Night Thoughts

wordle!

2010-02-17T22:41:00.001-05:00

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Oddities and Curiosities: Helen Kirby's FILLY

2010-01-16T11:32:00.002-05:00

It's not difficult to convince me to buy almost any book for a dollar. I plucked *Filly* from a dollar table in haste after a second's glance at the cover--the shop was about to close. *Filly* must be one of the oddest books it has ever been my questionable pleasure to own and finger at leisure. Helen Kirby wrote and illustrated this little biography in verse of Filly, her family, and her misadventures in romance. They are horse-headed humans--yes, reverse centaurs, as it were; their story is a rather faint satire on contemporary mores, while the dozens of illustrations are rather disturbing parodies of the likes of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Singer Sargent (see the cover for Kirby's Rossetti riff). *Filly* is evidently a sequel--yes, there's *another* in this vein!--to *Martingale, the Tale of a Foalish (sic) Virgin*; Martingale is Filly's aunt.
There is something singularly disturbing about Kirby's conception--but why? We have become accustomed to Anubis' doggy *kopf*, Thoth's ibis-in-a-wig look, not to mention centaurs, sirens, nagas, and the whole array of waist-down hybrids. Yet there's a distinct frisson to be had in looking at Kirby's elegant torsos with hooves (yes!) and long equine snouts, in her free and at times "brushy" pencil work. The whole effect is Peter Arno Meets, say, Gelett Burgess.
I have not as yet been able to discover anything further about Mrs. Kirby (except for that "Mrs.," as per worldcat.org), but now, of course, I'll have to hunt down *Martingale*.

Weaving

2007-11-09T13:24:00.000-05:00

I have read--heard, via CD--George Eliot's Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe-and what a curious limping book it is, revisited after many years. Her texture is determinedly, almost patronizingly, fustian: the cloth of the humble. Her novel is absolutely the counterpart of the approved paintings of her day: so *competent*, so *careful*; scenes of local color fussily laid out, with suitable "realism" and "touches of humor," with "typical" flat characters in the middle distance, to fill out the landscape around the wronged weaver and his little charge. Only one character can be said to develop--Marner himself. Eppie's place, as the sign of human values supplanting merely commercial interest--her golden locks, in infancy, seen by near-sighted Marner as golden coins--is spelled out so insistently that she hardly rises to the level of symbol. Eliot's fondness for melodrama, and the shrinking from certain realities that accompanies it, generates the embarrassing crisis at the heart of the novel--Cass' opium-addled first wife, Molly, dying in the snow, leaving her child to wander to Silas' cottage. Eliot, despite the unconventionality of her own life, had to damn Molly with opium, yet could not bring herself to make darling Eppie a bastard. Yet, Eliot's real gift, her wise and observing mind, peeks out in the parenthetical observations about truth, memory, faith, and the action of time, like a child peering out from around a curtain.

A Dream

2007-11-08T12:46:00.000-05:00

I have often remarked that I dream in architecture.
Two nights ago, doubtless partly enchanted by Dayquil, I dreamed that I was in a city, as familiar to me as Boston, but New York in its essentials. I missed a bus, but knew that the next bus, although a different number and route, would serve me just as well. After we had traveled for some blocks, the bus lifted directly into the air, like a kitten seized by a hawk. We were all a little fearful, but we came to know without quite being told, as is true in dreams, that it was possible to charter some buses, for enough money, for special purposes--weddings, funerals, receptions--and that our bus, at great expense, was being transported, by a machine we could not see, and at whose ingenuity and scale we could only guess, to the top of a highrise building--like a funicular, but straight up into the sky. Just before we came to our destination, the bus transformed itself into a mattress, and the population of the bus shrank to a handful. We disembarked, and the mattress slid into the garage-like aperture in the side of the building, like a sheet of paper into a drawer.
I found myself not on a tall building, but again on the ground. Just behind the grimy whitewashed structures that faced me was a silent grass-grown park: side by side, facing the east, were the ruins of two buildings. Their facades were like those of Classical temples, but I understood them at once as rival churches. Little remained but these faces, and the beginnings of the side walls; so long had they been abandoned that the moss and grass had covered them over entire and made them more green than stone; surrounding them, at a little distance, were overgrown and toppled tombstones. I came to know--as one does--that these churches and the little precinct that surrounded them--had been quarantined and left behind during a yellow fever epidemic in the early nineteenth century, and somehow rested, secret and undisturbed, in the very midst of a modern and crowded city.
Part Boston--part "New England" (the rival churches)--part New York--and a good deal of Rome, where so many ruins with strange antique stories lie beside modern steel and paving.

The Wonder of England

2007-10-28T21:45:00.000-04:00

To while away the irksome drive to my second job and back--an hour and more in each direction--I listened to Austen's Pride and Prejudice, read by Irene Sutcliffe, after five or six years away from Austen, excepting perhaps Persuasion--and was dumbfounded by the brilliance, the majestic assurance, of this great novelist. Never did I feel that her characters had been "worked up" from other writers' characters, or the pages of a chronicle, as in Scott or Hawthorne; never did I feel that they had been wheezed into existence for an idea's sake, as in Radcliffe or Shelley (he or she). For pages--quarter-hours--at a time, I found myself delighted by her apt deployment of dialogue or situation, half-forgetting that Austen, more than animating Bennets and Darcys, had created the whole--scenes, settings, houses, and parks. How deftly, in her comic deflation of moral certainties, she created the space in which true moral development might be shown; how wittily, judiciously, sparingly, she interjected her own little moralia. I have often thought--and this fresh encounter did nothing to change my mind--that Austen's writing was the last harvest of the eighteenth century; that she was, just as I think she must have hoped, a spiritual daughter to Richardson and Johnson. But how much finer, to our taste; how much more laughter. Richardson's eye for situation, without his frenzied fascination with sexuality; Johnson's wisdom, without his sententious gloom. Generating interest from crime and sex, always the first resort of the writer, is comparatively easy--without apparent effort, Austen understood the gravity, the symbolic power, of those little actions that determine the happiness of men and women. How faint and half-hearted most novelists look beside her! How fortunate we are, in the English language, to catch her singular prose, her signature tunes, first-hand!

A-Roma

2007-10-15T12:44:00.001-04:00

Every city has its signature smell--some strange potpourri of local earths and waters and human habits. All this past fortnight I could smell Rome again, wherever I was: an absolutely distinctive stew of honey, lemon, damp stone, a discreet backdrop of pine sap, and beneath it all, a benign note of decay, as though something had gone slightly wrong in the bottom of the refrigerator. It brings back the wide swing of the Via Veneto, the gravel walks around the Palazzo Borghese, the seagods splendid in mosaic at Ostia, the upraised arm of Christ and his mother's half-shielded face in Michelangelo's Last Judgment--and the faces of my friends there, my cousin Elisabeth, her husband Michael, and their little boys...
Why should I recall Rome so vividly now?

