Aesthetic Humility in Marianne Moore’s “The Jerboa” (Part 2)

Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Marianne Moore’s poem, “The Jerboa,” first published in 1932, and whether power and wealth might paradoxically prove less abundant than the strictures of form and necessity. Upcoming Episodes: M*A*S*H, Rilke, Dickinson. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. Okay, welcome to part two of our discussion of Marianne Moore's 1932 poem the Jerboa. Last time I think we talked about what toys little baby Egyptians used to like to play with. And it seems the consensus is that they liked to put badgers on camels and race them, dress them up as jockeys. And they also like to maybe feed wasps to snakes. The jury's out on what exactly they like to do with these things. But the point is. What is the point? The point is that they're toyifying nature or they are reordering for consumption and enjoyment and appropriation something that was maybe already ordered in nature. And this is therefore something quite morally fraught, I think, for Marianne Moore's idea of the proper way to treat nature, which includes treating people. People are part of nature. So. 1:30 Wes: And it's not just about survival, is what this shows. And later on we'll see that's important. You know, in the contra, when we get the contrast with the jerboa, it's 1:39 Erin: about survival for the badger, because if the badger loses, the losing jockey gets shot. 1:46 Wes: Career survival. Oh, okay. Well, that's an even. 1:50 Erin: I don't know, that's an even more 1:52 Wes: morally fraught game than I was imagining. 1:54 Erin: Got really real, really fast. I don't know why that's. That's what came to mind. 1:58 Wes: But yeah, I mean, I do remember as a kid with little groups of boys doing horrific things to frogs, for instance. Yeah, horrible. 2:07 Erin: How many people do you have in your freezer, Wes? 2:10 Wes: Yeah, exactly. But, you know, if you take them out and you put them on water, they float and you can use them like a raft. So it's the dual purpose. No, but that's actually part of my point, which is that this is right. The relationship to other animals in part is about survival. And of course other animals do this, the lions eating the gazelles or whatever. But for human beings, it goes above and beyond that to something, to a matter of dominion and a matter of a reinforcement of some sense of psychological superiority and the use of animals aesthetically, the use of animals to fuel important or as magical totems to ward off evil, all of that stuff. And then now in this next section I think you're about to read, we're going to get a transition to. Well, why don't you read it and then we can discuss it. 3:08 Erin: It was a picture with a fine distance of drought and of assistance in time from the Nile rising slowly while the pigtailed monkey on slab hands with arched-up slack-slung gait and the brown dandy looked at the jasmine, two leaf, twig and bud cactus pads and fig dwarfs here and there lent to an evident poetry of frog grays, duck egg greens and eggplant blues. A fantasy and a verisimilitude that were right to those with everywhere power over the poor. The bees, food is your food. Those who tended flower beds and stables were like the king's cane in the form of a hand, or the folding bedroom made for his mother of whom he was fond. Princes clad in queen's dresses, calla or petunia white that trembled at the edge, and queens in A king's undershirt of fine twilled thread like silkworm gut as beeman and milkmaid kept divine cows and bees, limestone brows and gold foil wings. In some places I. You know, she's famously hard to track her reference. And sometimes I'm like, what are the dwarves? What's going on? 4:20 Wes: Where do the dwarves come from? 4:21 Erin: Yeah, where do they come from? 4:22 Wes: Remember any dwarves? 4:25 Erin: It was a picture with a fine distance. What picture? And what is it? What is that referring to? But I love it. A picture with a fine distance. It's such a wonderfully oxymoronical phrase. 4:36 Wes: Well, I think she's talking about everything that's come before. So it was a picture. This is now her. The first explicit commentary. I think that's in this poem. It's all been description of details, but. Yeah, with indirect commentary. Right. Calling well these people like small things, I guess is commentary. But these people. These people. It was a picture with a fine distance of drought and of assistance in time from the Nile rising slowly. So I assume that that is the locust, oil and stone. Locusts. I thought I understood this. 5:12 Erin: The whole civilization. You're saying this is her picture of it? Is that what you mean? 5:16 Wes: Yeah, Everything that comes before is the picture. So she's drawing this causal connection between drought and assistance in time from the Nile. Right. So there'd be drought and then the Nile would flood and it would flood over its banks and the drought would end. So it's a boom and bust kind of cycle. If all of this is a picture of that, it reflects the. Again the anxiety of dependence on that natural cycle and times when there wasn't a lot of natural sustenance to be gotten from the land. So you had to find ways to store. So I think. Right. The Egyptians had huge granaries and that's part of how cats became domesticated. They would just let them hang out around the granaries and kill mice. So this picture of drought and then assistance from the Nile while the pigtailed monkey on slab hands looked at the jasmine, two leaf, twig and bud. What is that about? 