Don Quixote / lunatics, lovers, and poets alike

Don Quixote

Above William Lake Price, Don Quixote in his Study (Photograph, 1857), National Gallery of Art.

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Roy R. Behrens, “Lunatics, Lovers, and Poets: On madness and creativity" in Journal of Creative Behavior Vol 8 No 4 (1975), pp 228ff—

Don Quixote has tunnel vision, by which he sees through the tunnel of love. Everything he sees relates to chivalry. It is as if he wore blinders, like Rocinante his “steed.”

He calls his neighbor a “squire.” He dons armored armour, with a cardboard visor top. He sees prostitutes as ladies. His unbridled imagination has left us with phantoms of windmills, whch are in turn synonymous with Quixote and quixotic. When he hears the “neighing of steeds, the sound of trumpets, and the rattling of drums,” his sidekick  Sancho Panza sees “nothing but the bleating of sheep and lambs.” 

Sancho Panza is conventional, while the knight-errant is errant. The “visionary gentleman” is either poetic or crazy. He confuses similarity with identity, whether by purpose or fault. A is not not-A, but inside Quixote’s mind, A and not-A merge as one. His five-and-dime descendant is the nearsighted cartoon character Mister Magoo, who (in Magoo Goes Shopping) sees and treats a rib cage (A) as if it were a xylophone (not-A), implying that musical pitch is related to the length of the ribs.…

In Magoo cartoons, Sancho Panza is Waldo. He is Watson in Sherlock Holmes. Sancho, Waldo and Watson represent unexceptional views. They know that A is A, that A is not not-A. “Look, sir,” Sancho calls out to the knight-errant, “those which appear yonder are not giants, but windmills; and what seem to be arms are sails…” more>>  

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Below An interpretation of Don Quixote by José Guadalupe Posada, c1908.

adrift in milan / never too late for the last supper

Wind Instrument [detail] © Roy R. Behrens

Abel Warshawsky, The memories of an American Impressionist. Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 1980, pp. 86-87—

In connection with the Last Supper, a friend of mine, Samuel Cahan, a well-known newspaper artist who had been with the New York World for thirty years, told me of an amusing incident which occured when he and his wife visited Milan a few years ago. Speaking no Italian, they had asked their hotel porter to procure an English-speaking cabby to take them about. To the latter my friend very carefully explained that they wished to see the Last Supper. "Last supper?" replied the cabby, "yes , yes. Me understand!" Whereupon he started driving them round the town and finally into the country.

After the drive had extended for several miles, my friend, fearing that there must be some mistake, repeated his instructions to the driver. "Last supper?" he yelled back, "Sure! Me understand!" and continued to drive. Late that evening the two Americans were finally brought back to the city in a state approaching nervous exhaustion. Drawing up his carriage in front of a brilliantly lit edifice, the vetturino opened the cab and ushered his fares into a fashionable restaurant, proudly giving them to understand that he had brought them back in good time for the desired "late supper."

as if jack were struck dumb in the pulpit of golf

a bouquet of golf clubs

Burges Johnson, As Much as I Dare: A Personal Recollection. New York: Ives Washburn, 1944, p. 105—

After I had married and moved to Long Island, my cousin Tristam Burges Johnson died most dramatically in Washington DC.…While he was playing golf with Edgar Poe [a descendant of the writer] a storm threatened; there was no rain but some muttering of thunder. Poe went back to the club house, but Tristam walked across the links with an iron club over his shoulder to follow up one more shot, was struck by lightning and instantly killed. There was no other lightning flash and no rain storm followed. Naturally it made a dramatic story for the papers. Dr. [Henry L.] Stimson, who had not seen me for a long time, saw the headlines and [confusing Burges Johnson for his cousin] announced from his pulpit the death of a young man from his congregation. Then he wrote a letter to my young wife which I have always wanted to have framed because it seems to me that it is the only truly appreciative statement of my many virtues that I have ever read. Dr. Stimson was naturally embarrassed when he received my wife’s reply and I think always felt that the lightning had hit the wrong man.

