The Eloquence of Toni Morrison

Reading Toni Morrison's Beloved is like trying to make your way through a maze. Just when you think you see the way out, you're staring at impenetrable hedge again, feeling puzzled, even maddened, as she jumps around in time, offering only tidbits of a scene or memory she'll return to later, eschewing logic for poetry. But her sentences are always worth reading--and re-reading.

Here’s how Morrison describes Stamp Paid, a former slave who worked for the Underground Railroad:

"...sneaking was his job—his life; though always for a clear and holy purpose. Before the War all he did was sneak: runaways into hidden places, secret information to public places. Underneath his legal vegetables were the contraband humans that he ferried across the river. Even the pigs he worked in the spring served his purposes. Whole families lived on the bones and guts he distributed to them. He wrote letters and read to them the ones they received. He knew who had dropsy and who needed stovewood; which children had a gift and which needed correction. He knew the secrets of the Ohio River and its banks; empty houses and full; the best dancers, the worst speakers, those with beautiful voices and those who could not carry a tune."

I love the cadence of this passage, established by its many pairs of words joined by and: wrote and read; empty and full; best and worst. Morrison varies the syntax of the pairs: adjectives like "empty houses and full" (with that unconventional placement of the second adjective); clauses like "who had dropsy and who needed stovewood"; modified nouns like "contraband humans" under "legal vegetables." The many opposites echo the escaped slaves' vision of the world as having only two kinds of people, "whitepeople" and "blackpeople." Only one race was human.

Here's another passage that jumped off the page for me:

"Deeper and more painful than his belated concern for Denver or Sethe, scorching his soul like a silver dollar in a fool’s pocket, was the memory of Baby Suggs—the mountain to his sky. It was the memory of her and the honor that was her due that made him walk straight-necked into the yard of 124, although he heard its [ghosts’] voices from the road."

I love the alliterative s's, the silver-dollar simile that elevates a common cliche into poetry, and the mountain-sky metaphor that lets us know exactly how the man felt about Baby Suggs.

Finally, two passages that need no analysis:

"[The voices] had become an occasional mutter—like the interior sounds a woman makes when she believes she is alone and unobserved at her work: a sth when she misses the needle’s eye; a soft moan when she sees another chip in her one good platter; the low, friendly argument with which she greets the hens. Nothing fierce or startling. Just that eternal, private conversation that takes place between women and their tasks."

"From the night-sky they ice-skated under a star-loaded sky and drank sweet milk by the stove, to the string puzzles Sethe did for them in afternoon light, and shadow pictures in the gloaming."

Release

Slow for the sake of flowers as they turn
Toward sunlight, graceful as a line of sail
Coming into the wind. Slow for the mill-
Wheel's heft and plummet, for the chug and churn
Of water as it gathers, for the frail
Half-life of spraylets as they toss and spill.
For all that lags and eases, all that shows
The winding-downward and diminished scale
Of days declining to a twilit chill,
Breathe quietly, release into repose:
Be still.     - R.S. Gwynn


For our friend, Paul.

Artists and Spectators

We gawk and stare as the painters slice off their ears and down the booze and act like clowns. But we rely on them to make up for our own timidity, on their courage to dignify our caution. We are spectators in the casino, placing bets; that’s the nature of the collaboration that brings us together, and we can sometimes convince ourselves that having looked is the same as having made, and that the stakes are the same for the ironic spectator and the would-be saint. But they’re not. We all make our wagers, and the cumulative lottery builds museums and lecture halls and revisionist biographies. But the artist does more. He bets his life. ♦

from "Van Gogh's Ear: The Christmas Eve that changed modern art." Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker Jan. 4, 2010

This passage is from a long, wonderful article about Van Gogh: his passion, his suffering, his revolutionary art. It is as true for writers as it is for painters, and it makes me proud to be, in my small way, an artist as well as a spectator.

