Posts (page 2)
I do not imagine her as a child. Instead I think of her as a bit older, and still unmarried, still parthenos, because she was crippled, deformed, blind, or grotesque. Taught by her condition to be resigned, disciplined, obedient; and also assured by it of her specialness – so that her special fate did not surprise her. After all, wasn't the world turned upside down at that moment? Why should not all its values be inverted?
She saw a lot of the world for a woman of her time. She visits her cousin, and the city of her husband's ancestors, and Egypt. All this before the story is really underway. Later on, we see her far from home again, when she was certainly no child, to be present at the end of what started in her.
She
only carried the torch for a moment, really. She accepted it when it
was passed to her and handed it over when her moment was past. All
the rest of her life she was ordinary. And that was possibly the
greater burden, as it is for all those of us never called to such
distinction; to live an ordinary life which has come so near to
brilliance.
I would have
thought that I had never heard of either Pierre de Ronsard, nor of
this poem, Mignonne..., but
this can't be true. I have read the book at least twice before, and
must have seen the references to it. In fact, I remember very
clearly the scene in which the inspector makes hollow claims of
erudition in reference to the reference to it, but I presume that I
was happy with hollow claims to erudition as well, and I never took
any interest in the poem or its author. Luckily, the internet makes
armchair scholars of us all, as television made us armchair athletes;
luckily, because the oblique reference is a key one. Maugham is a
little tricky here, I think, because he seems to deliberately
mischaracterize the meaning of the poem – for in the scene referred
to above, the character Maugham quotes a portion of the poem to the
inspector, a courtesy that, pointedly, the author Maugham denies his
readers. What remains unsaid is perhaps what is most at the heart of
the matter.
Talking by numbers. There is no railroad here. Half of a dozen, half of a score. Plain in a black box. Scored by the tracks. A week of bounty. Six days to a week, six hats to a shoebox. Walking after midnight. Soundings of the big blue sea. Grand Central Station. How to photograph women. There are shoes that have never seen a map. Mutiny of kindness. Illinois Central. If the blood is good, the bone is better. Three hats will surely fill one head. How to graph the hundred headless women. Many a tear is spoken 'twixt the bear and the heir. Flash. You're it. Any old tier is broken midst the bare and the air. A train at anchor in the harbor of the terminal. How do you do? Pleasure cannot be kept in a shoebox; there are many whistles forgotten by history. Play under the trestle. The Old Northern Maine and Minnesota Trunk Line. Captain Bligh had a friendly smile. How to wrestle women. The hat is the anchor of the thought. Many a heart is broken, after the ball. Any old port in a storm. Wrestle by numbers. The shoe walks, the clock talks, the lover squawks and then he balks. Seven players to a week. Cover your tracks.
I went out to get the mail so that I would not have to leave the house again until morning. There were two Christmas cards, one from a Rummage person, one from a friend I knew in high school, and has since been more diligent than I at keeping in touch. Also in the mail were two DVDs from Netflix; I timed my return of the last two so that I would not be caught short over the holiday weekend. Walkabout and The Apartment. There were also some throwaways, the loose stuff that comes every Friday, and some things that interested me so little that I dropped them and forgot them.
The snow lies on the ground in patches now, and it crunches under foot. It is dark out now, the longest night of the year. It is rather warm and calm out, though, and sometimes it is pleasant to go out there and be under the night sky. Cloaked in darkness, hidden from the world, halfway between the stars above and the earth below, complete in solitude and not at all detached.
I
don't expect any stars tonight. As I drove home there was a
featherbed of cloud covering the sky. But the stars are still there.
I have never been disappointed when I have gone out and taken the
time to look at the sky. It's a long night and there is an eternity
between now and morning. I think I'll step outside tonight, and gaze.
Last night I went to a party at the house of a church member who lives only halfway round the block. The house is on the same design as mine, but hers is nice.
I have been to three Christmas parties this December. I'll pass over the office party, which was compulsory but, miraculously, less joyless than these things have been in the past. Another was a gathering of Rummage volunteers. Did I write about this already? It worked out pretty well for me, insofar as I was able to avoid talking to the people there I don't care for, for most of the evening, visit with some that I actually do like, and leave early enough that I was able to have some of my evening to myself.
The Bell party on Sunday was canceled due to the ice storm. I was looking forward to that one since some of my good friends might have been there. Instead I watched Holiday, which I don't like any more but find more fascinating with each viewing. Relevant to this entry, though, the family in the film throws a New Year's Eve party, on less than a week's notice, and has sufficient standing in Society to have the mansion full to overflowing with the 400. The leading characters in this drama have the good sense to withdraw from this affair to a room in the attic referred to as the “playroom”.
And
last night: Stephen Ministry party. I haven't spent too much time
with this bunch, in a social sense, since I became one of their
number. For much of the evening I was the only man there, and
probably the youngest. I listened more than I spoke, learned a few
things about a few people, and stayed longer than I intended. Then
I walked home, along a not-quite-cold, not-quite-dark,
not-quite-silent street. I think maybe I had a pretty good time.
