It's Like Pulling Teeth

In his essay, "Writing Personal Essays: On the Necessity of Turning Oneself Into a Character," Philip Lopate warns that when writing in the first person we should "resist coming across at first as absolutely average." We have to approach autobiography, in other words, like any other writing task, and instead of describing the all-too-familiar or documenting the mundane, we should instead be mindful of the unusual, the odd, and the offbeat.

In his 1924 autobiography Everywhere, Arnold Henry Savage-Landor Landor, the famed traveler and painter and grandson of Walter Savage-Landor, describes the following moment from his childhood.

There was in our garden a big tree, a Mespilus Japonica. The lowest branch was too high for me to reach. The tree was laden with fruit. I went to the stable, took a long feather strap and threw it astride the lowest branch, then held one end firmly between my teeth while I jumped up, pulling at the same time with my hands the other end of the strap, thinking I could thus lift myself up. Result -- my eight front teeth were torn from my gums. With a bleeding mouth I picked up my incisors which lay scattered on the ground, and ran to show them to my horrified mother. You're lucky you're not seven yet," she said. I was then four and a half years of age.

Lawrence Lessig: Three Stories on Their Way to an Argument

Postcard from Syria

I received a postcard the other day from Syria, from a friend who has been traveling in the Middle East. I didn't know he was there.

I've known him for many years. We both come from big Irish Catholic families. We went to grade school together and had many of the same classes, though I don't remember which ones. In 3rd grade we both had a crush on the same girl. We took swimming lessons together, went to religious ed, etc.

He's one of those friends who I don't see or hear from for many years at a time, but when we do get together it's like we pick up in the middle of a conversation that has left off a only few minutes ago.

The fact that I didn't know he was in the Middle East means very little. I remember one time when we were in college I called his house for some reason and got one of his younger brothers on the phone. I asked if K. was there. The younger brother turned his head away from the phone without covering the mouthpiece and yelled out "Is K here?! It's David!" I then heard a return yell in the background (yelling being the preferred means of communication in both of our families) "He's in Venezuela!" The young voice came back to the phone and said "He's in Venezuela." "Okay." I said, and hung up. I knew there was no use asking when he would be back since they probably didn't know themselves.

While in college, we traveled to the USSR together. This was back in the heady days of glasnost and perestroika, not that we knew what those were, or cared particularly. I remember that when I would take the subways in Moscow, I would always get people coming up to me and asking directions, whereas when he walked around he looked very much the American. (He used to wear this t-shirt with a big picture of Opus from Bloom County on it.) And yet for some reason he always seemed more at home there, more comfortable meeting people or just letting his feet wander. I think those early trips (there were several of them) impacted us both in different ways: he continued to travel to many different places and continued to meet people and see things; I wound up writing about travel writing...

This postcard, as I mentioned, was from Syria. It said little, as postcards do. Just, "I wanted to send one from Lebanon, but the postcards there weren't as nice." There was something reassuring about it. With this "war on terror" still raging on, with all the talk of security and borders, with the use of airplanes as weapons, with the travel restrictions, the travel warnings and the general small-mindedness that seems to characterize many Americans' world views these days...it's nice to think that K. was walking around Syria and Lebanon, probably wearing a worn t-shirt that says "Who farted?"

Edmondo De Amicis...

...writes on page 32 of his travel book Constantinople [published in 1877; I quote here from the 2005 Hesperus Edition, translated by Stephen Parkin], "to describe great things you must be at a distance from them, and to remember them well, you must have forgotten them a little first." The "great thing" that he is referring to here is Constantinople itself. De Amicis can't process his first sight of the Turkish city, let alone describe this first impression to the reader. He finds that not only can language not help him communicate what he sees, but he is unsure exactly what it is that he is seeing.

As his boat approaches the city, he is momentarily frustrated that his initial view will be spoiled by the fog that has enveloped the Sea of Marmara; but the fog slowly lifts, almost on cue, unveiling the city piecemeal to the eager eyes of De Amicis. So works the mechanism of fog...

Jules

Sometime toward the end of the nineteenth century, De Amicis traveled to Amien, France to visit the great Jules Verne, author of the fictional travel book Around the World in 80 Days and scores of other books. You can read De Amicis's account of his visit

here.

