"Fuell to their Fire": On the Santa Fe Doctor Atomic

I.

I never stoop'd so low, as they
Which on an eye, cheek, lip, can prey ;
Seldom to them which soar no higher
Than virtue, or the mind to admire.
For sense and understanding may
Know what gives fuell to their fire ;

I dreamed I was at the center of the crucifixion. I dreamed I was at the center of the crucifixion, a secular crucifixion upon which hung all of humanity, in the crosshairs of time. I dreamed I was at the cross hairs of the end of time. I dreamed I was at the cross hairs of the end of time that would not end as it ended, as it ended, as it continued to end, as it approached midnight, as it approached two minutes to midnight and continued to ever, to never, not arrive, in an endless non-concluding, in an endless stretching toward the ever-approaching, the infinitely-receding event horizon of midnight. I dreamed.

John Adams' Doctor Atomic begins with--as in his other two great operas on contemporaneity, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer--the chorus, singing and commenting, singing as commenting. This time, however, the chorus only arises after a long series of electronic vibrations, like painfully amplified giant insects menacing your ear, and statics, cracklings, hums, chuggings--a plane floats across the sky of your mind--and pops; a 40s pop tune flashing into phase then out again, as though Doctor Frankenstein were falling, flailing, through a storm of time as though he were Dorothy in the cyclone, watching wonders and nightmares go by, and wonder turning into nightmare; a symphonic pulse of dread erases all of that, and the kettle drum bangs out a pulse of time within that larger pulse, and within a tense shimmer of sound the chorus sings a scientific Credo, feel free to insert "We dreamed," wherever you see, "We believed":

We believed that
'Matter can be neither
created nor destroyed
but only altered in form.'
We believed that
'Energy can be neither
created nor destroyed
but only altered in form.'
But now we know
That energy
may become matter,
and now we know that
matter may become energy

I went to the New York premiere of Doctor Atomic, John Adams and Peter Sellars' opera about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the atomic bomb, at The Metropolitan Opera in 2008. I did not enjoy it.

The Met, ever too careful, hired someone else to direct it besides the only choice, which to my mind was Peter Sellars, the librettist and original director. Sellars was not to direct an opera there until the Met finally and quite dilatorily allowed Adams' Nixon in China to play there in 2011--so long after playing its NYC premiere, just across the East River, at BAM, in 1987--with the British soprano, Janis Kelly, singing Pat Nixon, and absolutely killing it.

I went to the New York premiere of Doctor Atomic at The Metropolitan Opera. I did not enjoy it. But my friend, Dan, said--Dan, who also went to see it with his partner, now husband, Luke, both of whom enjoyed it more than I did--Dan said, at the time, being, with Luke, a veteran of the Santa Fe Opera, having lived in Santa Fe for several years before moving to New York, Dan said that Santa Fe absolutely had to do Doctor Atomic there, because Los Alamos--where Luke's father had worked--was not only nearby, but is visible, always visible, through the back of the outdoor Santa Fe opera house. The pull of the place and one of the world's great opera houses surely could not be denied for long.

The three of us had left New York, when word came that the Santa Fe Opera would indeed be performing Doctor Atomic this summer, and we vowed we would go. And go we did. With our friend, Joe.

Go we did. And see it we did, on Thursday, 2 August 2018.

You must understand. The locus was a thing unto itself. The place was the thing. The place was the thing unto a vision of the thing that the thing was about. Let me try again.

The place had a view upon the thing and the view made of the place the thing itself. The thing, the occurrence, which is the, was the, thing was actually some forty-five minutes away by car, but the place of the planning of the thing, was within view of the place of performance, and that city of suicides, that place of planning, which was in direct view, its lights twinkling in the distance, in the background of the performance of the opera house, which was, which is, the twinkling distance of every performance at the opera house, is Los Alamos. And while the Trinity Site, the place called Ground Zero, is some hours beyond that town of planning, science, radiation, poison, chromium, pollution, and suicides, since all metaphor and simile are only a species of metonym, each place, the place of planning in view of the place of opera, and vice versa, and the unseen place of testing, the unseen place of explosion, of sea glass in the desert, of unknowable, unpredictable, unkind winds, and all the places downwind from that place, metonymically collapse into the same place. When you are watching Doctor Atomic at the Santa Fe Opera House, you are in many ways more than one, in Los Alamos, at Ground Zero, and every place that was ever downwind or water from that thought, from that bright, brilliant, deadly, human idea. Its hell-bright flash will light up your mind and leave only your shadow behind on the wall, just near, where you no longer stood. Isn't that an odd sentence. Time is confusing--time is confused--in the nuclear age. Space is, too. Time-space. Space-time.


II.

My love, though silly, is more brave ;
For may I miss, whene'er I crave,
If I know yet what I would have.

I dreamed I was at the center of the crucifixion. I dreamed I was at the crosshairs of time. Four women, dressed in the colors of bloods, of bruises, or of sunsets, or of explosions, danced throughout my dream. I took them to be the four cardinal points, or, more likely, the winds that blow cardinally from those places, incarnated, incarnadined, reddened by the future, by time, weighted and exploded and bloodied; watching, pulling near, regularly, their arms enfolding each other, facing each other, and then floating away, and spinning and dancing and watching. Because, you see, the winds and the weather, were key to that night, when we exploded the first atomic bomb.

Watching them, I could only think of Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, itself a meditation on Klee's famous painting, that might be as famous as it has become because of Benjamin's words on this funny scroll-haired figure, an image Benjamin owned, but is now in the collection of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Benjamin writes in what we call in English his Theses on History:

Es gibt ein Bild von Klee, das Angelus Novus heißt. Ein Engel ist darauf dargestellt, der aussieht, als wäre er im Begriff, sich von etwas zu entfernen, worauf er starrt. Seine Augen sind aufgerissen, sein Mund steht offen und seine Flügel sind ausgespannt. Der Engel der Geschichte muß so aussehen. Er hat das Antlitz der Vergangenheit zugewendet. Wo eine Kette von Begebenheiten vor uns erscheint, da sieht er eine einzige Katastrophe, die unablässig Trümmer auf Trümmer häuft und sie ihm vor die Füße schleudert. Er möchte wohl verweilen, die Toten wecken und das Zerschlagene zusammenfügen. Aber ein Sturm weht vom Paradiese her, der sich in seinen Flügeln verfangen hat und so stark ist, daß der Engel sie nicht mehr schließen kann. Dieser Sturm treibt ihn unaufhaltsam in die Zukunft, der er den Rücken kehrt, während der Trümmerhaufen vor ihm zum Himmel wächst. Das, was wir den Fortschritt nennen, ist dieser Sturm.

There is a picture by Klee, called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there that looks like it is about to move away from something it is staring at. Its eyes are wide open, its mouth is open, and its wings are open. The Angel of History must look like this. It has turned its face to the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, it sees a single catastrophe, which constantly piled up rubble on rubble and threw it at its feet. It would like to linger, wake the dead, and put together the broken one. But a storm blows from Paradise, which has caught in its wings and is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives it inexorably into the future, to which it turns its back, while the heap of rubble in front of it grows to heaven. What we call progress is this storm. [Translation, mine]

I have always found it difficult to interpret this image and square it with Benjamin's description, ever since I first saw it some twenty-nine years ago. It is a perverse image, is it not? A strange smile plays on the lips of this creature, this creation of God. But what Walter Benjamin has to say of this image, and its relationship to that hoary, hopeful, misplaced optimism we call "Progress," has, I feel, everything to do with the storm unleased upon the stage and the planet by Doctor Atomic, Doctor Faustus, Doctor Frankenstein, Doctor Einstein, Doctor Bohr, and Doctor Oppenheimer. But it is the winds of Progress about which I would like to speak.

