Capitalism Works!

It was one of those mild winter days in New York, and Rick and I biked uptown yesterday to the George Washington Bridge, stopping at the "Little Red Lighthouse." The lighthouse has always been a beckoning sight in summer when I was out on the river kayaking, so I was happy to get up close.

Rick is constitutionally unable to pass a supermarket or a greengrocer without stopping, and Fairway, ("like no other market") at 125th on the river, operates like a magnet on him. "There's no room in the refrigerator or freezer," I said. "We only needed tea and cream," he countered. We parked our bikes outside, just across from this outdoor display.

Fairway is huge, though not like the supermarkets I grew up with in the heartland. Saturday afternoon shopping at Fairway is torture, with people descending from near and far to shop, and the narrow aisles clogged with shopping carts. Mid-afternoon on Thursday it almost seems empty. Fairway uptown has an ingenious way of keeping cold all the products that require refrigeration. In place of freezers, there is a large "cold room," and everything from cold cuts to milk and orange juice are simply displayed on wire racks.

As soon as I enter the cold room I am always taken aback not only at the sheer abundance of the displays but also at the variety, the "choice." I used to say to Rick whenever we went into the cold room, "Whatever were they thinking back in the Soviet Union?" Meaning, why did the communist bureaucrats ever think they could produce such variety with their five-year plans?

I work at home, so it is seldom that I am outdoors early in the morning, but there was a time when I taught early and had to be on the road before it was light. What always struck me back then were the numbers of people who were already up and working, the bus drivers and transit workers of course but, for the most part, small-store owners and employees. The Koreans and Guatemalans at the greengrocery, the Arabs at the bodegas and newsstands, and plenty of other Americans at the dry cleaners and the bakeries. They were up and working because people like me wanted to have their coffee and bagels and newspaper, drop off their shoes for repair, buy their lotto tickets, and so on. Plumbers were starting their rounds. When at about 9 or so the really big stores open and the "government" offices began their operations, many, many Americans had been long at work. In fact, manual laborers had been working so many hours already that they were having their morning break at a diner. At Fairway, they had never stopped working. There were all those boxes of good from all over the world that had to be unloaded so that we would have our choice of olives or bottled water.

 

All this is a preface to the current problems with the economy. Yesterday when we entered the cold room of Fairway I said to Rick, "Does President Obama have any idea how all these things get on the shelves?" I suspect he does not, for the simple reason that he has never had the kinds of jobs that employ most Americans. He has never stocked a shelf, filled an order, made a payroll. Ross Perot made a comment about Bill Clinton when he was running for president; he said the Arkansas governor should spend six months running a candy store. In other words, in order to learn how money is made -- not how to spend it. As one who has grown up with the Boomer generation, I know well that our tendency is to spend and that we have lost sight of how the many choices we enjoy are produced.

By the way, we did not stop with tea and cream; we got out of Fairway after spending $42.00. That's how the economy works.

Ash Wednesday

Goethe's report of the Roman Carnival festivities (Das Römische Carneval) ends with a section entitled "Ash Wednesday," a meditation ("Betrachtung") on the events he had witnessed in Rome in 1787 and 1788: "Since life, like the Roman Carnival as a whole is ungraspable, unenjoyable, even questionable [unübersehlich, ungenießbar, ja bedenklich], we wish that each [reader] be reminded of the importance of every momentary, often even seemingly insignificant enjoyment that life offers." Goethe was not referring to the religious significance of the Lenten and Easter mysteries ushered in by Carnival. As usual, Goethe brackets that out.

He wasn't comfortable with the bacchanalia or the chaos, much of which played out on the Corso, directly below the windows of Casa Moscatelli, the quarters he shared with Tischbein and two German artists. In Italian Journey (February 20, 1787), he writes: "One has to have seen the Carnival in Rome, in order fully to rid oneself of the wish to see it again." Friederike Brun, writing in Roman Diary (1801), was also unnerved by the crowds on the Corso. Unlike modern tourists, neither she nor Goethe had gone to Rome to get to know Italians or Italian life.

