I’ve been reading Mark Twain’s memoir Life on the Mississippi (1883). David Thomas, the singer of Pere Ubu, writes in his Book of Hieroglyphs (2012) that he believes it to be the Great American Novel: ‘Oh, there are plenty of better writers, more important writers, more important books. There is, however, no more important subject for an American than the River, and the Mississippi is the granddaddy of all rivers’ (p. 42).
Elsewhere in the same book, Thomas asserts that ‘’The River’ is a hieroglyph, a building block of the grammar of consciousness’ (p. 31). In the Ubu song informed by Thomas’ reading of Twain, ‘Fire’, the Mississippi becomes blended with another American folk hieroglyph, Greil Marcus’ beloved Mystery Train:
‘Last night the river went calling
A train that jumps the tracks
It roared through the night –
A vow to never go back’
The song refers to Twain’s account of the river as an unpredictable jumbler of geography. It lengthens and contracts, shifts its banks, ‘plays havoc with boundary lines and jurisdictions: for instance, a man is living in the state of Mississippi today, a cut-off occurs tonight, and tomorrow the man finds himself and his land over on the other side of the river, within the boundaries and subject to the laws of the State of Lousiana! Such a thing, happening in the upper river in the old times, could have transferred a slave from Missouri to Illinois and made a free man of him (Wordsworth p. 32).
I never quite got to the bottom of what the Mystery Train is exactly, despite reading Marcus’ book of the same name several times, and I think this may, in fact, be its meaning. I think it stands for a journey that is also a kind of crazy unknown, a moment of faerie chaos that re-arranges the ordered world into something or somewhere else. In the above passage, it means, not so much the destruction of human codes, rules and boundary lines, but the creative flummoxing of them. The river is invested with a recognisable American wit. And notice that Twain credits this force the power to liberate a man from slavery: the Mystery Train or the Mississippi is life itself in its aspect as generator of random fortune, teller of tall-tales, an inscrutable moral ironist.
Elsewhere, he writes of his time as a ‘cub’, an apprentice steamboat pilot, and how he had to learn, in absurdly granular detail, every feature of the river’s ever-changing form, until eventually he acquires the skill to ‘read water’. The face of the river becomes ‘a wonderful book – a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice’ (p. 86).
I suspect this ad-hoc animism arises naturally in professions such as that of the Mississippi steamboat pilot, which demand the development, by years of practice and memorisation, of an intuitive ‘feel’ for a chaotic terrain. The vocabulary of ‘language’ and ‘telling’ reveals an object ‘enspirited’ by a working relationship, one determined by the nuances of the river’s sensory feedback via the ship, itself an extension of the pilot’s body. Presumably this is also the origin of the female figurehead on the prow of ships.
At the end of a pilot’s retirement of 21 years, Twain returns to the river to assess its changes: ‘The railroads have killed the steamboat passenger traffic by doing in two or three days what the steamboats consumed a week in doing; and the towing-fleets have killed the through-freight traffic by dragging six or seven steamer-loads of stuff down the river at a time, at an expense so trivial that steamboat competition was out of the question’ (p. 164).
A subtly moving sentence: ‘I suppose that St. Louis and New Orleans have not suffered materially by the change, but alas for the wood-yard man!’ (p. 164) He goes on: ‘He used to fringe the river all the way; his close-ranked merchandise stretched from the one city to the other, along the banks, and he sold uncountable cords of it every year for cash on the nail; but all the scattering boats that are left burn coal now, and the seldomest spectacle on the Mississippi today is a woodpile.’ (p. 164)
In this easily-missed little elegy in prose, the disappearance of the wood-yard man and his woodpiles from the banks of the Mississippi leads to this reflection: now that the whole infrastructure of which it was a visible sign has been removed, its contextual economy diverted to the railroads and towing-fleets, the woodpile achieves its full realisation as an object of aesthetic contemplation.
To build a woodpile (not just any old useful woodpile, as might be found stacked against the walls of a country cottage, waiting for the fireplace, but particularly a Mississippi riverbank woodpile in the year Twain recorded his return) is now to contrive something outside the momentum and flow of consequences and procedures of which it was once habitually generated.
In other words, it is to self-consciously create an art object- one that is a metonym for the whole system of the riverboat economy of Twain’s youth 21 years earlier. Where the humble woodpile was once a routine if maybe picturesque encounter for a riverboat cub, it is now, briefly and wistfully, the hieroglyph of an entire disappeared way of life. Yet that way of life was nothing more than the sum of whatever objects and activities happened to prove necessary to keep the whole thing going. It was mundane. It was business.
In this moment of Twain’s contemplation, the woodpile becomes a metaphoric index of these objects and activities at the moment of their vanishing out of everyday life, and at the solidifying of their ultimate coherence within the imagination. No more are they necessitated by the local circumstances of the material plane- they are finally free to exist for their own sake, as an end in themselves.
When things like this appear on Earth, they are often a bad parody, a kind of narcissism which is also called decadence. But in the imagination, beauty is usefulness achieving its destiny into uselessness. The memory, guaranteed by Art, in this case Twain’s writing, of the woodpile’s humble usefulness, is also realisation, made in gratitude, of its beauty.
I think of the hieroglyphic status of many objects in the writings of Richard Brautigan – creeks, trouts, clocks, watermelons – that seem to occupy a liminal zone, or realise an eternal transaction, between these spaces of use and beauty. Here, perhaps, is the hint of a through-line between two English Williams, Blake and Morris: use and beauty are the same thing in Golgonooza.
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"But in the imagination, beauty is usefulness achieving its destiny into uselessness. The memory, guaranteed by Art, in this case Twain’s writing, of the woodpile’s humble usefulness, is also realisation, made in gratitude, of its beauty."
Elegantly exact. This reminds me of the great Frost poem, "The Wood-pile"(public domain):
Out walking in the frozen swamp one grey day
I paused and said, "I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther—and we shall see."
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went down. The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.
A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather—
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
And then there was a pile of wood for which
I forgot him and let his little fear
Carry him off the way I might have gone,
Without so much as wishing him good-night.
He went behind it to make his last stand.
It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled—and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year's cutting,
Or even last year's or the year's before.
The wood was grey and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it though on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labour of his axe,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.