Renaissance

 June 24, 2022

I believe our Renaissance concert at Montford Park last night was a success. Adam’s ancillary Shakespeare material was charming and showcased every bit of his training. He and his friend premiered my anti-madrigal madrigal to ovations. I was in such pain at the end–inflammation of every imaginable square inch of my body–that I stumbled away before hearing much after performance chatter, but it seemed to me that most was well. I don’t know what causes such mass pain– maybe simply having neglected to take an aspirin beforehand. Most of my problems have simpler solutions than I entertain first off. S wanted to add an ornament to my costume, which was holding together with two giant safety pins in front. When she was done fussing (the ornament ultimately failed to attach) she had destroyed both heavy-duty safety pins and rendered them useless. I’d never seen such a thing before. Frenzy and anxiety attend upon her, a walking panic attack. It is organic. This understanding will make our relations easier in time to come. 

 

June 23, 2022

Full & broiling summer. I still like it better than The Freeze.

Iced coffee and a futile effort to write beside the French Broad. The water is low enough to expose great snags and shoals. Long flotillas of geese floating toward Marshall. 

Came home while Iris is still cleaning (which I almost never do). She has Tina Turner blasting through the house. Alexa must wonder what got into me. 

Exhaustion, hardly able to move or to keep awake, wondering how much of it is organic and how much is anxiety about the concert tonight.  I’m the most ready of all of us, but that in itself is alarming. Have not tried on my costume since I wore it 5 or 6 Christmases ago. Call is 5:30 for a 7:30 show. That can’t be good.

Gutter hanging from the roof this morning. I went to investigate, and the gash the squirrels gnawed is five feet long. Called the roofing people, to begin that ordeal. Traveler’s Insurance assures me I’m not insured against insects, rodents, birds, nesting or infestation of any kind. 

 

June 22, 2022

A day of revising. Hot, so I almost never left the arc of the fans. Rabbit feeding at dawn, Watering the elderberries, I flushed the rat, who skittered away into the bushes. I tried to love it. 

 June 21, 2022

Solstice, and a perfect day for it. Vestry last night. The preference for the general over the specific seems to me to be catastrophic, though I’m clearly outnumbered and end up sounding spluttery and indignant. I AM spluttery and indignant. The painstaking, often self-hobbling, process of discernment is referred to as the work of the Holy Spirit, though it seems to me that is rather an oxymoron. When did the Holy Spirit come when it was not sudden, un-looked-for, blazingly aside of any expected context? Yet my faith is that the slow grinding of the blunt wheels and the flash from the mountain ultimately reveal the same truth. The sentence, “I am Alexander and not Eisenhower” has just come into my head, so I might as well write it down. Both were victorious. 

Our strongest baritone has Covid. Two days until the concert, so who knows what will come to our aid? 

The lemon yellow day lilies must have been planted, but I don’t remember doing it.

Yeats

 

June 20, 2022

Dream before waking: I’m staying in Dublin in a place next to a wilderness area. The wilderness area features a long, wide path leading through woods and great meadows and wetlands, coming out in a slightly different place each time, so you can jog the trail and see something different each time. I take the trail and discover that only a little turn leads me back into a part of the city with which I am unfamiliar, I jog onto a city street and encounter a giant billboard, with notices on it of a celebration of the life of William Butler Yeats, where his grandson will appear. A man peers out a window next to the billboard, and shouts at me, “You’re Yeats, aren’t you?” It’s the first moment in the dream when I realize I’m Yeats’ grandson, and the celebration is the reason why I’m in Dublin. I say I am, and then I have a discussion with the man on how I was of a certain age before my father told me we were related to somebody famous, and thus lost out on all those years of renown and invitations to exotic places. 

Drinking my coffee in the slant light of morning I watched two brown rabbits nibbling grass in the garden. They were soon joined join by a rat, which was not as alarming in that context as it would have been on its own. I suppose the apartment dumpster next door to be a haven of rats. 

Father's Day

 

June 19, 2022

Father’s Day. Looking at old photos prompted me to remember the wonderful contraptions that my dad came up with. Sometimes they were to compensate for his polio. Sometimes they were simply jeux d’esprits. I inherited none of his engineering skills. Linda did.

The terraces at Goodview: big stone terraces covered with flowers where others’ lawns would be, because he couldn’t mow up and down a slope.

A magical tool house. It disappeared when we got the garage.

A root cellar dug into the hill at the back of the garage. Mostly creepy and musty, but dad loved it because they had that kind of thing when he was growing up. Great for hide-and-seek, except nobody dared turn the light off inside.

