X is for ... Xanth

The Xanth novels of Piers Anthony - he claims the partial eponym is coincidental - are a series of works of comic fantasy, originally conceived as a trilogy, that now spans enough books to qualify as a cubic trilogy with some to spare (the 27th Xanth novel was entitled Cube Route, a punning reference to the fact that 27 is 3 cubed).

Anthony has found a gold mine with his Xanth universe - its magical Talents, its population of centaurs and gargoyles and goblins, its tongue-in-cheek Adult Conspiracy to protect children from knowledge that might scar their youthful minds, and, above all, its pervasive puns have made it hugely popular with a devoted following. The author himself has remarked that Xanth novels are all his publisher wants him to produce these days, and if he sounds a little bitter there it's because even the most successful milieu can become an albatross round an author's neck if he's unable to write about anything else.

Particularly in the fields of humor and fantasy, imaginative creativity is the author's mainstay. When that author has spent around three decades churning out sequels set in the same world, there is a tendency for his well of inspiration to run dry. Indeed, for neutrals at least, Xanth novels, taken as a whole, constitute an uneven set; some are sublime, others simply seem to be extended Feghoots whose sole purpose is to fulfil Anthony's contractual obligations and shoehorn puns, almost at random, into a derivative plot.

That being said, even the worst Xanth novel is entertaining - Anthony is a fine writer, and he's been canny enough to supplement his own inspiration with that of his legion of fans. He receives huge amounts of fan mail incorporating suggestions for plot devices, character twists, new Talents - and puns, of course. I myself have sent him almost a dozen puns in the hope that one would show up in a future Xanth novel.

No pun in ten did.

You may groan now.

L is for ... Lazarus

- also, Late (which this post is); and Lie (which the timestamp on this post is).

The late Emma Lazarus lies interred in Beth-Olom Cemetery, in Brooklyn, New York. A poet, she is best known for "The New Colossus," which is to be found engraved on a plaque inside the Statue of Liberty, on what is now Liberty Island in New York Harbor (but perhaps not in New York... boundaries are arbitrary and capricious things). The poem contains several memorable but oft-misquoted phrases:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

The poem is written in a sonnet form famously associated with the Elizabethan poet and playwright known as "Shakespeare." It was Lazarus' contribution to an art auction to support the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund - this fund raised money in the United States for the erection of a pedestal to support the statue being constructed by the French sculptor Frederic Bartholdi to commemorate the ideals of international republicanism, and the American inspiration for the French Revolution. As the poem relates, this collaboration recalls an earlier statuesque harbor guardian: the Colossus of Rhodes. Bartholdi's own title for the statue was La Liberté éclairant le monde, or Liberty Enlightening the World; Lazarus' poem transformed it into a symbol for the great melting pot of American multiculturalism, a welcomer of the world's "tired... poor... huddled masses."

Although the poem was provided to an auction to raise money for the Statue, and was read at the exhibition of artworks contributed to that auction, it was not present in any form at the Statue's official opening in 1886. When Lazarus died a year later, her poem seemed to have died with her. But her friend Georgina Schuyler, a descendant of the founders of New York City, found the poem and embarked on an ultimately successful campaign to have Lazarus immortalized. Her poem was installed in 1903, and the Statue of Liberty became a beacon attracting immigrants from all over the world. Currently administered by the National Parks Authority, the Statue of Liberty was originally the responsibility of the United States Lighthouse Board; incongruously, when Emma Lazarus transformed its character from beyond the grave, it was under the care of the Department of War.

Almost exactly halfway between the opening of the new Colossus and its adornment with "the New Colossus," another poem was authored, this one by Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Almost certainly, Aldrich was not consciously responding to Lazarus, who had by then been dead eight years; but his "Unguarded Gates" takes an altogether more cynical view of those "huddled masses" flooding into New York Harbor:

WIDE open and unguarded stand our gates,
Named of the four winds, North, South, East, and West;
Portals that lead to an enchanted land
Of cities, forests, fields of living gold,
Vast prairies, lordly summits touched with snow,
Majestic rivers sweeping proudly past
The Arab's date-palm and the Norseman's pine
A realm wherein are fruits of every zone,
Airs of all climes, for lo! throughout the year
The red rose blossoms somewhere - a rich land,
A later Eden planted in the wilds,
With not an inch of earth within its bound
But if a slave's foot press it sets him free.
Here, it is written, Toil shall have its wage,
And Honor honor, and the humblest man
Stand level with the highest in the law.
Of such a land have men in dungeons dreamed,
And with the vision brightening in their eyes
Gone smiling to the fagot and the sword.

Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,
And through them presses a wild motley throng
Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes,
Featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho,
Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav,
Flying the Old World's poverty and scorn;
These bringing with them unknown gods and rites,
Those, tiger passions, here to stretch their claws.
In street and alley what strange tongues are loud,
Accents of menace alien to our air,
Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!
O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well
To leave the gates unguarded? On thy breast
Fold Sorrow's children, soothe the hurts of fate,
Lift the down-trodden, but with hand of steel
Stay those who to thy sacred portals come
To waste the gifts of freedom. Have a care
Lest from thy brow the clustered stars be torn
And trampled in the dust. For so of old
The thronging Goth and Vandal trampled Rome,
And where the temples of the Caesars stood
The lean wolf unmolested made her lair.

Between them, these two poems give expression to a dialectic that continues to resonate today; one which, fittingly, has several dimensions and one to which I shall return otherwhen.

B is for ... Brevity.

Brevity is the soul of wit ~ William Shakespeare (allegedly...)

Erin, you can stop reading now. Just kidding.

Out, out, brief candle! ~ also William Shakespeare (allegedly...)

The author of the plays commonly ascribed to one William Shakespeare often reflected on Man's mortality. "All the world is but a stage," opines Jaques in As You Like It, "and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances." It is, perhaps, telling that the exits are mentioned first; although Polonius finds something admirable in brevity, Macbeth's lament is much closer to "Shakespeare"'s message.

Dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return ~ Genesis 3:19

Yet there may be something comforting in brevity, if we focus more on our time on that stage than the waiting in the wings afterwards - and, perhaps, something more still if we reflect that beyond one stage may lie another. The action in Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead - a landmark in the theater of the absurd - takes place mostly in the wings of "Shakespeare"'s Hamlet; might we also take wings when our lines our spoken and the curtain falls?

* * *

A story I love, which comes originally from Persian folklore - although the version I heard was a Hebrew adaptation - concerns a very wealthy and powerful king.

This king had virtually everything he could possibly want, and it amused him to demand yet more of his loyal subjects. Upon a time, he summoned his vizier and said to him, "I have been thinking long and hard about what more I can ask of you, and I have realized there is still one thing I do not have. Legend tells of a ring of power, such that any happy man who wears it becomes sad, and any sad man who wears it becomes happy. I would own this ring." And the vizier, who was quick on the uptake, knew better than to disappoint his king; so he assured him in unctuous tones that the ring would be obtained, and departed, fretting and gnawing his beard at the impossibility of the task.

The vizier was no slouch in the wisdom stakes himself, and he consulted with all the wise men his wisdom could reveal; but none of them knew the location of this ring. He journeyed far and wide, and his beard grew longer, for he could not have it trimmed to his liking, and yet more sparse, for he rent it daily in agitation. At length, he despaired and determined he must return to the king's palace and admit his failure, and he halted for a night's meager rest at a tavern. While there, he fell into conversation, as one does at a low ebb with some strong drink inside one, with a stranger: a man who turned out to be a jeweler himself.

"... And I have searched for that accursed ring this past year, and tomorrow I shall return empty-handed, and the king shall have me torn apart by wild tapirs!" For this was the king's custom. Much to the vizier's surprise, as he concluded his tale of woe, his drinking companion laughed brightly and said the most astonishing words in the world: "I have the ring you seek." And he produced it, quite as if it were only a very ordinary ring of the sort jewellers carry with them everywhere they go.

The vizier accepted it in shaking hands, and observed that it was inscribed with these words: Gam zeh ya'avor, which is to say, This too shall pass. And as he read those words, it was as if all the year's long, despairing drudgery fell away; he laughed too, and he and the jeweller drank each other's health until the dawn.

Next day, the vizier, beard trimmed to even his satisfaction and a jaunty spring in his step, presented himself to the king. "Twelve months have passed since you dared enter my halls," intoned the king wrathfully. "I had given you up for a miserable servant." He snapped his fingers imperiously. "Bring forth the tapirs!"

But even this dire threat could not blight the vizier's mood. "Behold!" he cried in a voice that carried throughout the king's great hall. "I have found the ring you desired!" And he hurried forth and laid it in the king's hand.

The king examined it closely. His lips were observed to move as he deciphered the inscription. And he looked around him, at the sumptuous finery of his hall, at the gilded tableware, at the ornate draperies and peerless rugs, at the mighty edifice of his palace and the hushed throng of his subjects. And he looked at the ring - this too shall pass - and his countenance became grey with sorrow...