Friday firebreak i

One likes to be down there

at dawn. It can cauterise

the week and steel the day

with something impregnably

perfect.

    

republished July 1st

Nice work when you can get it, Mr Chief Justice

Who knew?

Photography  Steve Pyke

The New Yorker©

Is there a passing scene?

Is there a passing scene,

and which came first (the

scene of passage) and if

so what could that have

been?

Right now Renzo Piano will 

have a new museum and Cal-

vin Klein a new waistband,

and are they getting in my

way of seeing this stride?

Then please do not expect

that I will show them, too.

"Go sit down and wait to be examined."

I have lately become very interested

in tidepool effects which the drap-

ing of a T shirt can recall in some

lightings, as the previous entry and

this one will suggest. 

  

ii  Jeremy Young

Portrait from a marriage: matching the profession to the estate

Mirth - not an experience so

often associated with Graham

Greene as it is with mascul-

ine disappointment in our Age

of Bob Dole - is what floats

to the surface as Peter takes

Poopy to Antibes, to dispatch his honeymoon chores. Oops. Yet, with aid of a pair of 

humane interior designers 

(and I know, this is not merely plural but redundant), his conjugal distraction is

relieved in the usual way, and he returns to his bride with such elation in the acquisition of two new chums as to impart it with no trace of his previous reserve. And what a blessèd convenience, that the new couple's manse must be so extensively redone.

You can well imagine my bemusement, on discovering this classic of Greene's virtually on the day of my marriage's dissolution in Santa Clara County; and such a svelte little Penguin it is, as almost the cornerstone of my decor to this day. Yet as Tolstoy says, not all alliances dissolve for the same reason; in mine, one of us didn't care for California. I beg you to believe. How enormously I'd have preferred a clever pergola for our tidepool than to have paid a pack of lawyers to leave us alone. I cannot drive down to Monterey Bay, and see the sea otters crack the abalone open on their chests, without the sense that gastronomy, too, saves a California marriage.

Graham Greene

May We Borrow Your Husband?

1967

Penguin and Bodley Head, 1969©

We all know people who absolutely must have a tan

We do know such people. I can't recall if I were ever one of them, or if I simply reasoned one had to be exhibited, and acquired colour by default. Oh, yes. The which-comes-first thing, the chicken or the egg: sort of like, whether 'tis nobler to be at war, or merely be able to bomb. I, for my part, would always take my country's view: bombing is good enough. (And did you think, we would go in this direction? But possibly you'd underestimated the power of pec?). As Summer arrives, it's refreshing that our diplomatic choices redound upon first principles, without having to be spelled out.

I need hardly say, these diplomatic choices are only another way of framing the question, of what sort of friends one can get in any given season, with any given conduct. Has anyone noticed, the kind of people the United States has been hanging with, lately? Essentially, they're the gang Madeleine Albright used to trot out on Sunday as "warlords," when Bill Clinton noticed he hadn't conducted a war yet, and settled on Somalia for its simplified imagery. No Presidency in the lifetime of anyone living had not resorted to war to obfuscate its domestic excuses, and Clinton was running late. Not for the first time, would night follow day: losing Mogadishu, he went to Kosovo to bomb.

Inevitably (and there's no one to blame for this, of course), there's less fastidiousness about compan-ionship, when bombing options get a little thin on the ground. The need to hook up has always worked some strange society; but now that it's Summer again, there's no need to be partisan about it.

Is it dirty

does it look dirty

that's what you think of in the city

does it just seem dirty

that's what you think of in the city

you don't refuse to breathe do you

someone comes along with a very bad character

he seems attractive. is he really. yes. very

he's attractive as his character is bad, is it. yes

that's what you think of in the city

run your finger along your no-moss mind

that's not a thought that's soot

and you take a lot of dirt off someone

is the character less bad. no. it improves constantly

you don't refuse to breathe do you

Frank O'Hara

Song

1959

The Collected Poems

  of Frank O'Hara

Donald Allen, editor

op. cit.

I did not miss our most beautiful Spring

I wish I could have commemorated

it better; the season was very fine

in the Piedmont this year, and this

is less usual than legend would have

it. For the past 105 days, if you

have seen this page, you may know

that I've been under prescription

narcotic medication, every day with

no interruption, and I have been all

but completely unambulatory without

incurring great inconvenience. But

in the 'day room' by a side door to

this farm house, where I've concen-

trated an existence that I share with

my English dog, I am surrounded by

a couple of hundred square feet of

eastern, southern and western facing

windows, and have been able to sur-

vey changes in woods and pastures,

and a stream and an expansive pond

without complication by any other

structures. So if I have been com-

pressed, mentally and physically,

I have been blessed by the loyalest

society and the least pressing of

all circumstances with which to ob-

serve, and still to imbibe this

most refreshing of all natural ex-

periences. 

I have not been satisfied by the

blog's sharing of these advan-

tages, not to make too much of

them; but I have been able to

frame one or two postings of

greater clarity on a couple of

dilemmas which I had always

thought might never be expres-

sible. 

Yet a debt I anxiously feel

toward myself, and by extension

to the readers of this page, has

been very regrettably unpayable.

I refer to the photographic en-

gagement with this world which

I enjoy and admire so much in 

the contributions of others,

and gives such pleasure to me

to pursue. It is, I think, the

pleasure of the making of pic-

tures which rebukes, to some

extent, my complaint of "let-

ting down the side," when there

is no more than one side, if

you will. (Here is Ivan's cam-

era, and sometimes Valéry's,

in place of my own; how I do

owe them, too).

