Demanding words

And why should one call oneself anything?

One only deprives other people of their

dearest occupation.

But if you go in for shades, you must

also go in for names. You must distinguish.

From the moment it's the convenience of others,

the signs have to be grosser, the shades begin

to go. That's a deplorable hour ..

Henry James

The Tragic Muse

1890, rev. 1908

Penguin Books, 1978©

My favourite clothespin iii

weekending

Posture and memory

For BL, posture interrupted,
and a young first-baseman, uprooted


There are people who say they like waltzing, and I believe them, but I do not think this is what they mean. I think they were happy when waltzing sometime, and wish to reproduce that state, which they associate with myriad conditions that probably were not relevant. I also do not think they were happy on that definitive occasion for more than an instant, an insightful one to be sure; but now, their happiness in waltzing is anticipatory, contingent, as fleeting as it was then, and sometimes rather pale. I may say this, because one did marry a young lady who was passionate about the waltz.

What I wish to propose is that the sense of happiness in waltzing can be revisited by the accident of adopting the posture one occupied at that defining moment. (I fear this posting will have to achieve its expected Offense of Taste by mere hypothesis). I give you James Agee on this proposition, without whose writings many, many of us would not know what we already know. We leave - by way of illustration but not of contradiction - the waltz, together with the experience of happiness, and visit the 6-year-old boy as he went to the movies with his father, not long ago.

We encounter that inevitable placing of a stone in the shoe of memory, which is simply a natural consequence of family life, if by no means the only one. It has to do with one's posture, and it is Mr Agee's genius not to tell us this happens, but to show it happening, and to astound, by the perspective of the narrative voice, with the unstated implication that the stone will be revisited as that posture is, and can be either smoothed, or cherished for the wrong reason. Or possibly one is simply reading too slowly; Agee's time signature is not that of the waltz. He is vulgar, in the truest sense. Who wouldn't be, if he could?

"Well," his father said, "reckon I'll hoist me a couple."
They turned through the swinging doors into a blast of odor and sound. There was no music: only the density of bodies and of the smell of market bar, of beer, whiskey and country bodies, salt and leather; no clamor, only the thick quietude of crumpled talk. Rufus stood looking at the light on a damp spittoon and he heard his father ask for whiskey, and he knew he was looking up and down the bar for men he might know .. He looked up his father's length and watched him bend backwards tossing one off in one jolt in a lordly manner, 

and a moment later heard him 
say to the man next to him, 
"That's my boy"; and felt 
a warmth of love.


Next moment he felt his father's hands under his armpits, and he was lifted, high, and seated on the bar, looking into a long row of huge bristling and bearded red faces. The eyes of the men nearest him were interested, and kind; some of them smiled; further away, the eyes were impersonal and questioning, but now even some of these began to smile.

Somewhat timidly, but feeling assured that his father was proud of him and that he was liked, and liked these men, he smiled back; and suddenly many of the men laughed. He was disconcerted by their laughter and lost his smile a moment; then, realizing it was friendly, smiled again; and again they laughed. His father smiled at him. "That's my boy," he said warmly. "Six years old, and he can already read like I couldn't read when I was twice his age."

Rufus felt a sudden hollowness in his voice, and all along the bar, and in his own heart. But how does he fight, he thought. You don't brag about smartness if your son is brave. He felt the anguish of shame, but his father did not seem to notice, except that as suddenly as he had lifted him up to the bar, he gently lifted him down again. "Reckon I'll have another," he said, and drank it more slowly; then, with a few good nights, they went out.

If I could fight, thought Rufus. If I were brave; he would never brag how I could read: Brag. Of course, "Don't you brag." That was it. What it meant. Don't brag you're smart if you're not brave. You've got nothing to brag about. Don't you brag."
.. There were no words, or even ideas, or formed emotions, of the kind that have been suggested here, no more in the man than in the boy child. These realizations moved clearly through the senses, the memory, the feelings, the mere feeling of the place they paused at, about a quarter of a mile from home, on a rock under a stray tree .. and above them, the trembling lanterns of the universe ..

James Agee
A Death in the Family
op. cit.

At a distance from the city ii

Speak with us in

the writing all

about you, Socrates;

we do listen.

Suppose it were Friday iii

  

  In the Summer Ivan Grigoryevich traveled to the seaside town where, beneath a green hill, his father's house had stood.
  The train went right along the shore. During a short stop, Ivan Grigoryevich got out and looked at the green-and-black water. It was always moving, and it smelled cool and salty.

  The wind and the sea had been there when the investigator summoned him for interrogations during the night. They had been there while a grave was being dug for a prisoner who had died in transit. They had been there while guard dogs barked beneath the barrack windows and the snow creaked beneath the boots of the guards.

  The sea was eternal, and the eternity of its freedom seemed to Ivan Grigoryevich to be akin to indifference. The sea had not cared about Ivan Grigoryevich when he was living beyond the Arctic Circle, nor would its thundering, splashing freedom care about him when he ceased to live. No, he thought, this is not freedom. This is astronomical space come down to earth, a splinter of eternity, indifferent, always in motion.


  The sea was not freedom; it was a likeness of freedom, a symbol of freedom .. How splendid freedom must be if a mere likeness of it, a mere reminder of it, is enough to fill a man with happiness.

Vasily Grossman
Everything Flows
op. post, 1964
Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler
  and Anna Astanyan, translators
New York Review Books, 2009©

Playing with paint

i    Clément Chabernaud
ii   ciné
iii  Attilalou, photo Terestchenko

Otorhinolaryngology is the study of the ear, nose, and throat

of course

Henry Purcell

The Fairy Queen

  Act II prelude

1692

Sir Roger Norrington

London Classical Players

EMI, 1994©

Is yours a bricked city ii: a renewed consensus for rosé

The fate of our more elegant red wine grapes - Pinot Noir, Cabernet Franc - to endure neglect in Summer was early recognised to be not only an injustice to them but unendurable by their friends; whence, it was discovered that a timely reclamation of the blush of their skins would wring an agreable extract of their intensity in warm weather. For years, now, the Champagnes of Billecart-Salmon have been unavailable in Virginia; and their recent restoration to our shelf could not have come too soon, to respond to the predicament of the furnace at our borders' core, Richmond. The non-vintage rosé from Billecart (a good marriage for Mlle Salmon), a classic in the saignée transformation of the suavity of Pinot Noir, might respond to our estival sentimentality in Autumn, but to necessity when it's hot. 

Billecart-Salmon

Mareuil-sur-Ay

1818