Hal Smith

            On Monday morning I went through “Mélodie interdite" (Forbidden Melody) by Serge Gainsbourg in French and English, uploaded it to Christian’s Translations, finished the editing process and published it. The next Gainsbourg song I work on will be “L’aquoiboniste" which is a made up word from "a quoi bon" (what's the good) and so I call my translation “The Whatsthepointist". 

            I had sixty six pages left to read of On Beauty by lunch time. 

            I had chips, salsa and yogourt for lunch and apple sauce with yogourt for dessert. 

            In the afternoon I took a bike ride to Yonge and Bloor, south to Queen and home. At Yonge and Dundas a person in a wheelchair had a large sign that read, “TOO UGLY TO PROSTITUTE, TOO HONEST TO STEAL. PLEASE HELP ME.” At Queen and Bay the bright blue sleeping bag belonging to the homeless person who sleeps over the vent was empty but three pigeons were excitedly pecking at the contents of a box of leftover takeout that had probably been the person’s most recent meal. 

            When I got home I read some more of On Beauty and had forty six pages left when I checked online and saw that the professor finally posted this week’s lecture. It’s supposed to be at noon every Monday but it tends to be around 17:30. 

            The lecture was on Charlotte Smith’s “Beachy Head” and we will talk about Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” in tutorial. 

            The key of the poem and of Romanticism is the last word of the first line. “On thy stupendous summit, rock sublime.” The sublime is the key. Edmund Burke wrote The Sublime and the Beautiful in 1757. There are two categories of aesthetic experience. Beauty is a subtle and social experience that gives rise to affection, closeness, tenderness and adoration. The sublime is a powerful and personal experience of astonishment and horror that creates terror, robbing the mind of reason. It’s distinct and capable of being cultivated by words. In the experience of art at stake is the idea of the second kind of aesthetic experience. There is perversion of beauty called possession with no place in aesthetics. The vastness of the sublime evokes overwhelming awe. The sublime experience is isolated. They don’t overlap the sublime and beauty but poets write to convey both. 

           Smith addresses this with “Beachy Head”. The white cliff expresses sublimity, awe, terror. This is a Greater Romantic Lyric. This is serious and does not screw around. This poem is a university poem that is demanding and bigger. Sonnets contain one point while the great romantic lyric is a journey for the mind of the ungraspable. The poem is ungraspable and evokes the sublime. It is a mirror of what the poem is about and also not containable. It can only be understood in parts. The poem has a movement that doesn’t add up to a final argument. It shows tensions and contradictions. M.H. Abrams writes that “The speaker begins with a description of the landscape, an aspect of change of aspect of the landscape evokes a varied by integral process of memory, thought, anticipation and feeling which remains. It closely intervolves with the outer scene. In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision or resolves an emotional problem. Often the poem rounds to end where it began at the outer scene but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the meditation. This is an old school definition. Smith is slightly different. There is a relationship between mind and scene. The outside impinges for Smith on the inside. Peace is disrupted by the scene and its contents. Smith inverts this. She begins at the top and ends underneath. The movement is from high to low. The sublimity of Beachy Head adds to the traditional vastness of nature but there is also a temporal element. Smith’s poem is one of the great expressions of this. The slow agency of time is collocated in the contrasting figures of speed and slowness such as layered times of human and natural history. What are examples of conflict of clashing temporal speeds? How can we contemplate our own time when time refers to geological, historical and personal time at the same time? Any spot is overlaid with different histories such as farming, herding, national history, war, invasions, geological changes, erosion. What are the passages of clashing temporality? He pauses and looks at the camera to wait for us to answer this in our own minds. 

           I think the elephant bones are a good example because in the later history she recounts the reactions to the bones being dug up. The Romans bring the elephants but this is forgotten and so legends of giant people rise around the bones among the later populace. 

           There are hundreds of examples and a mix of temporalities. She mentions the beginning of the concussion that creates the channel. She is talking about this while remembering how she thought about it while reclining on the cliff in the past. The long temporality of geological change over millions of years but also god doing it right away. She wants to know how contemplate all these times to understand place. 

           He divides the poem into five: sublime sets fancy free from lines 1-110; British history is layered over geological history from 110-165; rural life from 165-308 is largely about the progress of traditional values on the land. Of people, colonization, transformations, pining after the older but it is impossible to return to the pastoral; internal reflections and failure from 308-506; the personal experience of her landscape and time, convention, personal history, the stranger and tradition from 506 to the end. The hermit is a return to conventional, personal history with not just facts but stories, which are part of history. From the general to the specific, slightly regresses and ends with the story of hermit and his sacrifice. It is a poem about the intertwining of progress and conservation. One way to deal with this long work is dividing for yourself. Divisions are provisional but give a way of understanding by showing the picture. 

