Recently, I've been reading Possession

Recently, I've been reading Possession
by A.S. Byatt. Now, I'm not one who generally goes in for "literary
fiction." And by "literary" I mean fiction that wins the National Book
Award here or the Booker over in England. I generally can't stand these
books because their authors are snobs, forever looking down their noses
at popular fiction. This is the same popular fiction whose proceeds
allow publishers to generously publish works of fiction which do not
sell---namely literary fiction. These authors regularly bite the hands
that feed them, and the world applauds---particularly the world that
reads The New York Times Book Review
every Sunday. I can't stand this sort of thing. On the whole, I find
literary authors to be a group of people who can't wait for the day
they're dead and their work is shoved down the gullets of unsuspecting
college freshmen.
No, I generally like there to be a plot to my books. Literary authors
focus on prose. Not plot. And it leads to some seriously boring books
that have, quite literally, lost the plot in beautiful wording and excessive description. Memorable case in point: Underworld
by Don DeLillo. At page seven hundred and two, I flung that Goliath
across my bedroom, where it crashed into the wall, and,
disappointingly, failed to cause any damage to the plaster or the spine
of the book. De Lillo got lost in his excessive description, and I lost
patience with waiting for him to get to the freakin' point. I've been
leery of literary fiction ever since, preferring to get lost in a story
that---ahem---goes somewhere. If that story happens to have great
words, all the better, but I'm not going to discriminate against an
author who uses the phrase "big shiny car" rather than "the excessively
large automobile brought to mind a kinder, gentler time, where my
father refrained from beating me. Ah, the halcyon days of the summer of
1954, when cars were Gilgamesh-sized beasts, which slurped petroleum
products like they were children sucking on sodas at the local
drugstore, twirling endlessly on their stools at the fountain, like
ants resting on revolving red vinyled covered toadstools. A time when
fathers had some kindness towards their sons, perhaps realizing that
beating them only brought out the worst..." BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, AD
NAUSEAUM. I think you get the point. While I don't mind some
description, a book full of that sort of thing gets to be quite
annoying. If Possession must be called "literary fiction," which I
suppose it must, having won the Booker Prize in 1990, then at least it
has the saving grace of having a plot. And some lovely poetry written
by Byatt on behalf of her fictional Victorian poets, around whom the
plot revolves. Here's a quickie synopsis: two modern day scholars
uncover a secret affair between these two Victorian poets---one married
and renowned for his presumed faithfulness to his wife, the other
presumed a lesbian---and rush around England and France looking for
evidence to prove this affair, which could change the conventional
thinking when it comes to both poets. In the midst of all this running
around, and fighting off departmental and collegial backstabbing, these
two scholars fall in love. Ahhh, romance. Anyhoo. I liked this poem and
I thought I'd share. Swammerdam was written by Byatt on behalf of the fictional Randolph Henry Ash. If you don't know who Swammerdam is go here and take a peek around.

SWAMMERDAM

Bend nearer, Brother, if you please. I fear
I trouble you. It will not be for long.
I thank you now, before my voice, or eyes,
Or weak wit fail, that you have sat with me
Here in this bare white cell, with the domed roof
As chalky-plain as any egg's inside.
I shall be hatched tonight. Into what clear
And empty space of quiet, she best knows,
The holy anchoress of Germany
Who charged you with my care, and speaks to God
For my poor soul, my small soul, briefly housed
In this shrunk shelly membrane that He sees,
Who holds, like any smiling Boy, this shell
In his bright palm, and with His instrument
Of Grace, pricks in his path, for infinite Light
To enter through his pinhole, and seek out
What must be sucked to him, an inchoate slop
Or embryonic Angel's fledgling wings.

