On the question of an expression people wish to change

The Celt

                  

  This portrait of our latter-
  day Despina on the runway has
  put one in mind of a reason-
  able question:


  Do people attempt to intervene

  in the expressions of ladies

  with the alarm and solicitude

  they manifest toward the other

  gender's? I honestly don't know.

  But they have a way of seeing

  things they think they can fix,

  render less disturbing.

 What are these deficiencies,

 these unsociable seeming sig-

 nals summoning solutions, un-

 solicited? What depths are

 these, to be so shallowed -

 and what sweet shallows, to

 be so dredged?

 If I knew, I fear I might

 be shot. There's much am-

 biguous business in these

 notions.

      Say to them, be my friend?

      Command, with the rising

      inflection, Blue, seems as

      close to Despina as we are

      likely to get. I'd sooner

      hasard an unfinished post-

      ing, than leave nice things

      unasked. But I do not mean

      to be glib: why do they come

      to us and say, the scene is

      not as you see; shape up -

      and, endlessly conversely,

      will you do me a favour:

      Will you colour my walls,

      will you borrow my spouse,

      will you be the place my

      soul can go, for choosing?

  Saper bisognami
  Pria la cagione,
  E quinci l'indole
  Della pozione:
  Se calda o frigida,
  Se poca o molta
  Se in una volta
  Ovvero in più ..


  Non vi affannate
  Non vi turbate:
  Ecco una prova
  Di mia virtù!


  I cite the hilarious
  Despina from the in-
  effable romp, the
  delicious nonsense
  of her lyric obvious
  without translation 
  (which would be ruin-
  ously inauthentic).

Ever since 18 Brumaire (hard to think!) nice people have been smarting from this sweet satire on such interventions, and often have gone so far as to suppress performances on charges of cynicism, I ask you to believe. 
Can anyone propose another, purer balsam, than to be subverted in one's jealousies by delight? Is that not the niftiest physic for getting through any coup d'état?

This solicitude toward the masculine expression, with all its zeal for change, is so prevalent that it has become the default party game of choice. No sooner is an expression amended by one player, than the novation is contested by the next, manipulating the face so entirely, that intent no longer has anything to do with its conduct. But what's a party for, if not to furnish an alibi?

     Shall we get an alibi,
     then, Hercule?


     What, Auguste, and deal
     with the crowds?


   


   














Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Così fan tutte
  I, xvi, et passim
Lorenzo da Ponte, libretto
1790

On a lack of hurry that we knew of yore, to disentangle

In fact, any suggestion to us 

of peremptory flight from a 

well-crafted nest to one of 

precarious parameters would 

have resembled a downsizing

in the Sanford Weills, from

snuggery to Mr Alighieri's 

6th level, the abode of her-

esy, itself. (Here, to pace

off their service corridor

and to confer with their

butler, we send them our

en tous cas metric, in a

gesture of housewarming).

  

This bias against precipitous dis-

entanglement far from distinguished 

one from our generation of fellows, 

and it must be confessed that our 

acquaintance with non-fellows was 

either rife with primordial incident 

or (equally to the point) not, which 

is to say, speculative. 

We, however, knew each other as our

own dirty socks: knew their stamp, 

knew they were ours, knew where they 

were, knew no one would take them. 

What: we can't admit to dirty socks?

     

There was, even then, something 

notably pressing, about whether 

we would be available for a visit 

at home; and I honestly cannot 

recall ever hearing the word, 

"No." Well, an Atlantic crossing or 

dental surgery, excepted. With each 

other, we were used to everything.

It was more than that we were the

thing we were all used to. We truly 

had been set apart, together. I am

aware this made us, mythically,

the butt of jokes, a stereotype. 

One sees now a smouldering entangle-

ment, prodigiously concentrative yet

observantly sympathetic, as we were

channeled (if you like) utterly to

extract each other's contribution. 

Few of us then conceived of things 

this way. We were absorbed, not -

in the strange expression of today

- busy. Nobody asserted that claim.

It would have been insulting, if

it were not so meaningless.

I'll never forget an evening by the 

fire with an upperclassman, two years 

ahead of me, tossing backgammon dice 

back and forth, conjecturing between 

saving the baptistry doors and his

pending defenestration with a glitter-

ing degree in Art, with layers upon

layers of security beneath him. He 

said he felt de-accessioned, let go,

not commended. If this sounds tire-

some today, it was disconcerting then.

     

One's heart very much went out 

to him, although I was too little 

seasoned to comprehend how he felt. 

