July 10, 2011
Cambridge on a sodden late afternoon.
Met up with Justin and Margaret and John and Celeste and Rob in London, and we lunched French, then took ourselves to the Abbey (too crowded to enter), the Houses of Parliament, and finally across the unbelievably teeming-with-human-life Westminster Bridge (it was the prime Saturday of summer) to the London Aquarium. The aquarium was crowded, and in some senses useless, but John had never seen one before, and we all had fun for his sake. All the venues along the river were passing an incredible volume of humanity through them hour by hour, and I had as much of crowds, for that moment, as I wanted. Came home very early and slept very long, happy to see the group again after an absence even of a day.
Mayhem at King’s Cross attempting to get back to Cambridge. We were comfortably settled on the train, with four minutes before departure (I was writing in my journal) when the announcement came that the train had been put out of service and that we were leaving–in four minutes–from track O, entirely across the station. All the British were running (I’d assumed they’d hold the train for us, but the natives we’re panicked, so I was too) and when we got there we were stopped like a flood behind a dam and told that THAT train was not ready to depart, that there was some sort of fire warning, and we should return to the main room of the station and await further orders. And alarm and the repeated announcement for so-and-so (clearly an emergency code) to report made everyone in the station uneasy. A while later the departure board flashed that same train at that same platform, so we all got on, together with the crowd which would normally be taking that train. It was a crush. The train was headed to Peterborough, but let us off at Stevenage, where we were herded onto a fleet of busses, which took us to Royston, where we finally caught the train to Cambridge.
Driven from the station by an Iraqi Kurd, who gave me a run-down of his life in Cambridge, which has been good. “Everyone knows me,” says he. He was playing Kurdish radio. The music was catchy and showed no signs of internationalism.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Sunday, July 10, 2011
London
July 9, 2011
Blue morning after the alternating squalls of yesterday.
I’d forgotten that as I walked from Kings Cross Thursday, I passed the Lord Mayor (the chain around his neck and the attendants made me think he was the Lord Mayor) placing a wreath on the spot where terrorists blew a bus up some years back. I stopped and watched because nobody else was watching. No American politician would do such a thing without the assurance of a crowd.
Headed to South Kensington yesterday to go to the Natural History Museum, but the crowds were tremendous, so I resorted to my old friend the Victorian & Albert (where there were no dinosaurs to draw the throng). I sat in the café, which I love, writing a blue streak, then out in the garden until I was driven away by squalls of rain. Lingered in Covent Garden. If you sat in a café you had to hold the sugar and napkins down against the wind. Went to the Royal Opera House to find an opera to hear next week, but instead got a ticket for Rufus Wainwright’s Judy Garland concert, something it had never crossed my mind to pursue. I didn’t pursue it; there it lay in the way. Royal Albert Hall and the Albert Memorial in the rain. Remembered last being there with Lou Fishback and Mark Meachum, my crush of the time, young men–exactly my present students’ age–footloose in London.
Napped, and then walked to the Old Vic, where I thought I was going to have to argue for my ticket to Richard III, as no ticket had come in the mail or to the Russell. Turns out that I had bought a ticket online from a bogus Finnish company, London Westend Box Office, which does not exist and sold me tickets for seats which do not exist. The man at the desk was very patient, and wondered why I was taking it so well. Turns out that a man thus hoodwinked before me had spent 350 pounds apiece for two tickets. I assured the box office manager, Mr. Dominic Byrne, that no such thing had happened to me. One ticket for the sold out house had been returned, and he sold me that. This was the best seat in the house, two rows from the stage, dead center. I had time before the show to get acquainted with the neighborhood around The Cut. I like it. Lively, gritty. Gave a prostitute four pounds not to sit with me at Nero’s.
Kevin Spacey’s Richard III is, for the most part, sold out and wildly desired. It was a solid production, assuredly, and yet not innovative or really extraordinary. Spacey’s Richard was a man who had succumbed since childhood to tantrums and, as an adult, was amazed and gratified when his growing power and menace made them work his will. Spacey was adept at getting the audience on Richard’s side, with sidelong glances and conspiratorial mugging. It was full throttle throughout, from mf to fff, no subtlety, but a satisfying bluffness. Walked home one of my favorite walks, over Waterloo Bridge, to the Axis Bar of One Aldwych, the elegant venue where DJ and I took refuge on New Year’s Eve a few years back. I drank shockingly overpriced vodka and watched the artistry of the bartenders, who squirt citrus peels in the air to the sides on the glass, I suppose to impart the subtlest hint of fragrance. The bartender gave me a shot of some new many-times-distilled vodka to drink, and it was blue fire.