III.

If that be simply perfectest,
Which can by no way be express'd
But negatives, my love is so.

Luke, Joe, and I ducked into a talk given by Peter Sellars before the opera began. He spoke of a few things. He spoke of how General Groves refused to listen to the meteorological group of the Project--in a certain manner of speaking, the heroes of the piece--who said that the winds were so erratic, on that night of the explosion of the first atomic bomb, that it could not be predicted whether they would blow in a safe direction away from the blast site, or toward populated regions of New Mexico. Not just toward the lands of native peoples--who were not considered, of course, negligible, but less than negligible--but toward towns and cities where white people lived. The general decided it was worth it to take the chance, and so, as it came to pass, the winds did blow in such a direction that many cities and towns, many, many individuals were exposed to the fallout from the first atomic explosion. They are known now, as the "downwinders," and Groves' decision had devastating consequences from the people living then, and their children, and their grandchildren, such that some of them are working through their third or fourth cancers. Making such a local production at Santa Fe, Sellars insured that when the character of Groves makes that decision in the opera, he is surrounded by wounded downwinders and the children and grandchildren of downwinders, onstage.

Before the opera began, Luke and I, thirsty after a pre-performance talk and the task of finding our seats noted both the impending start time of the opera and the gathering of clouds not just on the horizon, but closer, still, decided to make a last ditch run for the bar, as winds began to buffet the house, open as it is to the air on three sides. The wind and the rain parted our hair on the other side as we made our way to the house right plaza and bar at the Santa Fe Opera House, which had suddenly become a drama of its own. I thought, as we stood in the short line, to order a drink, the ill-named, "Manhattan Project" Manhattan, of the time, for which I wasn't present--this being my first time to this house--when Luke and Dan witnessed, because of an atmospheric effect, a storm, a swarm of bats flooding the air inside the house, at a key moment during the statue sequence of Don Giovonni. What we were about to experience was nothing so simple and beautiful as that moment.

As we, literally, ran back to our seats, our hair, now, being parterd on the other, other side, the wind and the rain picked up and continued, as we took our seats. It increased as the opera began, and for at least half of the first act, the rain, the lightning, and thunder, truly, dramatized itself across the landscape around us, and onto the stage. At one point, we could see stagehands sweeping the pools of rain off the back of the stage, to the extraordinary, the frightening flashing of lightning on both sides. The wind kicked the spray of the water everywhere, till I could feel droplets upon my face. We couldn't even hear the singers on stage anymore and had to truly resort to the untercaptions on the backs of the seats in front of us. It was glorious! And in my mind's ear, I could hear Peter Sellars cackling madly through all of it, as nature proved the opera's point, first-hand.


IV.

To all, which all love, I say no.
If any who deciphers best,
What we know not ourselves can know,
Let him teach me that nothing. This
As yet my ease and comfort is,
Though I speed not, I cannot miss.

The last aria of the first act--yes, in showbiz terms, the first act closer!--gives us Oppenheimer, immediately after some strange, comic business between him and General Groves about Groves' diet, is an aria that pulls Oppenheimer out of time. The time is out of joint in Doctor Atomic, throughout. And the real Oppenheimer was enthusiastic about his creation, up to, including, and after his famous realization at the bomb's explosion, straight out of Spiritus Mundi, straight from the Gita, that he had become Destroyer of Worlds:

I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

Personally, I have not had the privilege--or the doom--of thinking that. But as the blood of the bomb flows in both directions, as the realization, momentary, and thrilling, though it may have been at the time of his sighting of the horrible fireball of the Trinity Project, is yet to happen in this opera, and in this opera, will never happen, because it ends precisely before its detonation, Adams and Sellars give us, at the end of act one, a suddenly shattered Oppenheimer, as though suddenly possessed by his future self--remember, Doctor Frankenstein is falling through time, like the Angel of History--his future self, the self seen, for example, in Heinar Kipphardt's In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer, the original documentary drama of the atomic age, a drama which uses only the actual words spoken by the actual people. In Adams and Sellars' conception, Oppenheimer suddenly sings the most difficult, beautiful, sexy, and exciting of John Donne's Holy Sonnets, the very poem, which, though it never uses the word "trinity" was a favorite poem of the highly literate J. Robert Oppenheimer, and was the source for his specific name for his project, The Trinity Project. Oppenheimer's enormous hubris and unconscious ambivalence about the project is writ large in every line of this maddening, disturbing poem, in which the speaker tells his Lord, in a series of extraordinary contradictions, reversals, and paradoxes, that he never can be free without His enthrallment, nor ever chaste, without His ravishing--His raping--him. It is all--and yet it is also the not all, pas-tout--sex and eroticism and violence and ambiguity and sorrow. This is how we end act one.

(Text taken from John Donne's Holy Sonnet )
Batter my heart,
three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knock, breathe, knock,
breathe, knock, breathe
Shine, and seek to mend;
Batter my heart, three person'd God;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow
me, and bend
your force, to break,
blow, break, blow,
break, blow burn
and make me new.
Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knock, breathe, knock,
breathe, knock, breathe
Shine, and seek to mend;
Batter my heart, three person'd God;
That I may rise, and stand,
o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break,
blow, break, blow, break,
blow burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt town, to another due,
Labor to'admit you, but oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in me,
me should defend, but is captiv'd,
and proves weak or untrue,
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain
But am betroth'd unto your enemy,
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

It is worth seeing Sellars' first conception of this great aria, with the very expressive, wonderful tenor, Gerald Finley, creating the role. I call it the "film noir" version of Doctor Atomic, with fedoras, and mysteries: the femme fatale is the bomb itself, as we see here, with Oppenheimer's ambivalence. The subtitles are in Dutch.

It is not apropos of nothing, but apropos of nothing, it is worth hearing Adams' other setting of Donne, Negative Love.

I never stoop'd so low, as they
Which on an eye, cheeke, lip, can prey,
Seldom to them, which soare no higher
Than vertue or the minde to'admire,
For sense, and understanding may
Know, what gives fuell to their fire:
My love, though silly, is more brave,
For may I misse, when ere I crave,
If I know yet, what I would have.

If that be simply perfectest
Which can by no way be exprest
But Negatives, my love is so.
To All, which all love, I say no.
If any who deciphers best,
What we know not, our selves, can know,
Let him teach mee that nothing; This
As yet my ease, and comfort is,
Though I speed not, I cannot misse.

V.

On July 16, 1945 near Alamagordo, New Mexico at the "Trinity Site," the United States detonated an 18.6 kiloton bomb. The amount of energy released was equivalent to the conversion of 0.9 gram of matter into energy. One gram is roughly the mass of a standard paperclip.

Truman learned after Nagasaki that Hiroshima was not just a military target--he had been told that it was a military base, not a city teeming with civilians (nor, I am sure, that a POW camp, with American soldiers living in it, was nearby and also destroyed by the atomic blast)--and that a third target was planned. He was so angry that he had been lied to by the US military that he pulled the plug on any further attacks or tests, and ensured that a civilian component was required for any more atomic explosions to occur, to wit: the military had the bombs, but only the civilian scientists had access to the required enriched uranium.

