Proust in Raleigh

It is not widely known that Marcel Proust spent the war year of 1913 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Perhaps the place seemed - somewhat peculiar to him? So far as is known, the epically expansive writer and belletrist committed to paper not a single line describing his experiences there, or its unique functional ability to recapture some past or other. The feeling I have long-harbored in some backwater of my literary memory – relating to the fact that no Proust scholar or literary historian has ever made much of his passage there in the Carolina piedmont - is one of amazement. His genteel abode in Raleigh is well-known now, and it is a simple matter to imagine gracious teas on the veranda, caressed by the fragrances of jonquils and dogwoods.

You will forgive me for interrupting? Have you ever heard Victor Sangiorgio play Stravinsky’s Tango, For Piano? When you finish your Belgian waffle and café, you may wish to go into the Music Room and proceed to delight yourself immeasurably by playing the piece - on vinyl.

One might compile a list of painterly scenes from In Search of Lost Time that have never made their way onto film, foremost the Balbec beach scamp who both rudely and stylishly hopped over an old man in repose, and the following scene from Swann’s Way, as translated in turn by Scott Moncrieff and Lydia Davis.

“Marcel” has been matured by years of his close reading of what it felt like to realize he was becoming a writer, and by the eminent victory of Capital over Labor that had quite recently taken the form of the millions and millions of persons brought to death by the Great War. It is subsequent to these events that he is writing as if he were the boy subsumed into the electric zipzap that the scene describes, his marvelous conversion into the pure energy of ardor, self, and consciousness. (Predicate: Gilberte.) 3300 pages, over two thousand named characters. Have we not been too distracted by the author’s discovery that gender identity is merely one more means to rebuild emotional constructs in new and improved form?

Proust in Raleigh will have heard the trains at night. Night trains began their run in Philadelphia, and are on their way to the darkest pit of Minus-hell. Even as a neurasthenic who rarely left Oakwood, he will have remarked the black faces ubiquitous, and the midsummer humidity he can only have called opressif. Doubtless he had carried with him his habit of trying to retire to sleep shortly after sunrise. For a long time [in his life] he had a hard time falling asleep. There are thousands of oaks in Oakwood, Raleigh: massive botanical engines doing what they will with oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen and other sorts of chemistry and material ghosts. The long quiet period before dawn is the moistest hour, conducive of mental and emotional stillness, a sort of manufactory of sole-self-soul, as the undifferentiated mind plays its peaceable games with its own infinitely fecund memory-maker.

Far from Paris, he will have been able to suppose that I arrived in Raleigh in 1977, after my thirty years of lakes and hills Upstate. After Cazenovia and Skaneateles and Aurora and Cooperstown, we had not known so many houses could be made of red brick, or that the earth itself was sand and clay unbound. Peace and Person. In the late autumn, oak leaves accumulate and gather like oceanside sand dunes. Brown snowdrifts of leaves, so unlike the indiscriminate congregations of leaves in the Bois, which he cannot have failed to see. I often spent the night with my girlfriend, at her home across from the Oakwood Cemetery; a little brook formed the path of the side-winding street. I worked at Rex Hospital, then on Wade Avenue – I was doing my residency there in Pulmonology, or I was a parking lot attendant – and I had to be at work at 6 A.M. [My specialty was hemoptysis, which, crazily, ten years later I was to suffer halfway to easeful death; these rhythmic rhymes used to be known as “coincidences”; sometimes parking patrons would emerge from the hospital utterly wracked with weeping, in the first new moments of having been tortured by the devastation that they have lost their beloved spouse of forty years, or child of seven years of age, and we would charge them 35 cents an hour for the time they on our prized homeland had parked their car.] I rode my bicycle everywhere those years, and did not own a car until my third year in town. In the dripping darkness of the streetlamps, five o’clock in the morning, there was nothing so smooth as the sound of my bike tires on the pavement of the streets. Many writers have done very good jobs describing this darkling aura of gloomy otherness and charm, and it would probably be useful for you to look up some of these writings, to bathe in the wonderment of those delicious imageries. A quite-isolated yellow-bulb porch light beacons no ship or soul; these moments precede even the squirrels and the first cheepy birdies, and the aroma in which one swims as a fish in a pool, is devoid of automobile emissions, and deeply reminiscent. On an occasion or two, I would see a person walking silently on the sidewalks, and I could only presume the shadow was a colored maid or cook directing herself or himself toward some sleeping plutocrat’s kitchen; but even these other human forms (other than my own, which swooped and sailed on my Bianchi) seemed more a part of the dim scene than a reminder of the teeming mobs that would soon enough trample dear Raleigh with tens of thousands of feet of woe. The silence was curiously amplified by the awareness that a large number of nearby citizens were making no noise at all, and the hush lay on me as heavily as the dark, dark dew. It put me in mind of lush instrumentation or complex orchestration, DeBussyian or Chopinesque ­­­, though it was the silences in the nocturne that my placid heart was hearing; the gentle aubade, the serenade. If my admiring and still dreamy thoughts ventured anywhere idiomatic or unusual, it was not until I had rather enjoyed the process of the conventional observation in this setting, that the scene was mystical and magical, profoundly dear, certainly precious, and evocative of balmy reveries I may once have had waking in Clichy (Henry Miller’s Paris), riding my bicycle to Longchamps, and then dawdling on the Champs Élysées. The Raleigh pre-dawn was an essence of loneliness, cats must have been home and warm and asleep, and I was glad to be, for those few years, far from home.