* Edgar Allan Poe (1871-1961), who was Attorney General of the State of Maryland in 1911-1915, was a second cousin of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), the celebrated writer. As a student at Princeton, he was the quarterback and captain of the football team in his junior and senior years, and was named All-American in 1889. After a football game in which Princeton beat Harvard, 41–15, someone from Harvard asked a Princeton alumnus whether Poe was related to “the great Edgar Allan Poe,” in response to which the alumnus said, “He is the great Edgar Allan Poe.”

i can always remember the place on a page…

Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Living. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948, pp. 54-55—

I never remember anything without remembering its position. I can always predict the place on a page where I will find a missing quotation, even when I cannot remember the book that contained it. I can recall now the exact position in which I sat, and the position in which another person sat in relation to me, when he or she threw a cigarette stub and burned a hole in my sweater, but I cannot remember who it was, or where it was, or when it was, or what color the sweater was, or how I felt about it. This keen sense of spatial relation has something to do, I suppose, with my pleasure in putting things in order whether in a room, an essay, or an argument. I am not overconfident of my taste in colors or sounds, but I am always ready to state categorically whether a composition is good. Sometimes in a hotel room I feel so crisscross that I move the bed and bureau into their places before I can go happily to sleep.

Stendhal Meets Rossini / Who Crows for You?

Above Bantam, comic shadow caricature by British artist Charles Henry Bennett, Victorian illustrator.

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Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle), author of The Red and the Black, describing an incident in a visit to Italy in 1817—

We halted in Terracina, and there…we were invited to take supper with a party of travellers newly arrived out of Naples. Gathered about the table, I observed some seven or eight persons, amongst whom, in particular, my eyes lighted upon a fair-haired young man, of some five or six-and-twenty years of age, astonishingly handsome in spite of a slight touch of baldness. I pressed him for news of Naples, and in particular, of music in that city: he answered my curiosity with answers that were clear-cut, brilliant and humorous. I enquired of him whether, when I reach Naples, I might still hope to see [Gioachino] Rossini’s Otello. I pursued the topic, asserting that, in my opinion, Rossini was the bright hope of the Italian school; that he was the only living composer who had true genius as his birthright. At this point I noticed that my man seemed faintly embarrassed, while his companions were grinning openly. To cut a long story short, this was Rossini.

set off when we began to make nature serve us

Digital montages © Roy R. Behrens 2021

Below is a passage by a Scottish poet, novelist and translator. It was written in 1964, when he was in his late 70s. As I read it, it occurred to me that the same passage could have been written today (in view of the storms that took place overnight), to describe the dilemma we find ourselves in.

Edwin Muir, Autobiography. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1964, p. 194—

…the world has been divided into two hostile camps; and our concern has ceased to be the community or country we live in, and has become the single, disunited world: a vast abstraction, and at the same time a dilemma which, as it seems, we must all solve together or on which we must all be impaled together. This world was set going when we began to make nature serve us, hoping that we should eventually reach a stage where we would not have to adapt ourselves at all: machinery would save the trouble. We did not foresee that the machinery would grow into a great impersonal power, and that as it grew more perfect we should become more powerless and be forced at last into a position not chosen by us, or chosen in blindness before we knew where our desires were leading.

Pandemic Montage Exhibition (online)

if you don't mind please i must leave i smell bad

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Above Roy R. Behrens, Wind Instrument. Digital montage (©2021).

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Abel Warshawsky, The memories of an American Impressionist. Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 1980, p. 60—

What the pitfalls of literal translation from one language to another can be, I also learned to my cost. Spending the evening with some French people I had met, I was attacked by a splitting headache and felt I must get back to my studo. Desiring to make explanation to my hosts for leaving so abruptly, I made the literal translation of “I must leave, I feel bad,” which I phrased “Il faut que je pars, je sens mauvas,” not realizing that I should have said, “Je me sens mal,” for “sentir mauvais” means “to smell bad.” This astounding avowal was too much for even French politeness, and the laughter that greeted it still rings in my ears. Such verbal faux pas were a speciality of mine in those days, and caused me often great embarrassment, for I never knew to what I might commit myself.

the thundering sound of an overhead bicycle

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Above Roy R. Behrens, Permit to Pass. Digital montage © 2021.

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Fritz Heider, The Life of a Psychologist. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1983, p. 12—

As I think back on the [Burg] Feistritz house [in Austria], I recall an anecdote of my parents' early married life. My father was teaching my mother to ride a bicycle. They decided to practice in the privacy of the spacious attic, where there were a few loose boards that seem to have given off a rumbling noise that sounded like thunder to people on the floor below as the bicycle was ridden back and forth. Two of my father’s elderly aunts, who had scientific interests, were living in the house. They mailed regular accounts of the Feistritz weather to the Graz newspaper—this being before the day of regular weather reporting and easy telephone communication, amateur reports like these were welcomed. According to the press, the weather that summer presented some unusual features: the skies were consistently clear and blue, yet daily periods of thunder were reported from the Feistritz area.

VIDEO LINKS

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one bad clip / and a pheasant becomes a duck

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Above Roy R. Behrens, La Scala. Digital montage, © 2021.