The Big Slide: The biggest sliding board anybody had ever seen. The neighborhood thronged to it. My sister and I became living synecdoches: “Oh! You’re the Big Slide!”

An Indian teepee made out of burlap. He made me set fire to it when he thought I didn’t use it enough. 

A fake bedroom wall that I could use as a bulletin board, and then lower to reveal an electric train set bolted in place on top, ready to go. 

A dog house for our dog.

An elegant mesh cage for my anoles when I went through a lizard keeping phase.

An elegant rabbit hutch for when I went through a rabbit keeping phase.

An elegant hamster citadel for when my sister went through a hamster keeping phase. 

A three-storey lazy-Susan tool rack that doubled the storage capacity of the garage.

A playhouse for my sister that, when it was built, she and her friends could stand up in.

An enormous pebble stone trash burner (for back when you burned your own trash) that doubled as a barbecue. We never barbecued. 

Several gigantic & immovable workbenches. I assume they’re all still there.

A big patio, accented by a fish pond and a tiny mountain that he turned into a fairyland by installing Christmas elves and play animals in plastic boxes, and when you flicked a switch they would light up and dance. Also, a fountain in the fish pond came alive. When I added dinosaurs to the elves he thought it was wonderful.

A recreation of the Solar System on the basement ceiling. 

A den for himself in the basement. He napped there, because it was cool, until he couldn’t use the stairs anymore.

Various pulleys and levers and wheeled apparatuses that allowed him mastery over his environment long after post-polio syndrome began to take its toll. 

I’ve probably left stuff out, things so useful and necessary that they weren’t even noticed.

Pretty good day in the garden, where it was, after several days, cool enough to function. Got the hose to the back flower bed just in time, before rainlessness pushed it past redemption. 

Rigoletto

 

June 18, 2022

Fumbling around on the TV last night, I found the Met’s Rigoletto, watching with admiration and fascination. Here was storytelling as I understand it. I resented the brief act breaks. Singing choruses from Rigoletto was what ended my notion of maybe being a composer of some sort. A composer I didn’t particularly admire was subtler and stronger and smarter in every note measure than I could ever be, so why go on? My mistake was not to admire the composer far more than I did. 

 

June 17, 2022

Debacle at the Montford Amphitheater last night, in that they had no record of our reserving the space for dress rehearsal and a rehearsal for As You Like It was scheduled on top of us. We did manage to get in a set-up and an hour’s rehearsal, which revealed the ever-surprising truth that we sound, and are going to sound at our concert, pretty good. We are down to 1/3 of our number, but it must be the right 1/3. We will never have rehearsed the full program, and never have heard the intervals Adam produced for us, including the creaking old guy madrigal I wrote as a parody. 

Mother bear and one of her cubs killed by a car in Fairview. 

I’ve dwelt in this house for seven years, and today is the first day I pulled down the windows that open at the top to augment the breeze from the windows that open at the bottom. My excuse is that I can’t always reach them without climbing on something. But it’s mostly my mania for leaving well enough alone. 

January 6 hearings continue. What will astonish ages to come is the cowardice and pussyfooting. That Donald Trump should have been arrested for treason and sedition on January 7 cannot be seriously disputed. Clearly some people are above the law. Clearly some people can shoot somebody in front of witnesses on Times Square and go scot free. 

 

June 16, 2022

Lunch with B. He described having lost the County Commissioner race, which he took with better grace than I would. The lunch was to convince me to run for office. I tried to convey the fact that that was the single oddest notion on Planet Earth. B is an alert and active heterosexual. I realized during conversation that when men go on about their desire for women I vaguely imagine that they’re exaggerating, or working to live up to a cultural norm.

Good AVLGMC rehearsal last night, anticipating a sweaty dress at Montford tonight. Enjoyed the rehearsal because DB was on the other side of the room giving pitches from the piano rather than sputtering and exploding beside me. On Merrimon, where it becomes Biltmore, I was going through a green light when a line of 8 or 10 skateboarders made a left turn in front of me. At first I wasn’t going to stop, but the front rider engaged me with his eyes, making clear he wasn’t going to stop either. That was not my night for taking out a line of skateboarders. I said to my invisible passenger, “That was thrilling.”

Zoom with the cast and director of Before the Holy Temple in Madison. Interesting questions. Their love of the play was gratifying. 

Gave Iris the day off, as I have no air conditioning on day 4 of wet scalding heat. Three or four days a year I have to haul out the fans, which suffices me because I don’t do much but drag from one to another. Cleaning house would be another matter.