Shoes and the child's mind

2007-10-10T21:27:00.000-04:00

This last week, my forbidden pleasure has been Noel Streatfeild's 1937 novel, Ballet Shoes. What a document of the Depression, a vanished era in the theatre, and the child's mind it is--not to mention charming almost beyond its author's merits. The story, as you will recall, concerns three orphans, improbably and separately rescued from disaster by a paleontologist, eccentric in a storybook manner. Before he leaves them with his hapless niece Sylvia, the children dub him "Gum" (Great Uncle Matthew); with equal whimsical improbability, he gives them the common surname Fossil. They call Sylvia--who is neither their mother nor their nurse--Garnie, a childish corruption of "Guardian," and as in the Mitfords and their "Hons" and "Bod," these childhood nicknames take on an almost sacred, immutable quality. The remainder of the novel gives itself to the story of the Fossil sisters' gradual rise in the theatre--the lively half-world of pantomimes and matinees that employed London children before the era of Annie or Cats. They are lucky, each of them, to have a distinctive talent, but much of the book is devoted to their work--the assiduous daily training they undergo at Madame Fidolia's Academy, hours of home tutoring from their spinster-schoolteacher boarders (likely a lesbian couple?)--and the achievement and even joy they derive from their efforts. It is a fantasy of real life in its florets of whimsy (of course the boarders supply their educational and emotional wants precisely! of course Gum re-emerges like a deus ex machina!) --but of genuine fantasy and magic, there is none; nor do we desire any. What is most striking is Streatfeild's uncanny recollection of what satisfies the child's mind, male or female. Conversation is rarely long or sentimental; her heroines are never little philosophers or psychologists, but genuine children, kind, selfish, and hard by turns. She lavishes her novelist's attention on their clothing--crucial dresses and outfits--and on food they enjoy and long for (and sometimes lack). She remembers, somehow, what we forget: the child's almost fetishistic love for real, tangible things (clothing, toys, food), around which wishes and fantasies can cluster. Her children's lives are semi-magical; but the children themselves are never false or sugary.

Removal to the Winter Palace; Foremost; Stung

2007-10-09T22:13:00.000-04:00

Tonight, now that the weather has begun to turn, I will again begin to sleep upstairs, having latterly slept, in this strange, disquieting, unseasonal heat, on the futon bed in the guest room. In a mood of enchantment brought on by Murasaki Shikibu and Kenneth Rexroth's anthology of Japanese women poets, how can I not think of this as a counterpart to one of the Emperor's ritualized moves from palace to palace? I am lacking only--well, I am lacking layered multicolored robes, palanquins of hidden beauties, Shinto rites, fawning courtiers, flowering trees--and an Empire.
This morning, to my dismay, I was selected for a brief criminal trial. My prior experience has been that I have precisely the sort of education that makes one, in a lawyer's eyes, uppity--but I was not spared this time, or rather, I was honored with the privilege to serve. I was foreman for the six-person jury, and it was not difficult for us to arrive at a unanimous verdict in our little larceny case.
Last night, I confronted a wasp at my back door, hovering in what appeared to be a state of meditation near the top of the back door window. No Buddhist, I swatted at her with the bit of cloth I had in my hand, and she fell, as far as I could ascertain, to the mudroom rug. I went out on my errand, but as I grasped the inner knob to close the door again, I felt a sharp pain, like the entry of a pin, into my right thumb: my first wasp sting. My remarks on the wasp's character and morals do not bear repeating: suffice it to say that she fell at once to the ground, and is now stinging with the angels.
Since this was my first venture with Aculeata, I was curious to learn how I might react. "Well, " I reasoned, if I die in the next twenty minutes, I'm allergic." I went upstairs, washed, applied rubbing alcohol, and then a little witches' brew of antibiotic and analgesic ointments, wrapped in two bandaids. So far, so good.

Aghast

2007-10-02T22:04:00.000-04:00

It is disappointing to report how disappointing Gregory Maguire's Wicked seems to me. I did not, and do not, resist the appropriation and re-evaluation of a familiar story--I welcome it, as the ground of, for instance, some of Angela Carter's most imaginative writing; Tanith Lee's; Robin McKinley. Maguire's book, however, depressed me by the heavy, groping quality of its language. The novelist, unable to create or sustain a character, gives all his poor puppets a gleeless variety of ill-correlated emotions: they are all, male, female, human, or otherwise, all over the map. I was dismayed by the relentless, childish dwelling on excretion and swelling; every one of the players is venal and vulgar. In a great novel, even the foolish and wicked are not entirely beyond our understanding; the good writer's central characters suffer and laugh as we would, and so we join in their deeds and sorrows. What a fool Emma Woodhouse is! And Gwendolen Harleth! but we love them. We want to shake Emma Bovary out of her stupid dreams, but we love her. Nowhere in Wicked are we inclined to love, even in disbelief and despair.
Worst of all, perhaps, Maguire, in his superficial cleverness, has traduced and diminished the brilliant whimsy of Baum. Baum's world was never without its shadows and puzzles and mysteries: but his Oz was a place of near-volcanic creative energy, where anything might happen. Maguire's Oz is a police state--nowhere you'd want to raise a child.

Briareus Writes a Poem

2007-09-29T18:26:00.000-04:00

Generally, Yahoo may be relied upon to filter spam, but today,
one spam got through the filter, and I perhaps unwisely
read it. Below the usual subject line, advertising
cheap diet pills (not Viagra this time), I read:
"Like an old soldier, wakeful, in his tent!
And so I gaze avidly
Down the road, at Cypress Gardens, a woman
Against which we have been projected? What . . .
This drizzling three-day January thaw,
And piled up at the base of the columns
In a single floral stroke,
their bellies, they're out cold, instantaneously
XVI. Laying a Ghost: The Jeannette and the Fram
on their own little seat cushions, wearing soft caps
What I have in my hands, these flowers, these shadows,
Away, my songs, must we go
Swaying in unison beneath the snow,
Toward the still dab of white that oscillates
Against this sky no longer of our world.
Left and right, and far ahead in the dusk.
to try that, to hold a terrifying beast
The winged winds, captives of that age-old foe
That desire has ever built, have approached"
This seems to be a ragout of lines of verse harvested from all over the Net--
I've identified one line of Robert Pack
and one of Victor Hugo. I haven't enough ambition to investigate all of them...
The effect is as though the Hechatoncheires, the hundred-handed, fifty-headed
giants of Greek myth, wrote a poem in idiot imitation of their betters.
How like the Web they are--incalculably strong, inarguable, ferocious,
grasping, thoughtless, seizing fragments and bits for a ridiculous
but high-sounding omelette of words. And yet, how like
certain poems by John Ashbery or Leslie Scalapino the result is...

The Acrobat

2007-09-29T10:28:00.000-04:00

Her name is Marie--the papier-mache acrobat : her career remains unknown.
My erstwhile housemate informs me that she received Marie as a gift years ago--more than that we still do not know.

An End in View; Natural Narcissism; My Acrobat

2007-09-28T13:09:00.000-04:00

I slipped Disc 10 of the audio version of Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise this morning. Nemirovksy's skill, and her complex compassion for her characters, has not failed. Since she died in 1942--in the camps--she was in no sense a post-Holocaust or post-Nazi writer: she declines to demonize the German soldiers who occupy the second novel in the "suite" as they occupy the little country town--I wonder if she would have felt that luxury if she had walked out of the camps, or even if she had learned of their horrors from the safety of England or America in 1945. It is a salutary lesson for us: before they became a byword--a trite byword--for repression and evil, German soldiers were men.
And I feel the sorrow one does on finishing a great and important book for the first time. There is no recovery of that first naivete: it is like the uneasy transition from the "crush" to liking or love or indifference.
I drew my class--sleepy on a Friday--through poems by Anna Seward, William Wordsworth, and Charlotte Smith. I made a case for the true Romantic's benign narcissism: leaving the crowded highway of satire and social verse (Pope's Rape of the Lock, Goldsmith's Deserted Village, Crabbe's great narratives) for the lone poppy in the field, the solo vista over sleeping London, seeking the self mirrored in nature. It is interesting to see how loud and persistent that subjectivism is...
Seated in a miniature Adirondack chair that makes the base of a lamp in my kitchen is a mystifying figure--a jointed papier-mache woman, left behind by my former housemate years ago. For some time, she was seated a little precariously inside a papier-mache mold of my friend Rachel's foot, where she jostled for space with Maurice Sendak monsters and stale candied almonds. Now her repose has more dignity, undercut only by her casual attire. Looked at casually, she seems naked, or clothed in the least underthings, but I realized a few months ago that her clothing--painted on--is a faded acrobat's outfit. From this and from her fixed papier-mache coiffure, she could be a hundred years old. What was she?--an exile from a jointed circus? Too frail for dedicated children's play, she must have been created for display--but what?

