Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Jimmy's Soul Is an Enchanted Boat

Was it only yesterday that I was poking through that Hugh Kenner book, so pleasantly reminded of the ending of Samuel Beckett's novel MOLLOY, which was quoted therein? "Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining." WHAT! That is the way to end a book. Then I grabbed up at random, through an obvious and clumsy process of association with the Kenner book, focused as it was on three authors, some of them Irish, some scholarly whatsit called BARBAROUS KNOWLEDGE: MYTH IN THE POETRY OF YEATS, GRAVES, AND MUIR, and I don't even know who Muir is, well, now I do a little, anyway, what's this thing doing in my house? Saw two lines of Shelley quoted: "My soul is an enchanted boat/ Which like a sleeping swan doth float..." And once again, as was sadly recalled and recorded for posterity in 2006, I thought about how all the other college freshmen and I were encouraged to laugh and scoff at P.B. Shelley like we were a bunch of big shots. Shame, shame, shame. Somehow "My soul is an enchanted boat," etc., made me think of Jimmy, who is moving to New Orleans. Maybe because his soul is an enchanted boat! I mean, maybe that's why I thought of him, not that maybe that's why he's moving to New Orleans, though come to think of it, maybe that's why he's moving to New Orleans.