Rather, I naturally translated his

apprehension into another instance

for venerating his exemplariness.

But I was learning, and this conver-

sation will never be to me, just 

yesterday. It is not past. It is

counted in the census of our hol-

idays. What's become of Waring?

We traveled with our pajamas  

then. Risible as it is to think, 

it was considered polite to our 

hostess, even to our visitors. 

On one cold trip home one Christ-

mas, I contrived the necessity of 

flying from Philadelphia rather 

than Newark, to visit the guy born 

on November 2nd. I had a star from 

Cartier for his tree, and he had a 

scarf for me from our favourite 

haberdasher in town, whose bespoke 

jackets I still wear. We sat cross-

legged on a comfy Portuguese carpet, 

listening to Berlioz, where he and 

his brothers had knelt in their 

jammies to exchange toys - for most 

of a night, not thinking even to sip 

anything, absorbing nonetheless. The

character of that kind of time - no

machine to blink us a text, no custom

of tuning out, no pretense of multi-

tasking - drew upon an intense sen-

sory acuity we used to attribute to

the species, only to be proved wrong.

It needs to be given.

People who lived this way must engage

minds and faces of others in their

holidays, or allow them to slide by.

Very long ago, even when we were

dumb, we learned a holiday could not 

be forced. A holiday eased, however, 

counts among our happiest experiences. 

Those we can sit with, we always will.

Now the shape of affection changes,

its demands revising its qualities,

renovations estranging the unsus-

pecting, not that we are alone in

seeing this happen. My upperclass-

man friend gave me access to his

understanding, as well as to his

face and his voice. The solaced

holiday is not an entitlement of

life. It has to be given.

i         the birds guy

ii-iii  F. Lachowski

iv      Andrew Cooper

viii   Valéry Lorenzo

          intérieur series

You can imagine our delight for a hustler who shall go nameless

Once again, we're terribly sorry, this will not be a posting about money. Yet if it weren't for money, perhaps we'd never know what is valuable. Thus, we who measure value, and even our plumbing in cubic Lachowski's, can therefore understand the relief of the Sanford Weills, to be able to have got out from under their residential overhead, despite sinking so many thousands in theirs. With one clean 100 percent capital gain on a simple flat in New York, the Weills have redeemed who knows how many of the drowned. (No doubt, there will be a dance). A nameless hustler also did well, which is of less concern to us, such things being rather common.

The Slab

F. Lachowski

My vote for stocking stuffer

Somehow, the artificiality of the 

marionette's movements, entirely

controlled by a few strings, most-

ly in fact by one central string,

suggested a dance stripped of all

the self-consciousness and ego-

tism that absorbed the human dan-

cer. And the result was that the

marionette embodied a spiritual

power, a kind of purity, which on-

ly the greatest dancers ever

achieved ..

There is something .. that accords

with our natural yearning to be-

have in a certain way in the world,

to behave in a way that has a sav-

ing simplicity, a basic logic ..

Sometimes, in these quotidian mo-

ments, we feel the purity of which

Kleist speaks, we are freed from

the naturalism of our egotism and

our anxiety - we're quite simply,

transparently there .. what e.e.

cummings was thinking of when he

wrote,

   any man is wonderful

     and a formula

   a bit of tobacco and 

     gladness

   plus little derricks

     of gesture.

    

Jed Perl

Antoine's Alphabet

  Watteau and his world

  K   

  cf. L'enseigne de Gersaint 

Knopf, 2008©

5.25" x 7.75" clothbound

30 years ago this week

Dear Olga,

To return to the prison courtyard: what is actually happening when it begins to turn green in the spring again in bud and flower and perfume, when things come to life again? What in fact is that change, that its consequences can be so far-reaching? One important thing happens, I think: all at once, what yesterday still seemed no more than an agglomeration of dead, isolated, accidental and purposeless entities now begins to appear as nature - nature with its own great and mysterious order, its own direction, its countless births and deaths, its own life. We see that something exists that links, with countless hidden but common laws and tendencies, the grass, the flower beds, the trees and everything they represent and remind us of; something that gives them worth, that underlies both the infinite (antientropic) diversity of their existence as discrete entities and the unfailing concord of their natural coexistence; something that breathes into them their beauty and that through them, displays and celebrates itself and inspires celebration ..

I have survived the prison Christmas, my melancholy is gone and my paunch has grown.

