April 30, 2014

Obrecht on CD. Exactly right for the inert blue and complicated morning.

Met Nick my lawn guy, and his tattooed buddy the tree guy. Tree guy thought I was amusing.

The trees round about are full of tree frogs. Blessed.

Prevented from getting to the Woodfin Y yesterday by deep water on Merrimon.

Bade farewell to my poets last night. They really are very good, and I will miss them and their work.  My Blake class was under-enrolled and dropped, but Killian and a few others wish to do an independent study of him. I said yes.

The time of the writing of checks.

April 29, 2014

Violent storm hit around two. The lightning was so close that in my dream state I pictured the food cabinet upstairs (which does not exist) with all the canned meats cooked and burnt in their cans. For a moment there was hail. The rain continues now. Distant thunder. Reports in Tolkien class last night, some excellent, some very perfunctory.  Reading my Humanities students’ journals. The same spread of the perfunctory and the sublime exists there, though not always divided the way you predicted. Some are wonderful indeed. Some are notes torn from a notebook and bound with a paperclip. One girl wrote persona poems for the great figures of history, like Gilgamesh and Caesar. One boy wrote at a fantasy novel peopled by the characters he’d heard of in class. Indignant girls. Tenderly reflective boys. The students seem to like me–one young man adores me– (though if they hated me would they say so?) and seem to appreciate that I restate the materials of the Monday lectures to make sure everything is comprehended. They praise my wit and the way my class is not boring, as they expected it might be. They like my narrative impulse, which delivers history as though it were a story (as it is) rather than a cascade of facts. Of my Myth lecture, they said either that it was their favorite lecture or that it “fucked me up.” I am joyful over either. All in all, if reflective of what they actually, think, I get an A, Humanities gets a B, and the Monday lectures get a C-.  My sadness over what comes next semester redoubles, for most of the point will be lost in professorial self-gratification. I do regret sometimes not having been political, not having served on this committee or that. It was a failure of responsibility on my part, though I thought my responsibilities lay elsewhere. It meant that I saw nothing coming from afar. In the past I had relied on gravitas to turn the tide against silliness, but in the case of Humanities (deliberately, that is clear) gravitas was given no time to work. Not exactly my fault, but my powerlessness is frustrating. The child conspirators gave their lecture yesterday. There is no doubt that it was fun.

Great roaring in the air. Pale light behind the rain.

April 28, 2014

Sultry morning. All the windows were open all night for the first time.

Finally wrestled the end of Night Music into order.

Too much church yesterday. Too much food. Sipping my lemonade to clean myself out.

When the Chancellor Announced Her resignation

When the Chancellor Announced Her Resignation


People remembered where they were, what particular slant of light threw their shadows on the frozen ground. Some were hurrying to their cars, burdened with a shade of a dread that they might have missed something significant. The dread did not stop them. It made them hurry, a little, so there would be no chance to change their minds. There were appointments to be met, slightly early lunches to be eaten. But when they heard it on the radio, or looked at it on the computer screen, it was already of the second water, as one who looked where everyone was pointing after the shadow of the great event had passed. They might have all the information. They might have avoided the first shock, the moment or two of panic, the disorientation. Their stride over the thin snow might never have been broken. Still, it was not the same.

*

“Well, it doesn’t matter unless her replacement is someone significantly different.”
The young man had not, perhaps, expected such a long view. The announcement has just been made. A senior professor was sharing this observation with him who had only met the Chancellor for a few moments when he was hired, and seen her at imperial distance in various meetings. He’d thought she was tall. He noted that her slight speech impediment had not impeded her professional life much. He didn’t really know to what the older gentleman referred, or in what way the new chancellor should be different from the old. But the grand old man’s glance was piercing, so he said, “Indeed.”
The old man seemed satisfied. He got that look in his eyes his colleagues had come to associate with thoughts of the Keats of the summer odes.

