Saturday commute lxii: all over this world

     Here, basically, is the thing
     that we do. Whatever else you
     may hear is decoration. What-
     ever else he might say, is a
     guy's way of gaining permis-
     sion to excuse himself to go
     do this. Whatever else you 
     may have thought, is natural-
     ly very flattering, but kick
     back. This is what we do.

  I can't allow you to come
  to this page and then de-
  part, with the impression
  that this is complicated.
  It is not. We are hydraulic.

          We could have cracked
          its mirror with a rock,
          a branch that might have lifted
          something muddy to the surface.
          Instead we kept on staring
          and the sun set, several times.


          Somewhere it keeps setting,
          waits for one of us to still
          the thread that hums between us,
          not gossamer but steel.


          Somewhere you shimmer like the lake,
          the picture on the glass is real,
          and one of us says what we didn't say,
          feels what we didn't feel.

         

Our gestures, our movement, 
our play  and our rest are 
savourings sustained by hy-
draulic splendour; our meta-
phors and our imagery of pos-
sibility are steeped in flow 
and buoyancy, stillness and 
swell. 


Everything that Nature 
tells us is elegant, she tells us is safe, certain. Even our dearest and most vulnerable extractions of life, such as wine, are expressions of that treas-
ure of which we are a part.

Take me to the lake, we think.  Take me to the 
sea. These environments 
of our most obvious nor-
mality never exhaust 
their tug. We go where 
we are wanted, and all 
that we do there, in 
our various ways, is 
a reclamation for a 
time. I have a friend
who slides on water,
I had a brother who 
made war on it; the reciprocating pressure equalises profusion 
without being told.
Have you left the lake?
I don't think so. 






Jonathan Galassi
  Left-Handed
  Still Life  [fragment]
op. cit.


iv  Photograph Wynn Bullock
     1954

Suppose it were Friday lx: panache declares a stock split

The story goes, that the young Terestchenko

wrote home to complain of the glare at mor-

ning assembly at his public school, and on
the sound proposition that he'd need two
eyepieces, the family sent down a Rollei. 
The rest of the story is well known, how
he grew so to detest the accumulation of
its heaps of awesome images, that he open-
ed a blog and then a tumblr, to dispose of 
the debris. 


Yet his debris was so often another man's
castle, that it went on, until, while run-
ning 'round Nîmes on low batt, his natur-
al release at last proposed itself in the
the pausing of panache, propulsion and 
poise on a perch of sweet perspective be-
tween its navigations of aplomb. He would
invest in a surfing van, to purge impres-
sions of its pursuit with peripatetic
promptness.

What's good enough for lesser search engines, 
is good enough for our paragon of style to 
the bone; Terestchenko's photography page
has just declared a stock split, not to
sever surfing (I'd be sure) from its base
but to cast it forth in a new investigative
light, of the very most promising perspec-
tive and inspiration. We know it must be
marvelous, for this may be the first time
he's seized definition of his own project, 
with such open-ended permission. It in-
clines one to pay attention, bright as 
it's bound to be.

ii     Ivan Terestchenko Photography
iii   Tale from the Van

Scenes from Galassi i

               You talk about my

               bad judgment as

               if I had any.

Jonathan Galassi

Left-Handed

  Judgment

op. cit.

Reading with my father

            These, coasts,

       were the prayers of the age-old boy

       who stood at a rusted balustrade

       and, smiling, slowly died.

       Shores, how much these cold lights say

       to the tormented one who fled from you.

       Blades of water glimpsed between the arcs

       of shifting branches; rocks brown in the foam;

       arrows of roving

       swifts . . .

            O lands,

       if I could trust in you one day,

       funeral trappings, gilded frames

       for the agony of every being.

            Now I return to you

       stronger (or deluded) though the heart

       seems to dissolve in glad-and savage-memories.

       Sad spirit of the past

       and you, new will that calls me,

       perhaps it's time to unite you

       in a calm harbour of wisdom.

       And one day we shall hear the call again

       of golden voices, bold enticements,

       my more divided soul. Think:

       to make the elegy a hymn, to be remade;

       to want no more.

            To be able

       like these branches,

       yesterday rude and bare, alive today

       with quivering and sap,

       for us too to feel

       among tomorrow's fragrances and winds

       a rising tide of dreams, a frenzied rush

       of voices toward an outcome, and in the sun

       that swathes you, coasts,

       to flower again!

       Montale

It would have been unusual, I think,
if the years after his wife’s, my

mother’s death, which found my father

returning to La Jolla to live among

friends of their youth, did not allow, 

in this adjusted family geometry, a 

deferred rapport between us to unfold. 

