W. Grey Champion
The Carriage Lamp
The Carriage Lamp Among the many things we share, Anna and I are Sherlockians, and thus enamored of the late nineteenth century, before...
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W. Grey Champion
From the Moleskine
My Moleskine accompanies me everywhere, for the purpose of catching those elusive thoughts that bombard one’s consciousness and may or may not be worthy of elaboration. I have shared these musings on my blog, From the Moleskine, each week for many years. Originally a Google blog, I moved it to this website when my third book was released. In The Weekly will be recent reflections I seek to record and to share with readers. Described here are other headings, also updated weekly.
Dokusan: In Japan, dokusan is a private meeting of a Zen student with his master. For background, readers must see my book, Conjuring Archangel: Chronicle of a Journey on the Path, because the conjuring continues.
In the Courtyard: As my collaborator on the blog, my friend Anna reports under this heading from her frequent forays to the village. We often meet in the courtyard for croissants and hazelnut coffee from the French bakery.
The Carriage Lamp: Evocative of those bygone, romantic days of horses and carriages, Anna and I, Sherlockians both, will on occasion include original poems, either hers or mine. The most recent will be at the top.
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The Weekly
Seasons
After a rather brutal summer here, we are enjoying the mercy of an early autumn; and being my favorite season, I am loving it: the longer nights, the morning fogs, the chorus of crickets, now audible with the locusts gone. It amazes me that the word “crickets” is being used as a kind of meme to signify dead silence among young people immersed in a perpetual atmosphere of pulsatile, monotone noise. Early morning in my garage the crickets are a match for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
When the time comes I will move “My November Guest” to the top of The Carriage Lamp column here on the blog. The famous poem is by Robert Frost, whose work, along with that of Edna St. Vincent Millay, represent in my opinion the strongest argument against the idea that verse - a poem with rhyme and rhythm - is only doggerel. I had always thought the aforesaid poem was a late work, written in late life when losses accumulate. The guest is the poet’s sorrow, whom he speaks of in the feminine. Learning, however, that it appeared in Frost’s first collection, A Boy’s Will, I now wonder if it might be expressive of a youthful romantic disappointment. But there is greater depth here to reflect upon. His guest loves the “dark days of autumn rain,” “the bare, the withered tree.” She “walks the sodden pasture lane.” She tries to persuade him of their loveliness, and in the last stanza he confesses to us that he did not need persuading. “But I were vain to tell her so, and they are better for her praise.”
Surely the seasons give us contrast, the dark and the light, likewise the seasons of life. In our more enlightened moments we recognize their mutual beauty. That recognition is our intuition of their transcendent reality, that essence which inheres in all that is real - with the important exception of evil, a dark ignorance which totally obscures natural intuitions. Reflection should further inform us just how prejudicial our notions of reality can be.
What genius to convey such meaning and nuance in the perfect architecture of true poetry! What passes for the art today is merely a peroration of prose in a singsong cadence.
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