The last sung business of the opera is given to Oppenheimer, who, in a direct reference to the closing of act one, mentions a god, an affair, and a battered heart, a heart which will be much more battered as the years progress, as the opera, ever gestures, ever bloodied, forward and backward

Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart.

(Nothing moves and nothing is heard, only a rhythmic
countdown over the loudspeaker. At 45 seconds, an
engineer presses the timer switch. The tours begin
firing with haunting precision. "One, zero." A
mournful silence and the beginning of a new era)

 Time is marked, again, still, in so many ways: strings. You cannot escape time.

Alex Ross in his review of the first production in 2005, writes of going to the Trinity site, and the place they called "Ground Zero," the term more familiar in these latter days as the waste dump of wreckage and unidentifiable human remains of what had been the World Trade Center. He says:

The terrain beneath the bomb—Ground Zero, it was called—also underwent a transformation, which scientists are still trying to understand. When Trinity personnel came back to inspect the site, they found a green, glassy substance covering the ground. The latest hypothesis is that this artificial mineral, which was named trinitite, formed when soil, water, and organic matter were lifted off the ground and fused in the heat of the blast. Over the years, tourists have carried away much of the trinitite in their pockets—the site is open to visitors twice a year—and most of the rest was buried beneath the soil. Looking down at the ground, you would never know that anything out of the ordinary had happened here.

The final words of the opera are recorded and in Japanese:

My husband is missing. My children need water. Do you have any water? Do you have any water? Do you have any water? Do you have any water? 

From May 9, 2020

We are all joined to each other in this pandemic, you fools.

It is not that "one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic," as Stalin is supposed to have once said, in his infinite wisdom (a god-like wisdom that seems even more applicable today, in our current political situation, than ever before, which is better suited to Stalin, than ever before), but that every death is a tragedy implying, or rather, insisting upon one to four more tragic deaths, on an exponential level--yes, and they infected two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on....

The current administration fumblingly, bumblingly believes it can outpace this pandemic, because it believes that, statistically, "white people don't get it." The only thing that really makes sense out of that statement is that white people don't get that they can get it, the virus, and its accompanying disease, COVID-19, which, amazingly, expresses itself differently according to population, age, and preexisting condition.

Look to our brothers and sisters in Europe, you fools. Can you not see that its expression in Italy and the UK--alone!--shows its virulence among, so-called, white people? The fact that our most vulnerable people--black and brown and native and immigrant people, who, whether you like it or not, are attached to all of us as by an iron umbilicus, who are our brothers and sisters, whether you like it or not, whose every last fucking death or sickness is a tragedy to us, whether you like it or not--whose death and sickness is really the canary in the coal mine, means that this virus has spread to every last corner of our country, whether you like it or not.

We can't play this game of letting people of color, who just so happen to provide the essential work in the fields and factories of this nation, die or sicken because we both think their lives don't matter and that this virus doesn't apply to us. This is one of the things, before this most obvious time, that was meant when someone tried to tell you that Black Lives (Actually) Matter, you fool, you ignoramus, you stupid, stupid monster--yes, monster!--you lazy Nazi, who allowed Nazis to appear in our streets, with their guns and their swastika flags, and said nothing: this makes of you a Nazi, too, you, you fool, who said nothing and stood by, until they, or the virus, came for you. 

And can we tell the difference anymore between a government who does not close but opens the way for a virus to come for all of us--as it surely is already doing--and the virus itself?

I weep, daily, for my nation, and the fools whose every life is a gift and every death--each and every one--is an unbearable and preventable tragedy.

If you think this virus isn't coming for you and your family, you, or I, will be proven wrong, very soon.

You always already lost

You always already lost

for Daniel S.

You always already lost 
Beloved. I don’t have words 
To make you speak
Anymore. Nor would I 

Know how to try to. 
You always already lost
Beloved, how could I try
To corral you into 

Another space where
I could control you? I
Cannot have that 
Power. You always

Already lost beloved,
I tested you on the facts. 
I made you tell me
You still loved me, despite 

The damage and the thrill. 
I thought you were the love 
Who lasted no longer than 
The length of smoking 

A cigarette, but now I 
See, now that you are dead,
That you last for

Only the lifetime

Of they 

Who

Remember

You.

On

On

On a certain level,
I’m trying to die. 
It’s not exactly 
Intentional. I
Just hate living 
In this beautiful 
Murderous
World, so much. 
Ignore Dickinson,
Wollstonecraft,
Morrison, Baldwin,
Whitman, and Mill,
And all the great minds
That populate
Our Anglo-
American damage. 
God forbid, we should 
Learn something. 
Stay silent, angry,
And alone. 
What are we living
For anymore? I
Really don’t know.

Once

Once

Once , while
Trying to sleep,
Not in this
Country, but
In another 
Country, a
Scorpion 
Arrogantly
Crawled acros
My arm, before 
Arrointing 
Itself off my
Wrist at the
End. It is
The most
Exhirating 
Thing that has
Ever happened 
To me. Full 
Stop.

ON IKAROS

ON IKAROS

for Tammy

Child of a jealous,
Brilliant, arrogant,
Murderous parent,
The Leonardo of
Athens and Krete,
The inventor of
Everything important
Anywhere, ever, imprisoned 
With that famous
Father, atop a tower,
Atop the Minoan 
Civilization that 
Same exiled dad
Had built with 
A wile and guile
Greater than crafty 
Odysseos could ever
Muster; inventor of the

Minotaur and the labyrinth

that contained him; his flawed
Parent made wings
Of ordinary things:
Birds's feathers, bees’s
Wax, ingenuity,
Desperation, freedom,
Yearning; love;
And so they flew away,
Away into a kind

Of an expectation,
But the child 

Was headstrong,
Like his parent, and,
Exhilarated by flight,
As though he were a 
God, flew higher and
Higher, until you could 
No longer hear his
Father‘s horrified 
Cries to stop. Great Helios,
In his fiery chariot,
Looked down in
Disappointment, as
Waxen wings melted
Under the heat
Of his blazing gaze,
And Ikaros plummeted 
To splash into the
Wine dark Aegean,
As Bruegel foretold.

Thirteen Enumerated Thoughts on the Rights of Women in the United States

1. The reticence of the Supreme Court in terms of allowing a patchwork of legal ramifications to occur when ruling on the right of states to deny presidential candidates involved in insurrection from appearing on a primary ballot was not at all active when “returning” to the states the rights of any ignorant asshole voted into their legislature to trample on the personal dignity, the physical autonomy, and the medical privacy of all women qua women qua their specifically reproductive capacity and by extension all citizens of that state, because if you can find a good reason to stick your nose into the medical decisions that one person is making for themselves with their trusted medical doctor, therefore removing the privacy necessary for such decisions about their own body, then you can do the same, remove the same privacy, the same autonomy, for any body at all.

2. This patchwork of legal difference and lack of legal diffidence also ramifies not only across women’s bodies and their rights in the states they live in, it directly impacts the abilities of medical professionals in states without any diffidence when it comes to making choices for women about their own bodies and futures because it criminalizes medical care and medical training based specifically on the pathetic ignorance and misogyny of the fuckwads elected to office in that state. 

3. Every woman of childbearing age—the legal ramifications of transmen of childbearing age are still largely unexplored, probably for obvious reasons—her subjectivity under the law, her legal autonomy over the movement of her body in space-time and the movements within her body of objects, chemicals, hormones, and other bodies, is shattered into at least fifty different other persons, fifty different bodies: she legally becomes a different person, with different legal status, subject to different criminality, restricted differently, as she moves, is forced to move, or is barred from physically moving from place to place, from state to state. 