Good nights and days, Irene

2007-09-26T12:51:00.000-04:00

Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise is accompanying me on my daily jaunts to Hartford--as new as the translation is, there is already a recorded version on CD. No single work of fiction has impressed me as thoroughly and as deeply since I first read War and Peace. Have I read her equal, and Tolstoy's equal, in these intervening years? of course--but Nemirovsky is for me, as for most of the world, a discovery, and encountering her has the delight of the unexpected. The first novel of two that she completed in what was to have been a five-novel sequence depicts the flight of several people, singles, couples, and families, from Paris in anticipation of the German invasion. Nemirovsky's deft management of the shifts in the narrative from the collective to the particular, her quick, mercurial, razor-sure creations of and delineations of character are not less than dazzling.
And this is another of the Nazi murders: she died in the camps in 1942. Russian-Jewish by extraction, she thought and felt and wrote as a French woman. This is the very essence of the crude, stupid, reductive racism of the Nazis: Nemirovsky's uniqueness is dismissed for an accident of birth that did not define her. How many more Nemirovskys did the Nazis murder? the Stalinist purges? It's all very well, with Gray, to mope for "mute inglorious Miltons"--but his poor shepherd-boys and thwarted lights died in their beds.

Wednesday night and Thursday morn

2007-09-20T14:18:00.000-04:00

How the night owl blinks and gasps, confronted with the morning...
My alarm is set now for 6 a.m., and in what already is a half-darkness, neither night nor day, my eye falls on the spines of Christina Stead's Ocean of Story, and her last and unfinished novel, I'm Dying Laughing. "UNO 1945," which appears in Ocean, is a brilliant, despairing piece, about an ill-fated couple that cannot quite reconcile themselves either to Communism or the rapacious Hollywoodized capitalism that surrounds them. They are much given to what V. S. Pritchett, trying to understand what Dorothea Brooke's marriage would have been like *after* we close Middlemarch, called the infuriating stupidity of the intellectual. Likewise Stead's Emily and Stephen. They know too much, they weigh too many opinions: their lives are a blur, and they cannot act. The story, when she expanded it into that last novel, collapsed. Like her heroines, Stead had a stream of brilliant but unfocused words at her disposal--only once, really, did they simmer into the great tragedy, The Man Who Loved Children.
Mist is still burning sluggishly off the fields of Amherst as I drive gradually south...

Farewell to all that, my darling

2007-09-19T14:02:00.000-04:00

Dear Teleboobie:
How can I say goodbye after so many years? when did we meet--was it really more than thirty years ago? You must have been in your early twenties then, while I was--well, I won't say just how young I was when you seduced me--there are supposed to be laws against such things, but they're honored in the breach everywhere nowadays.
You have had so many styles. When I first new you, it was all black and white, but as you've aged, you've taken to wearing more and more color--it's downright garish now. And what loquaciousness you've taken on of late! years ago, when you spoke, it was only in three or four voices; now you have hundreds of things to say all at once. So much movement and changefulness and noise. I can't see how you can find the energy at your age; but you do, and there's no sign that you'll slow down.
How many sweet memories I have of you--so many wonderful, terrible, gladdening, distressing sights you have shown me: Mary Tyler Moore's hat careering into the air. The Michelin Tire Man--or was it an astronaut--walking unsteadily through the airless black curtain over the white moondust. Edith Bunker racing out of her kitchen away from the rapist she'd just attacked with a plate of brownies. Jed Bartlet scolding his God under the gentle arches of the National Cathedral. The sickening collapse of the Towers. So many sights to see.
Here is the part that is so hard for me. I need more than you have ever been able to offer. You talk--there is no end to the stream of your talk--but you don't listen. In all that sound, there is no substance. I keep waiting for an intelligible idea, a message, just a single message--and there is none. I am beginning to think that you can't grasp what it might mean to have an idea. You show me so much--but you never illuminate what you show. Spreading light and shedding light are not quite the same thing, my dear, and you have never understood that.
So, this is the end. I have unplugged you. Yes, I've left you before-- the last time, I left you for Leo Tolstoy, do you remember that? I was reading War and Peace, which has all your beauties and more, and you seemed so foolish and empty beside Natasha...Yes, I'm sure I'll see you in other places. I know I'm not your only victim--or do you call them "friends"? I'll see you in other houses--in clubs and stadiums and airplanes. I'll nod; I might even say hello. I won't pretend we've never met.
Will I be back? I said never last time--when I went off with Tolstoy. I'm human; I'm fallible-who can say? But this I know--you won't miss me.

30 August 2007--day for night

2007-08-30T13:13:00.000-04:00

A very fitful night. I started awake at 2:40 a.m. to find local public television about to broadcast a show on Nureyev's Russian years. "What an *odd* thing!" I thought. "Who remembers Nureyev in a gangsta-Paris Hilton-wretched-excess world, much less that he was Russian?" They were endearingly candid about his sexuality, and the early clips reminded us all how uneven his technique was, pre-Fonteyn--but how full of life and speed he was. I drifted back to sleep on a pillow I've punched out of shape, to find, in my dreams, Daniel, alive again, driving around a night-time city sparkling with lights, the two of us in a rambling conversation about who had been living where and doing what when we met and moved in together. In the dream, there was much laughter and agreement, but when I gave up and swam to consciousness again, I saw that all the details were wrong, were frankly fictional.

12 January 2006--day for night

2006-01-12T16:27:00.000-05:00

I have variously mourned and celebrated Daniel's achievements, failures, and passing for more than a year now. Nothing but continued life would have seemed like a just recognition of his virtues--what do we want more than more life, if we are not sick at heart or in body past endurance?--but I have at least offered him the respect of wearing black for much of that time, and given him that tenuous hold on life that remembrance is.
When I began this public-private journal, I intended it in no way to be a continuing memorial--but here we are. Journals are a little like photographs: in their seizure of a moment, they at once arrest time and remind us of its passing. At my left elbow now is a photograph of my father on the eve of his entry into the Army. Is it 1943? 1944? When I first saw this photograph, years ago, I was startled by its unfamiliarity--was he ever so young? I see now the features I know well--the barrel chest, the broadening nose, the heavy hands, the pale blue eyes. But this Jack, of course, never changes.

13 October 2004

2004-10-13T23:12:00.000-04:00

"...to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier." --Whitman, from "Song of Myself"
I have reread the entirety of the 1891-2 version of the "Song" from *Leaves of Grass*, and what an extraordinary poem it is; despite occasional longeurs, how it seems to include everything, even to anticipate all objections to itself. Of course my eye lit on this phrase. Can the good gray poet possibly have been right? Such states of ecstatic access, such affirming certainties, a confidence so supreme that it is supreme even in its generosities--it is scarcely possible for any human being to cling to such states long, except at the moment of poetic creation.
At times like this, it is hard not to feel that the nineteenth century, with its prescribed forms of mourning, had something to show us. We tacitly expect that the survivors will move on, move back into their lives, in a few weeks. I remember that FSG was careful to wear black for many months after his elder sister died; he can scarcely have imagined that I would now wear his black neckties to mourn for him. There were scarcely forms for divorced spouses; there were certainly no forms for divorced spouses of the same gender. A widow was to wear full mourning for a year; a brother was to wear full mourning for three months, and half-mourning thereafter. As something less than a widow or widower, and perhaps more than a brother, I say: full mourning for six months.

