Laundering Literature

Bowdlerization – A form of censorship named after Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825), a prison reformer trained as a physician and avid chess player who published an expurgated edition of Shakespeare in 1807. Words, themes and even characters which Bowdler deemed inappropriate were removed entirely, however he claimed proudly not to have added anything! After the relative success of “The Family Shakespeare” Bowdler set about a similar task, this time with Edward Gibbon’s monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire which his sister published posthumously. Though perhaps not as preposterous as an alteration of Shakespeare, the attempt to make Gibbon less “racy” was met with much less success and even well deserved ridicule. To the idea of liberal learning perhaps only outright censorship could be more antithetical than this regurgitated version of primary sources. The desire to sanitize literature is the bright side of the more evil rewriting of history.

9/A Via Albaro

Love Calls Us To The Things of This World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.

Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,

“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

"Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.’