Apparently, Walter Ralegh did not spell his name as did the city that was attributed to his local investment, and my Jewish girlfriend pronounced it “Rolly.” Thirty years later I can but treasure the mise en scene of Oakwood, and of and Peace and Person, where the lights of the Krispy Kreme suggested fresh coffee and murderously beautiful and dangerously delicious doughnuts, (and krullers too, though in that part of the South they are known as “madlins,” pronounced “mallenz” or [ˈmælənʒ]: etymology unknown and spurious, if such a thing is lexigraphically possible). The gleaming milieu shining like a lone star in the night’s obscurity also seemed to promise pastry-waitresses whose pink gossamer-rayon costumes implied breasts like those of Tess of the D’Ubervilles, or Sue in Jude the Obscure, and whose insouciance and coquetterie signified a plain, singularly Southern ravishability, the actual prospect of which, by definition, resided somewhere between likely and certain. Vance Bourjaily has a chapter in his novel Now Playing at Canterbury in which he imagines the meek Scott Fitzgerald attending one of his fiction seminars at the Writers’ Workshop. On the author’s behalf, Bourjaily experienced the oxymoronic conjunction of “excruciating cringing,” as the workshoppies flensed Fitzgerald’s short story, the chosen subject of that day’s ritual lynching. It was that sort of mortal shame I experienced on Peace and Person, feeling the warm flood of indignity and dishonor within me as I sat at the linoleumed doughnut bar with my coffee and kruller, realizing that I was unable to say even one word of non-risible seduction to the woman behind the counter, because I was – it can only have been too obvious - such a craven worm of a man. Anyway, I doubt she would have much enjoyed the itinerary I had been unable to propose, that wild and opulent six-week shipboard romance around the intriguing back alley bars of several Mediterranean ports of call.

The Cleveland Clinic

Several days were passed, late in November 2001, in the Cleveland Clinic. The duckdrop secret word of admittance, to the most esteemed cardiological Research Hospital in the world, was hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy, and the only means of exit from that Sao Paolo favela of inter-connected buildings, was a myectomy, a procedure that had before then been performed only two hundred times. That act was described by the chief surgeon (a graduate of the University of Rochester) as carving away muscle from the walls of the heart (as with a grapefruit spoon?) to permit cardiologic function to resume and life to be allowed, against forecasted expectations, to continue.

After the operation and the early stages of recovery, there is astonishment out of measure, and gratitude out of measure, and heightened appreciation, out of measure, for two particular miracles: one that survival has been assured, and two, Ohio’s sunlight on the dust motes behind the blinds has turned them into actual diamonds.

Then the subject goes home.

Just before that, a number of legally exculpatory tests are “run,” including the simple matter of a chest X-ray, which is carried out in the dim basement of the grand and palatial Cleveland Clinic, in Radiology, evidently too déclassé an activity for prominent space in a facility that routinely welcomes potentates from Oman and Robin Williams, or his like, to its four-star, adjoining hotel.

Opiate derivatives play their part; family members act queerly as if they were stoned; nurses and technicians appear and disappear like non-speaking actors in some commedia del arte farce, (O! farce it is!) and of course there is a confrontation with the food tray, which contains what must seem to be joyous gustatory delights, but turn out to be the tricksters’ outward manifestation of what are really archived, period-area Civil War biscuits. These particular distortions are but croutons in the large vague vichyssoise that is the soul’s helen kellering through such strange lands as faith, and flammable rivers, and the ceaseless and reckless vacillation between utter hopelessness and paroxysms of a grand guignol Humoresque. That is to say, pensee, or its leftovers.

My conventional, miserable personal habits of distressed familiarity seemed to have returned, as I was wheeled (I believe it was in a looping bi-plane) to Radiology. There, I realized that I was and had never really not been a desiccated sponge, as I was immersed in water and watched myself from within and from the outside burst into a blue ducky. All credit to the Clinic supervisors and policy-makers who must have been confronted with this issue and had decided for the side of right and justice, to permit the technician called WENDY to make her appearance as she would, (in fabulous contradistinction to the many dozens of desiccated sponges with whom I had been passing my time) with her black lipstick, white powdered face, and dangling piercings depending from the patches of skin just below the eyes, where later in life lesser sufferers often develop dark bags. I cannot trust myself to rightly describe the magnificent ocean sunrise she threw upon me, with her scintillating happy nature, dance-prancing around the room, and light laughter.