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Christopher Falconer, British gardener, as quoted in Ronald Blythe, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (New York: Dell Publishing, 1969), p. 113—

The garden was huge. The pleasure grounds alone, and not including the park, covered seven acres. The kind of gardening we did there is not seen nowadays. It was a perfect art. Topiary, there was a lot of that. It was a very responsible job. You had only to make one bad clip and a pheasant became a duck. The gardeners usually made up these creatures themselves. We were tempted to cut out something terrible sometimes, so that it grew and grew…but of course we never did.

Henry Miller | As blind drunk as Mister Magoo

Henry Miller, as photographed by Carl Van Vechten (1940)

Dan Davin, Closing Times. London: Oxford University Press, 19175, p. 131—

[Welsh poet Dylan Thomas] told me a burlesque story of meeting [American novelist] Henry Miller in London. After a prolonged session in the pubs they went to a little dairy in Rathbone Place which served sandwiches and which I well remember as being a very simple, clean, unpretentious place. But Miller was drunk and also extremely short-sighted. He was convinced that Dylan had taken him to a brothel and that the plain uniforms and innocent bearing of the waitresses were the last word in lubricious sophistication. Dylan had great difficulty in averting calamity and never succeeded at all in convincing Miller that he was mistaken. We speculated on how many similar misunderstandings might underlie the exploits so boringly recounted in [Miller’s] Tropic of Capricorn and Dylan went on to improvise a new work of Miller’s of which the dairy was the transmuted center and in which Miller played a grotesquely comical role, rather like Mr. Magoo.

Also, see an earlier post about Anthony Burgess’ comparison of himself to Mr. Magoo. I am also reminded of Buckminster Fuller’s account of his impaired vision as a child—

I was born cross-eyed. Not until I was four years old was it discovered that this was caused by my being abnormally farsighted. My vision was thereafter fully corrected with lenses. Until four I could see only large patterns, houses, trees, outlines of people with blurred coloring. While I saw two dark areas on human faces, I did not see a human eye or a teardrop or a human hair until I was four. Despite my new ability to apprehend details, my childhood's spontaneous dependence only upon big pattern clues has persisted.…

Dylan Thomas | Mistakes Friend's Hat for His

Above Cover of the paperback edition of Dylan Thomas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. New York: New Directions, 1968.

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Dan Davin, Closing Times. London: Oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 134-135—

In those days I often used the George restaurant upstairs for business lunches and would usually find [Welsh poet] Dylan [Thomas] and his wife and friends installed when I went to meet my own guests in the downstairs bar. On one such occasion after he had stayed the night with us I was surprised to observe that he was wearing a shirt I recognized as mine, a blue one. But I was appeased on returning home that evening to find he had left behind a dirty one of much better quality after my wife had surrendered mine. On another day I was for some reason or other wearing a hat, a rather extraordinary blue felt hat I had picked up in Paris and one to which I was deeply attached; perhaps because it was the only hat I had ever found which my wife thought suited me. I left it in the bar while I went upstairs to lunch. When I called back again after lunch I was surprised to see it stowed away in an open bag Dylan had with him for his visit that afternoon to London. I insisted on reclaiming it, rather to his chagrin. He explained that [his wife] Caitlin though it suited him and it was the only hat he had. I did not risk asking her if it suited me also but replied that my wife thought it did and it was the only hat I had. I might as well have given in at once. For the next time we met in the George the same thing happened, only this time I didn’t notice till he got away. And when I inquired later about the hat’s fate, with even some faint hope of getting it back, he explained that he had left it on the rack of his compartment while he went to the restaurant car and in his absence some unscrupulous bastard had swiped it; no doubt someone who didn’t have a hat and who thought his wife would think it suited him.

Charles Henry Bennett | Shapeshifting Fox

C.H. Bennett, Metamorphosis (1863)

Above One of a series of elaborate comic metamorphoses (aka shapeshifting) created by Victorian-era British illustrator Charles Henry Bennett (1863) in sardonic reference to Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, this one titled "Beware of the goose when the fox preaches." Courtesy The Wellcome Library.

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Vincent Starrett (Chicago Tribune book columnist Charles Vincent Emerson Starrett), Born in a Bookshop: Chapters from the Chicago Renascence. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965, pp. 295-296—

It is curious how the faces of acquaintances repeat themselves in foreign lands. Uncanny, too, for what could be more disconcerting than to encounter an old friend jogging past dressed like a mandarin or selling chestnuts in coolie cloth? No sooner had I reached the Orient than this began to happen. Friends and associates I thought I had left behind in America, sometimes fellows I hadn't seen in years, popped up in Yokohama, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Peking, looking very much as I had seen them last, yet subtly altered by the native costumes they were wearing. It was as if one met them coming from a masquerade. In Yokohama it was an old school friend who had been dead for years. He was running a cigarette kiosk near the docks and I knew better than to speak to him. In Tokyo it was a genial barber who used to shave me in Chicago. And in Peking [Beijing] here were so many that my blood ran cold.

