Oddities and Curiosities: Helen Kirby's FILLY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"...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

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

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

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.