She asked: “Where are you from?”

I answered: “Aurora, New York.”

This town, apparently, permitted her to ask: “Do you mind if I sing?”

Mind? I don’t think I mind?

During the preparations for the procedures, and during the procedures, she replicated the sound of (it was not mere singing) Marianne Faithfull’s “As Tears Go By,” a song I had first heard in 1964 while driving through the Everglades. That audition was an early occasion of one of Virginia Woolf’s “moments of being” in which time and consciousness merge harmonically. (A person is limited to seven of these in a lifetime.) Another was hearing in an Iowa City record store in 1970, Joshua Rifkin playing Scott Joplin. Another was napping and then sleeping through the Met’s Pelleas and Melisande in 1978 in Raleigh, which is probably the only way to really understand Maeterlinck and DeBussy. Another was watching Paris and its environs pass by from the top floor of an RER car. You will have noticed that all of these epiphanic perceptions depend for their effect and focusing energy on juxtaposition, which is the bête noire I have for years been trying to eradicate from the structuralist interpretive folly of my ungrand, ununified undercooked half-theory. (Books are not life, but then, what is?) Prior to satire, juxtaposition was all men knew of comedy, and even now, in the twenty-first century, much of our work is perfecting our patience with those persons who prefer not to be dragged past 1726 (about when Swift published Gulliver’s Travels) and who actually can convince themselves that Falstaff and his heirs were doing something that was truly funny. If you must know, I walk around Ithaca in a state of almost perpetual annoyance due to the fact that here, in a college town, so many people teach and so many people believe that what some of the early Roman writers were up to was satire, which is wrong, wrong, wrong. Someday, somebody’s going to make a movie of Mrs. Dalloway that actually depicts what Virginia Stephen was thinking, with that long neck of hers and her kind-versus-pitying eyes. Relativism accounts for so little, really, don’t you think? The difference between atheism and anti-theism is important here, or at the least extremely helpful. Perhaps we can’t ask for more than that. Though demanding some final resting place, for our ashes or for our last flickering opinion, may be the single most useful expedient for determining when our homeland has been recovered. I had done what I could, by moving from city to city, and I had tried to call the attention of my fellow citizens to the trench battles of the First World War. I have worked in various mills, and trudged across the plains. I ate in Vicksburg, grits on a hot dog sausage. The belief settled upon me, finally, that I was going to ship out with both Ishmael and Herman Melville, and that in our little pica type of a lifeboat we were going to reach our homeland port, and there abide with our people. Two people, in my case: one of them was real and symbolic and has been described accurately (I have avoided the word ‘goth’ in reference to Wendy, but that may suit you better). And the other is presently finding that after the late Victorians and chasing precisions, playing Brubeck on the Steinway is her Crow’s Nest in Gloucester.

Mlle Vogdes advises me that her career as a lexicographer may result in our moving to Beijing for three to five years, where three hundred square feet of putrid air might contrast in the sharpest manner with, here, an acre of lush grass, raspberry bushes, a brook, saplings and oaks, and a pink-blossomed apple tree. If we do not move there - if that doesn’t happen - if that doesn’t eventuate - you will find me here until the end, where I started, near the lake and among the gorges and ravines of Ithaca, where nothing is out of context, and everything is in its original position.

Clarksdale, Ithaca, Geneseo

Sentiments rise with the sun and vanish with the moon, similar to the way in which a river port moors for a night or two boats which then float away. “They All Go,” wrote Randall Jarrell. But I am presently bound to the deepest sort of impression that the only two geographies in which I have ever felt naturally-born, are the lakes and hills of upstate New York, and the Mississippi Delta. Port Gibson was declared “the town too beautiful to burn” in the Civil War, but that might equally have applied to Greenville. (One day I must drive from Cayuga Lake to Cayuga, Mississippi – this would be straight through – in Mississippi via the Natchez Trace.) The Civil War made one million persons dead out of the thirty million who then lived in the United States (Ten million in today’s dollars.) The moneyed people in the North deceived and suborned those fellaheen with no hope to engage militantly with the fellaheen with no hope in the South on behalf of the Confederacy’s moneyed people. The latter fellows supplanted their having been reduced to beasts of burden and wage slaves before the war with the entirely factitious Homeric and Tennysonian ideals of the glory of perpetuating slavery by reason of melanin.