Among the friends I met in Chinese garb (and with Chinese faces) were some pretty distinguished fellows…I saw Alex Woollcott many times: once he was chirping seductively at a bird he was carrying through the streets in a bamboo cage. Once my dead mother turned out of a side street and gave me a turn that almost bowled me over. Once I met Bob Casey driving a small donkey attached to a two-wheeled cart: he was selling vegetables. After a time it became an amusing game to look for absent friends and sometimes to hail them genially, and no harm came of it for the Chinese were a friendly people, always ready to hail one in return.

But one day I really did get a shock. Rolling down one of the main thoroughfares of Peking in my rickshaw, I came suddenly abreast of another rickshaw rider headed in the opposite direction. He was bundled up in a fur coat and wore a fur hat, rather like a turban, at a rakish angle. He looked exactly like J. P. McEvoy and for a moment we looked hard at each other. Then I said, “Hello, Mac,” and he stopped his boy and said, “Why, hullo, Vince! What are you doing in Peking?”

George Herriman | Are Cubists From Cuba?

George Herriman (1914)

Above A syndicated cartoon panel (repositioned vertically to read while scrolling) by the American master cartoonist, George Herriman, well-known because of Krazy Kat. This was one of his responses to the controversy surrounding the infamous Armory Show, the first US exhibition of Modern styles of art, Cubism among them.

Poster | Why Angels Take Themselves Lightly

Poster © Roy R. Behrens. Purchase online.

Cornelius Weygandt, On the Edge of the Evening: The Autobiography of a Teacher and Writer Who Holds to the Old Ways. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1946—
 
We had nearly all of us been brought up on the King James version of the Bible, Mother Goose, Pilgrim's Progress, Paradise Lost, and Shakespeare. We were much easier to teach than the classes of today, classes in which there is no common denominator of culture [p. 56].

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…Captain Makins' daughter had made the voyage to the Orient with her father on one of these trips. In her old age she was something of a Mrs. Malaprop, speaking of the cat licking her plumage and of the cedars of Zebulun. China was always Chiney to her and Portugal Portingale [p. 63].

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You are waiting for Dr. Phillips to haul you home by his car from the dentist's office at Fifteenth and Locust Streets. You have lost five teeth. An old man comes up to beg of you. He sees your despoiled gums. The hand that pockets your nickel withdraws from the pocket's depths a handful of teeth. "These are mine a dentist took out," he says, "at a dollar apiece. See how sound they all are. I wonder will I ever be able to sell them again for what they cost to have them pulled?" [pp. 76-77]

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[On first meeting him,] I got that impression of [Irish novelist] George Moore that I carry with me still. He was built like one of those little figures that you can not turn over, that are so heavy in their posteriors that no matter which way you put them down they come to a sitting posture. He had real eighteenth-century sloping shoulders and a seedy tobacco-stained lugubrious moustache not so walrus-like as [Irish linguist] Douglas Hyde's but incipiently walrus-like [p. 120].

The Man Who Mistook Someone's Hat For His

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Frank Swinnerton, Swinnerton: An Autobiography. Garden City NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1936, p. 28-29 [recalling an incident at a London publishing firm where he worked]—

He [a co-worker named Martin, who was the company cashier] had a very large round head, upon which he wore a great dusty bowler hat; and one Saturday, when everybody but myself had gone home, I was dismayed to find that he had taken my hat and left this monster [his hat] behind. Despair grew when it dawned upon me that the hat came down to my chin. But at last I recollected that Martin was most likely to be found in a local pub, and set out in search of him as Cockney wives sometimes go on Saturday nights in search of their husbands, opening swing doors and quickly scanning the faces in the bar.

My search was brief. He was sitting on a tall stool in the center of the saloon bar of the Essex Serpent, in King Street. In his outstretched arms was a newspaper; a pipe was held firmly in his front teeth; and high upon his big white head, looking in its inadequacy like a thimble, was perched my little hat. I removed it firmly; and Martin was very annoyed, first with me for entering a pub at all, second with himself for having taken my hat, and finally again with me for knowing where he was to be found. Poor man, his life was a misery.

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Note We will add this to our ever expanding collection of stories about those who have mistaken someone else's hat (or other item of clothing) for their own. Go here, for example, for another hat confusion tale by British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, or here for Mircea Eliade's story about walking off with Claude Lévi-Strauss' raincoat.