I kiss you,

Vasek

Václav Havel
Letters to Olga
  Letter 108
  Hermanice Prison
  Ostrava
  Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
  December 26, 1981
Paul Wilson, Translation
Knopf, 1988©

On our season's turn to a customary stock split

Adhering to seasonal custom, wits will be aphorising this week upon those gentler ironies which characteristically befall a mind acquainted with the existence of multiple possibilities. Not that this intellec-tual privilege is so much to be envied, it's more companionable than the right-and-wrong conceits of the two of every-thing school of thought.

A stirrup cup, first?

    

Now, this is a Monday posting, 
and we shouldn't wish anyone to 
have to proceed too deeply into 
our diurnal deliberation without 
a reasonable whiff of what is 
intended. Any amount of Monday 
without an infusion of Lachowski 
is not to be risked without ur-
gent justification, and for a
digression on the Christmas
cracker, no one could reason-
ably claim the slightest em-
ergency. On the contrary, the
cracker is the essence of an
amusement cherished for its
blitheness, a mode we much
commend in worshipful times.
Toil is so little our way,
we happily decline a vacation.

So, to recall the track record of paired alternatives in human history makes us, however, leery of so much as acknowledging their prevalence in anatomy, whence this quaint dualist sensibility must first have been engendered; but insofar as aphorism, like twins, represents a diploid cell purporting to declare a dividend, we greet these "cracker" packings as manifestations of fecundity, to say nothing of a gainful investment in humane studies. Now, however, when you google nothing succeeds like excess, you find commentaries on Mr Perry and Beyonce, just as almost any sconce implies a mate, somewhere.

I hope it is sufficiently apparent, that what we appreciate in the aphoristic gesture is its offer of a frame conducive to a kind of delight; yet even there, schadenfreude asserts itself as a disagreable possibility. It truly strikes us as a pity, whenever play with a delicious mechanism of our nature is inhibited by that track record from which it is difficult to free the mind. Is it known, therefore, the extent to which aphorism owes its merry renown to the passing of Port, at a certain hour? If this is true, there is only the gout to con-sider as our constraint; but what finer sign of privilege can there be? Yet this does then concede the ghastlier debility, of aphor-ism's concommitant reliance on the passing of youth.

At what price then, have our wits come to us with this game of thinking, that we should resist its charm? Only the highest; but as they have borne the expense entirely, themselves, the generosity of aphorism is self-evident and not the least of its claims, to be celebrated in such weeks as this. All but unfail-ingly, aphorism even rues its condition for us, almost as an arrival of a species of punish-ment, as Louise reminded Thelma of their pursuit by the police - Well what's the rush, Thelma? If we wait long enough, they'll come to us. 

In the meantime, we can only concur. We counsel no rush toward the clarity of aphorism. As distin-guished from puns, aphorisms have none of that crushing ostentation of the knowledge that must not only speak its name, but hound us about the room until we get it. It has its bittersweet consolations, at best, and only dilatory drawbacks at worst; but these appreciations really cannot be forced. When it is time for the gauze that clouds one's eyes to find its way to one's toes, douroble Portugal will still be there, to fortify that sport. Its origin is still its best use, as the towel-snap of levity, persisting.

                                                                                                   

                                                                                                        

Roy Porter
  and G.S. Rousseau
Gout: The Patrician Malady
Yale University Press, 1998©


Callie Khouri, screenplay
Thelma and Louise
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1991©


ii  F. Lachowski

"Will you go to Gstaad?"

Oh, I don't know what they're doing, but of course I won't. I want to spend some time with the new litter and naturally, I want to see you.

Yes, but they want us to be in New York - all ninety of us, it seems.

New York's no problem; see if you can say we have a singing date. They'll know better than to expect you back.

Where'll you be?

Mother has a place. It's stuffy, but there's room service.

Damn! You, and béarnaise.

John, I still want to go look at pictures with you.

You mad fool. You haven't stopped looking for the picture, have you ..

Oh, I think I have; and you were right. But there's a story in how they're done, and that's what I want to see.

.. I was already consciously in presence, here, of the most interesting question the artist has to consider. To give the image and the sense of certain things .. to give all the sense, in a word, without all the substance or all the surface, and so to summarise and foreshorten, so to make values both rich and sharp, that the mere procession of items and profiles is not only, for the occasion, superseded, but is, for essential quality, almost "compromised" - such a case of delicacy proposes itself at every turn to the painter of life who wishes both to treat his chosen subject and to confine his necessary picture.

Henry James
Preface to
  Roderick Hudson
The Art of the Novel
op. cit.