4. Her status and state change as she moves or is moved from state to state. 

5. This is an burden, a hardship, and an injustice tied irrevocably to her ability to experience reproduction, whether she likes it or not, whether it is viable or not, whether she wants it or not. 

6. It fully bars her from equal status with all others who are not subject to this state and status, this in many ways unpredictable and ungovernable biological process, and it permanently restricts her from full participation in the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and property by eternally proscribing her into a second-class, or less, citizenship, subject to borders, laws, and whims of legislatures, by transforming her from a citizen into a biological function. 

7. It makes her the property of the fetus—or the prospective fetus—inside her, even when that fetus is not viable or is dead. 

8. It makes her the property of her rapist, even when that rapist is her father.

9. It makes her the property of her blinkered state legislature.

10. It makes her the property of her state court.

11. It makes her the property of the United States Supreme Court.

12. It makes her the property of Samuel Alito, who is the author of her slavery, and of the shattered law, itself. 

13. It requires her to be owned by nearly all others and never herself.

Happy Pride, 2019, Everyone

Who are the people who celebrate, promote, support, or fellow-travel with the notion of "straight pride"?


Among other reasons, the word "pride" was chosen because gay people lived--and many still live--in a world that shamed them, that shamed, not just their choice of partners, other choices and associations, and actions but their very existence. When news of their existence became public, shame spread like a contamination upon their parents and family, friends, neighbors, associates, employers, co-workers, churches, schools, and hometowns, and, in the hands of the correct observer or interpreter, even to the state or the nation, even to the world or the species, itself. In this framework, the introduction of storms, flooding, fires, droughts, and disasters was understood as the consequence of the presence of the homosexual, a character so unnatural, so antithetical to reality itself, that the weather, that Nature, recoiled or revolted in response, as the body's immune system does when it rejects a foreign object, contaminant, or infection and seeks to eject, expel, or destroy it. In a related, less metaphorical, and more recent formulation, weather disaster has been seen as a response, a punishment, from a deity more exercised by the presence of the homosexual than that of poverty, war, the poisoning of the planet and its inhabitants, the taking advantage of the poor and political systems by the rich, murder, rape, and hatred, as such. If one imagines war, poverty, and hatred as yet more punishments for not toeing some other purportedly moral lines, then it should be asked what the point is of having a God so much more invested in negative responses than positive actions, where and how free will exists in such a relentlessly punitive universe, and why God's Will, in Susan B. Anthony's very memorable formulation, seems to cleave so closely to the worldview and prejudices of the people who promote it so assiduously. I have digressed.


Living in a world of shame, in which shame is encountered, or potentially encountered, or, most often, implicitly encountered in interactions with ones parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers-in-law, and other family; with mentors, ministers, priests, teachers, coaches, doctors, and others one has taken as role-models, even while not, and sometimes while, being molested by them; with neighbors, friends of parents, parents of friends, friends, high school and college girlfriends, fiancées, and wives; with acquaintances, people one barely knows, bullies, enemies, arch-enemies, former childhood friends, and closeted individuals who would rather destroy you than ever be mistaken for someone like you; with the other boys on your high school wrestling team or baseball team or basketball team or soccer team or swim team or football team; with some of the faculty advisors, some of the boys, and sometimes the girls you worked with on high school theater productions; with business owners, shopkeepers, clerks, librarians, bookstore employees, adult bookstore employees, other shoppers in a department store or shop, other members of the theater or movie audience; with your taxi driver, the driver in the car next to you on the freeway or stopped at the light, adolescent or adult passersby on the sidewalk, men or boys in groups or individually; and the worst of betrayals, with your best friend, your boyfriend or girlfriend, your lover, your ally, the person you trusted the most, and your very existence, itself.


It is this last contention--plus, probably, almost every other example I have raised, but most especially the question of one's existence, itself, as such--which serves as a rebuke to ones existence, that forever separates and describes the yawning void between gay pride and straight people's notion of "pride" in their sexuality.


While some people--some of whom we have learned or been encouraged to call "straight"--may feel that the presence of gay pride--or, if one must be frank, the presence of gay people, or to be perfectly bald about it, the experience of the idea of the presence of gay people--does a violence to them, that experience is merely an inconvenience to them, whereas, for some or many but not all gay people, straight people's belief that gay people as an extant thing, that gay people as such, cause straight people an emotional violence is experienced by gay people as an actual--sometimes physical--violence upon their actual bodies, their actual employment or employment opportunities, their actual relationships with their families, their social worlds, their access to healthcare, their actual last wills and testaments, their actual legal relationship to their actual children, their actual legal relationship to their actual spouse, and so on. What straight people experience as a loss of privilege doesn't actually exist, what their reaction to it causes is an actual loss of or resistance to basic human rights for gay people. To draw any commensurate comparisons between the two functions as a blind idiocy.


Gay pride has always existed as a rebuke to straight shame--both the shame that straight people feel about us and the shame that they try so very hard--sometimes, often, unconsciously--to make us feel about ourselves. Gay pride has always been an attempt to discover a place not that was once there, but that has never been there. To find a place that is not only not shamed, but that is a nourishment to one's existence, instead of an argument against one's existence, can never be compared to a sexuality that was so taken for granted as the sine qua non of all humans that its only experience of loss is a jealously regarded one of someone else's gain. Straight people should be thanking the other sexualities for helping them to see they are not alone in the universe, instead of trying to hound us out of existence.

What--what, exactly--do you have to be so proud of?

So many Spring

So many
Spring Marie
Antoinettes,
so little
time, in a
time of too
much Winter.

Recognition

 

I remember the first time I saw this picture, I didn't know who its subjects were. Already the image really struck me: the great difference in the age of the two subjects, the strong energy between the two, the suggestion of an intimacy and a distance at the same time, as though they didn't know each other well, but were somehow connected. Then I saw the caption, and I finally recognized Duke as the young girl, and the thing sort of exploded in my mind because I hadn't known that Keller was still alive when The Miracle Worker first appeared on stage. They are not just holding hands, if my memory serves, this image also captures, without being able to truly show it, a moment of silent, private connection, despite its being recorded on film, as they communicate--through a method invented by Annie Sullivan that only a very few people on the planet know how to use--a word that held the most powerful, foundational place in Keller's lexicon, in her very understanding and experience of the world, as Patty Duke finger-signs T-E-A-C-H-E-R into Helen Keller's hand.

Conversations with my niece

I wonder as I wander out under the sky,
How Jesus our Saviour did come for to die,
For poor on'ry people like you and like I;
I wonder as I wander out under the sky.

When Mary birthed Jesus 'twas in a cow's stall
With wise men and shepherds and farmers and all
But high from God's heaven, a star's light did fall
And the promise of ages it then did recall.

If Jesus had wanted for any wee thing,
A star in the sky or a bird on the wing,
Or all of God's Angels in heaven to sing,
He surely could have had it, 'cause he was the King.

I wonder as I wander out under the sky,
How Jesus our Saviour did come for to die,
For poor on'ry people like you and like I;
I wonder as I wander out under the sky.





I wonder as I wander out under the sky,
How Jesus our saviour did come for to die,
For poor on'ry people like you and like I;
I wonder as I wander out under the sky.

When Mary birthed Jesus 'twas in a cow's stall,
With wise men and farmers and shepherds and all,
But high from God's heaven, a star's light did fall,
And the promise of ages it then did recall.