Blue morning after the alternating squalls of yesterday.
I’d forgotten that as I walked from Kings Cross Thursday, I passed the Lord Mayor (the chain around his neck and the attendants made me think he was the Lord Mayor) placing a wreath on the spot where terrorists blew a bus up some years back. I stopped and watched because nobody else was watching. No American politician would do such a thing without the assurance of a crowd.
Headed to South Kensington yesterday to go to the Natural History Museum, but the crowds were tremendous, so I resorted to my old friend the Victorian & Albert (where there were no dinosaurs to draw the throng). I sat in the café, which I love, writing a blue streak, then out in the garden until I was driven away by squalls of rain. Lingered in Covent Garden. If you sat in a café you had to hold the sugar and napkins down against the wind. Went to the Royal Opera House to find an opera to hear next week, but instead got a ticket for Rufus Wainwright’s Judy Garland concert, something it had never crossed my mind to pursue. I didn’t pursue it; there it lay in the way. Royal Albert Hall and the Albert Memorial in the rain. Remembered last being there with Lou Fishback and Mark Meachum, my crush of the time, young men–exactly my present students’ age–footloose in London.
Napped, and then walked to the Old Vic, where I thought I was going to have to argue for my ticket to Richard III, as no ticket had come in the mail or to the Russell. Turns out that I had bought a ticket online from a bogus Finnish company, London Westend Box Office, which does not exist and sold me tickets for seats which do not exist. The man at the desk was very patient, and wondered why I was taking it so well. Turns out that a man thus hoodwinked before me had spent 350 pounds apiece for two tickets. I assured the box office manager, Mr. Dominic Byrne, that no such thing had happened to me. One ticket for the sold out house had been returned, and he sold me that. This was the best seat in the house, two rows from the stage, dead center. I had time before the show to get acquainted with the neighborhood around The Cut. I like it. Lively, gritty. Gave a prostitute four pounds not to sit with me at Nero’s.
Kevin Spacey’s Richard III is, for the most part, sold out and wildly desired. It was a solid production, assuredly, and yet not innovative or really extraordinary. Spacey’s Richard was a man who had succumbed since childhood to tantrums and, as an adult, was amazed and gratified when his growing power and menace made them work his will. Spacey was adept at getting the audience on Richard’s side, with sidelong glances and conspiratorial mugging. It was full throttle throughout, from mf to fff, no subtlety, but a satisfying bluffness. Walked home one of my favorite walks, over Waterloo Bridge, to the Axis Bar of One Aldwych, the elegant venue where DJ and I took refuge on New Year’s Eve a few years back. I drank shockingly overpriced vodka and watched the artistry of the bartenders, who squirt citrus peels in the air to the sides on the glass, I suppose to impart the subtlest hint of fragrance. The bartender gave me a shot of some new many-times-distilled vodka to drink, and it was blue fire.
Friday, July 8, 2011
London
July 7, 2011
Thirty-five years since the re-making.
King’s for evensong last night. They threw my comment about fortissimi back into my teeth, rattling the arches. Then to Saint Benet for a concert of dance music on lute and recorded, called “The English Dancing Master.” I’d rushed there to secure a ticket, but there was no need, as the tiny room was half empty and everyone at least a decade older than I. A thick rose is being laboriously trained around the door arch of that ancient church.
Afterwards, the bountiful Pickerel came through again last night. As I was re-acquainting myself with Alex–who claimed to have been hungover since arrival–I met Lucy Churchill, whose family used to be called Churchyard until her great-grandfather came home from WWI. She is a stone carver, and worked on the colleges until having a family drove her to the more time-effective pursuit of individual clients. Our conversation was wonderful, detailed, specific, and I realized that I was being flirted with at a rather advanced level. She left me her web page address, which I will visit. She said as we left that she had the 2nd best time with me she’d ever had at the Pickerel. I allowed that, because that’s where she met her husband. It was my second best time too, after meeting Steve.
J’s doxie was shouting into her phone in the hall at 5 AM. A number of lines were crossed that need to be crossed back. It was like a trusted child transgressing in the most public, disruptive and unapologetic way. Like most fathers, I have no idea what caused it and what to do,
London. It’s beginning to feel like home. The girls on the train told their boyfriends' most secret intimacies, cackling in derision. The Russell did not do right by me this time. There is none of the pretty views of the park which enchanted me with thins place, but, as in Florence, a view of the building’s guts crossed with pipes and walkways, roaring with obscure machines.