 

June 14, 2022

Great thunderstorm booming down from the north. As I sat with coffee at the kitchen counter, twisty stabs of blue lightning seemed to stand all in the same place in the sky, so far off there was almost no thunder. I thrust the red-handled spade into the ground–I guess to tell myself where to start again when I started again, which won’t be today–and now I imagine lightning striking it. Maybe Zeus will till my garden for me. The rain is blessed, the sky dark as evening. 

Reading Thom Gunn’s recent collection of letters. I try to stop thinking, “I’m a better poet than Gunn, yet it’s unlikely that there’ll ever be 700 pages of MY letters in a book.” I haven’t written that many, I don’t think, living as I did on the last frontier of letter-writing. I do know why my reputation lags behind my labor: after Exeter, I accepted rustification, not forcing myself into the forefront (fleeing, in fact, from the forefront), not making the necessary friends. All in all, it is well. The energy of cunning socialization went into writing; one hopes that pays off in the end. 

Tumult after the meeting last night. Maud got in a mood and began to urinate on the bathroom counter. I leapt up to prevent that, scaring her so bad that she leapt down, slicing my left leg and foot open on the way. The bleeding was profuse, and made worse because I tramped through the house looking for paper towels, leaving little footprints of blood everywhere I stepped. It looked like a murder scene in a TV show. Then beside the blood appeared clear pools, which I realized was the lymph fluid that always gathers in my legs, which also would be released by a scratch, but worse, because, containing no clotting agents, it could be the start of a seepage event which might last for days. Wrapped my leg in towels and went to bed. Sometime in the night the seeping stopped, and Maud made up profusely this morning, bumping me with her head and insisting on being lifted up.

 

June 15, 2022

Did something I never dd in my life before last night– went to bed when it was already light, just before 6 AM. I slept on the sofa with the TV on, so it doesn’t count as an actual all-nighter, but still a frontier that most cross many times when they’re still kids. Writing and sleep are things I never allowed interference with. Lunch with Bill at noon and rehearsal tonight, so if I feel exhausted (which I do not) I can catch a few Z’s. 

It was intended that I leave today for Hiram for my 50th Reunion. It’s almost certainly not going to happen. It’s possible that I’ll set out tomorrow night after rehearsal, but that, too, is unlikely. All sorts of conflicts and difficulties, but I could have made it work if I really wanted to. Yes, I want to see a handful of people who will likely be there, but I realize I really want to see them fifty years ago. 

 

June 13, 2022

The second floor is actually uninhabitable in the summer. If I aim my little fan full blast at the back of m head, I can keep working. 

Ed Morrison has died. 

Catbirds

 

June 12, 2022

This morning the catbirds had their babies out on various horizontal surfaces, feeding them and crying their harsh, homely cries.  Went to church to support the choir in recess, but there were too many basses already, so I came home. What have I done? I don’t know. But I feel well. 

Dixit Dominus

 

June 11, 2022

Last night at All Souls for the Bach Akadamie doing Lotte, Bach, and Handel’s Dixit Dominus. More perfect interpretation cannot be imagined. The space was built for those forces and that music. 

This morning at the Summit Café to decide on the final contents and form of the Magnetic one-act festival in November. I had a play in the running, and managed not to ask (and they managed not to reveal) whether ir had made the cut or not. One of these times I’ll look. ---- OK, I looked; made it: 17th on a list of 20, Good enough. We had 900 submissions. 

After an email exchange with S, I learn that she was not sniping at me but at D behind me at rehearsal. He is in fact always too loud and, as S observed, his rushing encourages mine. I try to get to a note first to forestall his getting the wrong one, and it turns into a sad little race.  A weekend of introspection over nothing. In music, when a mistake is noted I always assume I’m the one who made it, and if I HADN’T made it, I enter a period of confusion. 

 

June 10, 2022

Reading Millay’s diaries. Much about farming and illness. 

Carolyn has had her crape myrtles cut almost to the nub, the way she does every three summers or so. Means I have to look at her ugly little house, and she mine. 

Video from the January 6 Insurrection on TV last night. People keep using the word “unbelievable,” and that is right. I can find common ground with political rage, but not with prolonged irrationality.

 June 9, 2022

Zoom meeting last night to lay the groundwork for Cathedral interviews. My impatience is an astonishment to me. I pray it is invisible. When Y thinks she must pray over and bless every little thing or the world cannot continue, when Z wades into the same muck she’s waded into fifteen times before, bawling like a lost cow, I think I’ll not be able to contain myself. I have, so far. Time is so precious that those who squander it should be shown no mercy. My extreme terseness (as I suppose) probably causes problems of its own. 