According to some sources, Shakespeare rusticated-within-disguise and spent several months in Virginia, where he wrote a play (extant) that he willed to have produced on the 400^th anniversary of his death date, (which is to say, 2016). It is little-known that Henry James spent the summer of 1912 in Vermont, reading Proust in manuscript, and a long kept secret was the fact that Matisse passed most of 1952 at the eminently vulgar Fountainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, which he pronounced the most pleasant place on earth. Dvorak summered in Spillville, Iowa. You may wish to look this up, too. Greenville, Mississippi is also known for its unraveling of statistical probability by salubriously hearthing an unusually large number of authors, among them Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, and Tennessee Williams (though the latter spent more time at the Cutrer Mansion in Clarksdale, also a soul’s balm village). Greenville, Port Gibson, Vicksburg, Clarksdale; (Bourbon, Rosedale, Anguilla, Le Tourneau, Roxie, Redwood, Satartia, Nitta Yuma, Panther Burn, Hushpuckena, Alligator, Dubbs, and Bobo). This trip I will take in a convertible Saab, dark green.

Twenty years after souls had been freed from Auschwitz, which is to say, twenty years after souls had turn to melting and sparkling radium-fire in Nagasaki, some of us had retreated from battle engagement, and, except for a few skirmishes in the outlands, encamped mid the dusty lawns and copses of the Genesee Valley – a place in which, incidentally, despite my four years of residence, I never learned the cardinal compass points or ever felt topographically at home. The year before we had daily gathered round the chuckwagon in a place called Mary Jemison (a white girl raised among the native people, not so uncommon an occasion, as it turns out) and the next year for rations we stumbled over the lawns toward Letchworth, named for the nearby river gape. We did not bear weapons or memory; a peacetime army declines to attend muster. There was much mystification, and it seemed that nothing was not seen as through an opaque veil. Near Geneseo, there was a small park near a wandering stream, where we gathered in period costumes for afternoon charivaris and stupidly, recklessly, and pointlessly rode bareback the wild horses of our innocent and incipient wills. A monument there remembered the ignoble passings of Boyd and Parker, scouts of General Washington’s murderous and genocidal Sullivan Expedition. We used to picnic there (Alice B. Toklas Brownies, LSD, vodka-spiked lemonade, and cheeseburgers), by the tree around which by their intestines were those soldiers tied, run in circles, and finally fileted.

Someone had stolen her umbrella one rainy day, and afterwards she left at the coat rack scene of that purloining a note of the most sophisticated kind of sarcasm, well before that literary form had been by forty years corrupted with writhing pain and literal tears. I had not known that one might use English to fling the very wryest imprecations into the darkness of undifferentiated malfeasance, and the feat amazed me. After two martinis I place myself before my computer’s keyboard and swing lassos, fling javelins, sail down ocean swells at thirty knots. When I do this, or when I sit for hours reading or writing, I have in mind the girl who left a note intended to provoke the emotional disruption of the umbrella thief. She was the same person, I later learned, I had been secretly espying every day, and by whom I was fatally intrigued. She would come and go on the gentle hillside of the Genesee Valley, and by her I confected (as one will) a transubstantiation involving meat wrappings and wispy daydreams. She occasionally wore flowered, colored-print stockings. I think they depicted orchids or magnolias, but now I see them as Charleston dogwoods, hothouse bougainvillaea, tropical dahlias, tormenting daffodils, calla lilies, red red peonies, pornographic oleander, jazz gardenias, fen hibiscus, titillating hyacinths, amatory fuchsia, and sweaty hydrangea. Or maybe lotus flowers. Eventually she and I married and lived in Ithaca, but that didn’t work out well. There, in the hills by the lake, the only topography of which I was aware, was the cold and mean moonscape that her dazzling luminosity had made of my heart.

prose fiction

In relative terms - and those are the only terms there are - New York City can very efficiently swamp a person’s innate sense of isolation and being at the center of all things perceived, by way of crowding crowds, refuse in the streets, and rackets, whether it is the last few months of the 1760s or the last few months of the 1860s or the last few months of the 1960s. Arthur Polk was a contemplative man, who, though but a function in an office space behind a back office on Wall Street, felt that he might have actually, beneath it all, been aspiring, in twilight hours or when dead asleep, to better things. Arthur did not know if the medium of these things was artistic, or religious, or in some undesignated way metamystical, but he allowed himself to feel fairly certain that it was in that general vicinity of the process that mingles the restless heart and the wandering mind without regard to lucre.

Several misfortunes constellated upon, or around, or above, or within him one humid August Wednesday afternoon, among them an inevitable but nonetheless stomach-dropping amatory collapse, his insight that his manager, Simon Legree, would for many years to come retard Arthur’s any advancement in the firm, and a certain vague presentiment of broadly generalized, and lethal, hopeless desperation. These tribulations in very short order had built themselves into a vision of what he could only assume would be the signal catastrophe of his entire lived-out life. He had then, in that obscure state of numb intoxication, barely known what was the reason he fetched from beneath his cot the rucksack that had gone entirely unused since he had departed Richmond, Virginia for New York City four years before, and that four years before that, wandering the Blue Ridge Mountains, had delivered to him what he did not know then were to be his last feelings of exultation and true Arthurness. Into the pack he placed implements of personal hygiene, a book, and stuffs of clothing. He wore canvas-and-leather shoes, and these he rode north like a hawk on a zephyr, hard by the Hudson. As the moon began to rise and the sun began to set, he glimpsed behind him the physical location of the grand bubbling hub of the New York political and neighborhood jurisdictions, and ahead of him his eyes and blood and heart embraced several million trees.