If Jesus had wanted for any wee thing,
A star in the sky or a bird on the wing,
Or all of God's angels in heaven to sing,
He surely could have had it, 'cause he was the King.

I wonder as I wander out under the sky,
How Jesus our saviour did come for to die,
For poor on'ry people like you and like I;
I wonder as I wander out under the sky.





Blow the wind southerly,
Southerly, southerly,
Blow the wind south o'er
The bonnie blue sea.
Blow the wind southerly,
Southerly, southerly,
Blow bonnie breeze
My lover to me.

They told me last night
There were ships in the offing,
And I hurried down
To the deep rolling sea;
But my eye could not see it,
Wherever might be it,
The bark that is bearing
My lover to me.

Blow the wind southerly,
Southerly, southerly,
Blow bonnie breeze o'er
The bonnie blue sea.
Blow the wind southerly,
Southerly, southerly,
Blow bonnie breeze
And bring him to me.

Is it not sweet
To hear the breeze singing
As lively it comes
O'er the deep rolling sea?
But sweeter and dearer
By far 'tis when bringing
The bark of my true love
In safety to me.





Ombra mai fu
Di vegetabile,
Cara ed amabile,
Soave più. [x2]
Cara ed amabile
Ombra mai fu
Di vegetabile
Cara ed amabile
Soave più, soave piú

Oooooo
De vegetabile
Cara ed amabile
Soave più, soave più.





Hay and a clean stall
and ivy on a garden wall
and a sign saying sold
and no coat for the bad cold.

I believe in you.
Do you believe in me?
What do you want to do?
Are we leaving the city?

On the black road,
through the gold fields
while the fields are plowed
towards what we are allowed.

The bridle bends in idle hands
and slows your canter to a trot.
We mean to stop in increments,
but can’t commit. We post and sit in impotence.

The harder the hit, the deeper the dent.
We seek our name, we seek our fame
in our credentials, paved in glass,
trying to master incidentals.

Bleach a collar, leech a dollar
from our cents.
The longer you live, the higher the rent
beneath a pale sky,
beside the red barn,
below the white cloud
is all we are allowed.

Here, the light will seep,
and the scythe will reap,
and spirit will bend
in counting to the end.

In December of that year,
the word came down that she was here.
The days were shorter,
I was sure if she came round,
I’d hold my ground.

I can do what they alluded to,
a change that came to pass. And
Spring did range, weeping grass
and sleepless broke
itself upon my winter glass.

And I could barely breathe for seeing
all the splintered light that leaked.
A fish is fleeing, launched in flight
but starched in light,
bright and bleeding, bleach the night
with dawn deleting in that high sun,
after our good run,
when the spirit bends
beneath knowing it must end.

And that is all I want here,
to draw my gaunt spirit to bow
beneath what I am allowed,
beneath what I am allowed.

On Johann Sebastian Bach's Six Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello

Title page of Anna Magdalena Bach's manuscript of the Six Suites for Violoncello Solo without Bass. Dated before 1750, the author (Anna Magdalena Bach) is dead more than 70 years ago. So it is in the public domain.

tl:dr

Approximately thirty-three years ago I took my first--and, as it turns out, last--college-level music appreciation class with, my friend, Kristen. The class was taught, unusually, by a professor-musician in the music department, a cellist, who presented the course in a rather free-wheeling, very personal manner, which was casual, almost facetious on the subject of coursework, homework, and testing student knowledge, but had an easy intimacy, a pleasant spontaneity, and an honest but usually frustrated curiosity about the opinions, feedback, and real-time reactions of the class to statements and comparisons he made or to the work of composers or performers he played for us on recording. I loved it. And Kristen and I found a way to not only be attentive to much of the material but crack each other up constantly. It was probably the other way around, in all honesty, and being equally honest, it was hardly the most respectful mode one could apply to a pedagogic setting, and our guide through the course material would shoot us an amused or unamused look of exasperation from time to time. What we liked about the course--the absence of any substantive demands--is what allowed us to play off each other, sometimes to the point of obnoxiousness, but it was also the dimension that allowed the course to, at its best, truly be about the appreciation of music, through knowledge of its history and evolution, theory and application, changing roster of instruments and styles, generic and musical categories, performance traditions, cultural impacts and influences, gossip and legends, and the work of its various contributors, which we were frequently invited to listen to, consider, and appreciate. Rather than take notes or study for an exam, he really wanted us to listen, not just hear; not just think but experience.

One day, he brought along his cello, and proceeded to speak about and to play for us, right there, on his instrument sections from J. S. Bach's Six Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello.

First, it must be said, the experience of being in the same room with a cello as it is being played was an immediately exciting, even physical, experience, as you could actually feel the vibrations from the strings passing through your chest and torso, through your head, through your heart, through your body, as though it were a medium--because, it is--and you could feel the vibrations of these strings in your hair and on the surface of your skin and in the hairs on the surface of your skin.

When our instructor first described what we were to hear--six suites, which are Baroque dances, for solo cello, played on a cello and just that one cello with nothing else--my heart sank, having cut my teeth and ears on the enormous, layered sound and drama of the Mozart Requiem and Beethoven's second symphony. This was also the first time we'd heard music that wasn't on a recording. This was *live*. It was alive, and you could not escape the fact that a person was playing this for you, in the room with you, nearby. A breathing, real person, with a pumping heart, and a body, who, before he drew his bow across the silent, waiting, taut, straining strings of his cello with an incredible delicacy, yet with a precision, a placement, and the infinitesimal specificity of muscle, of power, he took a deep breath, as though he were about to speak, or sing. Because, as I learned years later from my friend, Chase, a dancer, who would always do the same thing before she danced a phrase, that is exactly, of course, what one is doing. Of course.

Everything about his playing was physical and real, breathing, and moving, and sweating, and there. And you were there.The slightest tap of the bow sent ridges or jitters or colors of sound through the room and the people in it. And one had the impression that the strings, before they were played, were already vibrating, already straining to release something out of them, into the air, into the world, through you and out into the world, because the slightest touch of the bow or finger was immediate, experiential, and thrilling. This there-ness of it all, you, and he, the cello, the sound, the feeling of the sound, the dark, varnished, warm, sonorousness of wood, both enclosing you as a reflection, as a comfort, and holding you at a certain arms length, as art can do, was indistinguishable from deep intimacy, and connection. It was like being in love and profoundly alone at the same time.

Bach wrote six suites for the solo cello, each with six movements, each in the Italian style of the Baroque dance suite, except for the two movements, in the gorgeous and melancholy fifth suite, composed in the French style. Our teacher played the prelude to the first suite. It is likely you have heard that prelude in different commercials or as the underscoring in various films, and so it is likely the best known of the thirty-six movements Bach composed. I can't help feeling it to be the signature of the work, because it was my entry point to it, and because its omnipresence functions as the sign for the whole. Ask anyone if they know Bach's cello suites for solo cello and she or he will sing you the familiar, DAH-bah-dah-bah-dah-bah-dah-dee-dah, of its opening, not any of the equally or surpassingly beautiful passages from any of the rest of it. And that is okay. By rights, the sixth should count as the signature, of the composer, and the end of the sixth, especially, since the suites become more expressive, more complex, nuanced, and demanding on several of several levels, for the cellist, as they go. For the listener, it is a different story. Unencumbered by the enormous interpretive, performative, and technical demands of playing them, we are allowed the opportunity--if we choose to take it, and you must choose to take it, for, while some passages of some of the movements of some of the suites will grab you and demand your attention, others, most of them, will only reveal themselves to you if you give yourself to them--of floating and plunging or soaring through a series of sounds that are a line of sound coming from two people through one specific instrument at one specific time. There are three people actually involved, however. The first is always Johann Sebastian Bach, the composer, the second is the cellist, always, and the third, the third always is you.

