Bliss Carman, 'The Blue Heron' and Breugel's 'Icarus'

Wm. Bliss Carman's poem 'The Blue Heron' from his Later Poems has left me unsatisfied in many ways.  Perhaps some critic or scholar has noted its resemblance to both a triptych and to the 'Icarus' painting of the elder Bruegel ('Landscape with the Fall of Icarus'.)

The mower is 'among' the hay - not as an insect or frightened rabbit - and the horses are being worked in the heat of day, rather than mowing the hay in the morning and later afternoon.  This is hay, not a cash crop in danger of frost.  He may not have known the cycle of farm labour.

The meadow lilies may be there in July, but for me they are late July and August.  And are they being mowed down, or does he take hay to be in a worked field, and not a meadow?

In July, the heron should have a mate and a fledged chick - it is not a loner soaring where the river may carry it.  The patient stalker was not merely 'among the reeds'. Or are we to go from Moses to the shepherd and his flock?  What were these trees in the Breugel?

These would not be concerns if it were not the argument of the poet which depends on his grasp of what is transpiring about him, both what is before him as evanescent and what is before him as cyclic, as unreal and as real.

The Breugel appeared in 1912 and this volume in 1922 (Auden on Icarus stems from 1938.)

Evolution Pleasure

The opposed thum and the phonological oppositions could be thought of as solving certain problems facing the evolution of organisms.

In that vein, suppose that the emergence of pleasure and pain solve a certain problem in the evolution of mobile animals that does not arise for more static plants.  What problem, then, would be addressed by the emergence of consciousness?

In memory of an existentialist clinician and his children

the existentialists on their children

  Nietzsche on his son, Hugo, as a middle child
 
  Kierkegaard on his oldest daughter, Sarah
 
  de Beauvoir on her youngest daughter, Claire
 
When Richard (Dick) Eaton Johnson was working on his book on Henri Bergson - a book he abandoned for an effort to write a book on Karl Jaspers - he was writing with two young children at home.

An existentialist reading of Bergson as an author treating lived-temporality has an awkward moment - my relation with my adult child - even my grey-haired adult offspring - is not my relation with a child. There is the extreme border case of my relation to the dying child - or the young child to the dying parent - but in the normal case (oh, a troubling notion, that) this is not the relation to the growing child.

There is the case of the male existentialist author and his young bride: as a mature woman she may have quite a different relation to her former husband and his young companion.  But from age 2 to 10 this is not the manner of disruption/irruption/rupture usually characteristic of a healthy relation of
parent to child.  'Healthy', I say, for having been free of violence verbal or physical, whether as victim or witness; for having been free of threat of starvation, loss, pointless separation or complete lack of privacy or lack of other respect of boundaries as accepted in a cultural community. And a child not ridiculed before peers or shamed before peers without provocation or cause. And a child not exposed to wanton drunkeness as a daily regimen.

Gabriel Marcel has written of the child, but who was the child Isaac to Kierkegaard?  Or the child Jeshua, later called 'the Nazarene', an itinerant stone-cutter, preacher, healer - and even if not of his own choosing - prophet.

Not that we have always had our notions of child, teen, single young adult woman, single mature woman, bored retiree, retired female executive.

What we do now have is a spectrum of relations of parnet to child charateristic of Aspergers and varying degrees and styles of autism.  This might have given the existentialist pause.  These are neither extreme of the prodigee, the genius or the psychotic or simply demonically evil.

What will count as a cure for the existentialist child psychiatrist?  Would it not be a more or less normal relation of the child to parent? But what about the child's independence and relation to arbitrary school children - the normal lot in urban life?

What we come to here is repetition: the parent reports that her child brought her flowers and said,

"These are for you - do you like them?"

What is key is that she reports* this.  And if this were one singular instance, never repeated, and before no witness?  Here is the nexus where Spinoza and Hume collide with Heidegger and in which we can see most clearly that Jaspers was the existential clinician's philosopher.

* To report is not to recount.  In recounting I often repeat myself, or even mistake the context. What I recount about my child, most often my wife has heard me tell before.  [ to be continued ]