10 October 2004

2004-10-11T02:25:00.000-04:00

For many months after her sister died in 1996, A has told me that she began every paper in the graduate program she was attempting to finish with the sentence: "I hate everyone." A simple outcry of rage upon a living world revolving senselessly around a black absence. Now that her brother--FSG--has also died, I find myself in her place; I called her to tell her that she had been quite right all along. It is not so much hatred I feel as distaste for the noise and bustle of others--how can they, how can we all, be alive, when that loved one is dead? Halt the buses; cancel the colors; stop the sun.
I am at my parents' community in Virginia, where they live among other military and paramilitary retirees; they are scarcely held back by their relative rarity as liberals here, and enjoy the fullest social calendar and the happiest daily existence I have ever known for them. They were invited to a dinner party by near neighbors, who are organizing a second trip to China, and indeed they spent the first half-hour or more settling the broad outlines of the adventure. My parents know well that I could not consider such a trip except at their expense, and they give me perhaps too much already: I make polite demurrals that I hope will not reveal the extent of my indebtedness to them. After about two hours of this--I listen attentively to my host tell of his visit to the widow of Minoru Ota, the Japanese commander in the Okinawa campaign (she was, he reports, "a very nice lady," but he later learned that their formal call was against military protocol; I was yearning to say, "But her house--was it Western or Eastern? were the doors wood or paper?"); I politely ask my hostess' grandson about the stone in his necklace (jeweled adornments, scarcely found even on gay men when I was an adolescent, is now general across my sex, except, it seems, for me)--I had had enough, and retreated into a study of Andrew Wyeth's fruitful relationships with the Kuerner and Olson families. "Have you found something to interest you?" my hostess inquired, in a rather bronzed tone. A man in black is never an ideal guest.
"I think I could turn and live with animals"--Whitman. I have thought very much of these other witnesses; they have been easier somehow than my species. About ten days before FSG died, driving toward Boston, I came to a very sudden halt before three deer that had begun to cross Amherst Road: they regarded me stilly with their wide holy eyes, their gaze fixed for a moment on my car, before they turned their heads as one and walked floatingly into the trees on the other side. A week or so later--while I was on staff at Circle Lodge--six white swans floated on the lake as I passed by to go to my bed on the Saturday night, stirring the water aimlessly, amazing with their sinister eye-patches and long tragic curved necks. And yesterday, as my mother and I walked toward the gym, we chanced upon a neighbor's new dog, a four-month-old dachsund. Wolfgang was at first frightened by my great leather hat, but I took it off and knelt to be near him, and he lay happy in the grass under my hands, unguarded, guileless, free.

8 October 2004

2004-10-08T21:13:00.000-04:00

During the long interval between the last entry and this, the unthinkable has happened: FSG has died. He died 21 September; the cause of his death is still elusive. What it was that assaulted his body and made it unable to counter infections doctors have still not been able to discover. How can we not wonder if it was--is--the same weakness or ailment that took his elder sister's life years ago?
It is scarcely possible for me to relay, in the course of a single entry, the weeks of anxiety, the terrible decisions, the many accommodations, the exhausting news-bearing, the crowds of stunned mourners--certainly it is beyond my strength. Episodes from that time recur to my mind over and over; they will rise to the top of these meditations according to their own calendar; Night Thoughts will be less than ever a chronicle of my days, and more than ever a tangle of dateless ideas and memories--but is this not suitable for a time in which the notion of time itself seems to have lost meaning?
I was asked to deliver the principal eulogy for the dead, and I did not hesitate to accept. I quote it entire here, as a continuation of my tributes to him. For the first and last time, he will appear in this nocturnal in propria persona, under his own name.

"Yesterday, a small handful of friends and relations gently lowered the body of Daniel Eaton Pentlarge into a grave at the family's summer house in Maine, where he will lie flanked by his sister Sarah and his mother. It was the very last embrace we shall ever give him, except in recollection or dream.

I met Daniel in December of 1988. He had the full measure of that dangerous Pentlarge charisma, and I made no effort to resist. We exchanged mash notes in Latin, and we had traded vows of love before a week was out. Our love was of the deeply engrossing kind that is so nauseating for outsiders to behold, complete with its special favors, pet names, and shared idiosyncrasies. Behind and beneath all of that lay the deep, considered mutual approval that persisted through many small differences and great changes in fortune. I adored him and he me; we built a smoothly-operating partnership that survived both our marriage and our divorce, founded on common agreements about the right treatment of people, the primacy of learning, and a laughing realism about human existence in the world. We supported each other's vocations and avocations and little whims in word and deed. When asked to describe our relationship, he liked to say, 'Partners...' and if a puzzled eyebrow shot up, he would say, '...in crime,' with a wicked gleam.

He grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, at a house he always referred to simply as 9 Germaine Street. He always felt a deep nostalgia for that place and his childhood and young adulthood there. He was under no illusion about his life there, which had its share of misadventures, but every year and incident there possessed a peculiar vividness that made much that happened later pale by contrast.

He was deeply rooted in places, even after the family's departure from Worcester. Each loved place came with its share of anecdotes that had the quality of romantic legend: solitary early walks near his apartment on Queensberry; the roses that grew on the fence when he and his sister Rachel took the apartment in Somerville into which I later moved; the first sight of the grand staircase at his last house in Wakefield, and with it the realization that he might at last be the grand seigneur of a house equal to 9 Germaine. Most of all, his memory and imagination fixed themselves upon 'the camp,' the astonishing—his favorite adjective—summer house in Maine. Grandfather, he told me, wanted a hunting lodge, while Grandmother wanted an Italian villa, and this was the result, with its mixture of rustic make-do and luxurious domestic appointments, a grand piano in the soaring living-room, and stuffed game around the walls. He was very careful, he said, to ask me to marry him before I had seen the house, to be certain I wasn't marrying him for his real estate.

Daniel's identity was deeply centered in his family, both the near and the distant: he displayed photographs of his ancestors Fredrik and Ulrica as proudly as he did photographs of his mother and sisters. His heart was the treasury of the family stories, both Eaton and Pentlarge. He loved his parents and siblings deeply, even when they puzzled or distressed him; no holiday or high occasion seemed quite right without a quorum of his family present. When his sister Sarah fell ill, they united effortlessly to give her comfort, company, and advocacy in the hospital. His intense loyalty to them was repaid in his time of need: his family and friends showed him the same loving attention he had shown to Sarah.

As many of you know, Daniel felt himself destined for the Unitarian Universalist ministry, a profession toward which his mother—and his own inner urgings—guided him. He loved the denomination's operations and principles; he bathed in its history. He worked for its central organization in more than one capacity, and knew many, perhaps all, of its secrets. Yet he was frustrated in his dream: he met the Ministerial Fellowship Committee not once but twice, and at times when they honored due diligence above his obvious charm. I liked to say to him that his gifts in ministry lay not in his words, but what seemed to be happening between the words. Despite the superb qualities of his mind and his strong competence at anything to which he seriously turned his hand, he was always averse to long and ugly efforts: He was a strong starter, but slow in the last laps. If ministry was not to be, I always wished for him that he could find a place and a profession in which first gestures meant most, so that he would be loved for his true strengths, but it does not seem to me that that ever quite happened.

