{"id":479,"date":"2020-09-24T01:49:51","date_gmt":"2020-09-24T05:49:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/?p=479"},"modified":"2020-09-24T01:49:51","modified_gmt":"2020-09-24T05:49:51","slug":"it-glares-wildly-at-you-with-a-strange-and-painful-expression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/2020\/09\/24\/it-glares-wildly-at-you-with-a-strange-and-painful-expression\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cIt glares wildly at you with a strange and painful expression.\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

by S. Dorman<\/span><\/p>\n

Going home through Franconia Notch, my spouse and I watched the great Whites rising like an apparition glimpsed between darker mountainous slopes. This whiteness\u2014befitting the name of the range\u2014was rime ice, crusting bold surfaces, before disappearing a day or two later. Then we searched for the telltale contour of\u00a0Agiocochook<\/em>, as Native Abenakis fitly named the greatest for its vast white summit: The Snowy Forehead\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Of these Presidentials Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, \u201cLet us forget the other names of American statesmen that have been stamped upon these hills, but still call the loftiest Washington. Mountains are Earth\u2019s undecaying monuments.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Hawthorne\u2019s stories in\u00a0The Old Stone Face and Other Tales of the White Mountains<\/em>\u00a0are, as you might expect, homey, austere, and slightly fantastic. I find the obvious word in it all is \u201cstone.\u201d The word is here by the dozens and the word \u201crock\u201d also features\u2014less so, maybe a dozen times.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nathaniel Hawthorne was college-mates with Longfellow at Maine\u2019s ivy league Bowdoin in the early 1800s. The great poet ended up reviewing Hawthorne\u2019s first book,\u00a0Twice-Told Tales,<\/em>\u00a0which contained a couple of the stories in this later White Mountains book. In his review, Longfellow said, \u201cA calm, thoughtful face seems to be looking at you from every page, with now a pleasant smile, now a shade of sadness, stealing over its features. Sometimes, though not often, it glares wildly at you with a strange and painful expression.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Old Stone Face\u201d story (1850) assumes the lastingness of stone formations. Based on \u201cThe old man in the mountain\u201d of Franconia Notch, this stone-sculpture of God the Creator figures in his tale. In this title story he writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

True it is, that if the spectator approached too near, he lost the outline of the gigantic visage, and could discern only a heap of ponderous and gigantic rocks, piled in chaotic ruin one upon another. Retracing his steps, however, the wondrous features would again be seen\u2026. Like a human face, with all its original divinity intact … until, as it grew dim in the distance, with the clouds and glorified vapor of the mountains clustering about it, the Great Stone Face seemed positively to be alive.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"In \u201cThe Great Carbuncle,\u201d the stone is something of a rosy guiding light, glowing among mountain mists but seldom stationary\u2014elusive. In the non-fiction \u201cSketches from Memory\u201d the author\u2019s own search for stories and experiences leads him through the real world stone walls of \u201cthe notch.\u201d He seeks through travels in the Crystal Hills to find his own metaphoric experience of the tempting red stone.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

His style is crystalline as well. For one thing, it\u2019s slow. In this figure, it\u2019s like the slow calculated building of atomically precise structuring found in White Mountain gemstone: amethyst, beryl, tourmaline, or quartz. These building forces are subterranean, seeming cold and crushing, but in fact are molten, incalculably hot and driven by energetic fusion only mineral elements can endure in order to bring forth lasting and mathematically precise light-enhancing beauty. The style can seem cold, ironic, stylized, but in its light-capturing array we glimpse unbreakable morality, stern and unyielding as Hawthorne\u2019s puritanical spirit\u2014without the Puritan sect\u2019s letter, some of its misbegotten laws, and its\u00a0code of enforcement<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

From Hawthorne\u2019s perspective, this eternal unbreakable spirit works in this life\u2014no matter the culture or era\u2014as we are forged by fate into whatever we are meant to be; in collaboration of our free will with physics\u2014the physical laws by which both we and the world are made. In Hawthorne\u2019s vision, this fate is coupled with doom or the\u00a0judgment<\/em>\u00a0of this invisible moral logos, or Word.<\/span><\/p>\n

Edgar Allan Poe had good things to say about Hawthorne\u2019s early artistry in the May 1842\u00a0Graham\u2019s Magazine<\/em>. Poe was grateful to him for helping establish American letters, specifically the short story, saying Hawthorne\u2019s belonged to \u201cthe highest region of art… art subservient to genius of a very lofty order.\u201d In this article he viewed the stories of\u00a0Twice-Told Tales<\/em>\u00a0as foundational, and gave an example of what he called Hawthorne\u2019s peculiar ability:<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Hawthorne is original at all points. \u2026Not all is done that should be done, but there is nothing done which should not be. Every word tells, and there is not a word which does not tell…. A tone of melancholy and mysticism [prevails]. The style is purity itself. Force abounds. High imagination gleams from every page.<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