Half full of milk, half full of bile,
The mind of man struts many a mile,
And ponders nothings great and small:
His Master's voice, his Bladder's call.
He returns to his shame like a dog to his vomit,
But insight is rarer than Kohoutek's comet.
He knows how to swim and not get wet
But how to think he will forget.
His brain's too full of the graves of dreams,
Or dreams of graves, or baseball teams,
Food or fever, bread or beaver,
Memories of June's meat cleaver.
Minds are cluttered with thoughts like these,
So is it any wonder I'm too distracted to find a rhyme to end this poem with?
She was as modern as 1967, and we all loved her. She died a miserable, lonely, untimely death. No one thinks about her any more.
My friend was rushed to the hospital in respiratory distress, A pregnant woman slipped on the ice. A child was rushed to the hospital with an acute and frightening infection.
I wasn't sure who Kiki would be until I wrote those first few sentences. When I think of her I remember rays of sunlight that did not warm, and dancing in the kitchen. There had been drinking the night before. I was too young to see how unhappy she was.
We speak in hushed tones in the hall. She touches my arm and looks at me with candid blue eyes. I hardly know her.
I was at college when I met her. After I graduated I worked there for a while, and we moved in the same circles. She started out with a nickname and a wild reputation. I called her by the name her parents used. I never met them.
I am secretly pleased that my car is still stuck in the ice. I am happy for the chance to think as I walk to work.
Kiki and I spent a lot of time in the art studio. I methodically made lithographs in the evenings and would walk back across the bridge to Vauxhall Street. She had a prehensile lip, which fascinated me, and still does.
Perhaps it will be warmer tomorrow.
Yesterday we held the service of healing in the chapel, and it was quite lovely; not so plain as some years, but well attended by the lonely, the elderly, the sick and the sick at heart. I am none of those, except maybe the last; but I am numb and apathetic, I am tired and I am lost, and I admitted these things and was anointed and prayed over and I cried a little as we shared the Lord's Supper. There were sandwiches and cookies after.
Then, in the evening, I went to the other church, and my friend was so happy to see me she gave me a first-class hug, and we had a dinner that couldn't be beat, and then we went up to the parlor and watched The Nativity Story. I thought, I don't believe this, so why do I believe it? Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief. I drove home and it was just beginning to sleet.
When I got up in the morning there were several inches of snow on the ground. I had to get to the church and nothing had been plowed. Providentially, my car got stuck in the driveway and I had to walk, two miles in the dimness before dawn. It occurred to me that this would be a good time for God to talk to me and tell me what to do. He didn't.
I got a lift home after my day's work was done. I felt an impulse to call A, and we talked for an hour, and I was glad to hear her voice, and it was good.
Afterwards, I was just slipping into the bath with Somerset Maugham, or rather one of his books, the rascal, when the phone rang. It was my old friend B, and I had been trying to reach him without success for weeks, and I was glad. He is about to become a father for the first time, and is newly graduated from seminary and seeking a call, and we had a lot to talk about it. It was good to talk to him again.
Then
I opened the bottle of wine I was going to take to the party this
afternoon, the party that was cancelled, and I wrote this. Tomorrow
I will see if the car will get out of the driveway, and go through
the motions for another week, and think about the moments that have
pleased me. There are more of them than I deserve.
None of those fancy internets for me when I was a kid; we had a dictionary, an atlas and most of an encyclopedia in the house, and the youngest of them had passed its twentieth birthday. The atlas, in particular, fascinated me. It was sort of like a picture book but each page was densely populated with fine type, delicate lines hinting at topographical information, the states and nations in pale shades of blush and buff, and the rivers and seas in light blue like a summer sky. It was a glimpse into a bygone age, with Africa colored a by the hygienic uniformity of colonial rule, and Europe a dazzling patchwork of historical chaos.
The atlas was a book with a plot, and toward the back that plot reached its culmination with the United States. Wyoming didn't end it, for such a symphony requires not a coda but a crescendo; but a series of maps depicting the industrial, agricultural, natural and human transcendence of the American Empire. Last of all, the nation was shown threaded from sea to shining sea: a road map. Rail Road.
Each line, and there were a million of them, or nearly so, each line, I say, was crossed with tiny stitch marks, so that the land of plenty resembled nothing so much as an oblong Frankenstein's monster. In tiny type the line was identified, abbreviated just like on the boxcars; you could almost see the hobos waving as the train passed. The lines converged to several dense ganglia to the east, a few in the middle, and a couple minor ones to the west, but there was nowhere these lines didn't go. Little did I know that even as I pored over that page, I was reading at the obituary of an era. My dad got on a train every morning, and got off one every night, but soon he used a car instead. I took day trips on the Erie-Lackawanna, fine electric trains with wicker seats, but they scrapped those cars and became a money-suck called NJTransit, and the ticket booths closed and the stations became luncheonettes and coffee bars.
Still, across the ragged face of an aging monster, those little scars remain. And sometimes, at night, I hear that lonesome whistle blow.