In a way, his goal was Port Oswego, on the southern shore of Lake Ontario, for there his dear sister had gone to reside as the superintendent of an orphanage. Arthur presumed that his skill at living off the land was off-form, and that a week or ten days of forage and sleeping in hayricks or on piles of grass would tire him onto vexatious exhaustion, and repose with Sister Sissy was bound to be necessary. He foresaw there staring out at the watery horizon towards where Canada lay, and confecting out of the free blown clouds, the useful plots and rollicks that would compose the next spell of his life.

This walk then, this pilgrimage, was a time for foraging in the wide open spaces of his mind and soul, for personally clarifying the messes he disliked calling values, and on the first three days following streams and hollows into the Catskills, as a tethered bird freed, he daydreamed riotously, becoming dizzy with liberty and drunk on chlorophyll. The widest expanses of possibility and self raged and sang, the sun and stars above offered him the keys to the Arthurian kingdom and realm. This reign, he realized, was mapped out as the whole State of New York.

Across the meadows, brambling through the woodstands, hopping little chops of creeks. Before he had decided for himself conclusively that it was a broad and penetrating sound, the force that lay itself upon him like a fog, and wrapped him in a subtle counterpane of the most delicate form of pressure, had put him in mind of something from the city. So vague - it might have been an aroma; the highly sensitive taste buds at the tip of his tongue, and some technically imperceptible sway of the follicles. If he was not mistaken, the topsoil and the leaves of yesteryear were conveying to some of his internal nerves, a distant disturbance, one that might have resembled a thousand Apache hooves gathering far out of hearing.

And so he paused for contemplation and consideration, perhaps too aware that he hadna time for such conditional reveries in the city, where moving hurriedly from spot to spot was compelled by gritty white men unknown. South of the city of New York, there is a beach that looks out over the ocean, and on Sundays men and women and children made weary and mean by Capital’s cheese-grating of Labor, imagine that the long horizon of the sea has in some way caused them to elude their mortal fate as dust. If a person possesses a fabulous and monumental courage, or idiopathic recklessness, or has fallen under the swoon of opium or the sort of nervous mad herding that impelled the characters of the monstrous dying called the Children’s Crusade (1212 AD, legendary version), he may as Polk, eschevvie himself to that plage, and Wednesday noontime sink into the warm sun’s sleep of distant dreaming make-believe. Of such a mind Arthur now partook, assaying the distant clues of that impression, and that weakened force of substance he had not yet been able to identify.

Polk slept. Dusk was coming, and he believed that he would not spend the night in this copse. He rose himself and gathered his leather shoulder satchel, and pulled his felt cap around hard down his ears and brows, and would leave the distant bass drums behind, forever a movement of beef hooves or slipping of techtonic plates, or perhaps the overflowing of a far river ‘pon a swamp unknown. Had it been starlings to make this thrush of beating noise, he reckoned that there would have had to be two million wings.

Hardtack is made by bakers accidentally, in the course of their daily toil, and in the city he often had fairly sustained himself on the giveaways breadman Pieta left inside a vase for his seizing and a fashion of delectation. A last obdurate biscuit warmed in his closed palm, and sweat and creekwater in a cup made for him the repast that would carry him quite cheerfully to sunrise, to a robin’s egg, perhaps, or – these events were not uncommon – a egg of a chicken.

He located blackberries, and thought his path through clamor and woe had been finally justified, when his lips made a little skipping into a smile as he recognized the “wild cherries.”

When Polk crested a certain hilltop, leaving behind him the queer distant tumult became impossible, as he placed in the fixed point of his internal compass’ walking track for a very distant horizon, what he should have called the source of the afternoon’s gentle obscurity. It was a cloud of dust he saw, half-lit in resolution, half-banked ‘gainst rainclouds, but it could portend nothing else but a community of persons, of an unprecedented scale for such sylvan vales and pasture fields as these.

The most efficacious objective correlative for depicting the will-crushed aftermath of those persons surviving the Civil War remains the scene of the straggle of worn and tattered soldiers broken apart from and trailing a group that may have formed to head back together horseless to their hometown. These soldiers of woe were often either exhausted from despoliation or injury, or so mentally advanced onto ruination, that all that remained of their conscious mind was the half-ability to drag along behind the path of their fellows. Upon such Polk came: the dusty and the muddy, ill-shod for earth mid the wildlife, and arrived too late for the whole playing of the bands. And when eighteen souls in pairs or small groups had grown into fifty or more of what he realized were now not soldiers but variegated mountebanks on their way to some strangeness-jamboree or fiesta (Morris Dancers, maybe?) Polk realized consequentially and simultaneously that exactly half these col porteurs were women; girls, rather.