Despite their relative nearness in age -- De Amicis died in 1908 in his early 60s. Verne died in 1905 in his mid 70s -- De Amicis here seeks Verne out as an elder sage, and this trip is more of a pilgrimage than anything else. He unabashedly approaches Verne to elicit some creative secret, to gain some elixir of genius. And in an interesting way, he does.

When De Amicis first sees Verne, we get the conventional disorientation of the young enthusiast meeting their hero for the first time, as he tries to bring the fantasy of Verne the genius and the reality of Verne the man into focus. But that foggy disorientation passes as Verne talks about his writing habits. De Amicis writes:

Contrary to what I had thought, he does not first imagine the characters and facts of he novel he is to write, and then begin to make investigations into one or more countries for his scene of action. On the contrary he reads up the history and geography of the countries first, just as if he intended to do nothing else than describe them fully and minutely. His characters, the leading facts and episodes of his story, rise up in his mind during the reading, which is really an object in itself and not a mere means to acquire useful notes for his book.The reading of books on foreign countries is, it appears, Verne's true object, not the stories he creates about them. It's as if the stories serve no purpose but to knit the facts together in a useful way, so they won't be forgotten.

This may seem an odd description of Verne if you have read any of his globetrotting novels. Countries are often so much backdrop, as, for example with 80 Days, where characters have more important things on their minds then stopping off and going native, and where technology has as its main goal the eradication of space, trouble, and all but the most obvious differences between people.

But as De Amicis learns more about the man whom he knew only through books and reputation, he finds that even the reading of books on these countries was not Verne's true object as he had first guessed, but rather a means to a much more ambitious, and, in its way, poignant end:

In regard to the choice of countries which are to be the scenes of his romances he is guided by an idea I was very far from anticipating. His intention is to describe the whole earth in his books and he goes from region to region in a certain redetermined order, not retracing his steps unless through necessity, and then as quickly as possible. He still has many parts of the world left, and has estimated the number of stories he must still write in order to fill out his entire plan. “Shall I have time for them all?” he asked, smiling.

I once taught Verne's Around the World in 80 Days in a course on Cultural Studies, where I was focusing on the twentieth century travel book, in which these writers' goals were much more modest: to diagnose a particular political situation; to understand how the past overlays the present; to find out the cause of war... I thought it would be a lark to start with Verne, and I made some points about technology and fantasy, not realizing at the time the sheer scope of Verne's ambition.

I was in the book store the other day and I saw a new biography of Verne. I browsed through it while standing there and noted the lack of De Amicis's name in the index; but I may get it anyway, because I would like to learn more about Verne than I now know. It was interesting to see how De Amicis's thoughts of Verne were clarified as he talked with him and as Verne answered questions about the secret of his craft, as the fog of unknowing dispelled to reveal Verne's city-hungry mind.

The Brooklyn Book Festival

A few weeks ago at Borough Hall in downtown Brooklyn, right near where all the lettered subways hub into a jumbled commuter's alphabet-- the C, the R, the A, and M trains -- the Brooklyn Book Festival was held.

It occupied the space usually taken up by the weekly farmer's market, which found itself as a result amidst the diesel fumes of the nearby busstops.

All the Little Presses were hawking their latest titles through catalogues and business cards. Though the festival operated as much by word of mouth as by the printed word, as the news of books spread orally, through a campaign of "did you see that book with the...?"

Some of the Big Presses had their territory staked out too: St Martin's was there, as was Oxford. Those displays were glossier, their reps more knowing, and they attracted the biggest crowds. But this was nonetheless a day for the small guy.When I first heard of the Brooklyn Book Festival earlier that day, I assumed it would be a place where small bookstore owners or even the general public would be selling used books, and I kicked myself for having recently (and cavalierly) thrown out some of my own books in preparation for our move. But I preferred what this festival turned out to be, a kind of expo with all these small presses advertizing that they were still in business, that they hadn't been swallowed up by the Literature/Cappucino Industrial Complex.

We approached the fair from Atlantic Avenue and had the bridge in our sights. Its image tented Borough Hall like some Persian bazaar. And it had that energy, that diversity, that busy-ness, as well as the underlying desperation that spoke of a need to sell in order to live. But rather than gew gaws or fabrics, dates or nuts, there was litrachure on sale, spread out on tables, propped up for display. And as we approached nearer, we came under the magnetic infuence of the vendors of books.

