Can Sophie of the Unsellables Save the World?

Sophie Allsop, Host of the Unsellables

Yesterday was weird because I wanted very much to stay on task and be productive but it was really hard. Every little thing took tremendous effort. 

I suspect this struggle is due to situational depression, caused by the behavior of people who continue to contest the election, the bungled vaccine roll-out, and the general awfulness of life right now. It didn't help that my long-awaited dental appointment was canceled because two people in the office tested positive for COVID.

I had hoped that there would be more people vaccinated by now, and that we'd be progressing towards our new normal, whatever that might be. Instead we're in the middle of a cluster-fuck with more transmissible variants of the virus emerging. Thank you, Donald Trump.

But anger and grief don't actually serve us well in a crisis, do they? On TV, emotions motivate the hero to take decisive and successful action. In real life, emotional turmoil just seems to cause decision paralysis or bad choices. 

Hoarding: Buried Alive disappeared from Prime Video for a few days, and in the time that it was missing, I started watching The Unsellables on YouTube. My husband hates reality TV but I like it – there's a predictable structure which always has a positive outcome (at least in the shows I watch). Sophie the real estate expert looks at the outside of the unsold house, says, "The problem must be inside, and I'm going to find out what it is." She walks through the house and comes up with solutions, which her team then implements, and hey, the house is either sold or they expect it will sell soon. Everyone's happy.

The other thing I love about that show right now is that everybody appears to be doing normal things in a normal economy. Nobody is unemployed, nobody is sick, nobody is wearing masks. It's life the way it used to be, a happy little glimpse of the past where families work together to make change happen and success is possible.

Wouldn't it be great if we had a Pandemic Sophie to guide us to a happier ending? I don't think Joe Biden and his team will be able to function as our guides, not because they are incompetent, but because they will face fierce opposition from people who don't understand science or the necessity of working together to save lives. It's Proud Boys and conspiracy theorists and short-sighted Republicans who stand in the way of the next administration, not peeling wallpaper or purple paint on the walls.

Ecclesiastes 2:26 says that God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy to people who are good in His sight. Right now, we desperately need all three, and perseverance to get us through the next few months.

The End of Shelley and "The Indian Serenade"

Seriously, I am done. I have accumulated an embarrassingly large stack of notes about this poem, and have written my own ghazal; it is time to move on. But first, let me share with some highlights about Percy Bysshe Shelley and his famous poem.

Not everybody liked this poem (I wonder why?):

The absence of concrete imagery in 'The Indian Serenade' has been adversely criticized. The poem's natural world verges on the impalpable: the soft winds, vague perfumes, song of the nightingale, the invisible inaudible stream, faint, die, fall, just as the serenader does in his half-waking ecstasy. It is as if he had awakened from dreams of his lady into a world even more dream-like and indistinct (Park 11).

"In certain critical circles, 'The Indian Serenade' seems to have attained an eminence second only to Kilmer's 'Trees' as a favorite whipping poem" (Levin 305). The New Critics in particular condemned the line, "I die, I faint, I fail" for its "vagueness of description and the direct statement of feeling in poetry" (Abrams and Harpham) – they, as Spock himself might have done, much preferred the Vulcan purity of the objective correlative to all that sloppy, vague emotional verbiage.

Nineteenth-Century Orientalism: Cultural Appropriation, or Cross Pollination? (1)

In the 1800s, Percy Bysshe Shelley found inspiration for his famous poem, “The Indian Serenade,” in Middle Eastern poetry.  There was actually a movement or school of poetry known as the English Orientalists, whose work Shelley greatly admired.

The Turkish Patrol, Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps (French)

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436116

To Europeans, the Middle East was a mysterious place.  Until Napoleon’s army occupied Egypt in 1801, not many Europeans had actually been to the Middle East (Meagher). Even after 1801, many creatives were inspired, not by real-life visits to this exotic destination, but by artwork and descriptions provided by others. (Meagher).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the artwork created by the Orientalists was biased in favor of European culture and against Middle Eastern peoples and their cultures. In fact, it was so biased that today, some have defined Orientalism as a form of racism:

"Orientalism” is a way of seeing that imagines, emphasizes, exaggerates and distorts differences of Arab peoples and cultures as compared to that of Europe and the U.S. It often involves seeing Arab culture as exotic, backward, uncivilized, and at times dangerous (Arab American National Museum).

