2 - Orion Hunting

Winter stargazing, letterwriting and Randolph of Roanoke, Richard II, Wines This Week, Bruckner

Orion Hunting

"You know Orion always comes up sideways.

Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,

And rising on his hands, he looks in on me

Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something

I should have done by daylight, and indeed,

After the ground is frozen, I should have done

Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful

Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney

To make fun of my way of doing things,

Or else fun of Orion's having caught me.

Has a man, I should like to ask, no rights

These forces are obliged to pay respect to?"

-Robert Frost, “The Star-splitter”

Thus says Frost’s eccentric farmer friend. New Hampshire is well south of County Durham – 11 degrees or so, I think – and they see Orion for correspondingly more of the year, though I suspect the diamond cold is the same in each place whilst Orion hunts, his skates gliding across the ice. A cold snap has hit here. Its first blow struck at the end of a Campfire Saturday with the off-brand Beaver Group I run, the sun disappearing in an icing sugar haze behind the southern ridge. Now the chickens’ water system has frozen up, meaning daily trips with hot as well as cold water. Yet this is perfect stargazing weather (and fittingly, the next Beaver meeting is a stargazing walk) – no cloud obscuring the running of Taurus, with Orion in swift pursuit, outpacing his hounds Sirius and Procyon. You must tog up – you fairly regularly get weather reports saying something awful like “-2, RealFeel: -10” – and you must take care not to disturb the stars, not even to rescue Andromeda – but it is fine, fine weather to stargaze.

The amount you can see by naked eye, even under light pollution, is incredible; I am startled to think how little of the sky I knew as a boy. I learned about planets in space books, but never knew you could, at all times of the year, see them in your back garden: royal Jupiter, silver in his locks; burning yellow Venus, like a particularly bold crocus; shadowed Saturn, identifiable by his stillness, his lack of glitter; Mercury, covered by Apollo’s cloak, caught by a trick of the eye; and martial Mars, visibly red across all those millions of miles, the iron rust of dead battles streaming in space.

Another admirer of Orion, Alan Seeger, fell to Mars’ blade, fighting for the Foreign Legion in the Great War, who recalled winter on the Aisne in this wise:

Or the long clouds would end.
 Intensely fair,

The winter constellations blazing forth --

Perseus, the Twins, Orion, the Great Bear --

Gleamed on our bayonets pointing to the north.
 

And the lone sentinel would start and soar

On wings of strong emotion as he knew

That kinship with the stars that only War

Is great enough to lift man's spirit to.

This may seem pure jingo, but Seeger never spoke of bloodlust, and he surely knew the horror of combat. A pure poetic soul was his, I suppose, one that could see glory and horror and be affected but not stained by either; a soul like Kipling’s. What did he value as he watched Orion?

For that high fellowship was ours then

With those who, championing another's good,

More than dull Peace or its poor votaries could,

Taught us the dignity of being men.
 

There we drained deeper the deep cup of life,

And on sublimer summits came to learn,

After soft things, the terrible and stern,

After sweet Love, the majesty of Strife

Whatever the rights of a more current war, I must confess that I hope some such souls are in the International Legions in their crystalline trenches in the Ukraine, transmuting an empty horror – as war itself always is – into something transcendent, not by the result of their action, but by their presence, by the sanctification the human soul offers things of nature, in imitation of the sanctification offered by the human soul by supernature.

Randolph and Letter Writing

I am reading – in part re-reading – Randolph of Roanoke’s letters to Dr John Brockenbrough. There is, I am sure you have noticed, a recurrent desire – expresses publicly by writers on Twitter, for instance, or by friends in private – to return to the days of letter writing. I think this desire springs from many heads: social media is exhausting; the hand-crafted is valued all the more in the era of mass production; there is a closet intimacy in the folded letter; and so forth. I think, beyond a few dedicated votaries, this is essentially a doomed quest, in the same way that hand scything and a column of men carrying a cider tun as they cut wheat in the dying gold of autumn is not coming back – though in fact I think the scythe likely has a better base amongst the under-60s than the handwritten letter.