We bought Lucy something from the very first stand we stopped at. It was for her, not for us, so that doesn't count as an impulse buy (we both agreed). It was some Russian Publisher and the book was a bilingual edition of two stories, Speckled Hen and The Little Goat Kids; or, KyPoCHKA PYABA and KOZLYATYSHKI. We will bring it to daycare so that Lucy can be read to in the proper accent.

Archipelego Publishers, our next stop, and coincidentally, immediately next to DomKnigi, had a table with boxes of books spread out, beautifully bound and oddly shaped books in that they were almost square. Gate of The Sun by Elias Khoury reproached me with its remaindered beauty, only $15.00 (They printed too many copies by mistake, the woman said. I wondered how many was too many...) I didn't buy it. I now regret it. I've had a small paperbound copy of one of Archipelago's other titles, Moscardino by Enrico Pea (translated by Ezra Pound) for a while now, though I thought the attractive binding was some publishing anomoly. But here were laid out book after book, each with its unique charm and yet with a similarity of binding that bespoke a deeper familial bond.

We continued on through crowds of Starbuck denizens released from their hazelnut-scented surroundings for this one one day a year. And at the next table, around behind the entrance for the C train, I bought The Man Who Walked to the Moon, by Howard McCord, a novella about an ex-marine sniper turned professional lone wolf.

Against a mountainous Nevada landscape and one peak in particular, The Moon, Gasper's [the lone wolf/sniper] menacing tale unravels of a life lived without illusions yet driven to the boundaries of mystical consciousness -- a gripping and disturbing indictment of the exigencies of civilization.

Is "exigencies" the right word here? I guess I'll have to read the book to find out. Anyway, it sounds good!

I also bought The Dream Sequence by Kate Hunter, a local writer, a novella (again) which bears the intriguing tag on the cover: "THE MOST DANGEROUS PERSON IS ALWAYS SOMEONE YOU KNOW." Five bucks never went so easily
.
CUNY's Feminist Press had a table, and there was more than one table with Afro-Centric titles, often (though not always) mixed in with Marxist books; though there were separate Marxist/Socialist tables too. Lucy tended to gravitate towards both the African and the Marxist tables because of the brightly colored materiel.

One table was selling t-shirts (as well as a magazine or pamphlets or something) that were all black with "FUCK LITERATURE" written in big white letters across the chest. I loved the idea of it, but couldn't think of an ocassion when I might wear it so I didn't buy it. Plus there is the off chance that these might be the first words that Lucy learns to read. She's pretty precocious. I wish they had mugs...

There were also people giving readings at various stands. One of the editors of Brooklyn: A State of Mind was there reading and dropping names like he was working for the Bush administration. Jonathan Lethem got more than one mention this day; he must have been in the crowd, browsing for FUCK LITERATUE t-shirts, no doubt.

Underneath the reconstructed dome of Borough Hall itself, in the shadow of the golden statue of justice wielding a bright and slicing sword, there was a reading of Richard Wright's Native Son, a passage I heard said something about how all the world is Bigger...

At one point Lucy got impatient in her stroller, so I picked her up and carried her around. She preferred that, looking at the life around her, smiling at the random people who entered her view. Though after a while, she became bored again and began to steadily raspberry. As I walked up to one table -- it was the Aragon Press I think -- she let loose a particularly distinct one, seemingly right on cue. I jokingly apologized to the man sitting there behind the table, but he just looked up wearily and replied, "Everyone's a critic..."

Lucy's Doubles

After daycare each day this past summer, I would take my daughter, Lucy, to this little park in Carroll Gardens where she would run out the day. A special section just for toddlers includes the usual equipment, with a bridge, an incline, a stone elephant, little swings, and a sprinkler (which Lucy loves) that is always crowded during hazy Brooklyn summers.

Before you get to the kiddie section, there is a basketball court and a baseball diamond in a different section, both on blacktop, that Lucy loves to traverse on her way to the sprinkler, and I can see her already sizing up the "big kids" for when she is ready to play with them.

One hot day in August, Lucy insisted on going under the sprinkler, gesturing wildly at it while imploring me "Dush! Dush!" (her word for "water" of all kinds), as I held her in one arm, pushing her stroller through the wrought iron gate with the other. So I changed her into her bathing suit, shod her with her pink crocs, and off she went.