6:18 Erin: Is she comparing us and her to the monkey here? You know, so we're getting a whole picture of the civilization with a fine distance. I love that because it's fine. Could be, you know, fair, nice, but it's also fine, like detailed. And distance would work against that. So we get this, the distance also 6:38 Wes: in terms of time and the perspective that we have. 6:40 Erin: Time and perspective. Right. So we have a, you know, the sort of tocquevillian relationship to civilizations. We can see finer details more clearly for our distance from them. Strangely enough, I take her to then sort of fancifully and funnily connect us then to the monkey who looks at the little leafy civilization happening underneath him. You know, and maybe by saying, oh, you know, we're so much more civilized than that. She's sort of joking about that, that we now have this perspective because we're sort of so much more advanced than the Egyptians and we can look at them in a gimlet eyed way. By comparing us to monkeys. She's both sort of like reinforcing that and joking about it, I think incriminating us in the way that we are looking at the civilization. That's the way I'm reading this. I'm not sure if it's right. 7:29 Wes: There could well be another wall painting or representation of just the thing that she's talking about. Where in the background there's the Nile and in the foreground there's a monkey staring at this whatever it is. Jasmine, two leaf, twig and bud, cactus pads and fig. Is it a fig tree? Yeah, there's a bunch of things. But in any case, you know, you can imagine some sort of wall painting of this sort of thing. But yeah, the metaphor stands and I think you're right. It's possible that she's putting us in the position of the monkey. 8:01 Erin: You know, I think you're right to talk about representation because then we're about to get the most explicit, I think wall painting section here. You know, I think she, that she then goes into those Egyptian murals inside the pyramids most explicitly here. So we get dwarfs. I don't know who these are. I don't. Dwarfs were the painters. 8:21 Wes: Okay, I was really hoping you would explain this to me. 8:24 Erin: No, I have no idea. I have no idea. But the things that are small versus things that are big, were they dwarfs in the society? Because I have no clue. I highly doubt these are literal dwarfs. But they can't be anything but literal dwarfs because otherwise what is she talking about? 8:43 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I did find ancient Egyptian representations of dwarves. 8:47 Erin: Oh, you did a lot more research than I should have done all that. 8:51 Wes: Yeah, but I don't know. I didn't do enough research to know the significance of that or whether she's saying that the dwarves were working were the ones who created these murals or that she's metaphorically saying their existence. You know, the representation of dwarves lends a nuance to all of this. So lent to an evident poetry of frog grays et cetera. A fantasy of verisimilitude. In other words, you wouldn't characterize ancient Egyptian representations as realistic, especially. 9:26 Erin: Right. 9:26 Wes: Sort of a sideways representation of bodies. Famously. It's quite stylized. There's lack of perspective. Right. You know, where you see representations of daily life that are less. Or that are ordinary or less stylized and grand. Right. So the inclusion of dwarfs is. It's no longer just a generic person standing sideways on the wall. Right. Doing the Egyptian stance. You get a little bit more realism. So that might be what's going on here. 9:59 Erin: I see. And we're sure it is dwarfs, not just smaller representations of the animals she's been talking about, because they would be smaller than they really are on the paintings. 10:09 Wes: I don't know. But I did find what are definitely dwarves. They're not, because they have dwarf proportions. So there's a whole page I found on disabilities in ancient Egypt. And they try to trace changing attitudes between different eras, between different kingdoms, based on the representations of disabilities and various. So apparently so. I don't know. Yeah, you might be right. It's really unclear. But there's something that. A fantasy and a verisimilitude. So one in juxtaposed to the other that were right to those with. That were right. That seemed right to those with everywhere 10:50 Erin: power over the poor, the people in power. 10:52 Wes: Yeah. It's an aesthetic. In other words, it's an aesthetic sensibility that appeals to people with power. And it's one that combines this unrealistic fantasy world with little touches of verisimilitude, I guess, is the idea. 11:09 Erin: And then we get the bees. Food is your food. So the poor are connected to the bees here by proximity. So everybody, rich and poor alike, we all eat the same food. You know, we all put our pants on one leg at a time. And yet I'm including myself among the poor because if you saw where I lived, you would agree. 11:27 Wes: Because you're a graduate student. 11:29 Erin: Yes, in my garret. So those who tended flower beds and stables were like the king's cane in the form of a hand. So I've thought a lot about this. The idea is that the people are part of the king's possessions, too. So just as the pharaoh is exploiting nature, and this upper class maybe is exploiting nature, so he exploits the human labor that he uses, which are expressions of his power. We're democratized here. So it's not just that that the animals are being exploited, it's that people are being exploited like animals as well, that these things which should be honored like the bees or the people who grow the crops, therefore, are like the bedrock of civilization. They allow for people to. To eat and to have this bounty that the pharaoh's power is built on. These things should be respected and given a voice. And instead, they're just used as a kind of cudgel against themselves. Because the pharaoh is just exploiting, not indeterminate. I suppose it's obvious in the fact that he uses slave labor to get the food and build the pyramids. 