Submitted by Jan Tarasovic

Belief Beyond Reason-Malcom Muggeridge

"A sense of how extraordinarily happy I have been., and of enormous gratitude to my creator,overwhelms me often. I believe with a passionate , unshakeable conviction that in all circumstances and at all times life is a blessed gift; that the spirit that animates it is one of love, not hate or indifference, of light, not darkness, of creativity ,not destruction of order, not chaos. Since all life-men, women, creatures, plants, as well as insentate matter- and all that is known about, is, has been benelovently , not malevolently, conceived; when the eyes no more see and the mind thinks no more, and this hand now writing is inert, I believe that whatever lies beyond will similarly be benelovently, not malevolently or indifferently conceived. If it is nothing, then it is nothingness I offer thanks; if it's another mode of existence with this worn out husk of a body left behind, like a butterfly extricating itself from a chrysalis; and this floundering , muddled mind, now at best seeing through a glass darkly, given longer range and new precision, then for that likewise I offer thanks."

From "anyone lived in a pretty how-town" - e.e. cummings

women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

From The Gettysburg Address - Abraham Lincoln

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.


But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The Meditation of the Old Fisherman - W. B. Yeats

"You waves, though you dance by my feet like children at play,
Though you glow and you glance, though you purr and you dart;
In the Junes that were warmer than these are, the waves were more gay,
When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart."

We Shall Find Peace - Anton Chekhov

"We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds."

From Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan

I fell in loe with my brother-in-law the way you fall asleepin the car when someone you trust is driving--gradually, by imperceptible degrees, letting the motion lull your eyes closed. Letting, that's the keyword.

Look to the Day - Sanskrit

Yesterday is already a dream, tomorrow is only a vision, but today ,well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, every tomorrow a vision of hope.

- Contributed by Don Warner

So Small A Thing - Matthew Arnold

It is so small a thing
to have enjoyed the sun
to have lived with the light
to have loved, to have felt and thought,
to have done.

- Contributed by Don Warner

Time is the Mercy of Eternity- Kenneth Rexroth

The long sunlight is golden
On the deep green grass and bright
Red flowers of the meadow.
I stop where I meander,
The brook forms a deep pool.
The water is greenish brown
But perfectly transparent
A small dense cloud of hundreds
Of midges, no bigger than my head,
hovers over it,
On the bank two small frogs.
In the water are beetles
Hydras, waterbugs, larvae
of several insects
It is like peering into an inkspot
and finding yourself staring
Out into the Milky Way
The deep vibration of my identity
With all this plentitude of life
Leaves me shaken and giddy.
I step softly across the meadow.

Little Gidding- by T.S.Eliot

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown , remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning,
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall.

The Sea- By Donald Hall

The drunken waves argue
the same sentences
over and over, as if
no one will understand them.

Splendour in the Grass -William Wordsworth

What though the radiance
which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass,
of glory in the flower,
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

From: "A Few Figs from Thistles" -Edna St. Vincent Millay

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends
It gives a lovely light.


1920US poet (1892 - 1950)

From: A Ship Made of Paper

“The sky is dark blue and the autumn sun is warm and steady, as if promising that winter will never arrive. A slow breeze moves down the street, carrying the perfume of the slowly dying leaves, a nearby field’s last mowing, the river. What can the world do to you with its beauty? Can it lift you up on its shoulders, as if you were a hero, can it whoopsie-daisy you up in to its arms as if you were a child? Can it goad your timid heart, urge you on to finally seize what you most shamefully desire? Yes, yes, all that and more. The world can crush you with its beauty.”

- A Ship Made of Paper by Scott Spencer

Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
W.B.Yeats

From "Spoon River Anthology" - E.L. Masters

Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith,
The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one?--
All, all are sleeping on the hill.

One died in shameful child-birth,
One of a thwarted love,
One at the hands of a brute in a brothel,
One of a broken pride, in the search for heart's desire;
One after life in far-away London and Paris
Was brought to her little space by Ella and Kate and Mag--
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.

Where are Uncle Isaac and Aunt Emily,
And old Towny Kincaid and Sevigne Houghton,
And Major Walker who had talked With venerable men of the revolution?--
All, all are sleeping on the hill.

Edgar Lee Masters

From "Among School Children" - W.B.Yeats

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

W.B.Yeats