Gala for the Harry Potter premiere down on Trafalgar Square, joyfully silly.
Wandered to the Coliseum and bought a ticket for Simon Bocchanegra. Absorbing, it turned out. Turned homeward after watching the fat half moon rise over Trafalgar Square.
Thirty-five years since the re-making.
King’s for evensong last night. They threw my comment about fortissimi back into my teeth, rattling the arches. Then to Saint Benet for a concert of dance music on lute and recorded, called “The English Dancing Master.” I’d rushed there to secure a ticket, but there was no need, as the tiny room was half empty and everyone at least a decade older than I. A thick rose is being laboriously trained around the door arch of that ancient church.
Afterwards, the bountiful Pickerel came through again last night. As I was re-acquainting myself with Alex–who claimed to have been hungover since arrival–I met Lucy Churchill, whose family used to be called Churchyard until her great-grandfather came home from WWI. She is a stone carver, and worked on the colleges until having a family drove her to the more time-effective pursuit of individual clients. Our conversation was wonderful, detailed, specific, and I realized that I was being flirted with at a rather advanced level. She left me her web page address, which I will visit. She said as we left that she had the 2nd best time with me she’d ever had at the Pickerel. I allowed that, because that’s where she met her husband. It was my second best time too, after meeting Steve.
J’s doxie was shouting into her phone in the hall at 5 AM. A number of lines were crossed that need to be crossed back. It was like a trusted child transgressing in the most public, disruptive and unapologetic way. Like most fathers, I have no idea what caused it and what to do,
London. It’s beginning to feel like home. The girls on the train told their boyfriends' most secret intimacies, cackling in derision. The Russell did not do right by me this time. There is none of the pretty views of the park which enchanted me with thins place, but, as in Florence, a view of the building’s guts crossed with pipes and walkways, roaring with obscure machines.
Gala for the Harry Potter premiere down on Trafalgar Square, joyfully silly.
Wandered to the Coliseum and bought a ticket for Simon Bocchanegra. Absorbing, it turned out. Turned homeward after watching the fat half moon rise over Trafalgar Square.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Cambridge
July 6, 2011
Early morning, to do a laundry before the others get to the machines. My blackbird preens at the window, knocking her head very now and then against the glass.
Lucy Cavendish is third-world regarding Internet service. It comes and goes, and one never knows when one will be in contact and when one will not.
Dream last night that Titus was dying, only he couldn’t die until he saw me again. He buried himself under a pile of leaves in the yard, and came crawling out when I rolled down the walk with my luggage. He could speak, and told me his plans for the afterlife, though I forget what they were.
Reading away at City of Sin. Reading about all that debauchery is actually a little sickening. Interesting perception: different things at different times are thought to change a person’s identity. In days of yore one sexual encounter would make (officially) a woman “fallen” and a member of a separate class. Today it is merely an adventure. Today a homosexual encounter slips a man into a separate category, gives him a new definition, though in days of yore it was just one of the adventures he might have sodding his way around appalling London. What is the apparatus which makes us form new classifications in our view of our fellows?
RS has had to suspend the review system she set up for MountainX. It was a good idea, but it supposed people to be very much more disinterested than they are, and abuses made it almost pointless. Since arriving in Asheville I’ve thought that the thing which stands between its art scene and completeness, sophistication, the ability to affect the culture of other parts of the country, was a mature critical tradition. Reviewers then were enthusiastic annotators of cast lists. The major media ignored events that were not themselves long established and “popular.”
The level of critique now is often quite sophisticated, and the media are far more catholic in their attentions. Now the problem is like Aesop’s frogs who cried for a king and, receiving him, didn’t want him. Asheville’s critics are hampered by the inability of artists and arts organizations to live up to their own call for good criticism. They don’t really want it. They want free public relations. They want praise, and praise is not always called for. For a while some one had the idea that reviews should be anonymous (this is actually a good idea) but then offended review-ees would, instead of taking to heart the exposed faults of their offerings, try desperately to discover the identity of the reviewer, in order to excoriate him or her. It was a case of “yes, I shit on the stairs, but the important thing is to find out who told on me.” More recently, arts organizations or individuals invent fictional “neutral” respondents to contradict reviewers in the comments columns, and flood Facebook with puffing messages in an attempt to control public opinion. All to the end of fending off the healthy and complete arts scene which everybody, publically, says they desire.
