Cambridge 7

June 25, 2010

Met Steve at the Pickerel last night. It was Mystical Drunk Night as the night before had been Rowdy Football Fans night. Steve asked my name, and when told him said, “I am writing a book whose main character is named David. He meets seven other men who are also named David.” Turns out that the Davids are the mystical cities of the Apocalypse in the book of Revelation, and that the main David is Ephesus, and when he saw me he was shocked, as he says the description of the angel Ephesus is one “with a golden head and the face of a child,” and he assumed I’d come to start the Apocalypse, and he had been chosen as witness–an event he had already anticipated. I think he was serious, in a way, in the sense of creating a fiction so intriguing to him he decided to live in it. I’d ask, “Why do I attract all the crazies?,” but I already know the answer. I listen to them, usually with genuine interest. Steve’s gentleness was remarkable, as though with every word and gesture he was caressing some tiny animal. I didn’t know how drunk he was–or if he was drunk at all–or what portion of that lovely affect was his all the time. He was quite handsome, in a wasted way, like a movie star coming off a three day bender. My body still feels the enthusiasm of his embrace. He was a little obsessed with Satan, and at several points said, “I am the opposite of Satan.” I can attest to that, anyway. He was always forming a continuum with his hands in the air, Love on one end, Satan on the other. I told him my place was not quite so far to that side as his, but far enough. His phone number sits on the computer as I write. I’ll be obsessing all day about the right time to call. Steve is from Liverpool, and sometimes he sounded–a little comically–like John Lennon. There is so much archness in the Liverpool accent that it is difficult to tell how serious a person is. I think they use that to their advantage. Steve made me feel I had been welcomed here.

Marcella, returning around midnight, saw a doe and a fawn on the street before St. John’s.

Hiked with the kids to the Fitzwilliam after breakfast. It has a very much better collection than I remembered, with some pieces that are quite spectacular. A work I copied when I was learning to paint was Veneziano’s saint restoring with widow’s son killed by an ox-cart, the dramatic horizontal of the widow’s white swathed head. We had trouble getting in.
“Are you a group?” says the harpy at the door
“Yes,” says I, introducing our little band.
“Well then you can’t come in. Groups must make arrangements at least a week ahead.”
“Well, then we’re seventeen individuals. Seventeen individuals would be OK?”
“Yes, but you came as a group, we’ll have to count you as a group.”
“No you don’t. We’re going in as individuals.”
She called in this burly, scowling guy who shook his head violently at me, which was the gesture by which I determined we WOULD go in come what may.
They explained that they couldn’t have us clumping through the gallery when there were other clumps there, and I explained we wouldn’t clump, but would dissipate till all but invisible, but one perceived the argument was about who was going to get his way. I was. I don’t think they expected outright disobedience. In we went, and neither clumped nor gummed up the works of the august establishment. A British failing has always been to fight to the death over things that were arbitrary from the first.

Evening: Evensong at Kings. I have said before it is one of the unsurpassable pinnacles of human achievement, and I have nothing to say but that again. The motet was Bruckner: a thundering, serpentine perfection.

My children laugh on the darkening lawn. They laugh from the balcony above my head. I want nothing but to laugh with them, or to create a place for their laughter to be undying. Cambridge is all one laughter on this night.