Sprinkler-time is highly ritualistic or stylized, like those linguistic bee-dances. She first runs up to the sprinkler and puts one hand in front of the stream while leaning on the stone water source with the other. Then she runs back at me and throws what water she has grabbed all over my shirt and laughing runs away. Eventually she musters the courage to run straight through to the other side, where jets of water come from the facing pylons. Her courage stoked, she then runs in screaming circles through the gauntlet of jetstreams, dodging the other orbiting kids all the while. I don't know wht there aren't more kid-collisions in this toddler accelerator, especially during these peak summer hours.

This particular day, after having done her rounds, Lucy took interest in a puddle on the circumference of the sprinkler area. She splashed carefully in the water as she looked down at her pink feet. She loves to splash in puddles and sometimes does this little dance where she cocks her head up in the air and stomps her right foot emphatically while dragging her left. It's very atavistic (in a good way). Soon there were two other little girls, about Lucy's height (I've given up judging ages) and they too took to splashing in the curved narrow puddle. They were all aware of one another -- there was no competition for the splashiest part of the puddle or anything -- but they mostly kept to themselves as they splashed, sometimes looking up at their respective parent.

Suddenly one of the girls reached down to pick something up from the puddle, and the water that had just seemed so pure for the stomping suddenly seemed filthy now that it was reached into. The mother lurched. At the same moment, the other girl started to splash more emphatically, just as Lucy started to wander off. So we both reacted too. At once there was a chorus of parental shouting, all of us calling to our own: "Lulu!" "Lucy!" "Lucia!"

We all looked at one another; the three girls looked up at the parents not their own, then back to their own mommy or daddy. After a moment, it hit us. We had all named our daughters Lucia!

But rather than this being a moment of bonding or light, it turned things suddenly awkward. We all began to explain, to justify: "Yes," said one father, "We call her Lulu. She's named after her grandmother." "Strange, I've never met another Lucy," said the mother,"I thought it was unique." "She calls herself "Cia," I said dumbly.

Carroll Gardens Park is a place where children and parents come together and is most full as the day ends, and in it we find not just recreation but the beginnings of the social dynamics that shape all our lives so inexorably, like some ominous starsign. I guess that's why (we tell ourselves) we take Lucy there, why we see daycare itself as important, so that our Lucy can interact with others, so that she she can begin to be socialized, though I wish it would be with people who find coincidence to be a mark of revelation rather than a sign of having been out-thought.

As we strolled home after I dried Lucy off from her ablutions, we saw coming out of their brownstone not three doors down from ours, a fourth Lucia -- one also Lucy's age and one we knew already -- and her parents. This Lucia was born on the very same day as our Lucy, only a year earlier. The family was going out to the Hamptons for the weekend, seemingly glad to escape the hazy heat of Brooklyn. The girls smiled at one another, and I chatted amiably with the parents, who when we met them several months ago were as surprised and delighted as we were in the coincidence of naming, under similar stars.

Hurricane Dog

The strongest storm recorded in 1950 was a category 5 hurricane called Hurricane Dog. It started in the West Indies in late August of that year and strengthened as it made its way north. Its strongest winds were recorded in St John's...the capital of Antigua and Barbuda...with gusts reaching 145 mph.

Here's a link that leads you to a pdf file of a 1950 issue of the Kingston, Jamaica paper The Daily Gleaner that tells of the aftermath of the storm as well as providing information about a special fund that was set up to help the victims in Antigua.

"Hurricane Dog" seems like an odd name for a storm. The current system of named hurricanes wasn't actually put in place until 1952, and so before that, as with Hurricane Dog, these names weren't really used in published accounts. It's not, for instance, mentioned in The Daily Gleaner article at all. But it's not just some irreverent wordplay. Before 1952, the names came from the Joint Army/Navy Phonetic Alphabet, and so Hurricane Dog is military-speak for Hurricane "D."

I don't know how long the 1950 hurricane season lasted. I don't know if it got as far as Hurricane Jig or Hurricane Nan or Hurricane Oboe. I sure hope not.

Hyperannotated Lear

"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drench'd our steeples, drowned the cocks!

You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,

Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!

Crack nature's moulds , and germens spill at once,

That make ingrateful man!"

Hips Don't Fry

Storms don't only happen here on the earth. Jupiter's Great Red Spot, for example, is an anti-cyclonic storm (meaning it spins below the planet's equator in a counterclockwise direction) that has been raging, as far as astronomers can tell, since at least the time of Shakespeare's Tempest. It is large enough to engulf the earth three times over and yet, even with that, it is nothing compared to the storms that erupt on the sun.

