An Anniversary

August 23, 2009

Cranky, restless Sunday evening. Choir started back this morning, and I had to convince myself I was glad of it. My voice cracked often and memorably. I wondered if that is a sign of a summer’s disuse or of anatomical change; if the latter, it may be the sad but time-saving door out of my long commitment to vocal music. We had a very long run– from the 7th grade on, at least. I sat in the choir loft wondering how much I would miss it, and the answer came that, at some point, enough is enough. In any case, I don’t think I’ll be one of those codgers cracking and whining away twenty years after beauty and harmony are gone.

Attended Amanda Porter’s recital, which was a masterpiece of selection and presentation. Most of the pieces were unfamiliar, and delightful. Purcell’s “The Blessed Virgin’s Exposition, Z.196" was flatly wacky. Both that and Copland’s setting of Dickinson’s “Going to Heaven” were examples of truly serious music in the service of awful poetry, an intentional frisson which I always find tasty. Amanda’s voice was more under control than at the last recital I heard, a truly supple and flawless instrument of interpretation. She convinced me that songs from Meet Me in Saint Louis could serve perfectly well as Leider. She and three other women sang a selection from Mark Adamo’s opera Little Women. If the rest of the opera is anything like that selection, it is a stunningly beautiful, profound work. She ended with Quilter’s setting of Shelley’s “Love’s Philosophy,” a turnabout-is-fair-play piece, showing that great poetry can be set to trifling music, and the result then, too, if everyone has the right attitude, is fun.

It occurred to me during Amanda’s recital that there is a fine symmetry in my picking up that box of poems when I did, for today is the anniversary of my first poem. August 23, 1966– a teenager alone in his room, bitterly unhappy, having fallen in love with his cabin-mate and having no idea that was actually what happened, but only knowing his misery was inexpressible and without bounds. He was reading a book of Poetry from Around the World, the Arabian section. The moon was rising or barely risen. He picked up a pen, and wrote. He is reciting that poem in his head right now. No ear but his and God’s will ever hear it.

Blame, too, that dark angel, is being exorcized by the last few days. A habit of thought, especially since my father’s death, has been to search back into our family life to see how I was twisted in the ways I think I was twisted, whom to blame, what percentage of my original self is still salvageable. The urge fades. I think now that I was a spirit of almost toxic creative energy born–by some cosmic joke, and not a bad one at that–into the last family on earth which could deal with such a thing– a sort of hillbilly Feanor engendered among accountants and tire builders. No hatred hovered over my cradle, no violent opposition, just blank incomprehension. People would love me to the exact degree that I hid my scary self away. Even infants know how to work this. I lacked Feanor’s galactic confidence, but possessed something he didn’t, adaptability. I was able to sense when people– beginning with my family–thought I was weird or had crossed some line, and was able to veer away and cover. There were doors that could be shut even in our tiny houses. I was able to find a path for my energies that was recognizable and approvable: to be a poet was not recognizable, but to be a scholar was. I found that, dug into that, triumphed with that. It was not me. Everyone, including myself, forgot that it was not me. When I found those discarded poems, I found me, the hidden one, for not one eye but mine has seen any but the few that came at the end, when I began to offer them up for publication. I failed at Johns Hopkins because I was about to give myself over wholly to the scholarly, and my guardian angel (whatever on earth he could be) put the brakes on. I have not know that surely until this hour.

Now that I have said this, I must backtrack a little. My father, as evidenced by the little projects he did with mechanical fairies and toy scenes set in rock walls, could be quite fanciful, if hidden even deeper than I. At the end of his life, when no excuses needed to be made to anyone, he began to paint, fancifully and memorably. I think his reaction to me was less incomprehension than horror, and the horror had to do with his shame at the same strain in himself. Father almost successfully masked a lifelong disgust for his son, based on his son’s being less successful, or less interested, than he in subverting his essential nature.

Here is the strangest thing. I think, after all, it was well. Feanor, given his head, consumed himself and his race. I would have no particular effect on my race, but I could see that those energies, the unbounded Luvah that I could have given myself over to, could have been destructive to me and those around me. The forces of antipathy that, maybe, my parents feared on my behalf really might have come to bear. Running down the “wrong” path gave me a secure and rewarding career, and credibility in areas my natural inclinations would have missed entirely. No one beat me up at school. I did not starve in a San Francisco alley. I did not die of AIDS in a West Village walk-up. I did not become one of those jackass careerist poets who exhaust everybody with illimitable self-delight. The degree to which I am a jackass has very little to do with my art, and that is something for which to be grateful. That I am a solid person is attributable, I think, to the fact that I had to build a far wider foundation for myself than my natal character, if indulged, would have required. Yes, I might have been born amid artists and boundless minds, and gone to boarding school and Oxford and been lifted up for my true self by those who loved and understood me. Would that have been better? Perhaps not. Perhaps not at all. In any case, the experiment cannot be performed. I think it was well. It seems that I have been granted enough life to make good on discoveries made beyond adolescence, and as discoveries go, this is a whopper. I will not say “all is redeemed,” for that is to tempt the gods. I will say all is in the process of redemption, and I am trying to comprehend, and employ. I am trying to understand–strangely, unexpectedly, inexplicably– how lucky I was.