It is in relationships that we discover both our depths and our limits, there that we anneal ourselves and transcend ourselves, there that we are hurt the most and there that we find the most healing. But despite what a crucible of our emotional and spiritual lives relationships are — or perhaps precisely because of it — they can be riddling and nebulous, destabilizing in their fluidity and ambiguity, leaving us grasping for the comforting solidity of categories and labels. The ancient Greeks, in their pioneering effort to order the chaos of the cosmos, neatly taxonomized them into filial love… read article

Johnson, Boswell and friends met for dinner at the Crown and Anchor on April 12, 1776. Among the topics of conversation was the evergreen favorite “whether drinking improved conversation and benevolence.” Sir Joshua Reynolds maintained it did. Johnson replies:   “‘No, Sir: before dinner men meet with great inequality of understanding; and those who are conscious of their inferiority, have the modesty not to talk. When they have drunk wine, every man feels himself happy, and loses that modesty, and grows impudent and vociferous: but he is not improved; he is only not sensible of his defects.’”   My experience confirms this. In conversation, the only thing more insufferable than a know-it-all is a drunken know-it-all. Alcohol creates experts. Otherwise modest fellows suddenly start thinking they know what they’re talking about. When one or more meet, arguments ensue, fistfights, bail bondsmen. Reynolds disagrees and Johnson replies:      “‘No, Sir; wine gives not light, gay, ideal hilarity; but tumultuous, noisy, clamorous merriment. I have heard none of those drunken,—nay, drunken is a coarse word,—none of those VINOUS flights.’”   And Reynolds responds more personally: “‘Because you have sat by, quite sober, and felt an envy of the happiness of those who were drinking.’”   It was the late novelist Donald Newlove who first suggested to me that Johnson may have been in his earlier years an alcoholic or at least a “problem drinker” (that anxiety-easing euphemism). In Those Drinking Days: Myself and Other Writers (1981), a meditation on the writing/alcohol connection, Newlove writes:   “Great writing about alcohol is an ocean without shoreline and I have a thick notebook of excerpts from world literature to attest to it, a sheaf of quotations to help me keep sober. One of the most stirring recoveries from excessive drinking was made by Dr. Samuel Johnson two centuries ago.”   To clarify that he is not issuing a blanket condemnation of alcohol or its effects – basically, not wishing to sound like a moralistic wet blanket -- Johnson says:   “Sir, it is not necessary to be drunk one’s self, to relish the wit of drunkenness. Do we not judge of the drunken wit, of the dialogue between Iago and Cassio, the most excellent in its kind, when we are quite sober? Wit is wit, by whatever means it is produced; and, if good, will appear so at all times. I admit that the spirits are raised by drinking, as by the common participation of any pleasure: cock-fighting, or bear-baiting, will raise the spirits of a company, as drinking does, though surely they will not improve conversation. I also admit, that there are some sluggish men who are improved by drinking; as there are fruits which are not good till they are rotten.”   I knew guys who were diffident dullards when sober and sparkling entertainers when drunk, at least for a short time, until the demons took over. Some recognized their transformation, drank greater quantities and more often,  and turned into bums or wet brains. Fellow drinkers deemed them weaklings, failed drinkers. Alcoholics are hard on their own kind. Johnson describes my style of drinking: “‘Sir, I do not say it is wrong to produce self complacency by drinking; I only deny that it improves the mind. When I drank wine, I scorned to drink it when in company. I have drunk many a bottle by myself; in the first place, because I had need of it to raise my spirits; in the second place, because I would have nobody to witness its effects upon me.’”   I’m reminded of a wisecrack attributed to Dylan Thomas: “An alcoholic is someone who drinks as much as I do whom I don’t like.”

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Here I pause to remember a forgotten poet who remembered a slightly less forgotten poet – a reminder that all of us are eminently forgettable, regardless of our purported virtues. Walter de la Mare died on June 22, 1956, at age eighty-three. The journal Poetry assigned William Burford to write a remembrance of the English writer, “Master of Silences,” which was published in the November 1957 issue.  Scrap that.   As I was reading “Burford’s” commemoration, it seemed familiar. I dug around and realized I had written about the same piece almost two years ago, under its true byline: William Jay Smith. In the same issue of Poetry, the piece after Smith’s remembrance is a review by Burford (I trust) of a Hart Crane biography. Someone at some time, whether in 1957 or last week, switched bylines -- which, of course, bolsters my observations above about forgettability. Smith’s piece on de la Mare remains definitive:   “When a poet of stature dies, a silence settles upon language. One becomes suddenly aware that words will never again be handled as they have been by this particular man. All that can be said or heard resides in his poems: the rest is silence.”   So, what about Burford? I don’t think I had ever heard of him. I see he died in Dallas in 2004 at age seventy-seven. He had a long academic career and published at least three collections of poems. His work appeared prolifically in Poetry, especially in the nineteen-fifties. In 1967, he translated and published with Christopher Middleton The Poet’s Vocation: Selections from Letters of Hölderlin, Rimbaud, & Hart Crane. He translated minor work by Proust. I would love to say his poems are unforgettable, or even memorably funny and incisive, and that I have salvaged a forgotten genius. Here is “Local God,” published in the Summer 1953 issue of Southwest Review:   “There stands a man in Texas, can grab the rattlers by the tail and crack them like a whip, snapping the vertebrae. He is the curse of all the snakes; milks the venom out of their mouths and wraps them round his arms for bracelets. Strange to say how the little children all steal away from his loving fingers.”

Michael Joseph Gross on the importance of strength, past and present The post Muscle Memory appeared first on The American Scholar.