Wild Things?

Where the Wild Things Are is, as most have said, haunting and beautiful. But the final return home is not necessary (Max eating a late dinner with his mother wordlessly gazing at him).

It's hard to end a story, and the demands of the journey motif -- home; leaving; island; return; home -- must have been too hard to resist; but the film would have been better if we had been left with the anguishing Carol howling on the beach as Max sails away (not quite this image, but it's the closest I could find).

The story's about growing up, yes; and so the ending brings Max home to indicate that he's learned about civilized life from his venture into the wilderness (that is, grown up). But I think it would have been better to let us stay in the realm of the imagination. For me, the film was about the imagination: about how a child -- a human -- uses storytelling, fort-building, games (even violent ones) to understand life.

Keats' Nightingale ode is a place I go back to, to remind myself of the imagination. It begins, like Max's story, in melancholy -- "Here, where men sit and hear each other groan." This grieving poet -- his brother recently dead, his own life deeply uncertain -- "runs away" from home to join the singing of the nightingale, the imaginative power that cuts across time, limitations, categories. He revels in its joyful abandon: "Already with thee! tender is the night. . ." But, as with Max, escape into imagination is no simple walk in the woods; it takes the melancholy and intensifies it until the dark woods become almost a grave:

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
  Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess . . .

"Darkling" -- in the dark -- he listens, "and for many a time / I have been half in love with easeful Death." All vision gone -- that most rational of senses -- the imagination "guesses" at truths that the conscious mind doesn't find. Time ceases to mean anything, the seasons blend together, the generations meld with each other, until windows open on another, strange land:

. . . magic casements, opening on the foam
  Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

This could be Max's island with its "perilous seas" and its deeply forlorn creatures.

Keats wrote in a letter once about how Milton put the imagination to reality in Paradise Lost: "The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream--he awoke and found it truth." But at the end of the nightingale, Keats is far less sure of that truth: he wakes, not to truth, but to doubt, back from the bird's song "to my sole self," to that rational curse of consciousness and identity. "Fled is that music." Maybe in all romance narratives, we have to return from the quest, come home, wake up; but hopefully we can remember the journey, the island, the bird's song, that deep "ecstasy" -- or "wild rumpus" -- that reminds us of the transforming power of the imagination.

A medieval house

The heron pulls slowly off the corner of this still moat, flying over the chestnut and sycamore trees in a nearbly copse. I watch as she flaps slowly past the tall Elizabethan windows of the hall, its Cotswold stone glowing in the shallow late-October sunshine. The flowers in the garden are mostly past, leaving it looking as old and weathered as the house itself.

This place is new to me, old to itself. In itself it holds the memories of the early medieval hall, but they are hard to find because on it has come the layers of changes, many of them Elizabethan (the windows, some panelling, some attempts to make the house lighter and warmer), some Jacobean (a room carved out for King James to stay in), some Georgian (a flamboyant plaster ceiling for the hall), some contemporary (a striking modern bed; new curtains incorporating, strangely, the hair of the family dog).

I have never been here, but it seems familiar as well as new. I have studied it in a big volume on Greater Medieval Houses of England, volume 3. I have pored over the house's website. And I have read an evocative book by a young man who grew up there, about his growing up and about his difficult older brother, a severe epileptic. This is William Fiennes' The Music Room. Read it if you have an interest in old homes, in the way the brain works, and in how writers pull on their memories and make them interesting to people who don't actually know them.

The house is called Broughton Castle, in Oxfordshire, England. Go there. I want to go back. My picture of it is just a teaser, mostly because my camera battery ran out while I was there.

(Coincidentally, Joseph Fiennes, William's cousin, danced here as "Will Shakespeare" in Shakespeare in Love.)

Dovedale

The layering of history in England is neither more nor less than the layering of history anywhere in the world, I know. But in England, I'm more acutely aware of it.

By layering, I mean the way one can sense the years and centuries underlying the surface of life: the way the road very occasionally gives up its manic curves and straightens out for a few miles, and you realize that it's following one of the roads cut efficiently and uncaringly across the landscape by the ancient Romans.

Or, going even deeper, the way the crags here in the Peak district show those long-past sedimentations, heaved up in the incline from southwest to northeast in geological time; that happens all over the US, too, but here an extra layering brings them to consciousness, for they are the evidence by which Lyell and the other 19th-century geologists propelled the world from biblical theo-history to geological evolution theory.

(I hope soon to read Tracy Chevalier's new book about the English fossil hunter Mary Anning -- not yet released in the US, I think).

I walked in Dovedale yesterday. It's a famous place in England, a Yosemite on a tiny scale, only 3 miles long. I came  because I love walking with my cousin Elizabeth and her husband John, and because I wanted to see a place where the geology tells so much about the layering, and where poets and artists that I'm trying to know more about have come in the past.

Here was Wordsworth, a kid walking (yes, walking) home from his freshman year at college, stopping by to see the valley. He wrote a little "blog" entry about it, too, storing up his impressions for some future use.

Here was Joseph Wright, the painter of Derby, who loved light so much. He must have walked this valley late at night, and he painted this beautiful picture that now hangs in Oberlin's museum and that I take my students to see.

Here was Miss La Roche, in the 18th century, who picnicked by the river Dove, and then climbed on a horse with the elderly Dean (cathedral Dean, not academic) to climb out of the valley. Near the top, the path became too steep, the horse slipped, the Dean fell to his death, and the young lady survived to write to her mother about the event.

And here was I, at one moment in time, a fold in the strata of history, gratefully balancing on the stepping stones planted two hundred years ago across a river that still flows today.

Northeast Ohio in fall

It's been a gorgeous day, half sunny and half not, the ground wet from days of rain, the sky half full of clouds that stretch the eye past the horizon. The soybeans have lost their green; when the sun's not out they are a wonderful dull brown matte; when the sun shines on them, they are golden like the dry hills of California. The sky is an intense, light-filled, watery blue; I don't know how to make pigments, but I'd want to grind up all the lapis lazuli I could find to paint it. The blue of that sky is channeled into the tiny, unobtrusive, glowing flowers of the Michaelmas daisies.

Keats again in my head: "To Autumn," that rich poem about patience and ripening --

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue...

Or maybe John Clare, with his great eye for details and his strange moves into transcendence, is an even better poet for this. One of his autumn poems evokes the way light changes how we see and reminds us that seeing is a relationship, not a fact.

The fallow fields glitter like water indeed,
And gossamers twitter, flung from weed unto weed.

Hill tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun,
And the rivers we're eying burn to gold as they run;
Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air;
Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.

The pictures I took today with a new camera! What a treat to be able to do so.