In part, reading Randolph, we can welcome the coming of ‘phone and e-mail – Randolph’s intense loneliness when at the plantation, mitigated only by occasional letters from friends (especially Brockenbrough), and the ugly and unreliable nature of travel then, remind us that there was no natural virtue to writing, nothing hand-sewn by the divine into the linen of the letterpaper. Yet Randolph was also lonely in Washington – quite understandably disliking most people except John Marshall – and we are the better for having his letters. Why? He is not always likeable in them (in the four letters of Brockenbrough that survive, this dear man seems to have been much more balanced and stolid). He is bombastic, hysterical, egotistic – though, by the grace of God, quite self-aware. His meditations on the Negro Problem are not always easy reading – though not due to any racial animus, but from a rather hardnosed approach, born of the experience of working a plantation back into profit, and even that (he says) for the sake of the slaves themselves, so they might retire in comfort rather than be sold to the “Alabama slave coffle”.

Rank deceit, surely? No. Randolph was a difficult man, but he meant every blessed word he put to paper. On his death, he settled all his slaves as free men and women in Ohio, on land bought by the proceeds of his estate and on the profit set aside for them over the years. We might know some bare facts of the legal side of this without his letters, but we need his letters to see the reality of a man, not like us, so unlike us – so alien in belief and practice – and yet so like us, and often – even if we should react with horror to the Peculiar Institution (as I do, and as Randolph did) – an inspiration to us by his integrity. He is the awkward, courageous man (the Mr Bates, to use a present example) that no-one wants around until after he has been proven right, and then all admire. He took up the lostest of lost causes – he found that Jefferson and Madison and Monroe were too keen on centralization, after all! – and yet ridiculed Nullification. We have this in his letters more than his speeches, because we have so few of his speeches (note his constant complaining to Brockenbrough that his speeches are maliciously misreported, to the point of active misquotation). What else? His intense emotion, the expression of his religious conviction, reflections on his one great lost love (lost, probably, due to the fever that seems to have sterilized him and left him ever after boyish in appearance) – his deep depressions, his intense morbidity, accented only by the black humour, literally of the toilet, of reporting to his doctor friend the fecund passages of his bowels – and, for all his avowed, and self-recognized, difficulty, a learned and practised generosity, loyalty to his friends, love of his country.

Why does the letter serve the cause of recording this imprint of humanity better than a Tweet, or even an email? I think emails might sometimes do; or blogs; or whatever. Yet the pained effort of the handwritten letter, and the concentration of emotion emerging from isolation, and the presumed privacy (that, God forgive us, we discard), and the limitation on edits, and frankly probably the poor light under which most old letters were written – I think these serve to distil the yeasty pot of passing experience and emotion into something finer, stronger, and better for the task of numbing our own wounds or purifying them.

Richard II

The play, not the man. This was this past week’s Digital Theatre watch, starring David Tennant in the lead. It is a fair production, nicely set, with good use of stage contraptions and balconies; wonderfully costumed; a very strong supporting cast (Gaunt/the Orchardkeeper, York, Aumerle, the Queen, Percy, Hotspur, Mowbray, Bolingbroke, Carlisle, and Salisbury all very good); all leading in, including the cast, to the pair of Henry IV plays by the RSC during the same era. (Those in turn partly lead in to their Henry V.)

The real dense meat to chew with this play is not whether Richard is especially sympathetic in the first half – Tennant plays him as pretty nasty, Ben Whishaw played him as clueless, Mark Rylance somewhere between the two – but whether he learns and develops, whether his final lashing out at Exton is rising to the point of virtue or merely a final spasm of the old petty Richard. I tend to the more generous of interpretations. The Queen may see any action on Richard’s part as a mere lashing out, but her point is that it is the last stand of the lion. The Queen is sympathetic in this play; she is not calling Richard to madness but to decision.