I am very pleased that I introduced him to social dance—contra dance and English Country dance. I remember well that after my second dance weekend, I implored him to come with me to the next, and he said, 'You would have to pay me to go.' But he soon saw sweet reason. He perceived the possibilities for the building of community through dance. He loved the inclusivity of social dance, and strove to bring even the less able and less bold along to the pleasures of the dance. He was a kind of ambassador, as Jacqueline Schwab wisely said to me the other day, between our dances and dance communities, and had patience for the unglamorous committee work that made such diplomacy possible. He loved and supported my growing work in dance, and my approach to dance now owes a great deal to our shared vision. He loved the dance 'Angels Unawares,' which I wrote for a same-sex union in our home community—the tune for which we will hear in a moment—in part because it leveled the field for all dancers. 'At first,' he said, 'the experienced dancers are puzzled, but the beginners catch on right away, which is just wonderful to watch.'

What manner of man was Daniel to me? You all perhaps know him as the smiling extrovert, ready with a friendly greeting; open-hearted and –handed; bold in outlook and opinion. He was as gifted a listener as he was a conversationalist; human, indeed humane, interaction came easily to him. I admired all this, but I think that the excellence of his mind was not always recognized. While he was not a deep scholar in many fields, there was a deftness, a quickness, to his intelligence of which I have never seen the like. He loved the big gesture, in life or in art. He had a refined taste in architecture, which he once studied with the idea of professing himself. And there was that quality of complete attention, that sensation that while he listened to you, you were the only person of account in the world. You all perhaps know what a strong flame his love could be, and what it was like to be surrounded by that heat. I was fortunate enough to receive his unconditional love for many years, even to the end of his life. I am certain it was more than I could have deserved; I am still warmed by that love.

Yet in all this, I do not want any of us to do him the unkindness of a posthumous canonization, making of him the saint or angel he was not, and would never have wished to be. He had all the failings of his virtues: he could be hasty, proud to the point of arrogance, intolerant—especially of religious or political conservatism--, brisk, even careless. He lacked a quality that many employers and congregations value: follow-through. He was not above the occasional snobbery; he could be grandiose.

Then too, he was earthy and real. He never quite managed to be the nice big six-footer he had hoped to be, but he loved being a physical body, and human bodies; there was nothing he liked better than the feeling of a tummy full of comforting food, an afternoon's sail on Great Pond, or the taste of rich kisses. He loved gossip and bawdy or outright silly humor. He was in no sense too good for simple pleasures. He and I shared a love of children's literature, and he introduced me to Barbara Cooney's Miss Rumphius, the refrain of which we often recited to each other: 'That is all very well, little Alice...but you must do something to make the world more beautiful.' Miss Rumphius planted lupines; he planted lupines in her honor.

The last several years were remarkably difficult for Daniel. His failure to make his way into the ordained ministry was a long heartbreak. The death of his sister Sarah was terribly hard for him, as were the trials of his brother Joel; his mother's death—although their relationship was at its strongest when she died—was also a great loss to him. His health was also poorer than he generally permitted others to know—his body gave him more pain, and let him down, more and more over the last ten years. He had a talent for projecting a kind of brash persistence and vigor despite all his disappointments, but inwardly he was sensitive, fragile, and susceptible to hurt. It is easy to say that Daniel's death proves the adage that the good die young, but with his style of goodness comes a certain delicacy.

How can we go on without him? I feel, at this moment, like many of you, perhaps all of you, that my anchor, my column, my compass, my strong oak, is gone. After his mother's death, several friends remarked to us how well we had worked together in that week, moving in concert to do what needed to be done. But I remember—and he did too—that we saw very little of each other that week, and even at night spoke very little. We had learned what to do: no discussion necessary. In a sense, even in his absence, his love has trained me for this day, giving me the strength to stand here.

He was always allergic to any strict theology, and would have greeted any speculations on our part about Heaven or a conscious afterlife with uncertainty. What he loved about Unitarian Universalism was the idea of embracing the questions together. And here we find ourselves, sharing his vision and values again.

I look for help to two outside sources. First, a passage from Walt Whitman. Daniel read part of this at our wedding: later lines show Whitman to have been, for Daniel, irritatingly prophetic:

'Listen! I will be honest with you, I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes, These are the days that must happen to you: You shall not heap up what is call'd riches, You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve, You but arrive at the city to which you were destin'd, you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction before you are call'd by an irresistible call to depart, What beckonings of love you receive you shall only answer with passionate kisses of parting, You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reach'd hands toward you.'
--Song of the Open Road, Sec. 11

I was reading outdoors once—when am I not reading?—when Daniel said to me suddenly, 'Look, it's a flutter-by.' 'What?' I said. 'It's a flutter-by,' he said, pointing to a butterfly. 'It just flutters by.' When we say that someone has died untimely, we mean that he has died before our time for him; Daniel fluttered by in his own time—not in ours. To have known him for such a short time—there is a rough prize. But his courage always gave me heart, and his death shall not change that.

At the end of a long novel I never quite persuaded Daniel to finish, George Eliot's Middlemarch, the narrator says:
'...the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.'

Whose life exemplifies this idea more than Daniel's? What, materially, has Daniel left behind? A few sermons; a few cherished recipes; a few hand-made neckties. Yet look how his influence surpasses calculation: all of us here transformed and united; his brightest qualities moving forward and outward through us into eternity."

4 September 2004: Day for Night

2004-09-04T10:31:00.000-04:00

Here I am at SS' iMac, with its turnip-like screen stand and elegant white and lucite keyboard and mouse. SS and her daughter are packing to go with me to Pinewoods Camp, where they are long-time attendees of the Labor Day weekend, and I am on staff as the English dance leader.
Much of yesterday I spent at FSG's bedside in Mount Auburn--from about eleven in the morning until just after six in the evening. His condition has altered without improving: doctors have now sighted nodules in his lungs that they believe to be bacterial in origin, and the bulk of the day was spent readying ourselves for the lung biopsy they hope will give them certain and clear answers about the sort of bacterium responsible--and the right antibiotic to treat it. FSG distressed and upset--inasmuch as a sanguine, solar spirit as his can be--by all of this. His color is better and his eyes brighter than when I last saw him, but he is drawn, and has lost a great deal of muscle mass. He is now sporting a quasi-Amish fashion of facial hair: a moustachio, but beard only under the chin--he has shaved all that he has energy to shave. He will not hear any of us say that the moustache is fine; he is wildly eager to shave it all again.
BH and I wait out the lung biopsy together. It is a blessing to feel the deep affinities that bind us, to see that our experiences, willy nilly, have brought us to not dissimilar conclusions, and that our unquestioned common impulses have brought us to this hospital and this bedside.
I have omitted to mention, from last week, the Museum of Fine Arts' breathtaking exhibition on Art Deco--but all of that, with my report from Pinewoods, must wait on another day.

