Letters

But in this latest dream there was a third…

Relate: Greece is to Rome as Rome is to the U.S.: translatio studii, “westward the course of empire,” “manifest destiny.” Joel Barlow, Philip Freneau. Iliad: Aeneid::Aeneid: Marylandiad, the second an imitation of the first, the third a parody of the second.

Back to LETTERS: notes on Ambrose Mensch’s story about Perseus, Andromeda, Medusa.

Work in: “2nd Revolution” (1812 War called Second War of Independence). Eben Cooke’s Sot-Weed Redivivus (1730). Roman economy slave-based, like early U.S.; Romans “invented” satire (also, especially under Augustus, bureaucracy, civil service, the mercantile middle class, and red tape). Ebenezer Cooke an “Augustan” poet. Rome built on marshes between those seven hills. Crank explanation of Empire’s fall: anopheles mosquito from those marshes. Sleeping sickness. Cooke in Sot-Weed Redivivus advises Marylanders to drain marshes. Philip Freneau traces Indians from Carthaginians; ditto Cooke in The Sot-Weed Factor (1698).

Marshes: associated with both decay and fertility, female genitalia (cf. Freudians on Medusa), death and rebirth, miasma (pestilence, ague, rheumatism, sinusitis), evil, damnation, stagnation (e.g. Styx, Avernus; also Ezekiel 47:11). Behemoth sleeps in cover of reeds (Job 40:11). Marsh ibis sacred to Thoth, inventor of writing. Reed pens and styli; papyri. East Anglia fenlands associated with eccentricity, independent-spiritedness, fertility, dialects, odd customs. “The Marsh King” (Alfred the Great, 848?-900). 12th-Century Chinese story-cycle Shui-liu Chuan: “Men of the Marshes.” Maryland is “Border State”: tidewater marsh also, between land and sea. Irish bog-peat: not only sphagnum but shrub Andromeda.

Back to Perseus.

Great sleepers, arranged alphabetically: Arthur, Barbarossa, Brunhilde, Charlemagne, Francis Drake, Endymion, Epimenides, Finnegan, Herla, Honi the Circle Drawer, John the Divine, Peter Klaus, Lazarus, Mahdi, Merlin, Odin, Ogier the Dane, Oisin, old Rip (fell asleep just before Revolution, woke after), Roderick the Goth, Sebastian of Portugal, the Seven Ephesians, Siegfried, Sleeping Beauty, Tannhauser, William Tell, Thomas of Erceldoune, Wang Chih.

Postscript 3/9/74: I wake half tranced, understanding where I am and then, aha, why I’m here: in Baltimore, whereto I’d not contemplated moving at all in 1969. Once again the fiction has been not autobiographic but mildly prophetic. In 1960, in the draft of a story about Ambrose Mensch, I placed a nonexistent point of land on the south bank of Choptank River just downstream from the bridge at Cambridge, Maryland; in 1962 the Corps of Engineers redredged the ship channel, dumped the spoil where the old East Cambridge seawall was, and voila! Having decided in 1968 that the “Author” character in LETTERS would be offered an honorary doctorate of letters from a Maryland university, I receive in 1969 just such an invitation in the mail. And presuming in 1969 to imagine, in notes for Jerome Bonaparte Bray’s story Bellerophoniad, a “hero” (Bellerophon, slayer of the Chimera) who falls from mythic irreality into the present-day Maryland marshes — I find myself back in the Old Line State.

Just as Eben Cooke put aside his Marylandiad to write The Sot-Weed Factor—and the “editor” of Giles Goat-Boy put aside his novel The Seeker to edit The Revised New Syllabus, and J. Bray’s LILYVAC computer put aside its Concordance to propose the revolutionary novel NOTES—so I put aside, in 1968, in Buffalo, a Marylandiad of my own in favor of the novel LETTERS, whereof Mensch’s Perseid and Bray’s Bellerophoniad were to be tales-within-the-tale. Then, in ’69, ’70, and ’71, I put by LETTERS in pursuit of a new chimera called Chimera: serial novellas about Perseus, Bellerophon, and Scheherazade’s younger sister. Now (having put by Buffalo for Baltimore) it’s back to LETTERS, to history, to “realism”… and to the revisitation of a certain marsh where once I wandered, dozed, dreamed.

But though I have returned to Maryland, I shall not to Cooke’s Marylandiad. One must take care what one dreams. And there are projects whose fit fate is preemption: works meant ever to be put aside for works more pressing; dreams whose true and only dénouement is the dreamer’s waking in the middle, half tranced, understanding where he is but not at once why he’s there.