Solar storms are among the most awesome events that are within the range of our concern. We see their effects mainly when their proton discharges interrupt out favorite radio programs but they are also responsible for the kalaidescopic Northern Lights. Solar storms or Coronal Mass Ejections as they are also known eject massive amounts of light matter into space and these displays have been recorded by instruments designed for this purpose:



But for all their beauty, they pose a real danger to astronauts. According to this article, if you encounter a solar flare while walking on the moon, the most vital body parts to protect are those that encase your bone marrow. And thus, if you get enough warning, in addition to your hips, you should shield (in no particular order) your "shoulders, spine, thighs, sternum and skull."

It seems weird to suggest that astronauts would be able to protect themselves and their body parts simply by crouching behind a moon unit or angling their bodies away from the radiant beams of the sun, but it makes sense in a way that this is how we would react, whether through instinct or according to NASA protocol. After all, that's what we do with earth-storms too, that is what we do. We duck, we shield ourselves with umbrellas or ponchos, we hide behind screens or doors, always crouching against the onslaught of matter that is hurling around the atmosphere, that is the atmosphere, that churns at great velocities, at killing vectors.

Daniel Paul Schreber once thought he detected in these killing, life-giving sun-beams something articulate speaking to the analogous rays that were bandying about the neural passageways of his brain exactly at the speed of thought, and he may have been right, if what he thought was being said was "shield yourself."

Here's a site for all of you earth bound readers who are interested in following these storms and who are fans of the Weather Channel:

Solar Storm Warning!

What Lies Beneath...

Here's an article from yesterday's New York Times (the Weekend Arts section) for those of you who are Discovering New York.

This paragraph struck me in particular:

We began in Tompkins Square Park, a focal point in the neighborhood’s history, which before the 1800s was soupy swampland and marshes. The East River shoreline was where Avenue C is now; everything east of that was built on progressive stages of landfill — including, amazingly, rubble from bombed London, shipped across the Atlantic after World War II to form part of the foundation for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive.

We tend to think of cityscapes as separated into grids, as mapped out onto neutral planes of land, or as encrusted onto the blank slate of the earth. We don't always see a living city as stratified, as something archaeologically interesting, and we don't always see archaeological digs as containing the histories of remote places.

When I showed this article to a friend he said that he'd always been interested in the similar plight of the tons of rubble from Ground Zero. We treat the emptiness of Ground Zero as something sacrosanct, and yet the tons of matter have seemingly dissipated without a word or a memory. It would be interesting to trace the mass migration (or forced exodus?) of rubble, any rubble, around the globe, and I wonder if we could detect any patterns the way we can with birds or humans.

And if we believe, along with Werner von Braun -- the father of the German rocket program who came to the United States right around the time that that section of the FDR drive was being built with the London rubble von Braun's rockets helped create -- that "Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation," then we might be tempted to wonder about the future transformations of all the rubble being created these days, in cities around the world...

Umbrellas Down Boerum Place

I had to cross Boerum place the other night in the wind and rain, right near where it widens as it approaches the Brooklyn Bridge. I was proud of myself because I didn't lose my umbrella. It didn't even blow inside out!

Boerum allows some freak intersection of winds that causes havoc with umbrellas. I've heard it described as a wind tunnel but it is not that. Wind tunnels channel the wind. This is like some kind of wind blender.

Most mornings when it has been raining and even a little bit windy, the broken skeletal remains of umbrellas can be seen sailing up or down the street. It looks like a rowing team trying awkwardly to play polo with their straight boats. The winds can gust so strongly and so suddenly that most people just give up trying to hold onto their umbrellas. Though I think that it's often not the force of the wind so much as the realization of a lost cause that causes this despair. It would take too much time and energy to try to restore the umbrella to its proper shape anyway, and the bodily contortions needed would be so publicly awkward that I suspect most people just "let go."

Mostly you see those 4 dollar short umbrellas with the retractable handles that won't work for long anyway; they're the first to go and they just look trashy tumbling up and down the street. But on really windy days, you can see those larger black umbrellas with the wooden handles, umbrellas with corporate logos on them, those clear umbrellas that are almost like hoods, those umbrellas with the bottle on top, even children's umbrellas that have either frog ears or cat ears on the top. Some of those boys glide.