*

“I will miss,” said the Chancellor after the important announcement had been made, “the fireplaces. The fireplaces in this house are truly remarkable. “
Though she had designed the fireplaces herself, along with the whole enormous house, this was not strictly self-praise, for here she was acknowledging how good craftsmanship can see to its end even the most vaunting ambition. And they were, too. The fireplaces were remarkable. If you were Lord of the Shield Danes you could roast a whole pig in one. If you lived three hundred years hence you could lead tours in period costume and mention all the interesting things that used to go on in fireplaces. You could sit across the room from one and imagine for a moment that the whole edifice was afire, picturing the headlines blaring that you had barely escaped with your life, and that you had delayed until you were in real peril making sure everybody else was safe.
You never pass by one of the fireplaces without glancing.
You think of the holocaust of documents there could be in the dead of night, accompanied by urgent hammering on the bolted door.

*

Some would remember how she had her favorite poets. One of these was never oneself. One learned through time that there is an anthology of approved poems and poets for people in positions like that of the Chancellor. The poets are black and female. Or if not, then damaged in some publicly intimate way. They will be invariably mistaken in their zoology. You should be able to deliver the poem from your heart, as though you knew it before it was written.  You can bring it out at convocations and commencements and say it in such a way that it will take people half an hour to realize it had nothing to do with the matter at hand. The power of indirection is a mighty power. You escape while the curtain is still trembling.

*

When the great pink crabapple fell in the Quad it distributed its branches as a boy throws toy soldiers across the lawn. You could have a souvenir if you thought of it in time. Only a few noted the prophetic nature of the event. It was a several years back, but such resonance is not easily dissipated. The branch that bore the flowers is broken. The dome of shade is flown. Now students must huddle for shelter under the other tree exactly like it across the Quad–planted for symmetry those long seasons ago.
But the wild things do not forget. The jay husband and the jay wife, left homeless, skitter across the ground, shrill and indignant. The would come to the Chancellor’s window and she would not to them, and they would understand.

*

It was not easy to say why the elder professor had chosen him for a confidante, but he had, and the young academic made the best of it.
“The will put the same people on the search committee that made a hash of it last time.”
“Are they still alive?”
“That doesn’t entirely matter. Of those who are dead, simulacra can be made.”
“If it was such a disaster, why would they–“
"Nobody ever said 'disaster.'" The professor retorted briskly. But then he leaned in, scoping the room as if trying to locate secret listeners; he whispered,”Repetition is redemption.”
The young man thought about this for a while. When he came back out into the open, a pair of bluejays had planted themselves on a certain piece of ground. It had begun to snow, a slow, elegiac transfer of luminous gray from the sky to the earth. Steam came from the birds’ beaks when the screeched, and they were screeching repeatedly, insistently like a pair of Yeats’ prophetic purgatory birds. So the young man thought. He watched them. He realized that the point the jays had chosen was not just one in an infinite number of points available on the Quad, but the precious point from which something vital had passed from the living earth. Maybe it was that crabapple tree everybody talked about, which he had never seen but which he understood was exquisite. Maybe the old man had it wrong, and that the birds had heard the Chancellor’s announcement, crying out now, and crying out.

*
“I will miss,” said the Chancellor, “the most extraordinary things.”  They waited for her to enumerate them, but she was too wise for that, and always had been.

April 27, 2014

Two pileated woodpeckers in the yard when I returned from school, They are so huge I thought one was, at first, a dog up a tree.

Wildly eventful Saturday. Got some writing done despite the Death Metal blaring away in the café. Going back on my determination that I had done all the transplanting I was going to do, I dug up voodoo lily and acanthus and bloodroot and yellow magnolia from 62 and brought them to live with me in eternity. The magnolia I bought as a small tree, which produced a few leaves and then turned into a stick, and was then battered to the ground when the limb of the sweet gum fell. I thought I’d just let it there to rot away, but last summer it put forth a few shoots from underground, and this spring those shoots renewed and redoubled. The shoots come from, I suspect, under a graft, so I probably do not have the tree I thought I bought, but I suspect it’s a cucumber tree under all that, and that would be well enough. The day was blazing bright and dry, but with enough watering I think I brought everybody through.