12:36 Wes: Yeah. Those who tended flower beds and stables were like. It sounds like they were an extension of the king. They are also tools. And the king's cane in the form of a hand. I don't know of any Egyptian canes that literally had a hand shape, but they have a crook in them like that. They're right. If you've seen that. They have a little circle on the top that I suppose fits to the hand. They are extensions of that hand, and they're made to fit the hand of power and to be used as a 13:05 Erin: tool that the hand that mocks them and the heart that. 13:08 Wes: Right, There you go. The bee's food is your food. You know, I suppose, again, it's like the worker bees with the, you know, what is produced by the worker bees, but it belongs to their masters. I don't know what princes clad in queen's dress is. I don't know what all that's about. Queens in a king's undershirt. 13:28 Erin: This was sort of easy for me to understand. I think this is Moore's fancy that she is seeing the look of what the pharaoh wears as being a kind of dress. You know, we could picture it, you know, the skirt, almost like a wrap skirt, you know, that they wear. And then the queens in there in the garments that look like undershirts, I could just picture it. The way that she's describing it makes sense to me. 13:49 Wes: But, you know, significantly, the undershirts are. Well, they're like silkworm gut as beeman and milkmaid kept divine cows and bees. 14:00 Erin: Oh, like they're cosplaying like people at Versailles dressing up like shepherdesses. You know, I think there's something performative in these outfits. And I take the limestone brows and gold foil wings to be, like, the makeup. Gold foil wings. Maybe I'm thinking of, like, winged eyeliner, and this is wrong. But there's, you know, there's something of, like, the face paint and the way that they're depicted as well in the paintings. 14:29 Wes: And then we move to naming. The king gave his name to them, and he was named for them, which is, you know, very much and puts him in the position of Adam. 14:39 Erin: They made basalt serpents and portraits of beetles. The king gave his name to them and he was named for them. He feared snakes and tamed Pharaoh's rat, the rust backed mongoose. No bust of it was made, but there was pleasure for the rat. Its restlessness was its excellence. It was praised for its wit and the jerboa like it. A small desert rat, and not famous, that lives without water, has happiness abroad seeking food or at home in its burrow. The Sahara field mouse has a shining silver house of sand. Oh, rest and joy. The boundless sand, the stupendous sand spout. No water, no palm trees, no ivory bed, tiny cactus. But one would not be he who has nothing but plenty. Oh, rest and joy, the boundless sand. It's so funny. She's hilarious. 15:31 Wes: He feared snakes. So the suggestion is, you know, snakes are part of their magic and feature prominently in their representations of the world. And then what did you call it? That goes on the forehead, on the head? 15:45 Erin: Uraeus. 15:46 Wes: And then so there's use of the mongoose, right, which can kill cobras to ward them off or protect the king from cobras. But she's comparing it. I don't know why it's called the pharaoh's rat, if that's mongoose, obviously is not a rat. But it allows her to associate to the jerboa. I don't know if the Pharaoh's rat is her invention or if that's the way the Egyptians thought of it. 16:12 Erin: I didn't look that up. I thought that that would just be something that the Egyptians called it. The Pharaoh's rat would be its colloquial term. This is where I think Moore makes us all equals, because I think I referenced this before. The fact that the pharaoh is afraid of the snake means that he is in a sense also afraid of and therefore oppressed by his own power. Like there's something. This power is unnatural even for those who wield it. And in a way, the pharaoh is kind of oppressing himself because there's something backward about a person having this much power. And of course, when one exploits someone else, one is also injuring oneself. She recognizes this, that it cuts both ways. 16:52 Wes: I think, well, the pharaoh has more to lose, right? And so people in power with too much abundance tend to become paranoid. So any form of superstition reflects that paranoia. Of course, partly it's the position in history and less control over nature. With technology such that they're more vulnerable to nature. And so the principal technology for controlling nature is ritual and rite and magic in which snakes have a role apparently. But then snakes are dangerous, then the 17:26 Erin: mongoose taking pleasure in killing the snake, you know, so there's a self destructive symbology then associated with the pharaoh, because the pharaoh's rat, the thing that protects the pharaoh, is the thing that kills the symbol of the pharaoh as well. The pleasure for the mongoose seems to be in overcoming this oppression, right? In overthrowing its master. Its tormentor is what gives it pleasure, sort of writing some kind of order. But the pharaoh at the center of this unstable symbology is kind of being attacked from both sides. 17:57 Wes: It was praised for its wit, which I assume means its intelligence on the one hand, but also might be a reference to its speed. If you've ever seen a mongoose tangle with a Cobra on YouTube, Cobras are really, really fast in their strikes, but somehow the mongoose is faster, which is really kind of odd if you think about it. 18:15 Erin: And overcoming oppression, I think requires wit. I mean, I think symbolically here, right? 18:19 Wes: Yeah, yeah. So power is slower and clumsier, it's heavier. And you can be crushed under the weight of it, or you can be poisoned by it, so to speak. But living under it for long enough. Yeah, the workaround is intelligence and nimbleness, maybe. 