All this makes me consider what criticism is for in a community like ours. The media likes it for a consumer guide, to tell people what they should spend money on. I suppose to a degree it is, though shows seldom play long enough for that to be a real factor, and what I praise for very good reasons may irk somebody else, and their money will be spent anyhow. I think the media cite consumerism to avoid accusations of elitism. A whole section goes to sports and yet readers resent a page dedicated to the arts, though locally (at least) the arts are a greater revenue source. A review may rightfully funnel consumers to an event they would otherwise not know, though keeping them away from things they won’t like is iffy..
Artists who want any sort of larger career can’t get one unless there is a certain patina of critique around their work, which means that for most of its history, a performer had to leave Asheville to build a career. No reviews, no track record. Are we going back to that? When I review, I think of it in part as a dialogue with the performers, writers, designers, as one might have if sitting around a supper table or in a bar, having been asked, “So, what did you think?” Even more, I think of it as audience development. Sure you liked it, but isn’t it nice to understand some of the details which led to this liking? Yeah, there was something wrong, and this will help us understand what. Criticism is teaching, and greater awareness arises from the best of it. It should work that way for the creators of art as well. Even reviews which are not accurate about the qualities of the piece art may be pretty good guides to audience reception.
Finally, the critic owes something to the future, to tell people what was happening when, done by whom and to what effect, and to do so at the upper edge of his perceptions and capabilities. Commentary is history, Puff pieces that spare the feelings of one’s friends or avoid the retaliation of the offended achieve none of the above. There are some Asheville artists I won’t review because the burden of consequences is too great. Of course, I too hate getting bad notices, but I hate getting fat when I eat too much and burned when I lie out in the sun, but all those things may rightfully be laid solely to my ledger.
There are faulty or vicious reviews. In a town where actually financial survival seldom rests on a review, maybe the best thing to do about them is let them ride, let audience decide, to stick one’s nose in the air and go on. It’s gauche to comment publically on a personal review. If you are commenting on somebody else’s review, it is probably best if you really are somebody else.
Arts criticism is important. I’m sad to see it founder once again–once from lack of interest by possible outlets, once from the artists’ not knowing how to behave. Maybe somebody will try again.
Odd to be thinking of this in Cambridge, where anybody can say anything and everyone seems to know exactly how to take it. Maybe we need another six hundred years.
Early morning, to do a laundry before the others get to the machines. My blackbird preens at the window, knocking her head very now and then against the glass.
Lucy Cavendish is third-world regarding Internet service. It comes and goes, and one never knows when one will be in contact and when one will not.
Dream last night that Titus was dying, only he couldn’t die until he saw me again. He buried himself under a pile of leaves in the yard, and came crawling out when I rolled down the walk with my luggage. He could speak, and told me his plans for the afterlife, though I forget what they were.
Reading away at City of Sin. Reading about all that debauchery is actually a little sickening. Interesting perception: different things at different times are thought to change a person’s identity. In days of yore one sexual encounter would make (officially) a woman “fallen” and a member of a separate class. Today it is merely an adventure. Today a homosexual encounter slips a man into a separate category, gives him a new definition, though in days of yore it was just one of the adventures he might have sodding his way around appalling London. What is the apparatus which makes us form new classifications in our view of our fellows?
RS has had to suspend the review system she set up for MountainX. It was a good idea, but it supposed people to be very much more disinterested than they are, and abuses made it almost pointless. Since arriving in Asheville I’ve thought that the thing which stands between its art scene and completeness, sophistication, the ability to affect the culture of other parts of the country, was a mature critical tradition. Reviewers then were enthusiastic annotators of cast lists. The major media ignored events that were not themselves long established and “popular.”
The level of critique now is often quite sophisticated, and the media are far more catholic in their attentions. Now the problem is like Aesop’s frogs who cried for a king and, receiving him, didn’t want him. Asheville’s critics are hampered by the inability of artists and arts organizations to live up to their own call for good criticism. They don’t really want it. They want free public relations. They want praise, and praise is not always called for. For a while some one had the idea that reviews should be anonymous (this is actually a good idea) but then offended review-ees would, instead of taking to heart the exposed faults of their offerings, try desperately to discover the identity of the reviewer, in order to excoriate him or her. It was a case of “yes, I shit on the stairs, but the important thing is to find out who told on me.” More recently, arts organizations or individuals invent fictional “neutral” respondents to contradict reviewers in the comments columns, and flood Facebook with puffing messages in an attempt to control public opinion. All to the end of fending off the healthy and complete arts scene which everybody, publically, says they desire.