It was during the second Carnival, in 1788, that Goethe began to see the artistic possibilities of the event. Thus, he writes (Bericht, February 1788) that he became reconciled to the turmoil (Getümmel) and looked on it as "another meaningful product of nature and a national event; it was in this sense that I became interested in it, noticed accurately the course of foolishness (Torheiten) and the way in which it all followed a certain form and appropriateness." He thus made notes of the individual events in the order in which they took place, which he then made use of when he wrote what he calls "the essay" that was published by Bertuch in Weimar in 1789 as Das Römische Carneval. The colored drawings in the first edition (of 250 copies) were by Johann Georg Schütz, a Frankfurt artist who also lived in the same house with Goethe and Tischbein.

I have a reprint of the edition with Schütz's beautiful drawings (as in the illustration at the top), which I always like looking at, but the text itself is cold and distant, representing a series of tableaux. Nicholas Boyle has written that, within "this exquisite physical framework," Goethe makes no attempt "to incorporate an account of normal Roman life: the subject is exclusively the saturnalian behaviour of the masked and costumed citizenry and the brief culmination of the day's excitement in the horse-race down the Corso. ... The narrator himself has no individual part in the events, except as a typical and anonymous body in the throng: he merely observes this world and reports it for an alien audience to whom everything he says is strange."

Goethe does not do tourist reporting. Instead, he dutifully forced his way through the masked crowd, which, "despite all artistic intent often makes a repulsive, frightening impression" (welche denn trotz aller künstlerischen Ansicht oft einen widerwärtigen unheimlichen Eindruck machte). The reason for this alienation has everything to do with why Goethe was in Rome in the first place: not to experience the contemporary life of the city but rather the ancient world as it could be disinterred from the ruins. Thus, "the spirit," accustomed to the worthy objects with which one had occupied oneself the entire year in Rome, seemed to become once more aware that he was not really at home  (Der Geist, an die würdigen Gegenstände gewöhnt, mit denen man das ganze Jahr in Rom sich beschäftigte, schien immer einmal gewahr zu werden, daß er nicht recht an seinem Platze sei).

This reaction reveals again the gap between 21st-century expectations about travel and those of Goethe's time. The 18th-century reactions to mountains offers a comparable difference. Indeed, in the 17th century already, writers can be seen attempting to come to terms with what were considered frightful natural phenomena. Here is the reaction of the English critic John Dennis (1657-1734), for instance, at seeing the Alps of Switzerland: "We walk'd upon the very brink, in a literal sense, of Destruction. One Stumble and both Life and Carcass had been at once destroy'd. ... The sense of all this produc'd different emotions in me, viz., a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy, and at the same time, that I was infinitely pleas'd, I trembled." Dennis's reaction is an instance of what 18th-century writers described as an encounter with "the Sublime." Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, Kant, Herder, Moses Mendelssohn, and Schiller are a few of the writers who addressed this phenomenon.

By now, of course, mountains have become tamed, even for mountain climbers, lost any sense they might have had of sacredness or terror. In the same way, the Carneval, which once marked the beginning of a period of mystery, both in pre-Christian and Christian life. The image of the running of the horses on the Corso (courtesy of Goethezeitportal) in an advertisement for Liebig "meat extract," from 1897, exemplifies the way the once-sacred was increasingly familiarized.

Give me glamour!

Okay, I did not watch the Academy Awards this year. We don't have a TV, but I had planned to watch with my neighbor. Hugh Jackman was hosting, and that was a reason to tune in. He is a real star, and I liked my stars to be glamorous and not mouthpieces for political causes. Whenever a star tears away the veil between them and us and let us see how their mind works, it is generally not a pretty picture. Please, stars, stay beautiful and distant.

I grew up in white bread America. The Oscars and the Miss America pageant were the height of all that was glamorous for me. My favorite actress was Esther Williams. I was delighted to discover that "Mare Radio" (of Radio Bremen), in a series on beauty, devoted a recent podcast to her ("die badende Venus"). When I got older, I moved on to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. In recent years, I have practically stopped watching new movies. Whenever I read the capsule reviews in the newspapers, the movies promise dysfunction, depression, crime -- unpleasantness. Come on! Entertainment is about escape. Remember: "Spieltrieb!"