24 August 2004

2004-08-24T22:01:00.000-04:00

A long drought in this record. I did indeed return to FSG's bedside, leaving Friday the 20th after work at the Renaissance Center. His respiration had worsened considerably over the intervening week; fluid gathering around the lungs had made breathing frighteningly difficult. Steady application of prednizone, platelets, and blood supplements eased his discomfort somewhat, and he improved slowly if meaningfully during the course of the weekend. His sister A, his elder sister, a lifelong friend, and I took turns at or near his bedside. I had brought a few of his favorite books--an earlier effort to read psalms to him not having met with much success: Hilaire Belloc, Ogden Nash, a bit of Ernest Bramah's Kai Lung sequence. At his request, I read Belloc's "Matilda"--but he was asleep before I had finished the second stanza.
How can one not marvel at the reliable, tedious anxiety of the sickbed and the hospital? the litany of obscure, slowly-changing indicators, constantly repeated and clung to like spars in the sea; the repetition of details, carefully scrutinized for meaning. What the dear sufferer eats; what goes in and comes out; how the eyes look and the skin feels. All of keenest interest to the central players; all dull as dust to the outer world. During a part of FSGl's stay, there was a very substantial family with a patriarch in Room 4 of the Cardiac Care Unit; at any time of the day or night, at least Mother was sure to be there, and more likely many more--I saw, over the several days, perhaps thirty different faces. Much of the time they filled the waiting room, tirelessly mulling the minutiae of the patient's condition. Rather uncannily, there was always one chair empty somewhere in the little room, where I might wait until FSG was ready to receive my visit, where I might awkwardly sit as they discussed Papa around me, or how entirely Cousin T's daughter resembled her. The final crisis arrived Saturday afternoon, when something like ten of them gathered in Papa's room, gustily weeping as he failed altogether--Mama, oddly, not at his elbow, but centrally placed in the doorway, as suited, I suppose, her role as principal player. The following day, FSG remarked to me that nurses had told him how much of the floor had turned over--several moved away because they had improved; others--"gone." "Yes," I said, "I'm sorry you had to hear that." "Ah," he said; "I thought I heard a lot of weeping yesterday."
A quite cross with me Sunday evening: I had encouraged her to come directly from a visit to their other brother in the south of the state to my hosts' apartment, from which point I would drive her to Brookline, for dinner and advice from TP about the marketing of FSG's house. I had been with FSG in the later afternoon & said good night without much further promise; A had promised to return "in the evening," and on our way back from Brookline I received a rather disoriented call from FSG, wondering where A was. A opined to me--as we waited for FSG to be ready to see us--that anything, anything that upset the patient in any way was bad, and that we had made a bad plan. If we couldn't do it right, she said, we might as well not do it at all. I said, "You cannot possibly be telling me that I have been screwing up all weekend." "No," she said, "but in the past, you have had a tendency to feel put upon--" "I don't feel put upon," I said. "What I feel is that we can't make all the guesses right all the time. I was with him all afternoon; he slept most of the time. When I left I made no promises--there was no reason to think he wouldn't sleep all evening--that he would even notice that you were 'late'."
All, of course, smoothed over by our visit to FSG--and my recognition that A is utterly exhausted. She has taken upon herself the tasks of first contact and principal comfort to her brother; she is spearheading the sale of his (and formerly my) splendid, crushing, white palace of a house; she is still trying to plan her own wedding.
In the midst of this unhappy, worrisome episode, my mind continued to revert to my last--perhaps my very last--conversation with TWB, whom I called about a month ago. It was a difficult and unpleasant conversation, not all of which I remember (a kindness bestowed by my subconscious,perhaps). The essence of it is that he has made no response to my repeated proferrings of the olive branch because--he wants no contact. He has concluded that I “did not treat [him] well at all, not at all.” In other words, I am the villain. I said,“That makes it sound as though you hate me.” “Well,”he said, “I don’t hate you, but I don’t like you much either. So I guess it’s somewhere between the two.” What generosity of spirit! I said: “My feelings about you haven’t changed” He feels that the whole thing was just a mistake, an illusion; that we are very different; that it doesn’t matter whether or not we are in contact since we live on different continents. I pointed out that we might cross paths at a dance event or weekend or week; he felt it didn’t matter since “it wouldn’t last long.” I said we might *want*to be in contact—artistic or intellectual things we might want to share; questions to ask. He said, in his snottiest tone, that that would be something I would want to do, not he. And that that pointed to the wholedifference between us. [Because, I suppose, he’s so“evolved”?]. I backed away from all these matters and asked after a mutual friend, and after his great-aunt. I thanked him for taking my call. He said, “Good-bye. Take care.” And I thought: that’s as much as I’ll ever get from him.
But as I hung up the phone, I thought, “What a jerk.” And then I thought, “*I* didn’t treat *him*well? What? *What*? WHAT? What is he talkingabout? I put his name on my bank account; lent him my car for months; edited his book; helped sell his album. Did whatever he wanted. What does he imagine my crime to be? Oh, I asked for help—for him—from his friends, because he was so evidently unhappy—that’s the crime? [The crime was that I got too close—and threatened him too much; but TWB can’t see or acknowledge that.] What about his mistreatmentof me—his persistent belittlement & disparagement—of my interests, character, talents, on and on and on?I’d have a much better case for ‘emotional abuse’ than he.”
The only merit of all of this is that I have finally stopped blaming myself. There was still a (fading)voice in the back of my head that said, “He was the perfect man, and you screwed it up.” Now I’m more inclined to think that I brought out the best in him—he was a more genial, smiling person with me; perhaps truly happy, if so briefly. I would have preferred to help him find that again-but he would scarcely let me help him then; I certainly can’t help him now.
I am a sentimental fool; I want us all, in the rondelay of changing relationships, to love each other, somehow, forever--but there is no such balm for this. In some ways, it’s worse. I think less of him than before--that unaltered feeling I voiced in conversation with him evaporated even as I voiced it to him; there is no real peace between us. It is a great shame that it seems impossible to detect the poison in a person until the toxin flows in your own veins--but the chimera, the delusive dream, that one can heal by love, like the lover of Rappaccini's daughter, is almost stronger than love itself. But as I remarked to a friend, "You apparently don’t get much credit for loving, except in Heaven."
At my hosts'--DM and her charming, sturdy-minded fiance--I found a charming and hitherto unfamiliar masterwork of fantasy--Silverlock, by John Myers Myers, a name worthy of comic poems and campfire songs. Its eponymous hero has the slightly flexible morals, and the bitter humor, of the figures of the comedies and noirs of the nineteen-thirties and forties (no wonder, since the book first appeared in 1949); its writing is swift and brash, but not without local beauties. He compares himself to the ship that has just sunk under him--"I, too, would have filled with water that stopped my fires." Elsewhere, a woman is described in one place as "settling in like sourdough," and in another place, as she searches the forest for her lost love, as "sifting big timber for her man."
25 August update:
Returning from a lesson in the sailor's hornpipe, for application to Ruddigore, I stopped in on my marvelous friends, CY and GC. "The sign nearest your house said, 'DON'T PASS.' So I didn't." We feasted on corn and turkey kielbasa, and in the course of a long and rather sidewinding conversation begin to wonder what has happened to the American midriff--why are the young so doughy in the midsection? and what has become of the revolutionary edge of sexual-preference politics, ours and the nation's? have we tired out, given up; has the fervor skipped this generation, to be relit in the next? There is no solution, but they press a gift of fresh tomatoes and onions on me, to my delight.
As I return to the car, I see that FSG has called my cellphone, which I had improvidently and inconsiderately left in the car. He has moved to the next level of care down, and has a new telephone number, but when I call him he is having a backrub "from which I maybe shouldn't be distracted," his voice still weak and faint and somehow like a child's. Am I to be comforted by his apparent improvement, or distressed by the exhaustion I still hear in him?

16 August 2004

2004-08-16T23:20:00.000-04:00

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."

14 August 2004

2004-08-15T01:46:00.000-04:00

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.

