December 24, 2011

Cantaria Hans has died. I never knew him except when he was sick, but I think he must have been a kind and merry man. I’m glad he decided to spend his last days with us.

Lunch with SC to discuss the past and future of Cantaria.

Full day yesterday, which I rounded out in late afternoon by going to the café, sitting down without much expectation, and ended up writing. . . well, it exhausts to keep saying “the best I ever have,” but it was like the glory days composing “The Glacier’s Daughters” when the flood of words could not be stopped. That it should be going just as strong after forty years is a blessing I remember less often than I should.

Watched fifteen minutes of Gold Diggers of 1935 last night. I have to say that, especially when he’s not tethered by a strong script, Busby Berkeley is quite horrifying. Leni Riefenstahl is the nearest–maybe only-- comparison. The extras on the DVD praised his vision and technique, justly, except that it could be pointed out that vision and technique are neutrals, capable of serving either the skew or the straight. My repugnance is more instinctual than explicable. Only horrified fascination kept me the fifteen minutes.

Here is the oddest thing. I can call to inner sight every ornament that was on our Christmas tree back home, in perfect (I think) detail, even to nicks and discolorations. I saw them only once a year, and not since for forty years. My tree has its visible ornaments that anyone can see entering my house, but also those ghostly ones from long ago, hung as the palpable ones were hung, as though existing all in a separate and unbreakable continuum. I have learned the amazing, perhaps pathological, strength of my imaginative world back then–as perhaps now– and suppose that the adamantine retention of those images is part of it in a way that there is not leisure at the moment to understand. I long for them, but I don’t know why. That I yet possess them in this way is a blessing equally inexplicable.

Maud the Cat holds on to my leg, insisting that I pet her, insisting that I rub her back. She is not patient. She does not doubt for a second that what she desires will come to pass, for why shouldn’t it? It is so little to ask. It reminds me of me and God, except, unlike God, I reach out and hold her, rub her back, explain why it has taken me so long.

What if the purpose of us all were to teach God how to be a man? I would be content with that. It would suffice. He gets to try again, tonight. He gets to come back as a baby and try it all again.

My mother will not be making hot chocolate tonight and serving it in the embarrassing Santa mugs. My father will not be putting swans on a mirror lake under the tree in his mysterious way. My grandmother will not be preparing a giant feast for everybody. That “everybody” is dead or mad or scattered to the wind. I think I am here to remember them. And I do. The night is unimaginably deep.

A mallow blooms in my garden for a Christmas miracle. It is Christmas Eve and I am twelve years old, dizzy with joy, and no way to explain it.