It's probably not so bad for the young children who have lost their umbrellas (adults who frequent Boerum Place should know better anyway) since kids usually wear rain slickers in addition to the umbrellas they carry. I've always wondered why parents do that and I guess now I know. You never know what can happen and it's better to be safe than sorry. Though I also wonder if maybe that's the wrong message to send to kids. Am I going to be one of those parents? I'll probably just dress Lucy in a slicker as I implore her to "Simplify! Simplify!"

After I conquered Boerum I was feeling triumphant. I stopped in a deli to get some food and they had this empty white coleslaw bucket at the entrance where people could leave their umbrellas and there were cardboard boxes spread on the floor. I went to the back of the store to get what I needed, paid for it. But when I got to the door I saw that someone had walked off with my umbrella.

Brooklyn can do that to you.

The Eye of The Storm

In 1704, Daniel DeFoe, author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, published his first book, The Storm, a journalistic account of the Great Storm of 1703, which devastated lower England and the English Channel. It remains the largest most devastating storm ever to hit England and The Storm is a compiliation of eye-witness accounts of this meteorological anomoly. It is a book of anecdotes, fragmentary views, glimpses of an event distorted either by exaggeration or, in some cases, mitigation, since what people witnessed was never really clear to them.

DeFoe's book created for the public a large scale view, made up of detailed particulars, of an event that we now know to call a hurricane. Not that they didn't have the word "hurricane" to describe this event, or even more biblical terms such as "deluge." But it is striking the way that so many of the people Defoe gets his information from are describing an unprecedented event, not just in its scope but in its very existence. There is a letter, for example, from one man in Oxfordshire who describes what we soon recognize to be a tornado. His friend calls him to come see this great "pillar" descending from the sky. And when he gets to where his friend is he sees himself a "spout" dipping down from the heavens, like the trunk of an elephant, leaping across a field, carving a swath through woods and farms.

It is no wonder that we consistently seek in such terrible, large-scale events some larger meaning and that we arrive at that meaning by seeking out a similarly large perspective from which the event was authored; and that the wrath or will of God is the most frequent "source" of any natural disaster. Dies Irae.

The Storm was written during the rise of journalism as a profession, when broadsheets and newspapers were being distributed more frequently to greater numbers of people. Robinson Crusoe, a book often seen as the first novel, a book about one man's surviving a storm, was still 15 years in the future. It is perhaps no accident that DeFoe got his start writing a book about a storm in which the author/survivor gathered together all avaiailable empirical information and fused it together into one large perspective, giving the world a picture in words of a hurricane, something we can now in an instant see with great sharpness on any satellite image. The minute and subjective perceptions of people on the ground have their cosmological analogue in the great organized structure of a storm, whose eye passes over the earth like the gaze of God.

Francois Hartog in The Mirror of Herodotus has called for an archaeology of perception, a record of how people have seen throughout the ages. Because how you see changes what it is that you are seeing. One wonders what the residents of England in 1703 who survived the Great Storm would see in the radar image above of Katrina. Would it allow them to make sense of the turbulence that they survived and that many didn't?

The Night God of Thunder

In Book IV of The City of God, St Augustine tells of a Roman god who had fallen into obscurity. This deity was the nighttime equivalent of Jupiter or Jove, the king of the gods, and at one time, according to Augustine, Summanus (for that was this nighttime God's name) was more popular among the Romans than the now more familiar Jove. Jove was the god of daytime thunder, whereas Summanus rolled the night.

Eventually, somewhere down the years, through a process that even Augustine finds too obscure to comment on in any detail, Summanus became overshadowed by Jove, who pleased people with his daylight tricks and sunny manifestations of power and pyrotechnics by, among other things, building a "famous and conspicuous temple." Summanus was less willing to pander to the crowd, preferring the aural displays best possible at night when the other senses become all focused into this yearning ear.

The early books of The City of God are an overt attempt to prune the garden of the Roman gods, to try to whittle it down to just one, or, failing that, to condemn those he deems unworthy. For Augustine the paganism of the Romans was too prolific. It was too much, there were too many, it was too bureaucratic, there were too many names and attributes to remember, and you never quite knew (Augustine complains at one point) which god you were supposed to pray to as you walked through a door: the god of doors, the god of hinges, or the god of fair egress.

