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.
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.
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.
