No good news from Boston: FSG arguably worse rather than better. When I left him on Friday, it seemed that his fevers were beginning to subside, or at least to drift downward--now there is some unidentifiable fluid between his lung and his chest wall, making FSG short of breath. His sister A is near at hand, and his other sister and her family not far; still, I expect to return to his hospital bed before long.
BC has reminded me that it was she who inspired my return to Eaters of the Dead: it was playing in her car as a recorded book when she drove up to my house for a visit. It is strangely poignant for me to have read Crichton's book again: I have never forgotten that the last person who spoke to me of it was my last piano teacher, Dale Anthony. Dale Anthony, with his neurotic, high-flying wishes for greatness, his fan of Gene-Wilder-like wiry yellow hair, who (despite what seemed to be a very happy marriage) died of AIDS so many years ago. Perhaps I have been afraid to return to the book because of the little darts of sorrow for him that I associate with it--but it was so long ago--he and his lovely wife and their grandly rattling Victorian house by the side of the railroad in Virginia are like figures from another world now, farther away than Pompeii.
I have begun at the gym, promising myself that I am permitted to hate every moment, so long as I go. I can't say that I get no exercise, but gravity is so much stronger than our wishes. I have begun to say, with Paul Simon, "Why am I soft in the middle/When the rest of my life is so hard?"
I have been half-watching a few of the Olympic events, praying that the athletes cannot hear--and will never hear--the gaseous, obvious jaw-flapping of the sportscasters. Men's gymnastics full of mishaps--stumbles and outright falls and missed chances. How is it that their comparative youth and dedication make every error seem like the first act of a Sophoclean tragedy? any of these goofs committed by, say, Rodney Dangerfield, would have us blind and hoarse with laughter.
BC has sent me a now-rejected preface to her favorite guide to the opera--inspired inanity about the consistent absurdities of opera--bodily functions and births offstage; everything sung, frequently at essence, even when speed ought to be of the essence. These, of course belong to the same family of cliches that in films guarantee that sprays of bullets fall all around but do not puncture our hero, that car-chases always find ethnic markets with carts of colorful vegetables to upset, and so on. One lovely phrase--for the feasts sumptuously served but never eaten in opera: "hunca-munca food."
Monday, August 16, 2004
Sunday, August 15, 2004
14 August 2004
I must record, before I forget, that last Friday, more than a week ago, on stepping out the back door of the house, that I saw a fox--only its brisk steady purposeful backside as it trotted off back into my pines--even this, I expect, more than he wished me to see. I see so few animals in the Pelham woods--this vision was like the sudden descent of a little god, and as sudden retreat to Olympus. I wonder where his covert is.
I have finished Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead, a very efficient, intelligent jeu on the story of Beowulf. The McGuffin here is that Crichton is the mere editor and translator of Ibn Fadlan's complete manuscript describing his dealings with the Northmen. Fadlan himself was quite real, and was, as the book tells us, sent as an ambassador to the Bulgars of the Middle Volga. In the novel, Fadlan is diverted from his purpose by the call for help from Rothgar, as in Beowulf; Fadlan is dragooned into service among the warriors. Crichton, building on Fadlan's repellent and horrified descriptions of Viking hygiene and sexual practice, makes him a half-unwilling anthropologist avant la lettre--a very sensible narrator for a novel, without any affectation that he writes for posterity. One must credit that the evil besetting Rothgar's court was not a single supernatural beast, Grendel, but a tribe of long-surviving Neanderthalers, the wendol, and that "his" mother was not the wiry witch of the poem, but a great snake-handling earth mother--but for all that, Crichton is in this an admirably deft writer, and never drops the mask of the prim, devout Fadlan for a moment.
FSG has taken very ill. On Thursday evening, he called me from his hospital bed, where his body temperature had risen well above 104 degrees, and said, "Do you have any big plans for the weekend?" I gabbled out something about my deadlines and work--all true, but I knew what he was about to ask, and was more than willing. "I think you should drop everything and come to see me this weekend. I wouldn't want you to be sorry later that you hadn't." I said, "Very well." And: "You must be afraid--" "Well--" "I'm sorry you're afraid."