18:37 Erin: And this is the beginning of her portrait of the ideal artist. This is someone who works tirelessly, restless. So the desire to work is always there and to work without recognition. No bust of it was made. So unlike the pharaoh, who is maybe fragile in his ego, who needs to be buffeted by having these totems to protect him. These, you know, speaks to what you're talking about with the paranoia and also to be told how great he is and to be given images of himself either by proxy via, you know, an animal symbol or of just of his own person. The true artist takes pleasure in the work and doesn't need these types of things that the pharaoh needs because it seems he has no real work. He has nothing to take pleasure in other than other people telling him how great and powerful he is. But there's a hollowness there, right, because he's not really performing a function or doing anything really important. So that's, I think, contributing to his lack of a stable self concept. Whereas the mongoose doesn't need that, as she says in the paper Nautilus, that writers can be, I think she says, entrapped by fame and tea time. Comforts or something. No, tea time. Tea time, fame and commuter's comfort. She says real artists, you know, they should reject that. They should just take pleasure in the work itself. The creation is the thing. Or in this case, the destruction, the murder is the thing. 19:56 Wes: The best way to do that is just to fail as an artist until you die and then you get posthumous fame. That's true, because otherwise you'd be ruined if you're successful in this life. But, yeah, I mean, the representations and monuments are right. They have an aesthetic function on the one hand, but they're too intertwined with power and in particular, the praise of the power of the pharaoh and the attempt to achieve immortality for the pharaoh. Right. Filling up pyramids and tombs with art objects that even in some cases are symbolically meant to be sustenance in the afterlife. And then with superstitious control, there's an ulterior motive. In other words, the enjoyment of these representations is not simply aesthetic. It's religious or it's superstitious or it's political thinking of dominance. It's all these other things. So I think in line with that and this transition to the desert rat, she's going to be praising a more workmanlike attention to detail as against the grandiose and the monumental. You know, the attempt to achieve immortality. Something about that attempt corrupts representation and is more akin to this exploitation of animals, for instance. So representation versus exploitation. So, yeah, we get the jerboa, we get the desert rat, who doesn't need a lot. He just lives in his trailer, working away at his poetry. I like this image of the rest and joy. So the concept of rest, I think, is very important here. 21:43 Erin: Yes. 21:43 Wes: And then boundless sand, which. So she's combining sand in the desert, is supposed to connote a wasteland and lack of opportunity for sustenance and all that. But in this case, that boundlessness is something to be appreciated. So you could think of it as abundance of possibility. Right. It's like looking at the blank page. I don't see that as a challenge. I don't see it as a problem. I see it as an opportunity to write in real life. It's just horrific. But, yeah, you see the boundless sand as an abundance of possibility and are not weighed down by luxury, not weighed down by material luxuries. And so what does she say? The palm trees and the ivory bed and all that stuff, by all the riches that you have, but also not weighed down by psychological luxury, so to speak, by the project of being great, famous, living forever all that. 22:40 Erin: Yes. I think earlier you said it's better to fail while you're alive as an artist than to achieve success and therefore become ruined. I've been thinking about that and I think that what I didn't understand about that is you meant failing in terms of achieving success, not failing in terms of, you know, I think of the only failure as not doing the work, not completing the work. Right. So the mongoose and the jerboa both are doing the work and they're also resting. Right. Because what's interesting about this idea of the desert outside of the Nile, the fertile Nile area, is that she's building into the concept of work, this idea of the fallow period as well. So the Nile has the period of its rising and of this abundance and then you have to go through the cycle of sort of enforced, not enforced famine, but you have to go through a cycle of a fallow period. It's built in. And she's saying in the writer's mind, I think, or in the mind of the artist, this has to be built in no matter what environment you're in. So you have to be able to do the work and also rest and have the fallow period. You have to be able to have this internal mechanism of self regulation to keep you doing the work. And that in itself means that you'll never be a failure so long as you do the work and you do good, good work. And the recognition which is over and above that, or aside from that really not above it is beside the point. The point is to, to do the thing and to do it well and properly. And, and this is what this, this is what the jerboa does. So the jerboa is by definition, I think, the anti. Pharaoh, right. Poor but free. Free to do the work and free to do it in a self generating, self determining way. And that's, that's important to the freedom to have that regulation inside the self, to control oneself and to experience both rest and work and to have the freedom to determine it for oneself. Not according to the dictates of the Pharaoh or even of the Nile, you know, the Nile's whims, Right. I think there's something therefore quite literally supernatural about the artist's self determination. 