9 August 2004

2004-08-09T23:04:00.000-04:00

MM and I have been to see Noel Coward's abominably silly Design for Living, a scrappily written drama about the dangerous choices of three Bright Young Moderns, a comedy at which it was almost impossible to laugh. Many fine small witticisms, but the overall arc very coarse and callous: after attempting to cohabit with her painter-lover, the young lady Modern attempts to cohabit with his writerly best friend; then leaves him for her staid banker-collector friend-of-the-family; then throws him over utterly to live with both writer and painter, in an ill-defined menage. What is not said, but sniggeringly implied, is that the writer and the painter were (very likely) lovers before they met her, and nigh-unmistakeably lovers after she left them both. The staid collector leaves in a very Malvolio-like rage, but there the resemblance to Shakespeare ends. Marisa Tomei looked the part, but had an unfortunate tendency to shout rather than project; none of the cast had mastered the sharp, clipped, snapped style of dialogue Noel and his Gertrude Lawrence made their specialty. The woman beside me said, at the conclusion, "I think that was the dumbest play I've ever seen." My view is only a little more charitable.
"She knows her onions." Said--rather inconsequently--by one of the young men of their common innamorata. I had been thinking rather a lot about onions, having just that evening consumed my second sandwich of lox, cream cheese, tomato, and the traditional accompaniment of red onion, in the course of three days. When had I last eaten even a crumb of red onion? FSG objected to them so much--they interrupt the flow to the kiss, apparently; TWB scarcely liked them better. I hesitated, each time, before placing the onion on the tomato. But why pause? why reserve myself for the kisses of lovers absent? They were so sharp and sweet.
An evening of Pat Shaw for my monthly dance, the Amherst Assembly. SS and her pretty daughter to visit, her daughter dancing quite a lot, and very creditably. BC and her intermittent lover, the elusive SF, materialized a little late, and left a little early, as affectionate to me as always, and as full of mystery as always. The evening's surprise delight was "Once I Loved a Maiden Fair," which Pat Shaw interpreted as a longways, and I suggested dancing as a two-couple set. At the break, WB came to me and said:"I tend to hear possibilities for Spoonerisms, and when you announced "Once I Loved a Maiden Fair," I immediately heard, "Once I Loved a Faded Mare."I said: "What you do with your private life is none of my concern." WB: "I knew I could count on you to say that."
I was apologetic to SS about the occasional interference my ego makes in my judgement about matters of dance. TWB used to flay me about my competitiveness; and certainly, I have been guilty of no end of push, of groveling, of staring at my shoes, of elbowing, of unreasonable pride and needless shame. But what is it that we expect of ourselves now? TWB and all the other choreographers who surround me, all the professors--are they motivated only by a selfless desire to give? Not at all: they are as madly egotistical, as hungry for fame and praise, as any one living, and it's nonsense to think otherwise. It was only my ego--the reminder and reflection of his own--that TWB couldn't abide; his own he served with tender faithfulness. And so on, with all the rest of the human race. Think of the Olympics, the ancient, authentic Olympics--free meals and commemorative statuary were the least of it: what the Greeks desired was fame, renown, to be remembered and sung forever. Christian humility is all very well, but even then, are the good souls not written in the Book of Life? what is that but sublimated fame? And am I alone supposed to eat and destroy my ambition, my desire to achieve and to be seen to achieve? am I supposed to be wiser than Aristotle himself?

4 August 2004

2004-08-04T20:15:00.000-04:00

At long last, I have replaced the disappointing 1990 edition of Chambers's Biographical Dictionary with the superior 1968. A kind of object lesson in the exhaustion of a franchise. It is wonderful that the 1990 editors managed to add figures from thirty more years in 200 additional pages and to deprive the work of its pith, like a laboratory frog. Says the 1968 dustwrapper: "The CBD owes much of its reputation and appeal to its policy of clothing the bare facts with human interest and critical observation...in a style that is at once compact, spirited, and readable"--all qualities that have evaporated in the 1990 version.
I have re-read Edwin Arlington Robinson's sonnets, collected in 1928--most of them abject failures, stuffed with dead phrases or ill-balanced images, but for "George Crabbe" and the conversational "Tilbury Town" poems, the latter very much in the manner of Hardy's "Satires of Circumstance" (surely their model). Yet we respect him in his very sourness, bitterness, refusal to play along with Pollyanna (a new cultural and publishing phenomenon in his day). Bless him for reminding me of the shining word "hansel"--this in the midst of the muck of the incompetently opaque "Never until our souls are strong enough..."
Monday, in GG's absence, I led the evening dance, the Amherst dance that is held, for the last part of the summer, at Whately's Dance Barn. A rather small crowd, much sapped by the enervating heat, but a fine little group--"All Saints' Day" (the David Ashwell dance) and "The Country Farmer" (my interpretation) equally well received--equally gratifying to introduce a worthy dance and to have my own work praised. FZ and TS and I had a long and gratifying gossip after the others had gone, roving from the demise of relationships and how we all differ in our efforts to save face when they do--to comparative nutrition and longevity, American and Eastern European. No matter how we romanticize the hearty simplicity of the peasant's life, our choices are on the whole better, at least if one cares to live beyond forty-five.
Tuesday to Boston--to my home dance in Jamaica Plain: there is no place, as Dorothy said, like it. CVM and I leading. One of our dancers brought a handsome bitch who rejoices in the name of Tulip. Tulip had certain remarks to make in her own language as we reviewed our figures: as JO'F and danced "Wa' is Me" together, I murmured to him, "*She* has a lot to say." "Yes," he said: "I wasn't aware before that this dance was a bark-arolle." Tulip's utterances were so intermittent and--dare we say--*editorial* that there was no sense in shushing her or putting her out. When I taught in the second half, and Tulip sang out, I would say, "...and everyone bark!" Which they dutifully did. No place like it, Dorothy.
That evening off to SS' house in Newton, where all of her very handsome and presentable were in residence, D fresh from New Zealand, coffee-table books, datebooks, albums, and half-unpacked bags everywhere. In the morning to Dedham for a little late coffee with LB.
Luncheon with TP and HR: T's brother in rapid decline with ALS, and her family frozen in horror around him. Meanwhile, T's other brother--no doubt grieving in his own unhelpful way--has been preparing for a footrace for the over-50 set, and in his efforts to diet down to his fighting weight, lost consciousness at his girlfriend's apartment. "*Marrrk*," TP said to him over the telephone, "Mom will *not* survive this if you croak before Steven."
TP, to HR on the difference between New Jersey and home: "Many of the people we've met in New Jersey are really hoping to avoid felony conviction. Many of the people we know in Massachusetts are really hoping for the Nobel Prize."
B joins us late in the lunch, fresh from the sanatorium and her suicide attempt, the unhappy fruit of her long, depressed, depressing association with T, whose neediness, evil temper, and catastrophically poor health have resulted in an untenable and finally abusive situation for B. With a certain degree of reluctance, I agree to accompany TP and HR to T's apartment, where B's cellphone--a real link to some future that might include a job and an apartment--is being held hostage. HR rides shotgun for B; I ride shotgun for HR, trying to pull myself up to my most menacing 65 inches, shaded glasses confrontatively left on. T is as angry at us as she is at the woman who is leaving her; her life and health gradually worsen, yet her catalogue of miseries is hauntingly familiar, unaltered in tenor if refreshed in substance from its last airing in my presence, three or five years ago.
In the car, the four of us wonder whether T understands her own cruelly manipulative gestures. "I'm sure she does," says TP; "she's a bright girl." "So I have always heard," says B. And I say, "But she hasn't been able to apply her wits to the art of living."