In an act of quite unusual independence, Mary had followed Polk to New York from Richmond, and though they had taken separate rooms, and she had found a position serving food in a middle-earth establishment in the Bowerij, off Houston Street, she was as attached to him as an electron. Her devotion and attraction to Polk were quite conventional, and in a nervous, religious way she had concluded that she just couldn’t live without him, but as the days turned into weeks turned into months turned into years, she began to achieve relations with certain of the people who are correctly and habitually best described as “denizens”; relations that shifted like the seasons themselves truly past the joshing where it had naturally begun towards the affectionate and strangely mutually-dependent, she had found it necessary from a heathen and dark, yet humane place within her, to succor tramps and brothel workers with hours of port or sherry by a candle in the darkest corner of her rooms off Houston Street. And these relations drew the pale of the Ephysians down upon anything in Polk that she might have thought he had there to give. These fondnesses and succursuses for the bowered bums evolved into intimacies which neither frightened nor surprised her, in ways no magic of her mind may have before conceived, and thus made confident by being for the first time in her life a “natural,” (than which there is in most estimations no grander soaring of the blood) she gripped to her midnight-to-dawn hours with the falling angels, noticing but not troubled by the realization that her representative communion by way of her friends’ customs had become for her juice and kef, more properly perceived as alcoholism and opiate-addiction. Her relief was also free, and she pictured and much-loved herself as an otter hoopling through the thickets and brambles of Richmond, but gliding and slithering into the ponds of New York and swimming gracefully and silently out of sight.

Otherwise was it seen by Arthur Polk, whose imagination in the stars of his dreaming bore more than similar traces to his culture’s general approval of piety and churchy decency. But this difference of opinion about Mary’s habit (and expressions of this were sometimes convivial and concupiscent) had not occurred to him for two years, that is, until he one day espied an exchange of greasy bills between her and a friend he otherwise had occasion to know was a trollop-for-hire. Thereafter the gulf between them was broadened by suspicion and doubt, daily, until in wrenching and grievous pain, in his jaws and brain he burst in exasperation, as she dispassionately and coolly said the equivalent of “Okay then, well, take care of yourself, Arthur” turned away and found his visage and patterns of behavior wholly vanquished and, apparently forever, vacated from her mind.

It then took but the slightest looking-away during what had been conversation for Legree’s detachment to mirror the whole of Polk’s life in its future as barren and misguided, and the woes and griefs of any aspiration Arthur ever may have had, to gape out before and below him like the Grand Canyon he had never known towards which he had been walking. He relived this now in the darkling woods and fields of straw, and remembered that he had gathered his roughened-up valise in a sort of stupor, and had found himself four days awalk toward Lake Ontario, nearing Iroquois rivers and longhouses. His mind was racing with peace, if there is such a thing.

The faces of the road-girls glowed, mostly with sweat, and their countenances were brightening as they all together approached the din, which coalesced into what he finally recognized were tunes, each note of which was transfigured as through a bolt of lightning. As he topped a hillock he looked down upon the impossible, an encampment of legions; a pungency of smoking campfires; an harmonic sway waved across the headtops as over a field of grain. For Polk, apperception existed out of time, as it will indeed tend to do in catastrophic and instantaneous events, the exhilaration of sexual deliverance, and supernatural revelation. His arms stretched out into an open geometry of salutation and the relief aspects of discharge, opening as to commit ingestion.

Yet his head felt cleaved by that lightning, and unsensed by the thunder, and a moment of illumination receded as a pinprick of Venus at dawn. It was raining. He was, he realized, in a happy state of mind; and then his feet recommenced their familiar gait, and near the edges of the swarm he picked a jagged route across, until he slipped into the woods and, never looking back, let, behind him, the babel groan its peaceful way into the arms of its mother.

During that night, he might have said that he had dreamed about the large boulders and rocks on the southern shore of Lake Ontario, for he knew that sunsets there behaved in a way he had not known in the countryside around Richmond, or in the angled shades of the city of New York, with its tall buildings and smudge fires from the many rooftop coalstove-like modern devices. Rays came from the sinister side, the western expanse of gathering evening clouds, and something in this obliquity made the environment of dream feel like home at last gained. In two days time he broached across the salt flats outside Syracuse, and the next day’s traverse of drumlin and dale showed before him the lakeside browns of the village by which his sister had grown bored, but whose people had come to know her as among the core solids of the mass.