Given that some artists deliberately created “propaganda in support of French imperialism, depicting the East as a place of backwardness, lawlessness, or barbarism enlightened and tamed by French rule” (Meagher), it’s not surprising that there were exaggerations and distortions; nor is it surprising that many Europeans readily accepted this interpretation of Middle Eastern culture. It fit handily into their preconceived notions, reinforced their Eurocentric world view and justified the exploitation of those nations.

Nevertheless, many British Orientalists studied Middle Eastern culture with a more open mind, and genuinely admired the literature and artwork of these exciting foreign places.

Works Cited

Meagher, Jennifer. “Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century Art.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/euor/hd_euor.htm (October 2004).

Arab American National Museum. “What Is Orientalism?” What Is Orientalism? | Reclaiming Identity: Dismantling Arab Stereotypes, Arab American National Museum, 2011, arabstereotypes.org/why-stereotypes/what-orientalism.

A Serenade Inspired by a Song - But Which Song?

You might think that if a famous poem were inspired by a song, literary critics or music historians might have a clue, but in the instance of "The Indian Serenade" by Percy Bysshe Shelley, that is not actually the case.  What we have instead are competing theories. You can pick your favorite.

B.A. Park believes that Shelley was inspired by the Irish poet Thomas Moore (who wrote the lyrics to the now-famous “Minstrel Boy”) to write lyrics for an Indian melody:

“The habit appears to have been introduced by Thomas Moore of composing poems to fit wordless or foreign popular melodies, with his Irish Melodies of 1807-1828, and his National Airs of 1819-1828. Shelley’s poem appears to have been written to such a wordless tune from India, played for him by a friend” (9). 

Chauncey B. Tinker thought that he had discovered a different source for the same poem:

“The love-song is associated with Miss Sophia Stacey, a young lady whose the Shelleys met in the last months of the poet’s life. She used to sing to Shelley, an experience which always moved him to an intensity of passion and not infrequently to the composition of verses.  One recalls Jane Williams and her singing to the accompaniment of a guitar, which awakened sentiments of the most intense delight in the poet’s heart. ‘I arise from dreams of thee’ may very well have come into existence as the text for some air sung to him by Sophia, though of this there is no proof” (71).

 However, Tinker does not believe that “the loved one” of the poem is Miss Stacey (71).

A third theory is that the poem may have originated during a contest between two now-famous poets:

...perhaps (as Trelawny testified in a manuscript now at John Murray's) to use in a competition with Byron, in which each was to compose lyrics to be sung to an Indian or Arabic melody. But whether Shelley recomposed from memory--or else pretended to compose for the first time--a poem that he had already used to impress Stacey, either to demonstrate his poetic facility vis-a-vis Byron, or to express his feelings for Jane Williams, we are faced with judgments of his motives (Reiman).

Judgments aside, Jessica K. Quillin gives us the most Romantic and compelling narrative:

“…the prosodic arrangement of ‘An Indian Serenade’ fits into the general scheme of Mozart’s music for ‘Ah perdona, al primo affetto,’ revealing the possibility that Shelley wrote the lyric with the melody or at least the words of the aria in mind. In any event, the correspondences between ‘I arise from dreams of thee’ and Mozart’s aria reveal the extent to which music formed part of Shelley’s conception of poetic form toward the end of his life. This theory is lent further support in light of Reiman and O’Neill’s hypothesis that Shelley had the fair copy manuscript of ‘An Indian Serenade’ containing the lines from Mozart with him when his boat, the Don Juan, sank off the coast of Viargeggio” (NP).

What could be more appropriate than a Romantic poet dying with both Mozart and a fair copy of a love poem in his possession during a fatal storm that sinks his boat and takes his life? Even if this turns out not to be true, it's a great origin myth and I want the movie rights!

WORKS CITED

Park, B.A. “The Indian Elements of the ’Indian Serenade.’ Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol 10, Winter 1961.  pp. 8-12. [JSTOR]

Quillin, Jessica K.  Sheely and the Music-Poetics of Romanticism. Abingdon-on_Thames, UK: Routledge, 2016.

Reiman, Donald H.  “Shelley Comes of Age: His Early Poems as an Editorial Experience,” Romantic Circles. https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/earlyshelley/reiman/reiman.html

Tinker, Chauncey B.   “Shelley’s Indian Serenade.” Yale Univ. Library Gazette 25:2, Oct. 1950. pp. 70-72 (JSTOR).