Let us hear Pablo Casals, the sine qua non of our current understanding of the suites, play the prelude to the first suite:

The prelude to the first suite ends at 2:26. You may of course listen to the entire suite, as you prefer.

The suites were more or less forgotten to time and hearing, when, in the early twentieth century the great Catalan cellist, Pablo Casals, as a thirteen-year-old boy, discovered them in a thrift shop, and studied them carefully for many years until he felt he was ready to record them between 1936 and 1939. Before this time, they had always been considered studies or etudes--lessons--unsuitable for public performance. There was the added "problem" that the suites do not exist in an autograph score (in the hand of the composer), but only in the hand of his second wife, Anna Magdalena Bach, who, after Bach's death faced financial hardship, little to no help from his children of his first marriage, or her own, except for her stepson, C.P.E. Bach, and who is understood to have died penniless, homeless, on the street, buried in an unmarked, pauper's grave at Leipzig's Johanniskirche. which was destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II. Without the hand of this discarded woman, we would know nothing of a work considered to be one of the sublime expressions of humanity. Think about that for a while. Not even her unmarked grave exists.

Casals recognized the quality of the Suites, and because of the quality of his name and reputation, other cellists recognized it as well, and recorded it as well. It is only in the twentieth century that these six pieces were finally given their due, six pieces for unaccompanied cello, which in 1980 the British music critic, Wilifrid Mellers, called, in a very memorable phrase, "Monophonic music wherein a man has created a dance of God." Cellists since the time of Casals have recorded them, some of them more than once, because their understanding of them has evolved over time. They are not notated in a way that gives very much direction to the performer, so fast or slow, Romantic or not, sensual, austere, dance-like or not, it is given to the interpreter to make these choices.

So. When I learned that Yo Yo Ma would be playing all six suites at Blossom--the outdoor, summer, amphitheater home of the Cleveland Orchestra--I suggested to my parents, who always get a collection of tickets to Blossom, that we should go, and more or less forgot about it. Flash forward to last Sunday, when my parents; my sister, her husband, and their family; and I all went to hear these remarkable pieces played by one of the great cellists of the day, outside, as the evening turned into night, and the light turned into dark.

I am not a fan of Ma's account of the suites. I do not find them perfunctory, but in the word of someone else, I do find them "bland." He has recorded them three times, and I only know his first recording, which he did when he was quite young. Mstislav Rostropovich, the great Russian cellist--understood by some to be THE cellist of the twentieth century--only waited until he was quite old to attempt them. And people don't like that recording, either, calling it "too reverential." With the suites, you cannot win.

I have been to Blossom many times to hear the Cleveland. I heard them play an account of Beethoven's fifth symphony, under Dohnányi, that blew my mind, because it was like hearing it for the first time, and because I wasn't looking forward to hearing *that* overplayed work again. Normally, at Blossom, there are people trying to find each other on the hill leading down to the covered amphitheater--where most people sit, where we usually sit--with children playing, dancing, and calling to each other. It is not what I would call a "riot of activity," but it is a very active space, a very social space. People are largely respectful of what is going on, but they're also not crazy about being respectful. Last Sunday, I have never, ever, been more impressed by an audience's silence and focus during a performance.

Ma played six solo cello suites, each with six movements--in his account, a ninety-minute evening--to my astonishment, and my everlasting respect, without intermission. And almost no one made a sound. In fact, it was so quiet on that hill, that when someone did make a sound, you knew exactly where it was coming from, and they never did it again, with the exception of the child, further up from where we were, who visited a small section or roughly half of the suites with an indeterminate wailing, that bothered me not at all. Was it the same child? At the end of the day, all wailing children suffering through a concert they don't understand are the same child. So, yes.

I sat, perched on that hill, perched, in almost utter silence, in a sea of people, and listened to these incredible pieces, played for ninety minutes, almost without interruption, and was rapt by all of it. Things accumulated a stillness in this space. A horsefly, or a very large dragonfly, hummed its way over my right shoulder and straight down the hill, several times, over the course of the evening, almost rhythmically, once during every other suite. The clouds were static after a day of rain, and every time I glanced up at them, they had formed only a slightly different position. The light crept away from us, softly, and without incident, and informed the music, as it played, in a single line, from one instrument, by two people, to one person, who was each of us. I. I sat. Perched on that hill of time. A hill that became more steep and less so over the course of ninety minutes. As a horsefly, or a very large dragonfly, kept its time to the music. And a child cried in the distance to a rhythm of Bach, copied out for us by the hand of a wife, buried in a destroyed, unmarked pauper's grave, whose children and step-children, except for one, thought better than to help her after their common father died.

I cannot tell you how profound it was for me to share this extraordinary experience with my family. Imagine what it might be like to know something profound--something so beautiful, that you have difficulty speaking about it. Something that, on a very specific level and in a very specific way is core, is central, to who you are and who you have become. Something that is such a sine qua non, you can no longer remember a time when it was not a part of you, because it has backwards formed itself into the time before you knew it. Something you have sat with, and thought about, and listened to, and derived sustenance from, and studied. For thirty-three years.

Now, I know. I know my family didn't have the same experience that I did, and how could they? In my mind, to play even one movement from one of the suites would be an accomplishment. To have them hear all of them at once, to have them be confronted by this monumental, marathon work, in one night, without intermission, without ever having heard them before? Unspeakable. And the amazing thing is, though I did not know I had expectations, they did not let me down. Which is really tough to do! I wasn't able to talk to my sister and brother-in-law, but they enjoyed it, and they said so, and I believe them--it's a hard, demanding thing to do, all six suites, without intermission. Even I registered fatigue at certain points.

It was my parents--with whom I had traveled to Blossom that night--who spoke volubly, with interest, and with specificity about what they had heard. Is there any better example of why one should be happy that one had the parents one had? Some people have the tools to understand the world without what was given to them. I am not that person. I can only understand the extraordinary world before us with the tools I was given by the people who made me. And while those tools take me places they don't understand, there is always a place that they do. So, I guess, thanks, Mom and Dad.

The Baroque suite was  considered an old-fashioned form in Bach's time, but the cello was an undiscovered country. Bach, whose patron at the time was a Calvinist who had little use for religious music--Bach's prime form, as a devout Lutheran (a Lutheran who composed Masses, mind you)--put Bach in the odd position of getting paid to do almost whatever he wanted, and so he composed secular music: the suites, the pieces for unaccompanied violin, and others. It is up to the listener to decide if she or he feels these works are truly secular. I hear nothing of the secular about them, and I say this as a proud atheist. Moreover, they partake of a simultaneously old-fashioned sound as well as a thrillingly austere modernism--even, if you like, a postmodernism, in their repetitions and juxtapositions--and yet that austerity gives way to passion and an expressive, deep emotionality. You will be hard-pressed to find a more paradoxical, elusive, moving, or exciting series of pieces called one work. If you are new to the suites, good luck on your new adventure, should you choose to embark on it. If you know the suites well, welcome home.

Now, for some examples:

I begin with Yo Yo Ma. What do we find in the prelude to the third suite? A minimal figure that turns at 1:42 into a wonderful floating line that plays until 2:08. It works through the figure, and the recurrent theme of, believe it or not, scales, and a series of false endings, before actually ending at 3:27. That is the third prelude.