He has been ill for more than a week and a half now with what at first seemed to be a flu--but his temperatures roved higher and higher, treatments notwithstanding. No explanation is ready from the doctors, despite the array of tests done so far. We are all of us--all of us who surround FSG in some way--scarred by the memories of his elder sister's last and still unfathomable illness--seven weeks of fevers, a splenectomy, and an inexplicable death in the recovery room. "None of us," I said to FSG, "will be recommending a splenectomy for you."
I made my arrangements to go. EC--whose heart is as stout in friendship as I had expected--showed every willingness to come and give me any assistance I needed; I asked him to sit with me while I packed Friday morning, to keep me uplifted and moving. FSG, when I saw him, looked indeed pale and tired and shaggy-bearded--but I did not seem to see fateful shadows around him. As his lifelong friend remarked when I spoke to her of all of this, "His ch'i is OK. Not great, but OK."
I stayed with him for almost four hours, in a setting of increasing surreality--his sister A there, imported from Washington for this latest crisis, BH arriving soon after, A's former innamorato E (long my favorite of her admirers) not long behind. Much discussion of friends in Russia, now separating after many years; telephone calls from BH's former novio, the dear, brilliant, three-quarters-mad S'OM. Phantoms of ten years ago and more--all the loves we used to know, chains still somehow unbroken. "We are turning," I said, "into a Nora Ephron novel. But we are funnier."
I have thought many times, in the past year and more, about love. I have loved, I have so often said to myself, four times. Not dropped into the well of infatuation--but loved and known a responding love--four times! what a treasury that makes! have I the right to expect or even hope for any more? I am so certain, when I say such things, that I know what love means and how it operates--yet when I pause to define it, like St. Augustine with time, the meaning evaporates. Love, a kind of fatal potion of necessity and desire...what does Germaine Greer say? "Love, love, love -- all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness." And there could be more--neurosis, childhood miseries brought out for comfort, chemical combustion. And where do I find myself among the postures? Dame Venus' most inept servant, unable to throw off the shackles, unable to bring myself to complete self-abnegation in the service. I have long loyalties--that is perhaps all: for me, love, that indefinable mist that embraces the lover and the loved, never quite removes from its objects. So, for me, with FSG, the princeps inter pares of my four loves. So with that strange trio cracking wise around FSG's bed--all of us, formal obligations to each other long exhausted, gathered in loyalty and one of the forms of love.
Today much more brisk and businesslike. I, having stayed with TP and HR, took TP along with me to the hospital, where one of FSG's childhood friends had appeared, and after her, FSG's other remaining sister. Much discussion--largely at my behest--of the disposition of FSG's house, that glorious old barn I escaped some years ago, and how best to find it a realtor and a market. I do not think--despite his not unreasonable fears--that this bout of mystery fevers will carry him off, and I think his fear has subsided as the crests of his fevers have begun to drop just the slightest bit. I am ready to return as soon as needed, as I have told him.
After lunch with TP--another long loyalty happily practiced--I have returned home to my lingering projects and two dozen weedy shoots of Queen Anne's Lace around my yard.
I have finished Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead, a very efficient, intelligent jeu on the story of Beowulf. The McGuffin here is that Crichton is the mere editor and translator of Ibn Fadlan's complete manuscript describing his dealings with the Northmen. Fadlan himself was quite real, and was, as the book tells us, sent as an ambassador to the Bulgars of the Middle Volga. In the novel, Fadlan is diverted from his purpose by the call for help from Rothgar, as in Beowulf; Fadlan is dragooned into service among the warriors. Crichton, building on Fadlan's repellent and horrified descriptions of Viking hygiene and sexual practice, makes him a half-unwilling anthropologist avant la lettre--a very sensible narrator for a novel, without any affectation that he writes for posterity. One must credit that the evil besetting Rothgar's court was not a single supernatural beast, Grendel, but a tribe of long-surviving Neanderthalers, the wendol, and that "his" mother was not the wiry witch of the poem, but a great snake-handling earth mother--but for all that, Crichton is in this an admirably deft writer, and never drops the mask of the prim, devout Fadlan for a moment.