All this makes me consider what criticism is for in a community like ours. The media likes it for a consumer guide, to tell people what they should spend money on. I suppose to a degree it is, though shows seldom play long enough for that to be a real factor, and what I praise for very good reasons may irk somebody else, and their money will be spent anyhow. I think the media cite consumerism to avoid accusations of elitism. A whole section goes to sports and yet readers resent a page dedicated to the arts, though locally (at least) the arts are a greater revenue source. A review may rightfully funnel consumers to an event they would otherwise not know, though keeping them away from things they won’t like is iffy..
Artists who want any sort of larger career can’t get one unless there is a certain patina of critique around their work, which means that for most of its history, a performer had to leave Asheville to build a career. No reviews, no track record. Are we going back to that? When I review, I think of it in part as a dialogue with the performers, writers, designers, as one might have if sitting around a supper table or in a bar, having been asked, “So, what did you think?” Even more, I think of it as audience development. Sure you liked it, but isn’t it nice to understand some of the details which led to this liking? Yeah, there was something wrong, and this will help us understand what. Criticism is teaching, and greater awareness arises from the best of it. It should work that way for the creators of art as well. Even reviews which are not accurate about the qualities of the piece art may be pretty good guides to audience reception.
Finally, the critic owes something to the future, to tell people what was happening when, done by whom and to what effect, and to do so at the upper edge of his perceptions and capabilities. Commentary is history, Puff pieces that spare the feelings of one’s friends or avoid the retaliation of the offended achieve none of the above. There are some Asheville artists I won’t review because the burden of consequences is too great. Of course, I too hate getting bad notices, but I hate getting fat when I eat too much and burned when I lie out in the sun, but all those things may rightfully be laid solely to my ledger.
There are faulty or vicious reviews. In a town where actually financial survival seldom rests on a review, maybe the best thing to do about them is let them ride, let audience decide, to stick one’s nose in the air and go on. It’s gauche to comment publically on a personal review. If you are commenting on somebody else’s review, it is probably best if you really are somebody else.
Arts criticism is important. I’m sad to see it founder once again–once from lack of interest by possible outlets, once from the artists’ not knowing how to behave. Maybe somebody will try again.
Odd to be thinking of this in Cambridge, where anybody can say anything and everyone seems to know exactly how to take it. Maybe we need another six hundred years.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Cambridge
July 4, 2011
Independence Day in a land which seems to forgive its past misunderstandings. At the students’ advice, we celebrated the day by going to the American Cemetery, where our World War II dead lie in ranks and files of white crosses and stars of David under the pure Cambridgeshire sky. It was a deeply moving event. I am aware of how much a current of rage there is in my sorrow, as if, if one had stood there in sufficient rage–say the fury of the Covering Cherub– one might have saved some, or many, or all. If you come seeking one of your own family, the officer in charge will take sand from Omaha Beach and outline the letters of his name. John found Joseph P Kennedy Jr.
Bought John shoes and watched women in Lion’s Yard have their feet serviced by cleaner fish. Lucy Cavendish provided us a lovely picnic dinner for Independence Day, and now the students will disperse into the pubs to try to make the most of the holiday.
My nephews have adopted six orphaned kittens. The image of them and their big lug friends holding kittens to their bosoms and caring tenderly for them is almost too sweet to endure.
Independence Day in a land which seems to forgive its past misunderstandings. At the students’ advice, we celebrated the day by going to the American Cemetery, where our World War II dead lie in ranks and files of white crosses and stars of David under the pure Cambridgeshire sky. It was a deeply moving event. I am aware of how much a current of rage there is in my sorrow, as if, if one had stood there in sufficient rage–say the fury of the Covering Cherub– one might have saved some, or many, or all. If you come seeking one of your own family, the officer in charge will take sand from Omaha Beach and outline the letters of his name. John found Joseph P Kennedy Jr.
Bought John shoes and watched women in Lion’s Yard have their feet serviced by cleaner fish. Lucy Cavendish provided us a lovely picnic dinner for Independence Day, and now the students will disperse into the pubs to try to make the most of the holiday.
My nephews have adopted six orphaned kittens. The image of them and their big lug friends holding kittens to their bosoms and caring tenderly for them is almost too sweet to endure.