24:43 Wes: It's hard to rest as a human being because. Right. So she'll say the jerboa in the next, which you can read in a second, but she'll say the jerboa can rest and then do the opposite. So he can jump around when he needs to find food or when he needs to evade a predator. And you can see, if you watch nature documentaries, you see how effortlessly and smoothly animals transition between survival mode and rest mode. One minute they're running away and they're in fear of their lives, but afterwards they don't sit around processing trauma. They're just like hanging out, relaxing under a tree. They can forget they're not aware of their mortality. In other words, human beings, with our awareness of our mortality, are in some sense always in survival mode. Ideally, our play and our artistic activities should be a form of rest. Yes, they are work, but they should be a form of rest in the sense that they are not engaged with trying to survive and they're not fundamentally appetitive. Painting the apple is not like eating the apple. It's not like I have some object I need to consume or I'm going to die. It should be an overflowing. It should come from abundance, it should come from extra time, from leisure time. But often we end up treating those things as if they are matters of survival. I've got to be successful or else I might as well be dead. I've got to. It doesn't have to be straightforwardly artistic pursuits. It could be any career. I need prestige, I need recognition. What am I going to do without that? Which I think is intimately linked to awareness of mortality. Because the idea is, if that we live strongly enough in the eyes of others, in the minds of others, then we won't die. 26:27 Erin: How then does someone say, like, Moore who makes their art, their profession? How does that fit in? I know what you're saying sort of in terms of what our ideal relationship should be, but what happens when that becomes sort of like self institutionalized and is built, you know, that you're the starving artist, that literally, if you don't, that is your work and if you don't produce it, it is your career. And if you don't produce it, you'll starve or you'll be on welfare. 26:49 Wes: Yeah, I think that's a weird problem. I don't know how people pull that off. Although I say that, you know, with The Partially Examined Life, I think people would look at that and they'd say, I don't know how you pulled that off, how you make money off of philosophy, but it's not a lot of money. So you got to have another job, right? You got to be a teacher. I think psychologically it helps to disentangle making a living from the actual artwork. It's not like you're getting paid a fortune or something. For your poems, you get ancillary opportunities to teach. And you're paid to teach, or you're paid to do this or you paid to do that. 27:25 Erin: But that's often related to the success you have. 27:28 Wes: If you're unlucky, you'll get famous and then you will get paid. But. 27:33 Erin: Right. But these things are often dependent on. I mean, you only get the day job as a teacher because you have success as an artist in some demonstrable way. I mean, not monetarily. 27:45 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I think this is a persistent problem. Like we can't get rid of ambition. But ambition can become malignant and it can become crippling. It can become. Right. Ambition can become so large that it becomes hard to even function under its weight. I think Frankenstein, in a way, which we'll do eventually, is kind of about that very topic. But I think, regardless of that. So I think what I'm doing is I'm relating the concept of rest to the aesthetic and a classic distinction between an aesthetic relation to the world and an appetitive relationship. So this is the classic conception of art as involving disinterest. To appreciate the painting of the apple, its aesthetic form is not to have an appetitive relationship to it, not to want to eat it. Sure. I don't know if this is Kant's exact example in his third Critique, but he uses examples like that. And likewise, when we work as artists, to the extent that it's driven by a desire for recognition and fame. It's not that. Right. Everyone is driven to some extent by these emotions. I don't think it's avoidable. But if it becomes too prominent a part of one's motivation, then it can be compromising in one way or another. Sometimes it can compromise the quality, but there are other ways it can compromise things as well. So I think the way you were putting it was very apt, which is, I think you have to love the work for the work's own sake. Right. Rather than for the ulterior motives. I think that's the point. Does that make sense? 29:17 Erin: Yeah. When you're an artist and your profession is your art, it seems that you become almost animal, like, I think, in the way that you're describing where the work is the art and the. And you rest from it by just clearing your head and allowing yourself to rest under the tree or whatever. No. So I'm just interested in when that is. Because it seems an artist, by definition, is one whose profession is their art. That would complicate this idea of using the creativity as rest. And if we're going to take the jerboa as the symbol of the artist, how is that then reflecting upon the human corollary? 29:49 Wes: Yeah. I wrote an essay once about Uncle Vanya called Being at Work, Being at Rest, because I think it's about a similar idea. And this is the Aristotelian conception of being at work as involving an organism's metabolic activity is sustaining itself, sustaining its form. And the overall form is a form of rest in a sense of persistence. I persist as a biological form. Right. I'm a stable entity. I'm not dissolving into the environment until I die. But what's hidden underneath the surface is all kinds of work that goes constantly into producing persistence, to producing rest is predicated on work. In Uncle Vanya, there's this very strong contrast between the idea of being busy, manically busy, and then being in the state of mind where there's enough of a quiescence to produce the kind of. I don't know how to. Am I making any sense? Yeah. So that when work can serve. In other words, rest is like a telos, as in teleology. It's an end or a goal that is more integrated into one's true existence. It's not ulterior. So you can do things to be who you are, to be what you are, and for the love of the work itself, or you can be doing things for ulterior motives, as in being important to other people so that they can make you who you are through their recognition. Something like that. So it's restless. It's a restless thing to do, to slave away in search of fame and to sell out. Right. For instance, do whatever it takes trying to get recognition. But it's a very restful thing to express yourself for the sake of the work and because it makes you what you are and you feel most actualized in doing that. I don't know. I feel like I'm not making sense. 