I call the phrase that begins at 1:42 the money shot. And the suites are full of them. It is the place where I, or you, get grabbed, and a place from which backwards, and/or forwards, you start listening differently. It is the kernel around which the movement seems to be formed, and by which your curiosity draws you into the rest of that movement. It is the piece of sand that around which the pearl is formed. Find it, or them, in each movement, and you will spend the rest of your life listening to the Suites, as I have.

 

Now, we have Mischa Maisky playing the third prelude. Maisky is my Master when it comes to the Cello Suites. I bought his recording while still attending the class I mentioned at the beginning of this post, and he has never let me down.

His third prelude is a much more muscular and playful version, to be sure. At 2:04 the money shot begins, considerably later than Ma's version, and can your hear, between the big notes, a song that makes itself known in even bigger notes? A static figure of repetition in a song? Wonderful. And listen to how he turns those false endings into a dramatic series that resolve themselves into an ending. The Prelude ends at 4:16. You may, of course, listen to the rest of the entire suite, as you prefer.






Heinrich Schiff plays it at a remarkable clip.



And then there is the incredible and elegant, the indispensable, Pierre Fournier.

she is locked up, beaten, and flung about the room

April 13, 2018 | A major donor with close ties to the White House resigned on Friday as deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee after the revelation that he had agreed to pay $1.6 million to a former Playboy model who became pregnant during an affair. The deal was arranged in the final months of 2017 by President Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen. Under the terms of the deal, the Republican donor, Elliott Broidy, would pay the woman in installments over the course of two years, and she would agree to stay silent about their relationship, two people with knowledge of the arrangement told The New York Times. The deal was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. From The New York Times.

I look at this man--everything that seems visible about him: the insistent PEPPERDINE photo-op backdrop; the poor physical and social health evident in the skin color, the mirthless pools of black that are his eyes, the grimace which at some point forgot to disguise itself as the signal of a pleasure in the world, which is to say, as a smile, rather than the wincing expression of a forbearance of, a steeling against, the world; I look at that "haircut"--I look at this man and I feel sorry for the "Playboy model," who, with those two words, is surgically caricatured into nothingness, into dismissal, as the barely described but overly present sine-qua-non--the that-without-which--pretext for the humiliation, the failure, the weakness, the desire of another, the barely described pretext for the humiliation of a man, who, as we well know, is the only another, the only other, that matters.

I look at this man, and I see the women not on his arm, in this frame or in any other frame: no surplus of disappointed wives or expensive mistresses or disappointed, expensive mothers will ever be enough to make him believe that he is a success, that he is a man, that he is alive, that he is real, that he is a real boy, alive, and not someone else's fantasy of a man, not some father's fantasy of a boy, not some father's fantasy of himself, made of painted wood and string, a fantasy whose lies are forever revealing, forever announcing, the degree to which they arouse him by his shameful erection, which is as clear as the nose on his face. 

It is, of course, the height to which he has risen; the richness of his investment and achievement; the scope and number of his responsibilities; the reputation and the dignity of--the admiration for--his family, both up (parental, ancestral) and down (spousal, childrel: inherital), which is to say, his very name, its currency and value, its reference and intelligibility; his ability, his dependability and responsibility, his ability to influence others, which is to say his word; his respect, his solidity, his fearsomeness, his strength, his resolution, his intensity, his fecundity, his power, which is to say, his maleness, his manhood, his sex, itself, all coming into question; it is the threatened or actual loss--even just the news of the threat of the loss--of these things that makes the story tragic, that gives it any value at all, that makes the story worth knowing or repeating, because the story's very iterability isn't affected at all by it's depressing and clichéed reiteration that it is news if/that/when a man falls from grace by partaking of his association with a [insert any two words here that describe a woman, but in this case:] Playboy Model. Every time, the loss, the tragic fall, the story occurs to, the story is about, an individual, a subject, a person of interest, or notoriety, of value, a person in whom I should be interested if only by dint of the fact that someone has decided to repeat the story of his loss of value to me. In the story, in his story, the (actual/potential) loss of his status--his value or usefulness in politics, industry, finance, faith, or law; his value as a leader or thinker or role-model; his value as a husband, father, son, and man--is presented as though it hadn't just happened to this other asshole yesterday, it is presented as though it were happening for the first time, when, depending on the timing it is only just happening for the first time today. And the lady--all the women, of course, for the most part--but the lady in question is just the stock character of Fallen Woman, just a two-word dismissal as a description, because it doesn't matter who she is, she doesn't have a story, she doesn't need a story, she is not important, except in one way and one way only: as the pretext for the (threatened, perhaps actual) loss of a man's status, family, fortune, word, name. Her presence in his story--because she doesn't have a story, she doesn't need a story, and no one cares about her story, except that there must be some suggestion, some hint, some suggestion to the suggestible, that she's just the least bit tawdry, or a shopgirl, or a divorcee, or an actress, or working class, or a coed, or a latina, or a european, or a prostitute, or a woman--signals his loss and is the cause of his loss. She exists--she serves--merely as a function in his story. She exists to serve. 

Certain kinds of psychoanalysis have a word for this state, which is often translated into English as a state of "abjection": she is abjected--in truth, before the story is told, she is already in an abjected state, always already--humbled and rejected, ejected outside of accepted, acceptable, informed, available, permissible or possible discourse. He is not. He has many more than two words to apply to his highest level of attainment, or any attainment, in the social spheres. He has many more than one sphere, he has many more than one title, many more than one role, and more than one name by which to call him, but his names, titles, roles, and spheres and his ability to move among them, capitalize upon them, and use them to his advantage and others' is damaged by his association with the storyless, abjected lady in question. Her story is unavailable and unimportant because she is abjected, and she is abjected because of some now-unimportant but singular detail of her now-unimportant and abjected story: she has no story, and it is as though his story, he, himself, takes on some contamination, partakes of some contaminating quanta of her abjection, and thus becomes, in some sense, abjected himself. So, gents, beware of Fallen Women.

But if we're really honest with ourselves, it is not difficult to see that the abjection of which Fallen Woman takes is not due to her fallen state, but due to her state as woman, as her hypothesized-but-the-hypothesis-is-enough fallenness is hypothesized on her hypothesized unreliable, unstable, untrustworthy, weak, flighty, fickle, faithless, unteachable, ignorant, dissembling, dangerous, dark, mysterious, unknowable womaness. The hint of falleness is the addition that is not an addition because it serves to call out what we all know women already to be, or be capable of, which is tacitly the same. The Fallen Woman is all women. She doesn't have the same value as a man, and her as-few-details-as-possible story only exists as a non-story to affect the story of a man. Woman is the property of someone else's story. She is property. That is why she is paid less on the dollar than a man for the same job; that is why she doesn't have her own name but has the name of her father or her husband; that is why she is defined most powerfully by her relationship to men, as daughter, wife, mother, mistress, widow; that is why when she is raped it is because of the way she was dressed or because she has had more than one sexual partner or any sexual partner, or because she is a lesbian, or a woman; that is why our vice president does not allow himself to be alone in a room with a woman who is not his wife; that is why when she is beaten by her husband it is because she must have done something to cause it; that is why we have difficulty encouraging or imagining women in physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, law, law enforcement, the military, sports, music composition or in leadership roles in these fields, or any field; that is why she cannot be elected president because she seems cold, seems untrustworthy, seems ambitious, and doesn't smile enough; that is why, in Virginia Woolf's memorable formulation in A Room of One's Own, she is locked up, beaten, and flung about the room. 