1 August 2004

2004-08-01T23:59:00.000-04:00

Delibes' very fine ballet-score Sylvia on my little CD-player; Delibes has been rather underrated, or simply derided for the local-color follies of Lakme. TWB laughed at my affection for Delibes; he said it was the sort of music his grandmother liked--but he was quite wrong in that, as in so many things: Sylvia and of course Coppelia are really outstanding--here is the confident grandeur of the opening march.
Friday, a party in celebration of J and S' recent marriage, their dance friends and a former neighbor gathered around, J and I comparing notes about the merits and grave woes of academic life in the present moment, both of us fearing for the future. She warned me that I ought to have modest goals, but I tried to assure her that--at least so far as my use of this degree was concerned--none could have goals more modest than I, and that I have Plans B, C, and D in store. I brought a handful of brilliantly solar-colored flowers--drenched yellows, sanguinous reds, enamel oranges-- and crackers and cheese--certainly the humblest of offerings. One of these was a Gouda, and as I set it down, I said, "Trader Joe's assures me that this Gouda has a 'nutty, mature flavor.' So, for the record, do I."
Saturday afternoon to a suitably mad dancing-master's gig: four-and-twenty darling young ladies, who had spent the rest of the weekend in a light bath of "Jane Austen" culture--genteel drawing, bonnet-making, and a host of other activities that would doubtless have made Austen herself wild with boredom. They had made their own gowns--rich and fantastical extravaganzas, well beyond the means of Austen herself, more in the Bingley or de Burgh line--and knew nothing of the forms or traditions of the dance. With some effort, and a good deal of repetition, we danced "Heartsease," "Ore Boggy," "The Comical Fellow," and "Freeford Gardens," I bellowing over the sound system, directing the traffic, walking up and down, stopping and restarting. All of us liquefying--I in my tuxedo, they in their silks, cottons, and unspeakably modern cotton-poly blends. They, despite the general condition of glassy-eye that prevailed in the room, assured me that they had had a grand time.
Away to dinner with EC, who made us a simple and irresistible dinner, he, despite cares of his own, offering his splendid supports. Today, off to the movies with PK--the eminently forgettable Catwoman, a kind of study in the supplementation--overthrow? of actors by computer-animation, or perhaps just a long commercial for the forthcoming computer game. Halle Berry's computerized doppelganger, however, somehow did not move as a character sufficiently constrained by gravity, supernatural powers notwithstanding--she began to look like "Frieda's boneless cat" on heavy stimulants.
Ah, the theme of Sylvia!--the great theme of Sylvia, the fanfare of les Chasseresses, Diana's Academy for Bloodthirsty Young Ladies. If only Wagner had written music so fine for *his* aggressive nymphs, perhaps it all would have turned out better for Wotan's family, and the world would not have ended in sad rubble after all.

29 July 2004

2004-07-29T23:45:00.000-04:00

I have come into the habit of saying that stupidity is popular in America. How can anyone doubt it, when the smart and the cultured are at pains to conceal their minds and their tastes? There is no shortage of sheer intellect in America--luck and bulk alone do not an empire make. But we have tended, of late, to shame our intellectuals, to bully and isolate them, to set them in constant and largely unconscious competition with each other. In their distress, intellectuals have retreated, petulant as children, into labryinths of self-destructive discourse--or fled for Hollywood or Washington.
This is the week of the Democratic National Convention--they are sweeping the floors in Boston as I write. The party's candidate has spoken--that very upright, downright old horse Kerry--and we have arrived at that strangely tender, eager, vulnerable moment of Democratic Party life, when a taper's worth of hope can be seen again. The POTUS' numbers are not overwhelming; the queasy economy, and the brooding anger brought to a focus by Michael Moore's film, may yet tell against Bush, and very unpleasantly for him.
I could do worse, here, than to include my latest blather to the English Country dance discussion list, these in response to Sharon Green's request for information about the source of "Barbarini's Tambourine":
Sharon:
I don't have that issue of the CDSS news before meeither, but I think I can reconstruct enough "for starters."
Kitty Keller, in the CDSS article you reference, has suggested that the dancer honored by the title ofBarbarini's Tambo. is Barbara Campanini, "LaBarbarina" (1721-1799).
According to the "Thinkquest" library on the web,"Where La Carmargo (another Italian-born Frenchdancer) could do an excellent entrechat-quatre, a jumpin which the legs cross each other, or "beat", twice,La Barbarina could do an entrechat-huit, a jump with four beats." Anything you could do, Camargo, Barbarina could do better. Yes, she could.
According to aSpanish-language web source, as translated by Google,"It made debut in Paris in 1739 and it made, during ten years, a shining race by all Europe." I don't doubt it. For our purposes, however, it is perhaps more important that La Barbarina was famed for a characterdance (a *tamborin* or *tambourin*) that featured a tambourine. Here is a link to a portrait of LaBarbarina wielding the instrument in question: http://www.abcgallery.com/P/pesne/pesne12.html
According to the New Grove Dictionary of Music, the tambourin is "an 18th-century French character-piece supposedly based on a Provençal folkdance accompaniedby pipe and tabor. The bass part simulates a drum by sharply accentuating the rhythm and by the repetition of a single note, usually the tonic, while an upper voice imitates the pipe with a fast-moving melody. The metre is usually 2/4 and the tempo lively. Rousseau described it as ‘a kind of dance much in style today in the French theatre’, adding that it must be lively and well accented, or ‘swinging’ (‘sautillant et biencadencé’)."This description, I think, accords well with our experience of B's T, although there is no reason tobelieve (as Kitty also points out, I think) that there is much choreographic relationship between La Barbarina's solo dance and our country dance--it's a tribute rather than an imitation."
And, following that:
"Dear Sharon (and others):
My apologies that I did not note that the source Iquoted misspelled the name of La Camargo (MarieCamargo)--"Carmargo," as seen in the quoted source, is not correct. La Camargo (1710-1770) gets far more column space in the history of dance than La Barbarina, who was comparatively just a twinkle of the *tamborin*.According to Richard Andros, "Though her elevation was limited by heeled shoes, she is credited with having executed the entrechat quatre. But what is far more important, by shortening her skirt a few inches she opened up unimagined vistas of technical possibility."I myself wonder if "technical possibility" was the vista her audiences thought they were seeing, but perhaps I'm cynical.
At any rate, there is a lovely and famous fete-galante style painting of her, dancing with her frequent partner Laval, by Nicolas Lancret, abbreviated skirt in evidence:http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pinfo?Object=99+0+none "

25 July 2004

2004-07-27T20:58:00.000-04:00

Some years ago, after I had begun to learn the rudiments of English Country dance, and begun to lead the dances myself, I began to keep a notebook. In this notebook, I allowed myself to place anything at all I deemed useful or suitable, without anxiety or self-consciousness, no Muse or editor leaning on my shoulder to see what I had written there--a kind of Lichtenbergian "waste-book," in which programs, dances, notes, and observations jostled for space together. Others may see it, and have often seen it, but the notebook serves only me: it is the continuing register of my experience as a dance-leader.
So with this notebook in electronic form. It would be disingenous to write, and then to publish, anything that has a place on the World Wide Web with the pretense that it is a private communication of the soul to itself--what is the point of publication, after all, but to be read? still, it is a kind of waste-record of my life and observations that I allow the world to overhear.
By way of preliminaries:
*Night Thoughts* was the title of a book-length poem by the 18th-century divine Edward Young. Immensely popular in its day, even with its rather heterodox theology, it would have sunk without a trace by the twentieth century but for two things. William Blake, for a deluxe late-18th-century edition of the poem, created a series of illustrations, typically alternating the brooding and the ecstatic: these, with the revival of Blake's reputation, have long since outpaced poor Young's poem. Plus, in the 1850s, George Eliot wrote a perceptive, sensitive long essay on Young, perhaps her finest non-fiction writing.
So much for Young. I do not embrace his theology or Blake's illustrations of it--I purloin his title as convenient for a kind of nocturnal diary, written by night, not the first inspirations of the dawn but the retrospections of the sunset and after.
I will not disguise my life in these pages, but I will try to protect my friends, who have not given permission for the publication of their lives. You may find yourself in these *Thoughts*, but nameless or obscured.
Why write these lines at all? why, in an era of information at flood-tide, amid a noise of endless chinwaggery, should I add my voice? I could scarcely make a claim to distinctiveness--anything that is human is unlikely to be unique--nor would I be so grandiose as to claim to speak for my kind or my generation or my country. All I know is that as I write for myself, I speak for myself also--that, at least, I am sure no-one else can manage.