31:40 Erin: No, no, no, you're making total sense. I think. I just disagree in. In terms of how I. I think it's far more animalistic in terms of the way that you're describing. For me, like the art is the work. The rest is the fallow period where you. You need something to feed the work, you know, so. So it's. It's animalistic in the way that you hunt, and then you have to rest to get ready for the hunt again. 32:00 Wes: Yeah, I think that's probably a better reading. I mean, I think your reading is probably more in line with what she's trying to convey. Right. Yeah, I think it's a better. It's a better reading. I'm just kind of free associating. 32:09 Erin: No, but I think the rest feeds the work in that you have to get. You can't just work and then do creative work on the side and have nothing that feeds the creative work. Right. I think the rest involves a kind of psychological process whereby you process things. It could also be stimulation. So you go out into the world and you have experiences so that you have something to write about at work time. If everything is just like work and then creative stuff, then there's no. In that binary, there's no third thing that. That actually feeds the creative. Because the creative work needs a source too. I think it can't just be rest. And I suppose I didn't figure fame and that kind of motivation involved in that. I see it more as like a closed system in terms of what she's describing for the jerboa and for the artist, in which you go out and maybe you travel or you do something on the weekend where that gives you an experience that is restful and fun and that feeds the creative work. Like you need something to write about. And also you need time that you're not working to process. You need almost time to be in a trance to digest experience, so that then when you return to the work, there's something there that you can feed off of. 33:21 Wes: Yeah, and I think that's right, and I think that's the idea here, is that the jerboa can make this transition between work and rest in this effortless way, but also in such a way that the rest serves the work, which seems like to me a good reading of this. But also, I think at this point in the poem where she's saying, oh, rest and joy, the boundless sand, she seems to be associating rest with this lack of luxury and monument and power and ulterior motive. So that mongoose is inherently restless. It's praised for its wit, which is its restlessness. It's mental agility, it's physical agility. It's always moving. It's a nervous little animal, as one might be if one's whole function is to kill cobras. That's its job. That's what nature made it for. And if you had that job, you would be nervous too, all the time. But it reflects the nervousness of power. It reflects the anxiety of power and the restlessness of power. There is no rest for the powerful. There is no rest for someone who can't enjoy the work except insofar as it might bring them fame. 34:32 Erin: Well, the boundless sand. You know, I referenced Ozymandias earlier, and I think of the lone and level sands stretched far away, right? That's the thing that dwarfs the attempt itself. Monumentalizing. And that's the place where the jerboa lives, not among the ruins or among the monuments that then will eventually become ruined. Right. But the sand itself, the thing that's supposed to be the absence of that, the vacuum, as you're saying. 34:54 Wes: You want to read this abundance section? I think we've talked about a lot of the ideas here already. 34:59 Erin: Here you go. Abundance. Africanus meant the conqueror sent from Rome. It should mean the untouched, the sand, brown, jumping rat, freeborn, and the blacks, that choice race with an elegance ignored by one's ignorance. Part terrestrial and part celestial. Jacob saw cudgel, staff in claw hand, steps of air and air angels, his friends were the stones. The translucent mistake of the desert does not make hardship for one who can rest and then do the opposite. Launching as if on wings from its match, thin hind legs in daytime or at night, with the tail as a weight undulated out by speed straight. 35:42 Wes: So Africanus meant the conqueror, Right? And that's. I think that's something Pompey would have been called for, conquering part of northern Africa. So it's the name given to the conqueror, but the name should be given to the conquered. It should be given to native Africans, who she is associating with the jerboa, the sand, brown, jumping rat, and the blacks. So again, you get this contrast between power, a name taken to connote domination, and power versus the name taken because it's what you are. So what's. Yeah, what about Jacob here? What's going on here? 36:17 Erin: Jacob is the one, I think, who moved to Egypt, right? When the Israelites had to leave because of famine, oddly enough, they went to Egypt. And of course, Jacob's ladder is the vision that he had, which he sort of compares or slant wise to the idea of the desert mirage. Jacob had a staff because I was trying to think through this like he was a shepherd, so he would have a staff, right? And it was also the symbol of his journey and of, you know, of him as a patriarch. And I think it was. I looked it up and I think somewhere I read, I think in the Bible, maybe it says that it was his only. It would have to be the Bible. It was his only possession when he crossed the Jordan and then with the stones. I was reading about my. My memory of Jacob is not good. So I was. I was reading about the fact that the pillar, like he has the dream of the ladder, and then he sets up this stone that