Four years of supporting finance in the hubbub had unfit him for the wood mill into which he slipped as a junior sawyer, yet even this much seeing and feeling filled him with as much inspiration as fatigue. September and October in a hovel seemed like grace, and though he would take a room at the inn for the maelstroms of snow time, the setting of the whole removed him from the unrest of the metropolis hard by the ocean and the Hudson River. It was, by contrast, another figure that roused him to the keenest peek, and he formed in his mind the conceit, if conceit it was, that it appeared to him that everyone in this town rode a horse. Polk in tremens saw the sloughing off of his skins of memory, and a book of history he had picked up seemed to suggest to him that the concept of the Renaissance may have felt tangible even to those who were experiencing it; and it was rather precisely this fashion that permitted nations of persons to imagine that persons had at about the same time briefly inhabited the moon above, in its cold, singular, and only-imagined majesty. Souls in a massive boogie, rustling the very air above them into sweeps and clouds of motion and harmony, emerged in his vision as he graded wood and ate venison jerky, as he crawled out of a burrow to greet the innkeeper’s raven-haired daughter with the most timid of futile chirps and cheeps. Around his memory of his tramping exodus, a glow of golden vibration had formed, which included a mighty chorus of approval and participation; and for the accident of egress he had developed the gratitude and fondness one might have for a departed benefactor’s unexpectedly generous testamentary bequeathment. It would even have been presumed that he was astonished by his own genial fellowship inside tavern windows that lit a patch of the ice and cold and black, black street out of doors.

In this town thereafter, he married, he fathered, he died, still a quite young man. If those who in peace and darling sweetness would have taken the measure of his soul’s passage, and could both reweave the carpet and see the figure in the design, and even beyond that play back the internal voice of his transcriptive and narrating inner recitation, they would revisit another day a year or two on, when he sat by the shore, and realized that he had heard sprechen between the swells of those cacophonous melodies in the meadow of clamor, and that a caller had been leading the people in a vast folk dance, a vernacular waltz of communion, and that the caller’s rasp had signaled a yasgur. By this iteration clarified, Polk would have been unfazed, for he knew of Iago’s brother Iazgu, nothing.

Reep

Mark Reep: art and writing, here

Some years ago I spent a long, hot, blue day sailing on Cayuga Lake with a new friend. After taking the measure of the loveliness of the lake and after adjusting our perspective to the horizon and the line of hilltops, and after the third beer and second sandwich extracted from the icebox, we found that we didn’t really have that much in common, and our conversation slipped into argumentation, which was then, as now, his chief dialectic, and which was then, the act I performed, or found myself performing, when I realized that the person with whom I was speaking was just too easily assuming that he was going to be able to get the better of me; in his opinion, in all matters.
I will always maintain that he is a good man, if for no other reason than having a son with a woman eighteen years older than he, and seeing that child through to college, another eighteen years after the parental relationship had foundered. Stout fellow! But his idea of proving his point (he worked in Cuban sugar cane fields in the 1980s, and formed cells of radicals all over central New York State whose worked hovered just below militant vandalism) consisted in the main of shrieking: “You mean you don’t think America is also a dictatorship?” In return, I would begin to analyze by means of spurious accusations, aloud and somewhat belligerently, that his motives in all his activism lay in Freudian sumps within himself, remarks that preceded, for both of us, those long minutes of silent brooding and painfully trying to eke out the killer retort.
There are those who will say that sailing washes away all sins.
The boat cut long reaches and vectors up and down the lake. One napped, the other reclined desultorily at the tiller.
The sun began its fall toward the western horizon, and we pointed the bow toward our port, as the wind began to fall.
Now there was less splash against the hull, and no fluttering of the mainsail. We dropped the jib.
I have always found it difficult to explain the tenderness inherent in rapprochement, as it seems to be one of those inflections of the human will that is sustained by the natural goodness of people who are not naturally cruel, or invidious, and who are through no credit of their own, the fruits of cultures that have settled around the very pole of benignity (after eons of anguish and rage). Perhaps Vincent and I merely thought that we did not care to witness the trashing of our acquaintance without further, more conclusive evidence of antipathy. Though it came to nothing and we met only one or two times more, the last hour of our conversation was an odd thing: constructive.
We worked together, in language and by fair trade, to conclude that it is a beneficial strategy to adhere to a salty execration of those persons with whom we disagreed, and never forgive them their trespasses, though under normal conditions they could blithely get away with all kinds of shit, uncontested. The corollary of this was that we excuse ourselves from meeting standards to which we hold others accountable, and it is in this way that I graft myself as stripling to sapling, to the idea that there is only one cardinal rule about good writing, and there is nothing I can do within my soul that will ever allow me to approximate that imperative.
Vincent and I declared that we would rather be certain (and badly-behaved), than polite (and pusillanimous).
Somerset Maugham famously remarked that there are only three rules to writing a novel, but nobody knows what they are. I have misunderstood this for forty-five years, for what he was really saying was that there are three rules; there are exactly three; and whatever they are, there is not one less or one more than three.

Cit: Good writing has lucidity, force, and ease. (Edmund Wilson, upstate New Yorker.)

With which compare: The rich, euphuistic satire by which sentences resemble brambles tying knots in brambles (this, is my pond).