           The cliffs are stark against the channel. The whole area from Brighton to Dover is cliffs. Beachy Head is the first cliff seen from France. The cliffs are a hard break insulating England from the world. The poem is contemplative. 

           Section one is the Apostrophe. This is an exclamatory figure of speech in which the poet addresses an inanimate object or event and not the audience. 

           She is flinging her imagination out. We follow the movement of poetic imagination first back to sudden geological time leading to the solar day cycle, to the metabolic cycle, to the appearance of humans in increasingly industrial configurations. 

           One sloop is seen and then a fleet of fishing boats and then to a ship of commerce and then to consequences. The headland is first, concussive and violent and then we see birds looking for food, shepherds and their dogs. The sloop is the first man made thing we see. The ship of commerce is a dubious stain and infection. It is going where slaves harvest, mine and dive for the things it brings back. The moment suggests a problem between man and nature. Nature is not valued properly. Pearls are overvalued. There is a human failure about nature, violating freedom. Section two shifts in perspective of time. It retains the immediacy of the lyric imagination. There is a detachment of the relation between nature and British history. 

            She retraces all the invaders of England and now Napoleon is a worry. There is a connection between this and the mercantile. There is an aloofness riding the history of warfare and the readiness for war. War is always part of this space, and the threat of invasion. Section three is a return to the rural. The idea of the rural. Of land transformed through time. By industry and community. There are scenes of peace but they are changed and not as simple as before. 

            There is no idyll. One can’t stop change. Commerce changes the rural. Shepherds are now smuggling. This part of the country is hard to live on because the soil is not rich. She laments this. She comes back to the personal. “I was”. It’s a childlike rural life. Places are imagined and held in the mind such as fields, meadows, flowers, trees and birds. She likes nature and the rustic. In section four this return to the personal is important. There is the idea that her worship of nature hits a limit. In the face of nature and in the growing realization of vast geological time, art, science and ambition fail. She notes a new vista. Art can’t overcome the mystery of how shells are on top of the cliffs. There is a contrast of science and the indifference of time. Geological time makes ambition into vanity. The sublime evokes a sense of failure. The shells are awe inspiring. She meditates. Ambition is vanity. The poet can’t represent this. 

            There is a turn. And still. Does nature mimic the shells in rock? Was the cliff once under water? How does one capture the mystery? Science is vain with vague theories. The peasant doesn’t care. They don’t match. We live on geological time and we will become part of it. All ambitions pass. This is the crisis moment in the poem. What to live for. 

            In section five the poem moves from explaining the sublime of nature, war, humanity, of rural life to individual stories. The story of the poet stranger. He and the hermit withdraw from the world. But the hermit still felt for human misery. The stranger was broken hearted and poetry was a part of this world that people remember. He disappeared and all that is left are his poems. Poetry does not last forever. The hermit and the stranger are parallel. They rejected the world. The hermit was outraged by humanity. He becomes a hero and saves the smugglers. He is killed but this is not sad because he is redeemed and there is no more misery. He is celebrated for simplicity. He made a difference with small kindnesses. We won’t last but we can write or do the right thing in our time. The poem is not a solution but a meditation about perspective. The poet can’t command all time but only one small perspective. 

            I had only started editing my lecture notes when it was time to cook dinner. 

            I had a potato, my last two drumsticks and gravy while watching the first season finale of The Andy Griffith Show. 

            In this story Aunt Bee starts to think that visiting his father at the jail after school is a bad influence on Opie. He is picking up words related to criminality, he sees Otis drunk in a cell and Barney practices the quick draw with him and even leant him an old pair of handcuffs which he used to cuff another kid to a pole at school. Andy follows Bee’s advise and tells Opie he can’t come by the jail anymore. Opie becomes so bored over the next few days that he ends up kicking a can out of town and almost goes into the abandoned mine. He falls asleep in the back of a truck until after dark while everyone is looking for him. After he is found Bee thinks she was wrong and he can hang out with his father at the jail after school after all. 

            Otis is played by Hal Smith, who was also one of the most prolific voice actors in Hollywood. He was the voice of Owl in Winnie the Pooh and many other cartoon characters.