Reflections on "The Indian Serenade" by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1)

The Indian Serenade

I arise from dreams of thee

In the first sweet sleep of night,

When the winds are breathing low,

And the stars are shining bright:

I arise from dreams of thee,

And a spirit in my feet

Hath led me—who knows how?

To thy chamber window, Sweet!

The wandering airs they faint

On the dark, the silent stream—

The Champak odors fail

Like sweet thoughts in a dream;

The nightingale’s complaint,

It dies upon her heart;—

As I must on thine,

Oh! beloved as thou art!

Oh lift me from the grass!

I die! I faint! I fail!

Let thy love in kisses rain

On my lips and eyelids pale.

My cheek is cold and white, alas!

My heart beats loud and fast;—

Oh! press it to thine own again,

Where it will break at last.  

Percy Bysshe Shelley, c. 1817

 

My initial impulse was to dismiss this poem as overwrought and ridiculous.  However, after completing some research on Percy Bysshe Shelley and the poem, I realized there was more to it than I had initially thought.

I discovered that the poem had a history, not merely as a Romantic love poem, but also as song lyrics. Arthur Farwell published a setting of this poem in 1899 (https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200186954/).  Apparently, there were many versions of this poem set to music: one author remarked: “Mid-Victorian composers tumbled over one another to set Shelley to music…. Choral settings are abundant...” (Evans 594).

Curiously enough, it was once even popular among college students at Yale: “ “The final splendour of Shelley’s serenade is that it easily wedded to music, and serves the purpose of expressing and releasing the passion in a lover’s heart.  So far as I am aware, it is the only poem of Shelley’s that ever became a well-known song.  I recall its popularity in the singing at the fence on the old campus, when boys in their early twenties sang it with an emotion which could hardly have arisen from the beauty of the poetry in which is is couched, and who dis- / covered to their surprise that it was the production one of the greatest lyricists in English or any other language.  The air sung at the fence was written by F.B. Tourtellot….” (Tinker 71,72).

Even today, there are versions of it on YouTube, such as this contemporary one:

Works Cited

Evans, Edwin, ed. Musical News and Herald. London: Publishing Office, 1992.

Tinker, Chauncey B.   “Shelley’s Indian Serenade.” Yale Univ. Library Gazette 25:2, Oct. 1950. Pp. 70-72 (JSTOR),

Make It Your Personal Destiny

Hannah Arendt, the philisopher who wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism, survived Nazism primarily because she fled to Czechoslovakia in 1933. She was a woman who knew how to read the handwriting on the wall.

After WWII, she "told a television interviewer... that everyone had known from the start how dangerous Nazi Germany was, but knowing it in theory was one thing, while acting on it and turning it into 'personal destiny' was another" (Bakewell 95).

Today, most of us know that the coronavirus is dangerous, yet whenever I go into town, I see people not wearing masks. They haven't yet made protecting themselves and others part of their own "personal destiny."

https://ensia.com/features/flood-survivors-victims-organize-for-change/

Similarly, people living near coastlines are generally aware of sea level rise, yet many have chosen to stay in these areas, raising their houses a dozen feet without realizing that someday flooded streets and dysfunctional sewers may make their homes uninhabitable. Perhaps, like the citizens of Tokyo once did, they plan to use a boat to travel to work, school, and shopping. Or perhaps they believe that their local government's mitigation efforts will be enough. A strategic response to climate change is not yet part of their personal destinies either.

Research has shown us that humans are terrible at calculating long-term risks. We really, really want rewards now, even if we'd get better outcomes by being patient or denying ourselves in the short term. We overestimate immediate threats and underestimate less obvious dangers. We trust our anecdotal accounts and our friends' experiences over statistics.

The United States is at a crossroads. We can choose to rush into re-opening the economy without sufficient coronavirus testing for a short-term benefit of getting people back to work more quickly at the risk of long-term detriments:

• new waves of the disease
• widespread illness
• prolonged recovery and post-infection quarantines that reduce productivity
• high numbers of deaths
• unpredictable, prolonged school and business closures when employees become infected
• high cost of cleaning and disinfecting before re-opening every time someone gets sick

Likewise, we can continue to emit greenhouse gases, and gain the short-term benefits of continuing to live comfortably for a while as:

• our cities flood
• our homes become worthless
• farm land turns to salt marsh
• hurricanes and tornadoes destroy homes and lives
• floods cause late planting and crop failure
• fires ravage the hotter, drier regions of every continent

Or we can choose to plan for a future in which cities and farms continue to thrive, sustainable economies expand instead of contracting, and we do not die in great numbers from political upheaval, famine, or disease.