For her to be acceptable, she must be the paragon of fidelity, fealty, faith, compromise, kindness, supportiveness, selflessness, nonexistent opinions, disregarded thoughts, and uncomplaining labor: In the terms of King Lear, she must only be Cordelia, whose back is a bridge for men, for men and children, for male children, a bridge for men; otherwise she is those monstrous other sisters, Goneril or Regen, it seems, by default. It would be best for everyone if she died in childbirth. For there will always be another woman to marry--as they are interchangeable--who will teach the daughter her place, or beat her into it, because she can be counted on not to love her as her own. Because we must always force women into competition with other women, for everything, but especially for the attention of the Man, who is the hero of the story, the narrator, the author, the publisher, the bookseller, the critic, and the reader. And he has made the notion of Fallen Woman--precisely because there is no real distinction from Woman, precisely because Woman is, at every moment, in danger of submitting to her nature, like a scorpion--to distinguish interchangeable women from one another. If you believe that the purpose of sex is not pleasure, a dimension accorded only to men, but solely for the reproduction of men, sons to carry the name only they may keep and to safeguard the property only they may inherit, upon your body, which is the purpose of your body, by the man you were given to by a man, through the painful labor of your body, which is the only labor you are to be allowed; if you are Cordelia and make an incubator of your body, a bridge of your back, and suffer beautifully with your muted voice and your cramped agency, a jealously restricted purview that is mostly the execution, reinforcement, and extension, as their agent, of someone else's interests, desires, prejudices, and will; if you defer to, maintain, celebrate, supplement, and anticipate those interests without question, because they are, and must be, your own; if your every action and expression is toward keeping things the way they are, then you will be called "respectable"--a precarious high-wire act of a designation--and your origins, your class, your poverty, your ethnicity, your foreignness, your sins, your past, your woman-ness will not be held against you. You will not be fallen.

On Memorial Day

Why does God permit suffering?

The State tells us that the murder of ourselves by ourselves is acceptable, or, rather, neccessary. And so, on Memorial Day, in America, we might wonder if we should suspend this question or interrogate it.

In memoriam, in marmoreal memorial, today, our war dead, we remember, and those who made war and lived through it. Even if your sacrifice meant little to you, it means a great deal to me.

We remember you, today.

On David Brooks on Jane Addams

Hull House, Chicago

I have criticized him, sharply, over the years, and it has been fascinating to watch his Times pieces evolve through Bush II, the Republican Congress with Obama, and Trump. At base, through dilatory, piecemeal self-expressions--as "the conservative" voice at the Times, through his initial excuses for the Right, followed by his subsequent bewilderment at the madness and obvious venom of their agenda, which was an agenda of inaction-as-sabotage-and-brinksmanship, when it wasn't one of plutocratic self-interest at the expense of, well, anything, everything, else--Brooks has slowly revealed himself to be a classic, true conservative--who does not put party before country--and the kind we need many more of.

I'm not a liberal, I'm a radical, but I respect a real, conservative movement, that seeks to conserve, that doesn't need the appellation "compassionate" before it to find the spurious taste of being palatable. We have come to a place where "conservative" means something it was never meant to mean. It's an insult to conservatism, as such. Let's just call it the Far-Right, and be done with it. And don't forget, there are--or were--both Right and Left conservatives. Oh, how I miss texture, nuance, investment, and thought.

David Brooks! I might start liking you one day.

From the New York Times, in its entirety:

The Jane Addams Model

David Brooks

 

April 25, 2017

These days everything puts me in mind of Jane Addams. Many of the social problems we face today — the fraying social fabric, widening inequality, anxieties over immigration, concentrated poverty, the return of cartoonish hyper-masculinity — are the same problems she faced 130 years ago. And in many ways her responses were more sophisticated than ours.

Addams was born to an affluent family in Cedarville, Ill., in 1860. She was a morally ambitious young woman who dreamed of some epic life of service without much idea about how it might come about. In her teenage years, she earnestly set to reading — “Pilgrim’s Progress,” Plutarch’s “Lives,” “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” — but in her twenties she was one of those young people who don’t get to themselves quickly. They spend years in study and in acquiring degrees with a vague sense they are preparing for something, without actually leaping into what it is they might want to do.

Addams took a Grand Tour of Europe and found herself in a vegetable market as the leftovers were being tossed to a crowd of paupers, who stood with their grasping hands upraised. The image had a powerful effect on her. Forever after, the sight of hands raised up, even in dance and calisthenics, caused her to feel the pain of poverty and want.

In London, she visited a place called Toynbee Hall, a settlement house where rich university men organized social gatherings with the poor in the same way they would organize them with one another. Addams returned to Chicago and set up Hull House, an American version of the settlement idea.

As today, it was a time when the social fabric was being torn by technological change. Addams moved her family possessions, including the paintings, books and heirloom silver, into a large mansion in a blighted district. The idea was to give the dispossessed the same sort of refined and cultivated home environment that she had known, and thus create a network of family and neighborly bonds. Before long, 2,000 a day were streaming through the place, taking and teaching courses, offering and receiving day care, doing the housekeeping, conducting sociological research.

This was not rich serving the poor (Addams hated paternalism). It was rich and poor, immigrant and old stock, living and working in reciprocity, and as a byproduct bridging social chasms and coming to understand one another. For example, Addams thought it was especially important to put immigrant adults into the role of teachers, because it affords “a pleasant change from the tutelage in which all Americans, including their own children, are so apt to hold them.”

There were classes in acting, weaving, carpentry, but especially in art history, philosophy, and music. Addams was convinced that everyone longs for beauty and knowledge. Everyone longs to serve some high ideal. She believed in character before intellect, that spiritual support is as important as material support. And yet “the soul of man in the commercial and industrial struggle is under siege.”

High culture was her way to elevate the desires and tastes of all who passed through. Residents were surrounded with copies of Rembrandts and presented with Greek tragedies and classical concerts. One new immigrant walked in and Addams handed him an Atlantic Monthly and recommended an essay he could barely understand. But it was a sign of respect and equality, and access to a different world. Even poor kids, she believed, should “share in the common inheritance of life’s best goods.”

Our antipoverty efforts tend to be systematized and bureaucratized, but Hull House was intensely personalistic. She sought to change the world by planting herself deeply in a particular neighborhood. She treated each person as a unique soul.

Addams had amazing capacity to work from the specific case to the general philosophy, and had the ability to apply an overall strategy to the particular incident. There are many philanthropists and caregivers today who dislike theory and just want to get practical. It is this sort of doer’s arrogance and intellectual laziness that explains why so many charities do no good or do positive harm. Addams, by contrast, was both theorist and practitioner.

In her day, like our own, public life was dominated by manly men who saw politics as a competition between warriors and who sought change through partisan chest thumping and impersonal legislative action.

Addams was certainly political, but she defended the primacy of the “woman’s” sphere. People are really shaped by dense intimate connections. People thrive in “familied contexts.” As Jean Bethke Elshtain wrote in her biography, “The world of women was, for her, a dense concoction of imperatives, yearnings, reflections, actions, joys, tragedies, laughter, tears — a complex way of knowing and being in the world.”

Tough, Addams believed that we only make our way in the world through discipline and self-control. Tender, she created an institution that was a lived-out version of humanist philosophy. In today’s terms, she was a moral and religious traditionalist and an economic leftist, and an incredible role model for our time.