David Jones and Van Morrison, unlimited
Books and music. What else are you gonna do on a Saturday afternoon when the heavens pour down inches of snow, the roads are impassable, and nothing remotely related to televised sports and talking heads sounds appealing?
Much like the young lady of Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” sought the sabbath’s imperishable bliss outside a traditional church, I desired something more substantial than the standard Saturday afternoon gruel of sports and politics.
A frothy concoction of books, music, and coffee seemed appropriate.
Fortunately, the mail lady dropped off a fresh batch of pre-packaged prose the day before and I recently picked up a cache of Van Morrison used vinyl from his early 1980s catalog. That era of his career is notable because it’s when critics turned on the Belfast Cowboy for daring to express nonsecular observations directly (despite the fact most of his oeuvre, at the very least, addresses some form of spirituality or another).
In retrospect, it appears the gatekeepers of popular music were too hasty in declaring rock hedonism the New Religion. Before they could roll the stone of obsolescence completely over the crypt of religious belief, however, at least three mainstream rockers charged out of the crypt like a three-headed rosary-rattling Lazarus. Dion Dimucci, Bob Dylan, and Morrison, to the chagrin of many critics, embraced Western Christian spirituality in their music, ceding the commercial market to the snotty, adenoidal, gobbing nihilism of punk; the sterile pandering of corporate rock to perpetual adolescent libido (I’ll allow exceptions for Springsteen, Petty, Tom Waits, and several other notable performers of the era); and whatever dreck wound up on MTV rotation.
Selecting the music to accompany my reading was a no-brainer: Morrison’s “Common One” (1980); “Beautiful Vision” (1982); and “Inarticulate Speech of the
Heart” (1983) were dusted off, cleaned, preened, and ready for spinning. What mattered most in selecting the reading material was something that couldn’t render such important music mere background noise — as noted by W.H.
Auden in “The Cave of Making” — without overwhelming my chosen literary topic:
After all, it’s rather a privilege
amid the affluent traffic
to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into background noise for study or hung as a status trophy by rising executives,
cannot be “done” like Venice
or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly still insists upon being read or ignored….
It’s always a delicate balance.
Speaking of Auden, he once called The Anathemata by David Jones “very probably the finest long poem written in English in this century” and Jones’ In Parenthesis “the greatest book about the First World War.”
Auden was not alone in his assessment of Jones’ poetic prowess.
As I do every other year or so, I picked up some David Jones — only this time, I left behind the two previously mentioned works to re-read the criticism I had excerpted for an entry I edited in the literary reference book salt mines back in the late 1980s as well as the recently delivered Thomas Dilworth 2017 biography, titled “David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Painter, Poet.”
I have more than a sneaking suspicion I haven’t quite cracked the code of Jones’ dense, allusive, and difficult poetry, and I’m okay with that. With a little effort and some background reading, I can grok enough. Repeated readings help.
I do know for certain, however, that I hold his painting in the highest esteem. I hope I’ll have another key to the poetry once I’ve completed Dilworth’s book because the biographer is widely considered to be one of the world’s most knowledgeable scholars of Jones’ life and works, both visual and literary.
Jones was both a painter and a writer (and considerably more), much like his Modernist contemporary Wyndham Lewis and their Romantic predecessor William Blake.
I’ve run out of road this week. More to come.