I have not much to leave. Once I had much,
Or thought it much, but men thought otherwise.
Well-nigh three thousand winged or creeping things
Lively in death, injected by my Art,
Lovingly entered, opened and displayed---
The types of Nature's Bible, ranged in ranks
To show the secrets of her cunning hand.
No matter now. Write---if you please---I leave
My manuscripts and pens to my sole friend,
The Frenchman, the incomparable Thevenot,
Who values, like a true philosopher
The findings of a once courageous mind.
He should have had my microscopes and screws---
The copper helper with his rigid arms
We called Homunculus, who gripped the lens
Steadier than human hands, and offered up
Fragments of gauze, or drops of ichor, to
The piercing eyes of Men, who dared to probe
Secrets beyong their frame's unaided scope.
But these are gone, to buy the bread and milk
This curdled stomach can no longer ingest.
I must die in his debt. He is my friend
And will forgive me. Write that hope. Then write
For her, Antoinette de Bourignon
(Who spoke to me, when I despaired, of God's
Timeless and spaceless point of Infinite Love)
That, trusting her and Him, I turn my face
To the bare wall, and leave this world of things
For the No-thing she shewed me, when I came
Halting to Germany, to seek her out.
Now, sign it, Swammerdam, and write the date,
March, 1680, and then write my age
His forty-third year. His small time's end. His time---
Who saw Infinity through countless cracks
In the blank skin of things, and died of it.

Think you, a man's life grows a certain shape
As out of ant's egg antworm must proceed
And out of antworm wrapped in bands must come
The monstrous female or the winged drone
Or hurrying worker, each in its degree?
I am a small man, closed in a small space,
Expert in smallness, in the smallest things,
The inconsiderable and overlooked,
The curious and the emphemeral.
I like your cell, Brother. Poverty,
Whiteness, a window, water and your hand
Steadying the beaker at my cracking lips.
Thank you, it is enough.
Where I was born
Was a small space too, not like this, not bare,
A brilliant dusty hutch of mysteries,
A cabinet of curiosities.
What did my eyes first light on? There was scarce
Space for a crib between the treasure-chests,
The subtle-stoppered jars and hanging silks,
Feathers and bones and stones and empty gourds
Heaped pele-mele o'er the tables and the chairs.
A tray of moonstones spilled into a bowl
Of alien godlings winked from dusty shelves.
A mermaid swam in a heremetic jar
With bony fingers scraping her glass walls
And still hair streaming from her shrunked head.
Her dry brown breasts were like mahogany,
Her nether parts, coiled and confined, were dull,
Like ancient varnish, but her teeth were white.
And there was too a cockatrice's egg,
An ivory-coloured sphere, or almost sphere,
That balanced on a Roman drinking-cup
Jostling a mummy-cat, still wrapped around
With pitch-dark bandaged from head to foot,
Sand-dried, but not unlike the swaddling-bands
My infant limbs were held in, I assume.

And your hands, will the? presently will fold
This husk here in its shroud and close my eyes,
Weakened by so much straining over motes
And specks of living matter, eyes that oped
In innocent lustre on that teasing heap
Of prizes reaped round the terrestrial globe
By resolution captains fo the proud Dutch ships
That slip their anchors here in Amsterdam,
Sail out of the mist and squalls, ride with the wind
To burning lands beneath a copper sun
Or never-melted mountains of green ice
Or hot dark secret places in the steam
Of equatorial forests, where the sun
Strikes far above the canopy, where men
And other creatures never see her light
Save as a casual winking lance that runs
A silver shaft between green dark and dark.

I had a project, as a tiny boy
To make a catalogue of all this pelf,
Range it, create an order, render it,
You might say, human-sized, by typing it
According to the use we made of it
Or meanings we saw in it. I would part
Medicine from myth, for instance, amulets
Of dimunition or of magnitude,
Until I saw successive plans and links
Of dizzying order and complexity?
I could anatomise a mayfly's eye,
Could so arrange the cornea of a gnat
That I could peer through that at New Church Tower,
And see it upside down and multiplied,
Like many pinpoints, where no Angels danced.
A moth's wing scaly like a coat of mail,
The sharp hooked claws upon the legs of flies---
I saw a new world in this world of ours---
A world of miracle, a world of truth
Monstrous and swarming with unguessed-at life.

