Cambridge

July 1, 2011

This is the longest day in history. It seems that July 1 has been rolling out like horses down and endless plain.

Met Steve at the Pickerel last night, and it was a merry meeting. He looked terrific–adversity sometimes trims us down to a wild beauty of youth-- and he said I looked terrific too, as maybe I did. Much talk. Much laughter. His strangeness and his gentleness remain intact. A drunk musician joined us for a while, and the mixture of solicitude and abruptness in S’s reaction to him was past my understanding. But, nothing mattered. I smiled myself sore. From where we sat you could look out at the perfect elegance of Magdalen, and somehow all of that formed a harmony. The B’s and others visited the Pickerel on their way to hear a band, and they looked ravishing, surely the loveliest women in Cambridge.

It is the next night when I write of this, and I have had time to let things take form in my mind. Steve’s visit to the Pickerel was a turning point of my life. Part of it was that I was so free with my love, and was delighted to see that I could still be. But it seemed also that he had come a long way by bike and bus to save me with a few winged words. I mark the times when I seem to myself to have been sent to help another; it was sweet and surprising for the tables to be turned. The significant worlds concerned fate and destiny. Steve’s lot is by any measure harder than mine, and he spoke of surrender to it and the willingness to work within the rules which seem to have been laid down. I spoke of my refusal of these rules. He said, “That is Satanic.” Now, I knew it was Satanic, but I always thought of that as a literary concept, a sort of metaphor, until I heard them in his mouth. In his mouth they were not a metaphor, not the sly compliment I always took them to be. Through the night and into the day I turned the words over in my mind. We took the kids to evensong at Kings. The music was Dunstable and Tallis and Byrd, and all things were perfection, as they always are in that sacred place. With the light through the glass and that music around me, I was still thinking, and sometime during “Never Weather Beaten Sail” it came clear. When I crossed Jesus Green under the stars so long ago, I made a leap out of the life that was given to me into a life I imagined for myself. I spent all the time since not so much exploring what was mine–a wide and abundant kingdom, who lordship I took for granted–as laying siege instead to what fate had never intended for me. I don’t know what was intended for me, I turned away so early and with such determination. Perhaps it was really everything I wanted. I was always baffled by the fact that I did not win certain prizes even when my performance was better than those who did. Those prizes were not meant for me, and the effort to get them–however successful, however unanswerable in my own eyes-- was irrelevant. It’s not that this thought hadn’t crossed my mind before, but it was always rejected as cowardly surrender. I believed that if I strove hard enough, if I presented my perspective and my accomplishments to God as exhibits and proof honestly enough, that he would relent and give me what I desired. That he would change the world for me. I raged against him with fury that was, in fact, Satanic, ordering him to remake the order of the world to suit my longing. I was Satan. I was Melkor. The idea that my imagined life would never be because it was not destined to be was so enraging I dared not think of it–unless circumstance forced me to–lest days evaporate in raging despair. But, before the end of evensong, acceptance seemed possible, for the first time since I was a child. I’d always fought against acceptance of what was really not a choice, because it seemed a tyranny to me, and to be opposed even if the tyranny was God’s. I don’t know what I think it is now. Perhaps just “what is.” I walked back into the sunlight on King’s Parade rejoicing in the exploring I have to do in the realms that may really be mine. It must be said that I don’t regret much of it, much of my rebellious past. A soul like mine perhaps cannot be at peace until it is annihilated into it. I wouldn’t have been content unless I’d tried. I tried too long, but I think that will, at the end of it, not make much difference.

As I stared up at the stars over Jesus Green, the moorhen in the water beside me was saying, “You do not belong to Cambridge. You belong to Hiram on the banks of Silver Creek.”