he had used as a pillow during his dream and makes that a pillar and pours oil on it and names it Bethel, that place. So the stone becomes like a symbol for him of this covenant with God. So the stones are important for reasons that are, you know, difficult to. The idea of Egypt is now a place not just of Rome and of Egypt itself. Right. But also, like this Judeo Christian conception is brought in here with the Israelites exiled to Egypt. And therefore, I think Jacob is representative of someone who makes the environment work for him in the way that the jerboa does. Right. So again, we have, like, the connection of the alliteration jerboa and Jacob. There seem to be doing something similar. Is that the reading that you had? 37:47 Wes: You know, I was associating again to ultimately, Israel's named after Jacob. Right. We're on our way back to the promised land and to establishing a homeland for the chosen people who are very frequently in a state of exile. And there's a kind of desperation here. And so what makes it a translucent mistake is the suggestion that religion is a. I don't know if this is the critique that's being made here, but that part of this religious impulse is seemingly about survival. 38:18 Erin: No, I don't think Moore is arguing that. I think she's just shifting from Jacob's dream to the idea of a mirage. Jacob's dream is true. Something about Jacob's dream turns his friends into the stones because he can make friends with stones as the jerboa makes friends with the desert, they're sort of morally equivalent. But the mirage, I think, is set in contrast to the vision of Jacob's ladder. So I see. Neither the jerboa nor Jacob would make the mistake of seeing something in the desert that isn't there. 38:49 Wes: I see. Okay, this makes sense to me now. Yeah. So the translucent mistake of the desert does not make hardship for one who can rest and then do the opposite. So Jacob, like the jerboa could rest and do the opposite. 39:00 Erin: Right. And because he dreams the Jacob's Ladder thing. Right. So that's a vision he has while he's resting and then wakes up and acts. Right, I see. Yeah. And then we get the wonderful image of the match thin hind legs of the jerboa, which allow it to launch as if on wings. Right. So this is the thing it can do really wonderfully, is jump. Super, super. High it looks like, in fact, like a little kangaroo, which I think she says. Yeah, kangaroo speed. Should I keep reading? 39:28 Wes: Yeah. 39:28 Erin: Looked at by daylight, the underside's white, though the fur on the back is buff brown like the breast of the fawn breasted bowerbird. It hops like the fawn breast but has chipmunk contours. Perceived as it turns its bird head, the nap directed neatly back and blending with the ear, which reiterates the slimness of the body. The fine hairs on the tail repeating the other pale markings lengthen until at the tip they fill out in a tuft, black and white. Strange detail of the simplified creature. Fish shaped and silvered to steel by the force of the large desert moon. Course the jerboa or plunder its food store and you will be cursed. It honors the sand by assuming its color. Closed upper paws seeming one with a fur in its flight from a danger by fifths and sevenths in leaps of two lengths like the uneven notes of the Bedouin flute. It stops its gleaning on little wheel casters and makes fern seed footprints with kangaroos speed its leap should be set to the flageolet pillar. Body erect on a three cornered smooth working Chippendale claw. Propped on hind legs and tail as third toe between leaps to its burrow. And we made it through. So we get. The actual description of the jerboa is memorable to me for the fact that we get this true conglomerate animal. And in a way that seems to be reminiscent of the descriptions we get of the Egyptians who are sort of, if you like, they're kind of making of themselves these fantastic creatures that are like built out of the. The features of various other animals, right. Like a composite creature that the. The Egyptian is almost like a Swiss army knife of animal parts or something like that. And here the jerboa is described as a conglomerate, so it would seem to repeat that. But instead it's natural, it's the result of its own unique evolution that it has these different features as part of its makeup. And that's an expression. It's natural. It's not acquired through the murder of these other animals, you know, so that it sort of like wears them on its head or anything like that. And it's not entombed in the way that the Egyptian imagery is continually of this death, entombment, reconstitution, exploitation. 41:45 Wes: You get this sense that it's very integrated into its natural environment, into its habitat, that its evolutionary origins serve it very well, its evolutionary history. Right. So its form and functional aspect of its functional aspects of its form are very suited to its environment. The way its body is shaped, which makes, you know. So she gives us that in detail, you know, we shouldn't be surprised that it's similar to other animals because evolution can converge on the same sorts of qualities. So for example, silver to steel by the force of the large desert moon. Even something that's as far as, you know, that the idea here seems to be right, that even something that's as far as a way as the moon can affect the form of this animal. It honors the sand by assuming its color. Right. That gives us a sense of its right. Evolutionarily, its evasion of predators depends on the camouflage of it having the same color as the sand. And I think human beings, this is our predicament, we are much more than that and we are much more poorly integrated because of our self consciousness, including that awareness of mortality that I was talking about. So we can create. I mean we can create beautiful works of art, but we can also create monstrosities or monuments to power. But then on top of that, humanity's capacity for doing horrible things, including enslaving people to make them build pyramids or war. All of that stuff is a result of a mind that has sort of jump the shark evolutionarily and that is so integrated or so flexible, put it this way, so plastic that it's not no longer tightly integrated into its environment. 