Collections Poster | Maris Price

Poster © Maris Price 2016

Above and below Posters on the theme of collections and recollections by graphic design student Maris Price (2016), Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa.

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Mircea Eliade, Journal IV, 1979-1985 (University of Chicago Press, 1990)—

22 June 1979
At 7:30, at the Tacous’: reception for the marriage of their daughter, the beautiful Florence, to the son of Claude Mauriac. At 8:00, with G. Dumézil at the home of his son, the doctor. Splendid apartment. At dinner, Claude Lévi-Strauss—very charming toward me. But we didn’t talk much. Only in the taxi did I realize I’d taken Lévi-Strauss’s raincoat by mistake.

Poster © Maris Price 2016

Collections Poster | Rachel Bartholomay

Poster © Rachel Bartholomay 2016

Above Poster on the theme of collections and recollections by graphic design student Rachel Bartholomay (2016), Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa.

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Joseph Gerard Brennan in The American Scholar (Autumn 1978)—

[British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead] himself had moments when he was not quite sure where he had put things. One day in the early 1930s he had Professor James Melrose of Illinois to tea at the Whitehead cottage…It occurred to Whitehead that his guests might like to see the work in progress on a library addition to the house. So he led them outside, first carefully putting on Professor Melrose’s hat which he found in the coatroom closet and assumed was his own. After the excursion he returned the hat to the closet, but at tea’s end, when he and Mrs. Whitehead prepared to accompany the guests to their car, he went there once more for his hat. This time Melrose beat him to it and retrieved his lawful property. Whitehead reached up to the place where his visitor’s hat had been, made a little exclamation of surprise, then trotted some distance to a spot where his own hat hung on a hook. It was clear to his guests that the author of Process and Reality did not realize there were two hats, but believed that his own had in some unaccountable way changed its place.

Collections Poster | Rachael Bair

Poster © Rachael Bair, UNI graphic design student (2014)

Marvin Bell in "Pages" in A Marvin Bell Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose. NH: Middlebury College Press / University Press of New England, 1994, p. 88—

Arriving at the dentist's office, he is only two minutes late, so he is surprised to see two others in the waiting room and several coats hung from the hat tree. He takes a magazine and sits down to wait. When the receptionists appears, she greets him as if they were merely passing on the street. As if she expects him to explain himself for lingering. He only says hello and returns to his reading. But she says he must have made a mistake, his appointment is for later that day. That makes no sense to him. He has the appointment written down in three places. Suddenly he remembers. I know what it is, he says, I have a haircut appointment! He leaves the waiting room in a good humor and runs to his barber. When he explains why he is late, the barber says, Well, you knew it was something above the neck.

Blind Leading the Blonde

Calendar page (2013) ©Rob Bauer

Above Layout for a calendar page (its theme determined by a quote) by Rob Bauer, graphic design student in the Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa.

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Dr. Peter H. Gott, "Health Q&A" in The Fresno Bee (Fresno CA), 4 May 2000, p. E-6—

After my father's bypass surgery, he felt so dreadful that he insisted his doctor stop most of his medication. Thereafter, he felt fine. While such a drastic action is not everyone's cup of tea, you would have to know my father to appreciate how relentlessly stubborn he was. He claimed to have "accurately misunderstood" his doctors, didn't want them to put [all] his "aches in one basket," was fearful of "dying for nothing," and wished as an adult to be "the blind leading the blonde."

Robert Craft in Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1994), p. 344—

[The poet W.H. Auden] says that in the train club car on his way to lecture at Yale, some students sent him a note: "We can't stand it a minute longer: are you Carl Sandburg?" He wrote back: "You have spoiled mother's day."

Game Parody | Kaitlyn Cuvelier

Game Parody © Kaitlyn Cuvelier (2012)

Above Design for a game parody by Kaitlyn Cuvelier, graphic design student, University of Northern Iowa (2013).
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From Max Eastman, Great Companions (New York: Farrar Straus and Cudahy, 1942)—

[In his later life, American philosopher John Dewey] moved out on Long Island, and preserved his contact with reality by raising eggs and vegetables and selling them to the neighbors… [He received an urgent order one day] from a wealthy neighbor for a dozen eggs, and the children being in school, he himself took the eggs over in a basket. Going by force of habit to the front door, he was told brusquely that deliveries were made in the rear. He trotted obediently around to the back door, feeling both amused and happy. Some time later, he was giving a talk to the women's club of the neighborhood, and his wealthy customer, when he got up to speak, exclaimed in a loud whisper: "Why, he looks exactly like our egg man!"