Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 03/17/10

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Poem of the Day: Edward Taylor

Upon a Spider Catching a Fly

Thou sorrow, venom elf:
   Is this thy play,
To spin a web out of thyself
   To catch a fly?
For why?

I saw a pettish wasp
   Fall foul therein,
Whom yet the whorl-pins did not clasp
   Lest he should fling
   His sting.

But as afraid, remote
   Didst stand hereat
And with thy little fingers stroke
   And gently tap
His back.

Thus gently him didst treat
   Lest he should pet,
And in a froppish, waspish heat
   Should greatly fret
Thy net.

Whereas the silly fly,
   Caught by its leg
Thou by the throat tookst hastily
   And hind the head
Bite dead.

This goes to pot, that not
   Nature doth call.
Strive not above what strength hath got
   Lest in the brawl
Thou fall.

This fray seems thus to us.
Hell's spider gets
His entrails spun to whip-cords thus,
   And wove to nets
And sets.

To tangle Adam's race
   In's stratagems
To their destructions, spoiled, made base
   By venom things,
Damned sins.

But mighty, gracious Lord
   Communicate
Thy grace to break the cord, afford
   Us glory's gate
And state.

We'll nightingale sing like
   When perched on high
In glory's cage, thy glory, bright,
   And thankfully,
For joy.

--Edward Taylor

Yesterday a snake, today a spider. Not intentionally trying to creep anyone out here. Taylor's little sermon about the wiles of an arachnid Satan -- stroking its waspish enemy into submission, swiftly dispatching the silly fly -- is pretty potent stuff. It's worth comparing Frost's poem about a spider:

Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth --
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth --
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall? --
If design govern in a thing so small.

While Frost's questioning is more to my way of thinking about things -- you might read this as a kind of response to "intelligent design" -- I think Taylor has given us the more satisfying, and wittier, poem.