Stanza was a young woman I met many moons ago, with whom I shared a brief but memorable friendship. We bonded over poetry and certain mysterious literature of the past, and I give her full credit for igniting or reigniting my interest in those things and the possibilities inherent in them. That she was darkly attractive and possessed an exquisite speaking voice made me all the more willing to follow her into unexplored territory. If it sounds as if I’m talking about one of Edgar Allan Poe’s enigmatic women (minus the morbid bits), that’s because she often puts me in mind of them. And she did introduce me to “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.”
I had always assumed her name was short for “Constanza.” When I asked her she quipped, “What, you think I’m maybe named after the car?” Hence our introductory image.
When you have an intense relationship with someone and then eventually lose contact with them, you end up communing not with them but with your memory of them. Thus, there are moments when the Stanza in my mind seems so elusive and esoteric that I wonder whether she really existed at all as I remember her, or if instead I’ve conjured something out of our brief time together that pleases me and keeps my sense of wonder alive.
Given her name, it’s no surprise that one day I asked if she had a favourite stanza of poetry. She came at me with a guy I’d never heard of, seventeenth-century Welsh physician-poet Henry Vaughan (whose twin brother Thomas was an alchemist). It’s the opening lines of the oft-anthologized “Corruption”:
Sure, it was so. Man in those early days
Was not all stone, and Earth,
He shin'd a little, and by those weak Rays
Had some glimpse of his birth.
He saw Heaven o'r his head, and knew from whence
He came (condemned,) hither,
And, as first Love draws strongest, so from hence
His mind sure progress'd thither.
Stanza said that once you sorted out all the hence/thence and hither/thither, it was a neat little Neoplatonic** anthem. And so it became the anthem of my old blog, which was a naive, rather precious hyperlinked memoir of synchronicity sprinkled with periodic posts aimed at the few initiates who had survived the memoir portion with their sanity and curiosity intact. I’ll likely be linking to elements of it on occasion, so if you hang around here long enough, you’ll see what I mean.
No, our new blog will not dwell much on the past; the present and the future will be our remit. In other words, I’ll start blogging like a normal human being for a change. And I’ve found the perfect new stanza to help propel us forward. It’s Vaughan again, from his electrifying “They Are All Gone into the World of Light”:
And yet, as Angels in some brighter dreams
Call to the soul, when man doth sleep:
So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes,
And into glory peep.
So let us go a-peeping, and who knows, Stanza herself might pick us up on the internet dial and peep back at us one of these days.
And now, to put the finishing touch on our New Stanza dedication and launch, we’ll revisit our opening image, that Really Old Stanza from Nissan that our Stanza is definitely not named after. Let’s leap forward from the seventeenth century, catch up with ourselves and zoom right into the future. When you finish watching this quickie 1982 TV spot, you’ll understand two things: (1) “The future looks like Stanza”; and (2) “With Stanza, the future looks good!”
** Neoplatonism is a topic for another day. But she did kid me at one point with, “Our relationship is strictly Neoplatonic.” And sometime later, “Look at you. Met a girl, and then—presto—metaphysics.”