As incompletely as I could imagine

how our unexpected family residue 

struck him, I think I can say that

for both of us it did invite an or-

iginal conciliation, more than a 

reconciliation, in its two most dis-

tant members. I know that I am for-

tunate, that our lives allowed my 

natural hunger for a true rapport 

with my father to furnish entire 

vacant quarters of my mind, not 

with inheritance or belief but with 

confidence and ease, in talks we'd 

pursue on many themes after breakfast, 

before I would set out for those day-

time and evening distractions of the 

young bachelor, flying down from 

San Francisco once or twice a month. 

His never-doubted interest in one's 

intellectual growth had never expired, 

and not just as an element of paternal 

duty. What was telling, was how that 

motive brought back so clearly to him 

the education he had been given and 

never laid aside, but also never ex-

ercised in such plain sight in years.

It was almost startling to seem to 

sit with him at Cate (then the Santa 

Barbara School for Boys), and re-open 

Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad; or 

bring him back to Twain to take that 

voyage down the river with me, into 

the "Negro question" as it marked our 

past. I found how a single book we might 

read - Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian as 

much as Lord Devlin on Woodrow Wilson’s 

foreign policy, Too Proud to Fight - 

could let us appreciate our strikingly 

sympathetic but distinct sensibilities. 

This pleased him, both in the exertion 

and its evidence, and certainly with

less surprise than the same impressions 

came to me. But it did something else, 

that one could see. It comforted him 

in a project of his own. And we had not 

yet done that. Tone of voice, setting, 

time of life played their part, but 

for me they distinguished less an ex-

ception than a stunning, shining rule, 

that texts are meeting places we can

carry. 

Such a book, I think, has lately been

published and will likely find its way 

into further presentation here, Jonathan

Galassi's new poetry, Left-Handed. I've

already exhibited his translations of 

Leopardi and of Montale, and I've known

him to be one of the great editor-pub-

lishers of his generation. I'd not been 

aware of his poetry.

To anyone who has been interested occa-

sionally in reading this page, I espec-

ially commend these poems, which com-

prise a continuous narrative drawn from
elements of his life. They achieve with 
the reader what Montale foretold for an-
cient intimates, not for self-disclosure
but to unite in a calm harbour of wisdom.
You probably learned it from your father,
that this can be done, and probably you
wish to pass it on.

Eugenio Montale
Riviere
  [extract]
1925
Jonathan Galassi, translation
Collected Poems, 1920-1954
op. cit. 


Jonathan Galassi

Left-Handed

Knopf, 2012©

"Beware of torticollis," she says

All of life for me has been an im-

provisation of a study posture. If

I had ever come near to a position

which enabled efficiency in assim-

ilation without advancing fatigue

or promoting complacency, I'd prob-

ably have violated half the rulings

of the anti-trust code, to amass
these competing virtues in one cushy
entity, and wrought the ruin of the 
furniture trade and the cloisters 
at the same time. And yet we still 
hear of the upholsterers, and now 
and then of other Orders.

The first thing to be loved about

torticollis is that one has to look

it up. We can't have a true frisson 

of study without an irritant, a pang

with a word someone uses right in

front of us, which rings no bell

at all. It's only a pity that the

lexicon is so nearby these days,

and I have real sorrow for an en-

tire generation which hasn't had

to go downstairs to the dictionary

stand in mother's morning side of

the library, to find out what the

heck is going on. Only yesterday,

learning was so chronically about

getting up. Hence the contingent

postures we ancients still adopt,

so conducive (we were told) to in-

tellectual versatility, and that
good character otherwise sustained
by the cold shower.

Torticollis does sound promisingly

like a cause of action popular in

the common law of Area Code 310,
not otherwise famous for monastic
contemplations. One can see entire
phone banks of clinky-loafered law
clerks, churning prospective plain-
tiffs from the student directories
of UCLA, "How's our pretty neck to-
day, my dear?" And it does hold out
that promise, for which I don't ex-
pect so much as a referral fee, 
from the glossy new skyscraper on
Santa Monica Boulevard, for legal
stalwarts of its cause. There's
something more and more contemp-
tible about any free exchange of
ideas in the Facebook age, when
you can get a billion.

Now, seating, on the other hand, con-
tinues to command our consideration,
if only as an investment principle.
Several dozen amusingly artisanal
plinths for the posterior can set 
up a pleasant little trade almost 
anywhere that Jaguars gather, un-
like their namesakes as it is to
do so. And if the chair doesn't 
have to be conducive to study any
longer, one can just imagine what
this would lend to its price.

But now we come to our provenance
for torticollis, in a writer who'd been
having her parquet repaired, possibly
to mitigate the risk of slip-and-falls.
I had written to her, on some creative
counsel she was giving in the matter of
the study posture, when she warned me of
a risk I hadn't given due weight in mine.
Nor had this compassion the tone of the
reprimand we might expect, toward the
irreverence for the bombe implicit in 
improvisation. Just free information,
if I'd bother to look it up.