I'm actually not sure if Augustine is saying in this book that the god's name was Summanus. He says: "For, as we read in their own authors, the ancient Romans paid greater honours to I know not what Summanus, to whom they attributed nocturnal thunderbolts, than to Jupiter." "I know not what Summanus" is a locutaion I just don't follow. Augustine here seem to be piecing together the story of a God that exists by then only orally, who exists in the stories that people tell themselves and each other of the impact and severity of storms, storms that still exist in the public consciousness. There needed to be a God to manage all the storm-wrought damage and to tend to people's individual needs, and Summanus did just that; until, of course, Rome fell and the ominous signs of a decaying empire that gripped a people with a paranoia became nothing more than a passing thought...

But it's a shame that Augustine's pruning was so fervid and so complete, so monomaniacally monotheistic, though I think we can discern a hint of regret lingering through this passage. It's a shame that the god of nighttime thunder, whatever his name was or is, lost to us. Because there is nothing more fearful-divine than thunder at night, not in the distance, but right on top of you. There is something otherworldly about it.

It is, for example, a dark rolling thunder that awakes Dante from his swoon in "Canto IV" of the Inferno.

From the Longfellow translation...

Broke the deep lethargy within my head
A heavy thunder, so that I upstarted,
Like to a person who by force is wakened;
And round about I moved my rested eyes,
Uprisen erect, and steadfastly I gazed,
To recognise the place wherein I was.
True is it, that upon the verge I found me
Of the abysmal valley dolorous,
That gathers thunder of infinite ululations.
Obscure, profound it was, and nebulous,
So that by fixing on its depths my sight
Nothing whatever I discerned therein.

Storm Front Matter

In 1786, between the first drafts of his Ur-Faust and the publication of Faust Part 1, the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, then the acknowledged leader of the Sturm und Drang movement in Germany, traveled down through the Brenner pass to Italy. On his trip he kept a notebook of his impressions and observations that he published much later in greatly revised form as The Italian Journey.

After leaving Innsbruck, Goethe's journey took him through the beautiful and perilous terrain of the South Tyrol. Though the weather often made the travel difficult, the combination of turbulent atmosphere and sublime landscape prompted some of his most interesting writing. At one point, as he approaches one of the mountain peaks of the Alps, a storm gathers and the sky darkens. From this spectacle of Nature Goethe discerns cosmological principles.

From page 31 of the Penguin edition of the book:

On the plains, one accepts good or bad weather as an already established fact, but in the mountains one is present at its creation. I have often witnessed this as I travelled, walked, hunted, or spent days or nights among cliffs in the mountain forests, and a fanciful idea has taken hold of my mind which is as difficult to shake off as all such fancies are. I seem to see its truth confirmed everywhere, so I am going to talk about it. It is my habit, as you know, to keep trying the patience of my friends.

When we look at mountains, whether from far or near, and see their summits, now glittering in the sunshine, now shrouded in mists or wreathed in storm-tossed clouds, now lashed by rain or covered with snow, we attribute all these phenomena to the atmosphere, because all its movements and changes are visible to the eye. To the eye, on the other hand, shapes of the mountains always remain immobile; and because they seem rigid, inactive and at rest, we believe them to be dead. But for a long time I have felt convinced that most manifest atmospheric changes are really due to their imperceptible and secret influence. I believe, that is to say, by and large, the gravitational force exerted by the earth's mass, especially by its projections, is not constant and equal but, whether from internal necessity or external accident, is like a pulse, now increasing, now decreasing. Our means for measuring this oscillation may be too limited and crude, but sensitive reactions of the atmosphere to it are enough to give us sure information about these imperceptible forces. When the gravitational pull of the mountains decreases even slightly, this is immediately indicated by the diminished weight and elasticity of the air. The atmosphere can no longer retain the moisture mechanically or chemically diffused through it; the clouds descend, rain falls heavily, and shower clouds move down into the plain. But when their gravitational pull increases, the elasticity of the air is restored and two significant phenomena follow. First the mountains gather round their summits enormous cloud masses, holding them firmly and immovably above themselves like second summits. Then through an inner struggle of electric forces, these clouds descend as thunderstorms, fog or rain. The elastic air is now able to absorb more moisture and dissolve the remaining clouds. I saw quite distinctly the absorption of one such cloud. It clung to the steepest summit, tinted by the afterglow of the setting sun. Slowly, slowly, its edges detached themselves, some fleecy bits were drawn off, lifted high up, and then vanished. Little by little the whole mass disappeared before my eyes, as if it were being spun off from a distaff by an invisible hand.