It's one thing to know what's dangerous. It's another to act before it's too late.

What's your personal destiny? What's the destiny of your nation?

WORKS CITED

Bakewell, Sarah. At the Existentialist Cafe. New York: Other Press, 2016.

Foy, George Michaelsen. "Humans Can't Plan Long-Term and Here's Why." Psychology Today. 25 June 2018. <https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/shut-and-listen/201806/humans-cant-plan-long-term-and-heres-why>

King, Dr. Matthew Wilburn. "How Brain Biases Prevent Climate Action." BBC. <https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190304-human-evolution-means-we-can-tackle-climate-change>

One Bit at a Time: My Isolated Brain!

My volunteer potato plant

Yesterday I spent most of the day working in the yard.  I was actually planted something - a potato that came up volunteer in the compost. I had intended to plant a sweet potato from the grocery store, but when I started to screen the compost, I found this guy.  Sometime last year, I tossed an old potato into the bin and buried it.  Over the winter, that forgotten potato sprouted and struggled up through several inches of dirt to reach the light.  

In the midst of a global pandemic, it seems wrong to kill anything so determined to make a life for itself.  So I planted it instead.

It’s obvious, BTW, that we are going to run out of garden soil rather quickly.  No way is there enough compost to start a large garden.  But that is definitely not today’s issue.  My real problem is my distracted brain.

Every day,  I’m scatterbrained and emotional, and I struggle to complete any task.  Admittedly, there would be something truly wrong with me if I felt happy right now in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak.  The U.S. if facing a highly contagious pandemic with inadequate medical supplies, no known treatments, thousands of deaths and a global recession –  I’d be a monster if I were fine with all that.  Nevertheless I would like to be a little more fine than I currently am.

The primary way I’m functioning right now (when I'm not "misery scrolling" on Facebook or reading and re-reading the latest news) is by “bitting.”  A bit is the smallest unit of information processed by a computer, either a zero or a one.  Bits are usually grouped into larger units called bytes.  Bitting is taking things one very tiny piece at a time.

This is how it looks in my life:  People are dying, I’m terrified for everyone around me (including myself). What can I do?  Okay, there's a lot of laundry sitting around. Maybe I can match three pairs of socks.  Great, I did that.  Now I can fold two tee-shirts.  What’s the next little thing I can do? Eventually the stack of laundry disappears.

It would be way more efficient if I could manage larger data packets right now, but my mind is not in the kind of a place.  I’m happy just to be moving forward, a millimeter or two at a time.  And to be healthy, at a moment when so many are literally struggling for their lives.

Where do you go to find yourself?

How do you define your identity as a human being? Is it a matter of gender, or of being a certain age?  Having a particular profession? Are you defined by your actions and achievements?  Your family and friends?  Their expectations, or your own dreams?

At church Sunday, the topic was baptism, and the text was Matthew’s account of John baptizing Jesus. Reverend Renée said that Jesus didn’t need to be baptized, because He had a perfect relationship with the Father and He had no sin; therefore Jesus had no need for repentance.  However, by coming to the river with those who were looking for healing, renewal and grace, Jesus participated with them in their pain and their need, and in so doing, discovered who He was.  Reverend Renée hypothesized that without the baptism, there might have been no ministry, no atonement, and no resurrection.

I like her idea that “we discover who we are in community.”  That’s definitely true of creative people, which is why I need the Writers Coffeehouse, the Huachuca Arts Association open studio, the monthly open mic reading at Broxton’s and my critique groups.  I don’t just learn craft there; I also learn who I am.

But I don't want to be like Ernest Hemingway, with his self-destructive impulses and his inability to continue living when he could no longer write.  I cannot simply define myself as a writer, or an artist; I am more than what I do, or how well I do it.

Sunday, we came, one by one, but also as a congregation, to dip our fingers into a bowl of water and choose a glass pebble.  "Remember your baptism, Tina" Reverend Renée said, and I picked a smooth, blood-red piece of glass that was practically glowing in the sunlight.  

"Put this where you can see it," she told us all.  And I have, because I want to remember that I am part of something much larger than myself, and that we are all figuring things out together.  I am loved, and I do not have to walk alone.

Buy your own glass gems <https://www.amazon.com/Miracolors-Colors-Fillers-12-19mm-Approx/dp/B00OPN5IZU>