Monday, July 4, 2011
Cambridge
July 3, 2011
I knew I was sick when I rose yesterday morning. I felt the cold too much. I was disoriented. But I couldn’t send my troops to Bury St. Edmund’s on their own, so I took a few pills and headed for the train. I always hope that it’s going to be something other than phlebitis–don’t people get the flu? Food poisoning? La grippe? But it is always the same, and as we hurried down the streets of that pretty little town I got sicker and sicker, and before we entered the Greene Man Brewery for our tour, I was in a taxi heading for the station. A pretty girl sat across from me on the train, and her perfume gave me the dry heaves. I wonder what story she is telling about that. Did make it back to Lucy Cavendish, where I fell into an exceptionally brutal episode of the disease. Fever and chills. Fever, pain, chills. Pain. Chills. And above all the hideous mess the fever makes in the brain, sickening and compulsive, tangled lines of thought that one cannot break. The progress was exceptionally clear-cut this time, though I don’t understand why the symptoms of a fever should be so elaborate and successive. Maybe the worst was that when the rest got home, nobody checked on me. They had seen me stagger away toward a taxi, and yet when they got back, nothing. I could be dead in my room right now and nobody would know, depending on how long it took me to decompose. This was hurtful. There are moments in the progress of the disease when company would be a real comfort. Now that I say that, I have never had such comfort since my mother, so why make a big deal of it now? But I thought we had a different relationship here.
Bored and sick at the same time.
I think this is part of the great humiliation which started two days ago, struck down and no one cares. It’s hard to convey that I am smiling as I write this.
Night: Evensong at St. John’s. If Kings’ singers attest, “We are angels,” St. John’s, with their almost-pushed tempi, their thrilling fortissimi, proclaim “We are men.” The anthem was Britten’s “Rejoice in the Lamb.” I have heard this piece a dozen times and sung it several, but never before HEARD it, really. By the time they came to “for I am in twelve hardships,” I was slain in the spirit, weeping like a child, transported. When I heard the phrase used by the kind of people who use it, I thought “slain in the spirit” was ridiculous. It is not.
Went to the Pickerel afterwards and met Alex R, a John Kennedy Jr-resembling, John Steinbeck-admiring law student from Fresno. He wants to go into politics and be, for starters, mayor of Fresno. I prophesy success.
I knew I was sick when I rose yesterday morning. I felt the cold too much. I was disoriented. But I couldn’t send my troops to Bury St. Edmund’s on their own, so I took a few pills and headed for the train. I always hope that it’s going to be something other than phlebitis–don’t people get the flu? Food poisoning? La grippe? But it is always the same, and as we hurried down the streets of that pretty little town I got sicker and sicker, and before we entered the Greene Man Brewery for our tour, I was in a taxi heading for the station. A pretty girl sat across from me on the train, and her perfume gave me the dry heaves. I wonder what story she is telling about that. Did make it back to Lucy Cavendish, where I fell into an exceptionally brutal episode of the disease. Fever and chills. Fever, pain, chills. Pain. Chills. And above all the hideous mess the fever makes in the brain, sickening and compulsive, tangled lines of thought that one cannot break. The progress was exceptionally clear-cut this time, though I don’t understand why the symptoms of a fever should be so elaborate and successive. Maybe the worst was that when the rest got home, nobody checked on me. They had seen me stagger away toward a taxi, and yet when they got back, nothing. I could be dead in my room right now and nobody would know, depending on how long it took me to decompose. This was hurtful. There are moments in the progress of the disease when company would be a real comfort. Now that I say that, I have never had such comfort since my mother, so why make a big deal of it now? But I thought we had a different relationship here.
Bored and sick at the same time.
I think this is part of the great humiliation which started two days ago, struck down and no one cares. It’s hard to convey that I am smiling as I write this.
Night: Evensong at St. John’s. If Kings’ singers attest, “We are angels,” St. John’s, with their almost-pushed tempi, their thrilling fortissimi, proclaim “We are men.” The anthem was Britten’s “Rejoice in the Lamb.” I have heard this piece a dozen times and sung it several, but never before HEARD it, really. By the time they came to “for I am in twelve hardships,” I was slain in the spirit, weeping like a child, transported. When I heard the phrase used by the kind of people who use it, I thought “slain in the spirit” was ridiculous. It is not.
Went to the Pickerel afterwards and met Alex R, a John Kennedy Jr-resembling, John Steinbeck-admiring law student from Fresno. He wants to go into politics and be, for starters, mayor of Fresno. I prophesy success.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
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.”
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.”
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