Pretty disastrous rehearsal. Our numbers dwindle two weeks from the concert. I irritated S by singing too loud, by rushing, by singing funny vowels, as I take it. I take the crap banner for the evening. 

 June 8, 2022

My dreams thought today was Graduation Day. Part of the dream was leaving my roommates, with whom I’d been sharing a ramshackle apartment high up in some building. I wondered if we’d keep in touch. I crept away to hide in my grandfather’s house on Hampton Road– a frequent place of dream resort, now that I think of it. It had a vast wooden door to the basement, which I couldn’t quite close. But I figured if no one had broken in yet, no one would. I tried to remember if I’d told my parents about graduation, wondering if they’d go and expect me to be there. I wondered if my brown winter jacket would do since I had failed to rent a gown. 

All charges against former Governor Cuomo have been dropped, and yet his political career is over. I’m not finding justification for this, and am confused. 

 

June 7, 2022

Discernment Committee presents Vestry with its slate of candidates to be our third Dean. Except for the Episcopalian mania for recapitulation, all goes well. The phrase “you can’t go wrong” seems to be accurate, all candidates excellent and desirable. 

“Polorum Regina” on Pandora, totally unknown to me, totally lovely. 

Whitsunday

 June 5, 2022

The Lord’s red Whitsun. 

Downtown last night to hear the Asheville Symphony’s rendition of Beethoven’s 9th, after all a credible and moving interpretation. There was great limpidity, and I heard passages I’d not noticed before. The conductor is Romantic, attractive, committed, personable, and, if last night was an indication, headed to or in the midst of great things. He’s also a show-off, but who isn’t? The men of the chorus were excellent, and the soprano soloist landed on the top note of the soloists’ quartet like a warbler landing on the tip of a pine tree– effortless, radiant. People forget that the three sections leading up to the choral section are themselves masterpieces, the best composer in the world working at the pinnacle of his powers. At that point the word “Titan” came into my mind. When the voices come in, Beethoven is no longer just the best composer in the world, but a Titan. Not Apollo but Hyperion, something rougher and more elemental than the Olympians. No one painted better than Velasquez, but Velasquez is not a Titan. Caravaggio is. Michelangelo but not Raphael. It has nothing to do with quality, but with the final impulse of energy– available only to the few-- that hurls a maker beyond the confines of his world. It is transfiguring, but it can be impolite. Stravinsky’s influence is found everywhere, but Mahler was a Titan. The music of the choral section is, my musician friends are fond of pointing out, not actually very “good.” It’s mischievous, unmannerly, unexpected, too close to acknowledging a Bavarian oom-pah band. I think Beethoven didn’t care if it was any good or not, because it was sublime & immortal. He was a grinning kid walking on stage in the middle of a symphony, doing a trick with a soccer ball, all eyes suddenly on him. 

Additionally, this was my first night out downtown, with the issues of crowds and parking and all, since the Pandemic. I did well. I had fun. I remembered what it is like to talk to strangers on the street. Walking to my car in the dark, I was accosted by a young man who admired my sports coat. He introduced me to his girlfriend as “My Man.”  I stopped in Zambra’s for a cocktail–my custom when the event is on that side of town– and ran into P, who ended up being my date for the night, I having been given two tickets and taking both with me in case such a thing happened. Janis had given me the best seats in the house, so he was glad to abandon his seat for mine. We talked about Schiller and Goethe till the music began. 

Asked K this morning how he had liked the concert, and his dislike of the whole evening amounted almost to wrath. I had noticed the problems he mentioned– you wanted to turn up the volume dial whenever the singers came on, intonation problems in the orchestra, a little bit of showboating on the part of the conductor-- but they had not bothered me. I supposed them to be part of an imperfect world (and a very imperfect auditorium). He let them ruin it for him. I was going to say, he is a professional and of course those things would bother him more, but in the theater I am a professional, and though I cannot forgive the selection of a bad play (Beethoven skates through in that department) I can and do forgive almost any slip or ding or outright folly that goes into an honest production. I have known perfection, though, and though I don’t anticipate it, I melt into a pool when it comes: Playboy of the Western World at the Abbey leaps into mind. It was a comedy, and I sat weeping when it ended, for sheer delight and gratitude. Music? De la Rue at Emmanuel College long ago. 

 

June 3, 2022

AVLGMC rehearsal a tribulation, D, the operatic bass, vibrating and thumping behind me in a kind of aural rictus. In a teenager it would be called enthusiasm. Now it’s a mania, a pathology. He’s so loud and confident that when he’s off, there’s no getting back. 

