheon helped beget the future, for better and for worse.

The Romantic obsession with the past is a continuation of their veneration of nature. Rousseau, who deserves the title of progenitor of the Romantics perhaps more than anyone else, believed in the superiority of the society that existed before property, when man lived “naturally.” Oppression, according to Rousseau, was a recent development; and just as he escaped to the fields around Lake Bienne to escape injustice, so could man escape the injustice of tyrannous property by returning to his natural state. This natural man, existing before the taint of civilization, is also manifest as the child whom the Romantics adore. Children appear so often in Romantic poetry because their perception of the world is uncorrupted, their sensibility unprejudiced by social constraint. Man is “natural” in his childhood, be that the springtime of his civilization or the early years of his life.

Later writers, more strictly Romantic than Rousseau, also saw a connection between times past and the value of nature. We are moved by the mountains immortalized in Coleridge, Wordsworth’s “Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,” and the lonely moors of John Clare not only for their beauty and their immunity to human pettiness but because they are so much older than we could possibly fathom. In fact, the feeling of the sublime – best illustrated by Coleridge, by the Alpine descriptions in Frankenstein, or by the painted crags and storms of Caspar David Friedrich and J.M.W. Turner – is often conjured by reflection that nature is so unthinkably longer-lived than humanity. Nature and the past are inseparable: it is befitting, therefore, that the generation of artists who so thoroughly threw themselves into mimesis of and mediation on nature should come to venerate old age and the past with an equal zeal.

It is also befitting that a generation so obsessed with forces outside society should also have so much to say about the classical, pre-Christian world. Keats, after all, was apostrophizing a Greek urn, and figures from mythology appear frequently in his verse. Shelley paid homage to the “true Poetry of Rome.” Hölderlin wrote an entire novel, Hyperion, set in Greece; and although the story takes place in the nineteenth century, during the independence struggle against Turkish domination, Hyperion’s visit to the Parthenon is a glorification of classical Athens and everything that entails: the pristine marbles of Praxiteles, the eloquence and magnanimity of Pericles, the high-minded thoughts of Socrates. All of these are voices calling from a world as devoid of modernity’s unpleasantries, at least in the 19^th century imagination, as the meadows of the Swiss countryside, the rugged hills of Scotland, or the tumbledown shepherds’ cottages of rural England.

But Hölderlin’s enthusiasm for the past stretched even further back. The name of his protagonist comes from a Titan, one of the divine beings that preceded the Olympian gods. On the same note, Hölderlin’s poem “Kunst und Natur” is a denunciation of Jupiter in favor of Saturn. Saturn, like Hyperion, came from a generation of mythological spirits that existed before civilization; Saturn was associated, among the Romans, with time and the cycle of seasons, familiar motifs in the Romantic canon. In the worship of Saturn, Hölderlin gives us a vision of man whose spiritual focus is nature, observation and celebration of nature, simple and without trapping. He gives us natural man. Jupiter, desposer of Saturn and giver of mighty laws, is thus the great violator of natural man. He is the property that Rousseau sees as causing man to live everywhere in chains; he is the religion that so revolted the adolescent Shelley; he is the man who, like Mary Shelley’s narrator Walton or even Victor Frankenstein, violates the will of older generations and plunges himself into misery. He is the generation of whom I misunderstood Keats to write, receiving the gift of old age and squandering it.

The influence of the Romantic attachment to the past goes beyond these poets. Romanticism had political ramifications and reverberations, not the least of which was the bold Prometheus of French revolutionary liberalism – Bonaparte, who dared to snatch fire from the gods of history and thrust it into the hands of Europe. Napoleonic art was Romantic, but also strongly neoclassical. We can imagine both Percy Shelley and his stuffy professors approving of a painting like David’s Oath of the Horatii; Canova’s tomb for Napoleon’s sister has the graceful proportions of the Aphrodite of Knidos, and yet we can see the marble woman as the girl sitting on John Clare’s lap in one of the simple ploughman’s love sonnets. The nationalist movements that followed, or revolted against, the changes in Europe ushered in by Napoleon all hearkened back to times past. The image of revolution in politics, just as in poetry, began to derive from memory, and would continue to do so even after the rise of Marx, realism, and the disdain for sentiment.

For this reason, the political adoption of the Romantic love of the past has proved a dark legacy. The romantic nationalists of Germany had as clear and unique an image of natural man and the natural past as had Rousseau and Wordsworth. This in itself was nothing to lament; in fact, it gave us such classics as the collected folklore of the Brothers Grimm and the sweeping symphonic epics of Wagner. But looking at history, we see a direct line of descent beginning with these attempts to reclaim the natural spirit of a nation and ending with the torchlight processions of Nürnberg and the twentieth century’s most fearful and hideous scar. This, too, was the legacy of Romanticism. We see, at last, the face of Frankenstein’s monster, created in the best of faith and carried out in the worst; and we find it in the same history to which Rousseau appealed against tyranny, to which Hyperion turned against the wretchedness of modernity. Old age can be turned to; its lessons, however, can also be wasted. Keats’ line in the “ode to the Grecian Urn,” whether he meant it so or not, was prophecy.