An adjustment of 20 degrees F

in our mid-afternoon temperatures

in the last couple of days, has

signalled a new season as if we

might not have heard. Such is the 

presumption of that season, where

we are, that it is seldom willing

to suggest a chilling of our wine

without harangue; if Spring is a

fresh-faced Lieutenant then Summer 

is a drill Sergeant here. It may

be that the oppressions of narcot-

ics have been a timely training

for the capsule of refrigeration 

in which we conduct our exis-

tence here, for more than a

season's fair share of the cal-

endar. I awoke this morning, with

such enhanced respect for these

oppressions that I cannot hesi-

tate to report of them to sustain,

for this entry, the page's re-

nown for poor taste.

I believe I have now caught a

rather panoramic glimpse of the

psychosis of narcotic captivity,

and it came to me very hard this

morning as I drew my first waking

breaths, in daylight, which is

already suspiciously late for me.

I will tell you, bluntly, I am

frightened, I am scared, I feel

saddled by an enormous, suffocat-

ing weight. I can attribute this

novel orientation to nothing in

my experience but this sustained

regime of narcotic consumption.

Very great pain and confusion

have been replaced by terror,

not the heir one bargained for,

of going to sleep, itself.

I have known, I do not have

my body. I have written about

learning that I do not have

my mind. But I did not know

until this day, I do not have

my own breath. This, I must

admit, is enough to give

Summer a run for its money

in aggression, and cast a

pall against complaint with

my imagery of healthy people.

Who knew, we could be offend-

ed by fear we couldn't anatom-

ise, couldn't limn in blithe

genealogy? 

I awoke with unprecedented short-

ness of breath, and it shortened,

of course, as one groped to ac-

count for it. I submitted to a

feeling of envelopment in an iron-

fisted grip, which I did then as-

cribe to my narcotics - dilaudid,

oxycodone in a couple of variations,

gabupentin, scads of tylenol, not to

mention the intravenous delights in

hospital which opened the space for

them. I had a physical sense of be-

ing subject to a formidable dictator-

ship, a squashing of hope, and a

feeling of smothering in my pillows

came over me as I lifted up, in new

pain at my incision. My body was the

Summer drill sergeant, demanding I

obey with drugs. A panic of drowning,

a sense of asphyxiation never known

to me before, lifted me angrily to

the pharmaceutically laden table 

across the room, abjuring my own 

dog's affectionate greetings.

I can lodge this report at this 

date on the calendar because I am

grateful to have seen the threat to

which I am exposed: a somewhat ill-

balanced regime of post-operative

treatments, I can redesign with my

surgeons when I meet with them on 

Monday. And I will. It is unseem-

ly of one to complain of a modest

tilt off-center, in a standard of

care which I still regard as in-

formed and diligent. I would rath-

er complain of Summer, and I'm not 

about to minimise it.

Is taste a human right?

This posting was originally issued
May 25th and was taken down for
revision. A friend was asking for it
lately, and allowed that it was OK
as it was. It should still be developed,
and in time I hope to do so.




Another excellent exchange
on taste was lately joined
at Blue Remembered Hills.

     A thousand postings in the same vessel at the same time,
and still we haven't identified the right to what is so often decried of this page, taste. It's a matter of important work, 
and then we can play.

     On almost every page of this blog, a right is asserted on behalf of the young, of which they were endowed by their creator but only haphazardly by society, if at all. The right to have Horace at one's back, Haydn in one's hospital, Heraclitus in one's curriculum is nothing more than the right to be formed in the legacy of one's birthright - and nothing less. Thousands of seagulls will crash into the Seagram Building before any ten pedestrians in a walking radius will know to preserve it. Yet, it was built for every man on the street for coherency's sake, for proportion's sake, for longevity's sake, and then for eloquence and elegance and inspiration's sake. And why is this, if not because no civilisation can stand without them?

     Is it possible to torture in good taste? Is it possible to tease others with oppression in good taste? Is it possible to exalt grandiosity in good taste? Is it possible to refuse the gifts of science in good taste? Is it possible to plan for New Orleans to drown in good taste? Is it possible for a fiduciary insider-trader to "bet" against his client in good taste?

     Could Mr Madison have fashioned the separation of powers without taste? Could Mozart have reconciled his finales without taste? Could a child's quadratic equation in algebra stand without taste? If we were conscious of the rôle of taste, in short, what would be obscure? 

     We are unalterably adamant, even in this nation, on the universal right of learning. We are at times tiresomely persistent at this page, on the universal obligation to commit the same act, at least on behalf of the young. Is it not probable, given grounding in Vitruvius and Palladio, Titian and Watteau, Haydn and Schubert, Virgil and Virginia Woolf, that some software program can be written, to infuse our domestic design with sympathy -- even if, as we read from time to time, nobody knows anything anymore?

     Coherency. Proportion. Longevity. Add whatever aioli we may want, this is our sandwich of taste. Of course it can be learned; it has only been learned, as regards comprehension if not execution. Let taste shape my herbaceous borders all it wants, it will incrementally shape my civilisation. Why, may an outsider ask, do we ever entertain the slightest doubt, that Syrie Maugham lives up to the Persian Letters of Montesquieu, and that David Adler should be taught in middle schools, along with Mr Emerson?

     The teaching of taste, the sharing of taste, the conserving of taste for the bequeathing of taste have been the subjects of this blog, just as the novelty of its projection of those purposes has struck some as paradoxical. The answer is, that the constituency for those purposes claims precedence here over examples of its achieve-ment, to lend resolution to a task which should feel like play. Something mad over something good, in a word, from the BRH exchange. We want there to be healing voices, we wish there to be a literature of power without force, but not merely because they are in good taste. The wanting of them gives the good sensation of their being, if one has the taste to dream of them. And this obliges us, once in a thousand blog entries, to declare their necessity. We want such things because there are people we love, to be looked after, and taste is their right, their ultimate protection.

I dedicate this posting

with thanks, to the

sharers of taste who

have been with Laurent.