Summer the way I like it, sweeping thunderstorms in the afternoon, flower-delighting sunlight before and after. 

Went to the riverfront office and pawed through old poems and journals. The evidence of the journals suggests that the era of my greatest and most fluid expressiveness concerning my own life was 1977. I could go on page after page-- still interesting to read, even by me who should already know what it says. The handwriting is perfectly, even elegantly, legible. When did I have time to write all that? How did I have the patience to form the letters so they could be read?  Leafed through poems as old at 1968, trying to find something salvageable. Did find the salvageable, but not very much of it. But, dear God, I was productive– hundreds of poems, thousands maybe, a poem every few days, epics and lyrics and verse-essays, if handwritten and stacked, taking up three full file cabinet drawers, three carefully arranged stacks to a drawer. With a few exceptions, no one on earth would know what I was talking about. They’re not complicated or intellectual so much as private. Poetry was an event or emotion striking a bell inside me, and the poem described the quality of the sound rather than the event that caused it– allusive, allegorical, musical, private to the point of dissipation. My poems created a world parallel to the world of the events that inspired them, leaving no necessary connection between. They were all signs and markers to a separate creation, and only I had the key. I was the piper of Blake’s “Song of Innocence,” piping from the heart and not worried if there were no intelligible connections to the mundus. I wondered why people praised them (or tolerated them) and I suppose it was because they give off an aura of lyrical authority even when demonstrably about nothing at all. They’re smart and musical. They’re also evasive, a shield rather than a revelation. I don’t understand the mind that made them any more. Maybe I didn’t then, and they were an effort at discovery. That quality of work lingered, I think, because I had no mentors. Tennyson and Millay were my models; I got Tennyson’s music and Millay’s attitude right, but somehow never their solidity. Chatfield was a little afraid of me, and praised what was not yet quite praiseworthy. I think I have to credit a rejection slip I got while I lived on Beaumont Ave in Baltimore, where the editor (identity long forgotten) took the time to tell me in what ways my poems were antique and elusive. Of course I rejected what he said. Of course my writing was changed the very next time I picked up a pen. What was going on in my life didn’t seem to enter the poetry at all. The whole catastrophic move to Baltimore became revealed only when I began to use Baltimore place-names to adorn the same kind of poems I had written before. The passionate revelation of the journals became glossy artifacts in the poems. 

What made the difference between the many poems from that time that failed and the few that succeeded? I don’t know. I’m sure I couldn’t tell them apart then. I did in a split second this afternoon. I probably had an unusually long development period as a poet, disguised by the fact that I was always so private about it all and nobody knew. I was the swan in the adage, so serene on the surface of the lake, paddling like mad underneath.

But I am writing the poems I ought to write now. In the face of that, I’m hard put to make complaint about any failure of the past. 

 

June 2, 2022

The cleaning lady’s having to put down her sick dog rather than cleaning my house today threw me off. Rearranging tasks as I write. 

 June 1, 2022

Parents’ wedding anniversary. Sacred to Juno. Scruffy happy rabbit scampers from one end of the garden to the other. Last Cathedral choir rehearsal. Incapable of making conversation at the reception afterward. 

Sarpedon

 

May 31, 2022

Sat beside the French Broad, trying to write (not writing), trying to memorize madrigals.

A lone turkey hen roamed the garden for most of the day. You almost never see them alone, but there she was, sometimes perched on the back of a lawn chair, sometimes in the shade, sometimes in a low branch of the maple, sometime walking her slow jerky way in the full sunlight. I refrained from going to the garden, to give her the solitude she appeared to crave. I made up stories. She wanted just a few hours away from the press and urgency of the flock. She reveled in maybe the first solitude she had ever known, thinking such thoughts as she had. The looked strange, dinosauric roaming out there in the familiar space. She was holy. 

Police dishonesty about their own transgressions was never at issue. Uvalde confirms that they are liars whenever self-justification is required. Police cowardice can, after Uvalde, no longer be denied. It’s not necessarily the fault of the individual cop, for their training instills in them the notion that their first duty is to their own safety, their goal to get their own precious selves home safe at night. Many citations of the Supreme Court finding that officers are not required to endanger themselves for the sake of others. All right. One sees the logic. But the rest of the logic is that where there is no responsibility, there is also no authority. I think of Sarpedon’s speech about those favored and rewarded by their society. No risk, no honor. The time of thinking of the boys in blue as heroes, or even as agents of order, is over, until by some all-but-miraculous reform it comes again. 

 

May 30, 2022

Aborted my third attempt to read the Qur’an. It’s disappointing, stylistically. I’ll honor the dictum that is must be read in Arabic.