We don\u2019t\u00a0want<\/em>\u00a0to think we can break a moral law, or that a moral law can break us. In Hawthorne the moral law is inset in the Creation like gravity, which brought down the stones when erosional forces loosened them. We\u2014the humans\u2014are that portion of creation dedicated to morality\u2019s encoded expression.\u00a0\u00a0As all physicality expresses invisible gravity, so humanity experiences invisible moral law. Throughout Nathaniel Hawthorne\u2019s work we find morality both mocking and aiding humanity.<\/span><\/p>\n

Where gravity is impersonal, the hopeful Crawford Notch householder character nevertheless gives personification to the mountain. So in Hawthorne\u2019s work morality\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0also<\/em>\u00a0personal, not impersonal. In Hawthorne\u2019s we are persons, as is God.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hawthorne\u2019s \u201cCrystal Hills\u201d were exposed in a massive erosional off-scouring of glaciers. Erosion continues, and on our day trip, we saw its testament in topographic changes to the surface of the Franconia Notch profile. He wrote of this real-life stone surface\u2014the basis of the first story\u2014as a ruined chaotic pile. But even at that time, it was still intact as \u201cthe old man in the mountain.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The first time I saw the great granite face it was braced with iron but still very much recognizable\u2014high above\u2014as the iconic natural emblem of New Hampshire. One might even say of New England. I heard of its fall over a decade ago, and recently we came through the Notch to see its remains high on the once-anchoring cliff-face.<\/span><\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Ambitious Guest,\u201d the narrator\u2019s host and head of the house wishes they could move, even though he says of the mountain, \u201cWe are old neighbors and agree together pretty well, upon the whole. Besides, we have a sure place of refuge hard by if he should be coming in good earnest.\u201d Hawthorne has scattered the odd rattling, rolling, falling stone throughout this masterful story so that their sounding reaches the reader\u2019s ear (along with that of the householders\u2019), heightening the overall force\u2014much as Poe said about the reader\u2019s ear in \u201cThe Hollow of Three Hills,\u201d another Hawthorne tale.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cMr. Hawthorne has wonderfully heightened his effect by making the ear, in place of the eye, the medium by which the fantasy is conveyed.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

However, based as it is on a true story of what happened in the Crawford Notch, the house stands. The people who hoped for kindness, but also feared their mountainous neighbor, fled when they might have stayed alive in the house. Shielded by a ledge, their dwelling afterward stood between the arms of the landslide that destroyed them. My retelling clumsily echoes all the hard and fearsome parts of both Hawthorne\u2019s story and the puritanical scripture on which (among other literary masterpieces) he was raised.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hawthorne\u2019s \u201cSketches from Memory\u201d is the last of this small collection. In this, his depicted travels-through-the-notch experiences, receiving glimpses of things to come in the making of these stories. \u201cThe notch\u201d itself intrigues him. He tries and feels he has failed to describe its effect on him:<\/span><\/p>\n

It is, indeed, a wondrous path. A demon, it might be fancied, or one of the Titans, was travelling up the valley […..] Shame on me that I have attempted to describe it by so mean an image\u2014feeling, as I do, that it is one of those symbolic scenes which lead the mind to the sentiment … of Omnipotence.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Instead of conflating fictional characters out of real fellow travelers suggestive of his themes, he divides surface attributes of these individuals into separate types, to allegorize fictive seekers after the carbuncle. But we might also surmise, given his early felt discouragement over prospects of publication, that he plays gently off himself as the ambitious guest who is destroyed with his hosts in the Titan\u2019s \u201celbowing of the heights aside\u201d in Its monstrous passing.<\/span><\/p>\n

We today can surely marvel at what Hawthorne has to say in parodying his own tastes in literature. Especially if we cannot detect its satire, or know little of historical shifts in culture, or lack a sense of complexity in coupling these shifts with our own\u00a0unchanging<\/em>\u00a0human nature.<\/span><\/p>\n

To be easy about Hawthorne\u2019s uses, we think our own old stone face should object. But if, however, we think of the Native Americans selling the businessman for ransom in \u201cThe Great Carbuncle,\u201d and then perhaps recall what the Titan Time did to the real-life historical \u201cOld Man of the Mountain,\u201d we might think of our unchanging nature.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Hawthorne\u2019s artistry, we now have the legend of the great carbuncle out of Native American lore. Being true to his own tastes, he nevertheless gives artistry its due, maybe wildly,\u00a0glaring<\/em>\u00a0in times and places: from the ancient and classical, through the primal native lore\u2014in allegory and archetype\u2014even to his own day.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a9 S. Dorman<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \nDorman has lived in Maine and studied its ways for\u00a0thirty-five years.\u00a0Maine in Winter\u00a0<\/em>is forthcoming this winter, forth book in the series of\u00a0Maine<\/em>Metaphor<\/em>narrative nonfiction\u2014put out by Wipf & Stock.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Visit the S. Dorman Author\u2019s Page<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    by S. Dorman Going home through Franconia Notch, my spouse and I watched the great Whites rising like an apparition glimpsed between darker mountainous slopes. This whiteness\u2014befitting the name of the range\u2014was rime ice, crusting bold surfaces, before disappearing a day or two later. Then we searched for the telltale contour of\u00a0Agiocochook, as Native Abenakis…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":481,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=479"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":483,"href":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479\/revisions\/483"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}