I saw Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman last December in Australia. What an epic: "Gone with the Wind Down Under." Kidman has always seemed very brittle to me, but her brittleness paid off in the movie, and Jackman was just incredibly dishy. It was Hugh that made me decide to watch the Oscars this year, but we ended up going to Connecticut instead for dinner with friends. Just conversation and good food and drink. Rick was happy to get out of the kitchen for the evening.

This morning I went through the various sites with pictures of the Oscar festivities. Herewith my Oscar choices. You can match up my awards with the pictures: Coolest Male Glamour (Brad Pitt, hands down); Coolest Female Glamour (Penelope Cruz; I love this gal); Best Dress (Beyonce, also a cool gal); Most Germanic Looking (Heidi Klum); Best Necklace (Amy Adams, an up-and-comer); Most Glamorous Couple (Josh Brolin and Diane Lane).

Then, there were some odd types: Weirdest-Looking Actress (Tilda Swinson; any argument here?); Weirdest-Looking Couple (Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick; and, by the way, am I the only sick of seeing SJP? What's the big deal about this woman, anyway?); Funkiest Couple (Philip Seymour Hoffman and his bride).

On this day in history

This is a cute link, though they missed Goethe's departure from Rome on this day in 1787, for Naples and points further south with Tischbein.

Aging Lovers

The Cleveland Museum of Art has a spectacular, 23-foot handscroll entitled Portraits of the Qianlong Emperor and His Consorts. I have not been able to find an image of the entire scroll, but it begins at the top right with the portrait here of the emperor in his youth (he ascended the throne in 1736), followed on his left by portraits of the empress and the second highest consort. Below them, in order of rank, are eleven additional consorts. The emperor had forty-one, but these were apparently his favorites.

I happened across an essay by a Taiwanese art historian that discusses the dating of the scroll and of the individual portraits, many of which were executed by the Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766), who became a court painter of the emperor and introduced Western painting techniques into Chinese art.  When the portraits were arranged in the handscroll by the emperor at a later date, many had already died, and thus the individual portraits in the scroll are based on models executed earlier, beginning in the 1750s, perhaps commemorating a promotion in rank.

The author of the essay suggests that the scroll was executed after 1776, when the emperor was sixty-six sui, by which time only 22 of his 41 consorts still survived. Indeed, the empress and the second consort had died already in 1745 and 1748.

According to the author, the death of close family members must have been unbearable for the emperor; the poems he wrote in this period reflects his grief. She writes: "It must have been difficult for him to confront the death and decay approaching his family members and himself."

 

In his old age (here we see him in court dress late in his reign) he particularly favored three consorts who were over 30 years younger and who had entered the imperial harem later than the other women portrayed in the scroll. The images of these three were rendered  in an artistic style more Chinese than that represented by Castiglione and his assistants.

The scroll thus represents the memory, for this once-powerful emperor, of "days gone by, when he and his beloved consorts were young, when, perhaps the most exciting moments in their lives were the times they were granted unusual honor, status and power, such as his inauguration as emperor and each lady's promotion to a new and higher rank. As seen in the handscroll, all of the sitters' faces radiate joy and satisfaction. Altogether these faces form a beautiful picture, which not only served as a source of consolation for the emperor in private but also represented a document testifying to the Confucian virtue of exemplary family life."

This commemoration by the emperor reminds me of Goethe, titan of German letters, who at the age of 74, fell in love with the 17-year-old Ulrike von Levetzow, while visiting the rejuvenating spas of Karlsbad in August 1823. Goethe went so far as to have Duke Carl August approach Ulrike's mother and make an offer of marriage on Goethe's behalf for her daughter. There seems to have been no outright refusal; the acquaintance with the family simply tapered off.

Goethe left Karlsbad on September 5, and literally in the coach on the return to Weimar began composing the poems that comprise the "Trilogie der Leidenschaft." Stefan Zweig wrote a memorable essay on the composition: "Goethe zwischen Karlsbad und Weimar, 5. September 1823" (in Sternstunden der Menschheit).