Blake and David visited late in the morning, bringing champagne and orange juice with them. What great and stimulating talk we had! David gave me the CD and the score of a sort of cantata– I guess you’d say themed album– based on a paper he wrote for my class. It looks brilliant. By the time they left I was so smashed on the mimosas I slept the balance of the afternoon, rising in time to go to Hendersonville with the usual crew to see Flat Rock’s The Fantasticks.

I’ve seen The Fantasticks often enough that I could practically recite the show as it unfolded. This is a good thing and a bad thing. The good part was that it allowed me to remember all the casts I’ve seen in the past– Al Swanson and Lucia at Hiram, with John Macnamara as a sinister El Gallo. Before that, Kenley Players in Ohio, with John Gavin as El Gallo and Edward Everett Horton as the old Player. Tracy Hackney as El Gallo at UNCA, me coaching him through his anxiety about his voice. Jack played in it twice, and I know he was full of nostalgia as he sat beside me. I remember a review of the original show that said something like, “If you are the sort of person who likes this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you will like,” and I think that’s accurate. The singing was strong, everyone was good-looking, the music is sweet as it can be (I couldn’t stopping singing it down the streets of Hendersonville and into the Black Rose bar) but I was a little impatient with it, a little intolerant of its wide and aggressively marked thoroughfares. There was a real innovation, though. Maria as the mute was acting every moment, alive every moment, reacting every moment, as if the story were being told to her. Without a single line she stole the show. Almost unable to keep my eyes open on the road home.

April 26, 2014

Woke to a voice out of some immense darkness calling me “The Unloved Lover.” Yes, I thought, that’s it exactly. It’s better than “The Unloving Beloved,” but only just.

Will came over yesterday to talk about 62. He was late, and I worked myself into a frenzy over that. I would make the deal where I had the time I’ve spent waiting for people added on to the end of my life. Anyway, I thought we were going to be finalizing things, when in fact he cannot, financially, finalize anything until August. This was a disappointment to me– me who hates so for things to drag on, and for whom they, therefore, drag on interminably. I had been specific about closing in the spring, but can’t is can’t. I measure the money I’m losing up against the bother not having to put the house on the market spares me, and the deal still seems good, but, again, only just.

Trapped into attending the Lit Club party at Merritt’s last night, but glad after all that I did. Happy time, with good talk, among students many of whom I will not see again, unless I see them walking across to get their diplomas, which, according to my recent record, is by no means certain. Several tables groaned under the food people had brought.

K, who was healthy three weeks ago, now has a stint bleeding slowly in her shoulder, through which they’ll pour the chemo for her breast cancer. People hug her without realizing how painful it is. She comes to me for support, and I’m all jolly and jokey, hoping to God that’s the right approach.

April 25, 2014

Planted red raspberries.

Planted blue columbines.

Kelley and her mother, walking the dog, took a tour of the house.

Enraged at students who, never having asked a question about the subject matter of the course, ask meticulous questions about the exam. Thinking of putting it on my syllabus: “if you’re not interested in the course material, you’re not interested in the exam.”

“What should we expect on the exam?”

“Same as every time before.”

“Essays?”

“Yes.”

“Short answers?”

“Yes.”

“ID’s”

“Yes.”

“Maps?”

“Maybe.”

“Maps aren’t fair.”

“Why aren’t they fair?”

Silence.

“Because you actually have to know something, right?”

Silence.

“Something particular which can’t be bullshitted. Right?”

“Some of us think that rote memorization isn’t education.”

“What’s the difference between rote memorization and remembering? Education IS remembering. By my lights, I haven’t asked you to memorize a single thing, ever.”

Silence.

Public education makes very clear that education is knowing what’s on the test. There are fewer of me; therefore I must be vehement in making clear that is not it at all.