We matured out of the time we realized we were of the language, or literary, or the bookish sort, into those who formed opinions to wield against feeling vanquished in nowheresville. With brutish book reviewers and literary critics like me I would board a sailing ship and hound white whales, but I don’t believe I’d share toast and jam with those of whom I am egregiously suspicious, those who offer comment on prose fictions without mentioning their own stakes. Reviews are about reviewers.

Nor was I born to kingly manners, or to play left at Wrigley. By character and habit I gathereth hordes and embrace mosaic stars. I choose environments in which there are fugues and flourishes, a thousand miles on the road, and thunderstorms.

Mark Reep makes constructs. Prose gem-boxes, by which I mean to commend them at the highest order. Conventions of elegant structure are acquitted purely (the selection of detail is unexpected and wise; the energy form is like breeze on pond; basic verities sculpt one another in a candy bowl) but these are the least of his accomplishments. A reader is granted access by detecting in her or his soul the sound of natural language, and before we deform English with artifice, its conveyance in our heart runs alongside a panther in the sunshine, and it is transparent, and it has the suppleness of a dancer, and no element of it is hard-driven or ridden, bandied or bopped: hence, lucidity, force and ease. The heart beats the rhythm of illumination; equivocation falls away, and we take this stuff personally.
Intelligibility is not a value any more than paraphrasability, or the knack of reducing an episode of “I Love Lucy” to fifteen words for TV Guide. The single point of access to Mark’s vignettes lives in the shadows, the spaces between the landmarks. It is there our sentiments of memory and association can thrive, not limited to but enhanced along the self-evident axis of the story line. His is the aesthetic of the glimpse. Ezra Pound’s haiku, “In a Station of the Metro”

The apparition of these faces,
Petals on a wet black bough

may tell you more about the Paris underground railway in 1912 than any extensive transliteration. In a sense, Reep’s prose is imagist in nature, but instead of being divorced from journalistic scene descriptions, it actually thrives in stories that can be elucidated by those with a pure grasp of expository prose. There’s a great trick in this, almost as if the author is asking you to look at horizontal and vertical black and white patterns, yet see with your inner heart’s eye, the colors and textures that are implied within. There is quite a long history of trusting the sensibility of the artist to reveal truth within, that may rest apart from intention, if intent was ever there in the first place. Mary Shelley, writing Frankenstein, knew she was plumbing aspects of the soul that no one could rightly understand until Freud and Jung and Marx came along to provide their coherent explications, and in the early 1960s Dylan told Baez he didn’t know what this shit means [his lyrics] but eventually somebody would figure it out. Nothing is so mysterious as the plain truth directly stated.
And so again the contradiction, aptly expressed by His Grouchoness, declining acceptance by standards that would embrace himself: this imagist writing defies the deconstruction literary theory with which I fuck the stars, and presents instead, without the bramble pits in which I tangle, the point of the exercise, which I will call for the moment, time-travel. Maybe a horse dies, maybe a girl drives a car, but a reader will have taken himself or herself to a place he or she may seem to have remembered, to a place that exists only in their deepest self-actualization: in their hands the gift of being able to understand yes, or to be able to understand no, the sensitivities that one writer has offered. The clarity of the truth (perception and expression inextricably one, and kind-hearted) should not be obscured by limpidity of prose, though that too has a value with which one may confront the rabble of crowds. The residing place of the works’ sensibility is in our assumption that a magnetic resonance imaging machine would reveal in the prose elements of kindness, and a sympathetic heart, without which it could not exist. With which compare the black evil beast of Paul Auster, for whom storyline alone is assumed to be enough to capture a walnut he has found and wishes to place in our (obeisant, obsequious) hand. Reep’s prose pieces convey so much more from the underwater: fishes, kelp beds, currents, and other evidence that craftsmanship here means what it did for many artisans in the 16th Century: this axe is meant to last my lifetime, and contains everything I know about form, expression, and function. This woodsman’s mentor is here, his wisdom and something that came to be known in later centuries as pride, a sentiment of which he had no knowledge at all. This axe was to be complete, and it could be nothing less than comprehensive; that is, it was rich with the inferences associated with his deepest memory of learning axecraft from men who had in turn derived the skill of axe-making from generations before. The Modern Age taught men shortcuts, and firms and companies and consortiums and rafts of wage-slaves made axes that barely eked themselves inside the definition, and the appearance of axehood was all that was required (hence Auster).
I happen to live in the satire of euphuistic embroidery, but what I admire more truly, is the Wilsonian prose Reep writes. Lucidity reveals the generous soul within, as well as the more fundamental truth behind the storyline; it also divulges the essential goodness of a writer who is making a gentle offering of a peek inside the Grail cup rather than scurrying legions of comedians around a picnic table. Force bespeaks the sinuous, natural beauty of a ballet dancer or a second baseman, for whom excessive movements or contemplation create only falls and outs. Ease is the vibrating tone that rhymes a true story with the beneficent hum of natural, human and stellar harmonics.