43:34 Erin: The humble colors of the jerboa are set in contrast to the luxurious pinks and red of Egyptian fabrics that she describes. Right. So like we don these flamboyant attention seeking types of garments usually in order to indicate class and things like that. Right. In this context anyway. And that the humility of being evolutionarily a good fit with one's environment. These beautiful browns and whites and then the black and white tail with the tuft, which is a little like flourish on the jerboa, is still part of its environment somehow. Like it's well integrated in that respect. And therefore it's sort of accidentally because it's perfectly evolutionarily living in its environment. It's like living within the forms and the strictures of a poem. You know, the artist becomes the art. There's a perfect integration between the maker and the thing made somehow. And that's why I think we get the description of it sort of being an accidental dancer to the flute or to, you know, she compares it, its claw to a Chippendale. So it's the leg of a chair and the pillar body, right. So we get Another connection back to both Rome, I suppose, and to Jacob with the pillar, the stone pillar, that he sleeps on the stones becoming his friend. So it's this, like, perfect, ideal integration where you become the artwork yourself. You like that? That's like leveling up. The artist becomes the perfect work. It's reminiscent of, like, Yeats's ideal in sailing to Byzantium that you get out of your aged and paltry body and you become the hammered golden bird singing on the tree to the generations. Right. Something about that seems to be the ideal. It's through accepting the form, accepting the limitation. And that, I think, is so important in conversations about poetry, because Moore is writing at a time in which, of course, free verse is becoming. Starting to become a dominant mode and form. Poetic form is seen as oppressive and not allowing the full free expression of one's psyche, emotions, history, whatever. Whatever the case may be. Right. And so this is a poetic argument, I think, as well as a sort of evolutionary one, an anthropological one, in which somehow the embrace of limitation actually allows for the flourishing and working within the strictures that one has, whether that be the desert or the limits of a canvas. Something like that. Right. That these are the things that actually allow for freedom and for this sort of true expression of what makes oneself as the artist and one's art form good and sort of self realized. 46:07 Wes: Yeah. I think the other thing in these last two stanzas, where she's suggesting that we. First of all, she's suggesting that the movement of the jerboa is like the unknown, even notes of a flute, and then that we should set that movement to music. So she's inviting us to a way of representing this animal. Right. And that's something the Egyptians have done a lot of. Right. This. You know, she's described all the various ways not only in which animals have been exploited, but the way they've been represented. But in this case, we're invited to think of the animal as in motion, in movement, and to capture that musically. Right. So rather than in a static picture. And perhaps we're being invited. Right, ultimately, to, at some level move like the jerboa, and to rest, you know, to be able to transition between these states of rest and movement. But in any case, it's inviting us back to a certain type of aesthetic relationship to nature and to this animal in particular. But it seems to be something different than the Egyptian relationship that she's criticized. 47:16 Erin: Yeah, that's really good. You know, the sibling relationship between poetry and music here, I think, is maybe in contrast to the Sort of more estranged, more fraught relationship between poetry and static art. Right. Because poetry is often compared with music and the fact that it's temporal and it unfolds in time in the way that music does. And that helps me kind of, you know, the ideal of the jerboa as being a kind of. Yes, it's a beautiful little physical specimen, but that is compared to music maybe suggests this kind of, as you're saying, the patterning of rest and movement, which is what music is. Right. It helps to put that in contrast. You know, one of the flaws that we could point out in Moore's argument is how lovingly and attentively she records these descriptions of Egyptian self indulgence. You know, like her descriptions themselves are rather indulgent. Right. And so she can be accused kind of too lovingly recording what she faults the Egyptians for. In other words, she's taken in by it too. I think that's kind of. I think she's aware of that. I think it's a little bit of a self indictment. And I wonder if the Jerboas musical connection is kind of the U turn that she takes, you know, to go in a different direction to get away from the static art which is associated with this sort of static sins, if you like, for lack of a better term, of the Egyptians and of the Romans. I don't know. I'm putting that quite well enough because of course, image is important. 48:47 Wes: I think that makes sense. You know, the. The static being associated with weight and power as well as opposed to life and movement and freedom. Okay, all right. Any last words for the jerboa before we put it down? Sorry. Oh, the jerboa has not been feeling well. 49:08 Erin: Stuff it and turn it into a. 49:09 Wes: The kids won't take it out for a walk, so it's gotta go. We love the Jerboa, but everyone's gotta go. Yeah, 49:22 Erin: this is fun. 49:22 Wes: All right, thank you, thank you, 49:26 Erin: and thanks to everyone who listened. 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