Lyn Hejinian — Saga/Circus — Reco’s Circus — a Saw-gah

Darién Gap

Friday

April 2, 2010

Dear Lyn,

Ego contra: erasures of the one — totality in the texture — time without trial and transformation. Ego pro: humility of erasure — texture as personality — time within trial and transformation. Your newest book of poems sprawls such parts across a sea, building a bildung to stretch the expanse of, as you put it in an earlier work, the single instant of ignorance . . . [what] might correspond to what you have called paradise.

Herbert Reco was a circus factotum who began his career as a tightrope walker, clown, and acrobat — but was better known to his confreres as a liar, scoundrel and spendthrift.

This is not to mention his temper: on one occasion he shot at three hundred drunken circus-goers with a shotgun, before attacking them with a spiked tent pole and turning a bear loose on them. He later said he was trying to calm them down. Reco:

People think we’re nothing, associate us with fairs or gypsies because we live in caravans, but we’re just as educated as they are, if not more so.

A number of performers in Reco’s circus had been involved in film. Mr. Cook trained horses for studios and his wife was in two features. Reco himself had assisted with technical points relating to the circus in the film, “Dark Tower.” He often bought animals from studios that no longer needed them. He worried that the spectacle of film would supersede the circus. Mr. Cook said:

I think the circus is dying out. I don’t care what they say about it booming again, – it’s dying out… Whereas in the old days there was no amusement near at hand, now [children] go to the pictures two or three times a week. Travel isn’t what it used to be, and if they haven’t got a picture palace they can go into the next town on the bus…

And it wasn’t only the townies. One of the favorite activities of the circus folk was to visit the cinema whenever available. Whenever the cinema was not available, they entertained themselves with increasingly ribald games of animalia with the outlandish:

Stanley Mason, a dwarf clown, would get drunk and fight children from the towns after his performances. Monkeys were frequently beaten by the workers — while being fed only the best food available: whereas a bear was fed stale bread and sour milk, a monkey was fed fresh lettuce, carrots, bread, jam and butter—and once, after having been beaten for some misbehavior, a monkey was fed a cantaloupe with sugar on it, being told by Reco’s wife: “There you are, you naughty girl—no lettuce for you today.”

But Reco was obdurate. After the war, he believed that there would be so many circuses on the road that it would be advisable to have his headquarters in a more central position, so that rival circuses could not know which way he intended to travel when starting off at the beginning of the season.

Though it was well known that one of Mrs. Cook’s keepsakes was a photographic still from a film in which she had starred.

the Saw-gah

(from Saga/Circus):

Banned from ships as if I were fate
Herself I nonetheless long hankered after adventures

. . .

And I went to sea after all
And shaped a course away from the trees that framed the seascape
Beyond my mother’s house, incandescent
Birches and fiery maples as well
As forbidding clouds of hemlock and pine, a forest that was
Like a terrestrial sky
But is much less so now in memory—I don’t remember why.

. . .

Emboldened by the ice

. . .

Existence is when we are at sea
Subject to capriciousness
Though we sleep slung in binding hammocks like spiders
Or netted fish or trapeze artists bouncing near
Ground level at the end of their act.

. . .

Pathos has sea legs

. . .

And feared. Men have accused us
Of witchery, they’ve accused us of receiving
Visitations and crafting
Transmutations; we are blamed
For changes, the more precise the more terrifying.

. . .

The future has acquired the habit of waiting to reveal itself.

The beauty, one might say, is not between the parts but in the unformability of the whole from the parts. There is no way to dismember Dionysos if he was never whole. Re-membering how he came to us is an act of beginning every time at zero. The show must always be brand new. All the more terrifying, I say, to set out with such troupe.

Sincerely,

Edgar