I generally hold with what one might call the “pacifistic” interpretation of Shakespeare’s plays (though it is not pacifist in strict truth), but here it does not seem to me to work. Richard may be an undeserving viceroy of God on earth, an arrogant one; he may discredit Divine Right by his actions; but the undoubted moral centre of the play after Gaunt’s death, the Bishop of Carlisle, still sees Richard as divinely appointed, and we are meant to as well. His Queen calls him to action in defence of that dignity. He so acts. The strongest argument in favour of the pacifist interpretation is that Richard here acts too late; but at other times, as with Lear, our heroes act “too late”, and yet are still plainly heroic in their action. The action, after all, is not defined solely by reference to the fruit, but also by the virtue flowing through it – and Richard, who previously bullies and whimpers and speaks on and on, now come to a point of utter isolation, is able to act and ignore stern odds in defence of the anointed servant of God.

Tennant does a reasonable job. He is good at pettiness, good at humour, good at antic madness – but he does struggle a little with the calmer, meditative, kinder moments at Pomfret. A more significant issue – in the formal not substantive sense – is the strange decisions relating to Aumerle. Here, Aumerle is Richard’s homosexual and incestuous lover, or seemingly so – which is an interesting companion to the play’s depiction of Richard as wordily effeminate. Then, Exton is in fact replaced in this staging by Aumerle, as a final Judas act after the betrayal of the plot to rescue Richard (which, as Carlisle has joined it, we know to be just). This may serve to deepen Aumerle’s character, but Shakespeare is happy to leave it with Aumerle ridiculous and discredited with his father, and Bolingbroke in the agonies of making up for his guilty by rushed forgiveness. Exton is a picture of the degradation of the state – a knight taking it upon himself to assassinate a King. Aumerle nephews, meanwhile, will claim the throne in due time – the whole thing strikes different.

Nonetheless, good.

This Week’s Wines

Just one bottle this week: a Trimbach Pinot Blanc 2021, just the basic estate wine. Curiously, for an estate (in)famous for the dryness of its wines – my wife, who loves Riesling, finds their Rieslings hard to cope with – it is really a fairly standard Pinot Blanc. I suppose this is because Riesling is an aristocratic grape, capable of a vast array of shadings – Riesling is Hamlet – where Pinot Blanc is a good and honest grape, ending up inevitably in green and white fruit with plenty of acid. Pinot Blanc is barely ripe apple and grape, and all the better for it – but this means that even a well-made PB only has so much range. I enjoyed this as a “posh aperitif”.

I did forget one wine from last week, and the story may either teach of the wonders of the human tongue or the folly of winetasting. We had a sweet, juicy, slightly herbal red with dinner; touch of the hedgerow and a wash of oak. I asked if it was claret. It tasted, to me, like pleasant midrange claret, of the type you can usually get at a non-exorbitant price. Our host said she thought it was Merlot – well, close enough! Plenty of non-Bordeaux Merlot are now made that way, too. In fact, after she checked, she clarified that it was a Chilean Malbec – disaster! Except, of course, that Malbec is a Bordeaux red grape…one of the minor ones. Is this a victory for the blind taste test, or a crashing failure? A lot of people are sceptical of wine tasting. Long experience teaches me that most people can identify flavours, with either less or more vocabulary to do so. Scepticism is, I think, largely unwarranted, at least where people are tasting in good faith (same with single malts). However, there is, for those of us not professional wine critics, a massive experience gap – you can have drunk hundreds or even thousands of decent wines, but that is still a tiny sample against which to judge something blind. You may literally never have had the style before – I’ve never had Chilean Malbec, for instance.

Bruckner’s Symphonies

The depth of my music theory and understanding, beyond listening to a lot of it and humming along, comes from Robert Greenberg’s entries into the Great Courses. He is an excellent teacher, but I am a poor student. Nonetheless, I have listened to a lot of music, especially classical. Today’s work music is Bruckner’s Symphonies. I often listen to Bruckner and Mahler’s Symphonies – more than their other works, in fact, and frankly more than other symphonists – more than Beethoven or Dvorak, even! I don’t know why. I don’t really have the language to explain. There is something in the balance of structure, musicality, and drama – here we have something advanced in range if not in quality from Beethoven, who was in many ways a pioneer more than a settler. There are just so many sweet moments in Bruckner – the horns against the pizzicato strings in #2, for instance – that may be showy but are, for us amateurs, eminently memorable and enjoyable. I recommend.