The love as expressed in the trilogy (again, the Poem Hunter offers lovely translations) is of a more profound nature from Goethe's earlier poetic passions: at 74 he was nearing the end of his life, and his feelings for Ulrike reminded him of all that was now past: his youth, his achievements, all that he had been granted in his life. The first poem, "An Werther," calls up this ancient ghost ("Noch einmal wagst du, vielbeweinter Schatten,/ Hervor dich an das Tageslicht"). The second, "Elegie," begins with lines from his drama Tasso that remind us of Goethe's ability to turn feeling into poetry: "Und wenn der Mensch in seiner Qual verstummet/ Gab mir ein Gott zu sagen, was ich leide." The third, "Aussöhnung" (reconciliation), reminds us that life goes on, even if diminished: "Und so das Herz erleichtert merkt behend,/ Daß es noch lebet und schlägt und möchte schlagen." Goethe was approaching his death, something he did not like to be reminded of, but in the meantime he was still alive. In the next years he turned to finishing works that had occupied him for decades: Wilhelm Meister and Faust. At the end of Faust, it is a young woman who intercedes for his soul.

Goethe in Love 4

I promise this is the last time (for a while, anyway) that I will post on this subject, but I wanted to bring together a couple of things that, superficially, might seem to have nothing to do with one another. First, Goethe in love.

Yesterday while working in the Wertheim Room at the New York Public Library, I took off some time to read another chapter in Heinrich Meyer's book on Goethe, Das Leben im Werk, which always offers interesting insights. On the chapter on Goethe in Leipzig, Meyer makes the same point of my last three postings, about the ideal nature of Goethe and love. Here is what Meyer has to say, in my less than elegant translation:

If Goethe had not constructed (aufgebaut) new passions, year in and year out, mostly with older, already engaged, otherwise not attainable women, even with women unknown to him or even with already married women, then we would perhaps believe his old biographers, namely, that he was really a great lover. But in reality he always loved most passionately when he had created the entire relationship himself and established it, as it were,  in his imagination.

Looking back [in his autobiography] he spoke about this as "moral sensuousness" [sittliche Sinnlichkeit], that is, in Goethe's terminology ... a spiritual [geistige], intellectual sensuousness appropriate to the imagination, thus a one-sided, not really physical sensuousness. This is indeed especially characteristic of poets.

In the next paragraph Meyer also made the troubador comparison:

Jaufre Raudel, the Provencal troubador, fell in love with a princess from Tripoli whom he had never seen, just as Goethe had never seen Gustchen Stolberg, to whom he sent love letters and opened his heart. Petrarch had his Laura, Dante his Beatrice.

Though it is very difficult to get into the mind of people from the 18th century, Goethe's poetic allegiances again reveal something about him and about the "moral" (sittliche) milieu in which he lived, one much different from ours.

The two pictures from Pakistan touched me, showing as they do people venturing out of traditional ways to make a living or to love. They are from Big Picture, and they appeared on the site the same day that the government of Pakistan announced it would accept Islamic sharia law to be implemented in its Swat Valley region. This was part of a truce (i.e., capitulation) with local Taliban leaders, who had been burning scores of girl's schools and banning many forms of entertainment. 

The balloon seller in Islamabad is trying to make a little money by taking advantage of an undoubtedly small market niche. Valentine's Day in Pakistan! Who would have guessed? Of course, this is one livelihood the Taliban will try to do away with and, no doubt, do away with love as well.

(There was a period in my childhood when my family fell on hard times and my father worked as a salesman. He was temperamentally unsuited to the work, but he did it anyway, because it had to be done. Thus I have always had a spot in my heart for small-scale businessmen, whom you can see, if you look around you, even here in Manhattan. They all seem to be middle-aged and have an incipient pot belly and are doing this unforgiving work because there is someone at home with whom they once fell in love and vowed to love and cherish for the rest of their lives.)

The other picture, according to the caption on Big Picture, is of Pervez Chachar and his wife, Humera Kambo, in a makeshift room in police HQ in Karachi: "After falling in love and marrying without their families' permission, the newlyweds (from rival tribes) dare not venture out of the police station as they fear their families will hunt them down and kill them to preserve the families' honor."