FSG has taken very ill. On Thursday evening, he called me from his hospital bed, where his body temperature had risen well above 104 degrees, and said, "Do you have any big plans for the weekend?" I gabbled out something about my deadlines and work--all true, but I knew what he was about to ask, and was more than willing. "I think you should drop everything and come to see me this weekend. I wouldn't want you to be sorry later that you hadn't." I said, "Very well." And: "You must be afraid--" "Well--" "I'm sorry you're afraid."
He has been ill for more than a week and a half now with what at first seemed to be a flu--but his temperatures roved higher and higher, treatments notwithstanding. No explanation is ready from the doctors, despite the array of tests done so far. We are all of us--all of us who surround FSG in some way--scarred by the memories of his elder sister's last and still unfathomable illness--seven weeks of fevers, a splenectomy, and an inexplicable death in the recovery room. "None of us," I said to FSG, "will be recommending a splenectomy for you."
I made my arrangements to go. EC--whose heart is as stout in friendship as I had expected--showed every willingness to come and give me any assistance I needed; I asked him to sit with me while I packed Friday morning, to keep me uplifted and moving. FSG, when I saw him, looked indeed pale and tired and shaggy-bearded--but I did not seem to see fateful shadows around him. As his lifelong friend remarked when I spoke to her of all of this, "His ch'i is OK. Not great, but OK."
I stayed with him for almost four hours, in a setting of increasing surreality--his sister A there, imported from Washington for this latest crisis, BH arriving soon after, A's former innamorato E (long my favorite of her admirers) not long behind. Much discussion of friends in Russia, now separating after many years; telephone calls from BH's former novio, the dear, brilliant, three-quarters-mad S'OM. Phantoms of ten years ago and more--all the loves we used to know, chains still somehow unbroken. "We are turning," I said, "into a Nora Ephron novel. But we are funnier."
I have thought many times, in the past year and more, about love. I have loved, I have so often said to myself, four times. Not dropped into the well of infatuation--but loved and known a responding love--four times! what a treasury that makes! have I the right to expect or even hope for any more? I am so certain, when I say such things, that I know what love means and how it operates--yet when I pause to define it, like St. Augustine with time, the meaning evaporates. Love, a kind of fatal potion of necessity and desire...what does Germaine Greer say? "Love, love, love -- all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness." And there could be more--neurosis, childhood miseries brought out for comfort, chemical combustion. And where do I find myself among the postures? Dame Venus' most inept servant, unable to throw off the shackles, unable to bring myself to complete self-abnegation in the service. I have long loyalties--that is perhaps all: for me, love, that indefinable mist that embraces the lover and the loved, never quite removes from its objects. So, for me, with FSG, the princeps inter pares of my four loves. So with that strange trio cracking wise around FSG's bed--all of us, formal obligations to each other long exhausted, gathered in loyalty and one of the forms of love.
Today much more brisk and businesslike. I, having stayed with TP and HR, took TP along with me to the hospital, where one of FSG's childhood friends had appeared, and after her, FSG's other remaining sister. Much discussion--largely at my behest--of the disposition of FSG's house, that glorious old barn I escaped some years ago, and how best to find it a realtor and a market. I do not think--despite his not unreasonable fears--that this bout of mystery fevers will carry him off, and I think his fear has subsided as the crests of his fevers have begun to drop just the slightest bit. I am ready to return as soon as needed, as I have told him.
After lunch with TP--another long loyalty happily practiced--I have returned home to my lingering projects and two dozen weedy shoots of Queen Anne's Lace around my yard.
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