That glass of water you hold to my lips,
Had I my lenses, would reveal to us
Not limpid clarity as we suppose---
Pure water---but a seething, striving horde
Of animalcules lashing dragon-tails
Propelled by springs and coils and hairlike fronds
Like whales athwart the oceans of the globe.
The optic lens is like a slicing sword.
It multiplies the world, or it divides---
We see the many in the one, as here,
We see the segments of what once seemed smooth,
Rough pits and craters on a lady's skin,
Or fur and scales along her gleaming hair.

The more the Many were revealed to me
The more I pressed my hunt to find the One---
Prima Materia, Nature's shifting shape
Still constant in her metamorphoses.

I found her Law in the successive Forms
Of ant and butterfly, beetle and bee.
I first discerned the pattern of growth
From egg to simple grub, from grub encased,
Shrinking in part, in other putting forth
New organs in its sleep, until it stir,
Split and disgorge the tattered silk, which fast
Trembles and stiffens and then takes the air
Unfurled in splendour, tawny, sapphire blue,
Eveyd like the peacock, tiger-barred, or marked
Between its wings with dark death's eyeless head.

Within the crystal circle of the lens
My horny thumbs were elephantine pads.
I fashioned me a surgeon's armory---
Skewers and swords, scalpels and teasing hooks---
Not out of steel, but softest ivory,
Sharpened and turned beyond our vision's range,
Lances and lancets, that the naked eye
Could not discern, beneath the lens' stare.
With these I probed the creatures' very life
And source of life, of generation.
Their commonwealths are not as we supposed.
Lay ou the ant-hill's Lord, the beehive's King
The centre of the patterns that they weave
Fetching and carrying, hurrying to feed,
Construct and guard their world, the pinnacle
Or apex of the social hierarchy---
Lay out this creature on the optic disk,
Lay bare the seat of generation
The organs where the new lives lie and grow,
Where the eggs take their form. She is no King
But a vast Mother, on whose monstrous flanks
Climb smaller sisters, hurrying to tend
Her progeny, to help with her travail,
Carry her nectar and give up their lives
If needs be, to save hers, for she is Queen,
The necessary Centre of the Brood.

It was these eyes first saw the Ovaries,
These hands that drew them, and this fading mind
Discerned the law of Metamorphosis
And wrote it down to show indifferent men.
I had no honour of it. Not at home---
My father cast me bankrupt in the street---
Nor 'mongst my peers in Medicine. When, by Want
Driven to sell my library of slides,
My demonstrations and my experiments,
I found no Buyer, nor no man of Science,
Philosopher or Doctor, who would take
My images of Truth, my elegant
Visions of life, and give them hope to last.
And so I came to penury and beg
For sops of bread and milk and scraps of meat
Scattered with maggots of the self-same flies
I marked the breeding of.

Great Galileo with his optic tube
A century ago, displaced this Earth
From apprehension's Centre, and made out
The planets' swimming circles and the Sun
And beyond that, motion of infinite space
Sphere upon sphere, in whihc our spinning world
Green grass and yellow desert, mountains white
And whelming depths of bluest sea, is but
A speck in a kind of star-broth, rightly seen.
They would have burned him for his saying so,
Save that the sage, in fear of God and strong
In hope of life, gainsaid his own surmise,
Submitted him to doctors of the Church
Who deal in other truths and mysteries.

It was one step, I say, to displace Man
From the just centre of the sum of things---
But quite another to step to strike at God
Who made us as we are, so fearfully
And wonderfully made our intellects,
Our tireless quest to know, but also made
Our finitude, within His Mystery,
His soft, dark, infinite space, wherein we rest
When all our questions finish and our brain
Dies into weeping, as my own taxed mind
Died in dissecting the Ephemera.
I found their forms, those dancing specks of life,
The one-day flies, I gave my years to them,
Who live one day's space, never know the night.

I ask myself, did Galileo know
Fear, when he saw the gleaming globes in space,
Like unto mine, whose lens revealed to me---
Not the chill glory of Heaven's Infinite---
But all the swarming, all the seething motes
The basilisks, the armoured cockatrice,
We cannot see, but are in their degrees---
Why not?---to their own apprehension---
I dare not speak it---why not microcosms
As much as Man, poor man, whose ruffled pride
Cannot abide the Infinite's questioning
From smallest as from greatest?

{Desunt cetera}