Cannon, loose

   ..

                     But it's the having

   not the keeping that is the treasure.

   Ginsberg came to my house one afternoon

   and said he was giving up poetry

   because it told lies, that language distorts.

   I agreed, but asked what we have

   that gets it right even that much.

   We look up at the stars and they are

   not there. We see the memory

   of when they were, once upon a time.

   And that too is more than enough.

Jack Gilbert

Refusing Heaven

  The Lost Hotels

  of Paris
  [fragment]

Knopf, 2005©

Gérard barred from Roland Garros

No dogmatic adherent of the 

Fall of Man school of sartor-

ial policing, himself - 

remembered by us all, in fact, 

for teasing the fine line be-

tween treachery and liberty in 

composing some habillements - 

Gérard nevertheless recoils from 

tennis’ fatal overreaction to the 

immaculate whites of Bill Tilden, 

the blithe panache of René Lacoste, 

the marmoreal valour of the Finzi-

Contini’s, for that matter, in their 

banishment's redoubt. You’d almost 

think, we’ve heard him muse, they 

do it for the money.

As if some gruesome Larry Ellison, 

flaunting the fattest, lurid Rolex 

he can find, practitioners of tennis 

now were bent, he truly feared, on 

forcing clashing catamarans to front 

a sponsor corporation, on what used 

to be a genial game. The iconoclastic 

lust to deny to others what they like 

was flashed before his eyes by Vittorio 

de Sica, in the arrogant brush of the 

fascist leather trenchcoat through the 

Dottore’s library, arresting the whole 

household as much for sensibility as 
hereditary faith. 

Now tennis, now sailing: why do they 
mock their favourite crimes, and per-
petrate such blight, denying us gen-
tility in camouflage of spite? 

Vittorio de Sica, director

Giorgio Bassani, book

Giancarlo Bartolini Salimbeni,

  art direction

Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini

1971

Last week, on the 29th, 100 years ago in Paris

We might have remarked as we

passed a bold centennial with

some concession to its mean-

ing, but we find that a con-

sensus still eludes us. I re-

fer to the first performance

of Le sacre du printemps, at

the new Théâtre des Champs-

Élysées, Nijinsky hollering

in the wings to give direc-

tion to the dancers, the or-

chestra inaudible above the

commotion in the hall.

No two witnesses agreed with

each other, on what they saw

or heard, or even with what

they'd said the night before.

They put one in mind of how

Wallace Stevens parsed The

Things of August, greatly 

now affronting the minds of 

denizens of Virginia, endur-

ing a cacaphony of cicadas:

something so generative that

breaks upon the stage as if 

by shock, itself, but ancient: 

These locusts by day, these crickets by night

Are the instruments on which to play

Of an old and disused ambit of the soul

Or of a new aspect, bright in discovery -

A disused ambit of the spirit's way,

.. that was a ghost, and is ..

A century later, almost to the day,

that instant in the history of the

dance is what has not expired, as

much as it is said, the world has

changed. The great commotion lives

and its instruments are with us, a

comprehension needing to be played.

      The greatest events and thoughts -

      but the greatest thoughts are the

      greatest events - are comprehended

      last: the generations that are con-

      temporaneous with them do not exper-

      ience such events - they live right

      past them. The light of the remotest

      stars comes last to men ..

Modris Eksteins

Rites of Spring

  The Great War and

  the Modern Age

Houghton Mifflin, 1989©

Wallace Stevens

Collected Poetry and Prose

  Things of August

Frank Kermode and 

  Joan Richardson, editors

The Library of America, 1997©

Friedrich Nietzsche

Basic Writings of Nietzsche

  Beyond Good and Evil:

  What is Noble

Walter Kaufmann, translator

op. cit.