More and more, I tend to resist things that
are free, in most circumstances; I regret
the dismissal of provenance, obligation,
rapport, reinvestiture. This is only to
work a torticollis in the mind. I'm with 
Woody Allen; I like copyright, even in a
pedagogic passing from cup to cup. I like
knowing to whom I owe my ability to swim,
my putting stroke, my snicker at the phrase,
always chasing Rimbauds. I believe in tex-
tiles, tessuti, and integuments of taste.
Some are wired their way, I am in mine. 
Behind what I possess, there is no annul-
ment. There is context, or I am missing.

Le style et la matière

Perils of the off-the-rack way of life

I really didn't need this,

an off-axis button in a new

pair of jeans. Oh, wait to

break them in, was my haber-

dasher's answer; it's his 

answer to everything, as if

it's up to me to do my own

tailoring. I tell him, fine,

but don't sell me any wine.

I don't want to stain my feet.

Strain of the Hermès stirrup

A recent marker, in the long spiral

of acquisitive affectations of excel-

lence, the exact moment hasn't been 

recorded when we first began to see 

hirelings of the politics industry, 

wearing the distinctive necktie we'd 

been selecting for years. Probably,

the initial crack in the levee came

from a courtier columnist, at a re-

ception of Mrs Graham's. Now every

strutting intern sports the stirrup,

Hogarth's lobbyists supplying whole

stables at the think tanks. 

I don't imagine, our thugs have 

dared to affect the insouciant rain-

coat, the rakish baseball jacket, 

the satiny sellier belts. But that

was the end of the necktie, for most 

of us. And it was fitting, that our

evacuation left these figures ex-

posed as the charlatans of indul-

gence in craftsmanship and design 

that they are in representation and 

probity. I'd love to see the house

imprint a Daumier scarf for them. 

But, look again. We'll always have

our haircut.

Shame or scorn, there would need to be some haven

I love this painting by Elisabeth Baysset,

for many reasons, including that it reminds

me of the boyhood home of Laurent in Malle's

immortal Le souffle au coeur (1971), while

the steps and vegetation are so like those

along the Presidio wall in San Francisco, 

and the crest of Telegraph Hill. But I love

this painting for suggesting the mysteries

as much as the laughter in a house in the

sweetest settings.

In the boyhood home I grew up in, protected 

in leafiest oblivion of place, my 11-year-
old brother was departing one afternoon for 

a dressy party hosted by one of his friends, 

when my mother, remarking on how well he 

looked, bestowed on him an approving kiss

in well wishes for a nice time. Watching 

this, at age 6 or 7, I stepped forward to 

do the same, as I might have done, any old 

time in a variety of circumstances.  

I was restrained and offered my first pretense

of shock, that such a gesture could have enter-

ed my mind. It came from my mother, announcing

that it would be inappropriate for me to kiss

my brother. A bright flicker of something ter-

rible flashed in her tone and her manner, as

if something wrong in me did not belong in the

house, and I recoiled into a furious search in-

to myself for what that could be. I can still
hear myself saying, I want to kiss Davy, too.

This was my initiation into what I would come

very soon to perceive as a grinding but unpre-

dictable interrogation through the years of my

youth, into whether or not I were experiencing

this bad thing that dwelt within me. It was, I

promise the reader, my earliest comprehension of

the need for some externality of shielding - in

my mind, in those days, no doubt simply a fairer

god - against a simmering and ferociously bitter

uproar in the one very closest to me, of scorn 

for something I simply had no idea of existing.

But what, too, remained to be done, to tranform

me into an angry and predatory bully? 

I applaud the estimable Blue Remembered Hills

blog for devoting an Easter posting to the mat-

ter of familial homophobia. I have found it to

be pervasive and sometimes immeasurably devas-

tating to people of my friendship, from coast

to coast and of every variety of background or

means. I had an easy time of it, although one

can never forget astonishment with its first

appearance. I honour the memory of my mother

utterly, with deep admiration and gratitude. 

She had recently lost her young half-brother, 

an uncle of whom I've written more than once, 

to what was explained to us all as an acciden-

tal death. She simply never could distance 

herself from anguish and an irrational guilt

in that loss, except through kindly Episcopal

counselling, blaming his death on his sin. And

he and I had been on terms, my god, of family

trust. We drew animals together, with crayons,

and he helped me to laugh through orthodontia.

Elisabeth's lovely painting haunts me with a

warmth and gaiety with which a house can shel-

ter a family. All my little torments have ex-

pired. We meet in the present, do we not, be-

cause there are people we love, to be looked

after.

Elisabeth Baysset
Les Enclauses
1996