The image of Jaufre Raudel is from a site called "Andaluz Cabizbajo." Link to it for some cool music!

Goethe in Love 3

In the past two postings I have discussed the connection between Goethe's love poetry and his love for certain women. There was not one woman who served as Goethe's inspiration, as in the case of Callimachus, Petrarch, Shakespeare, who devoted large numbers of poems to a single woman. I also indicated that the love or passion felt for those women was of an idealized sort. The troubadors and trouveres of France and the German Minnesingers made a profession of expressing unrequited love. Such wonderful names the Provencal poets had: Marcabru, Jaufré Rudel, Bernart de Ventadorn, Bertran de Born, Thibaut de Champagne. And of course the supreme German: Walter von der Vogelweide (pictured here from Codex Manesse).

Back in graduate school I wrote a paper on the German Minnesang poet Heinrich von Morungen (d. 1220), whose lyrics have an almost modern complexity. Here are a few lines from the poem I love best:

Mirst geschên als eime kindelîne,

daz sîn schônez bilde in eime glase ersach

unde grief dar nâch sîn selbes schîne

sô vil biz daz ez den spiegel gar zerbrch.

dô wart al sîn wünne ein leitlich ungemach.

alsô dâchte ich iemer frô ze sîne,

dô'ch gesach die lieben frouwen mîne,

von der mir bî liebe leides vil geschah.

(Here is the translation by Fred Goldin, with whom I had the good fortune to study medieval literature: "It has gone with me as with a child/ that saw its beautiful image in a mirror/ and reached for its own reflection so/ often till it broke the mirror to pieces;/ then its contentment turned into a great unrest./ So I, once, thought I would live in continual joy/ when I set my eyes on my beloved lady,/ through whom, besides some pleasure, I have felt much pain."

All this is a preface to talking about Goethe in love and distinguishing him from us moderns. His love poetry is an indication of his indebtedness to an earlier philosophic and poetic inheritance. Love was a many-sided phenomenon, as Diotima (here in the self-presentation of the Polish poet Jadwiga Luszczewska, 1834-1908) informed us, moving from romantic, physical love to intellectual longing and including several stages in between.  The dignity once given to the subject is indicated by Greek terminology: eros, philia, agape. I like very much what Steven Marx has written about an aspect of Diotima's discourse: "the succeeding generations we procreate are like the recurrent memories of a real experience lost to time. Each generates the future in hopes of recapturing the past. Remembering, we approach, but also recede from what is remembered. We, our parents, and our offspring -- lost relatives in search of the absolute." How ideal can you get, anyway?

In severing reproduction from passion, love has been deconstructed for us moderns. Thus we also want it to be deconstructed for writers of the past like Goethe. We want him to be a man like ourselves. Thus, all that foraging around in his letters to ferret out sentences that might reveal homosexuality or incest. But what do we have when we have learned the details? I ask this because of my current work on V.S. Naipaul and world literature.

I am currently reading Patrick French's biography of Naipaul, The World Is What It Is, and have come to the part describing Naipaul's relationship with Margaret Murray Gooding, a married Argentinian woman (with three children).  In an interview with French, Naipaul reported of his reaction to her at their first meeting (this was on the balcony of a 10th-floor apartment in Buenos Aires): "I was completely dazzled. I loved her eyes. I loved her mouth. I loved everything about her and I have never stopped loving her, actually. What a panic it was for me to win her because I had no seducing talent at all."

So, immediately, Naipaul's thoughts are of sexual seduction. Their first sexual encounter, however, was "a calamity": "They slept together, he had a quick orgasm." Did you really want to know that? Things obviously got better in this respect, because she became his mistress (he also had a spouse, back in England) for the next 20 years.

As his mistress, however, Margaret does not appear to have had an appreciable effect on his writing. Had she been instead his muse, a woman he desired but who remained unobtainable, a dimension might have been added to Naipaul's work that all agree is missing: "love" for others.

Frankly, I think Naipaul's work stands on its own and will hold up because it is really great writing (as I am coming to appreciate, as I go back through it, from the beginning). Still, thinking about Goethe in love has offered me reflections about the absence of "love" in Naipaul's writing.