Substrata of our syntax we have really not pursued

Another Slim Aarons portrait of the late Mrs Guest at a party, this is not, but from the point of view of this page it might as well be one. We have not made so much of Mrs Guest as we might have done, because her affect is so assimilated as an element, already, of the ethnographic and cultural wellsprings of the page that it would only be to wallow in the generic to reproduce her image at all. It is a given, that this portrait of Fernando Fuhrherr equally stands in the wings, so to speak, of such presentations as an individual blogger must, I think, endeavour to offer by way of distinguishing defini-tion and contribution. 

We already have people out there, richly nourishing our grasp of the guest lists of their time by diligent self-reference, who remind me of certain boys in one's eating club who couldn't bear to be known for who they are, in their own right. Again, I would rather cite Philip Johnson for the principle that everybody has a television house, than for the substance of what it shows of everyone. Shall the programming, sometimes referred to as "style," of one hour of Friday evening take precedence over another; or shall what one does with Friday evening despite television, come to the fore?

I know of one blog which grafts these stocks of caste and outcast with a very enlightened discretion and a lightly worn familiarity with them both, which already is so adequately building a dossier on their interior designer trellising that it is only logical to hope that someone will do the same one day for the growers of wine. This is a page, however, on what is left when these self-cancelling salients are set aside, and the individual voice stammers to break forth, almost to conserve the sentence by the technique of spur pruning. The argument is, not that Mrs Guest and Fernando Fuhrherr persist on the same rootstock, but that that vine is carrying something which they extract under obligation to propagate, intact.

Personal "style" is not an aspect of our syntax we have actively pursued, except as regards the creative, authorial voice, as in Terestchenko's or Lorenzo's in photography or Lauridsen's and Jeremy Young's in facial expression. Mrs Guest and Fernando Fuhrherr, on the other hand, are avatars of received expression - familiars to a fault, but alike in that constancy. They are what we have looked at forever, and rightly so, except to the extent that they may relieve us of looking. It would not be insulting to accuse me of feeling failed by these two avatars.

I wouldn't mention these distinctions on a Saturday unless I meant for them to register here. Yesterday I happened to run across again, such a demonstration of essayistic power in selection of detail as to define "looking" once again as that quality to be cultivated first among the blogger's obligatory gifts. It comes from the inwardly traveled gaze of Eleanor Clark, and it appears in a work I've cited here, before, which I happened to be consulting in that most vulnerable of moods, the quest for familiar pleasure. I have not seen a stronger image in textual form, for the arduousness of looking; it has the feel of a scene in the cinema of Robert Bresson, a hero of that act. I only regret that this citation must cost much in context, on the qualities of a fine rural priest, and of life in a harsh economic landscape -- subjects of gigantic pertinence in their own right, to this minute. But this extract may summarise the compassionate imagination that is so beyond the reach of idealised avatars, and which is indispensable for bringing forward, intact, what we all purport to cultivate.

A man of only 26 from the village has died the night before, of a highway accident. His widow has been visited by mourners who encounter the priest on a country road, walking toward her home.


He is passing the after-lunch stream of women on bikes, going the other way, back to the yards, some taking their children to work too since it is Thursday, and yesterday's death lies on their greetings to him. Not many of them from those outlying parts go to church regularly any more although they send the children; hence some of the curé's vituperation and alienation from them, but that is not in the Abbé's rôle, or his nature. He finds the fact unfortunate but doesn't dislike the people because of it; Yvette, for instance, with her grand smile edged today with the common trouble, for she has just been to see the widow and stops to speak to him about it, or lusty weather-beaten Mme Aurogné, nearing fifty and full of jokes, taking her two youngest to work with her. And Jean-Pierre? Ah, that's no joke; she is worried, he disappeared a little while ago and now she has to go and doesn't like to leave him wandering in the fields.


Later, on leaving the stricken house, the Abbé finds him masturbating by a hedge nearby. His features are blobbering and out of kilter, with one eye vacant and much bigger than the other, but he is not quite an idiot, and his mother's earlier fears of sex violence haven't been realized. Something is preying on him, he manages to say it finally; it is that he is twenty-six too, and now that the other one he has known all his life is dead and how can that be, when they were both twenty-six. His head sways like a bear's under such a weight of thought and effort of speech, and then he solves it all in a gesture the Abbé is not quick enough to stop. His huge hands are into the thorn hedge over his head and with one grab, spurting blood from all his fingers, he wrests out a bouquet, and whether from the fragrant little blossoms in it or from the blood of his own wounds, is suddenly at peace. And so, trailing vines and specks of blood from his hands, in a shower of lark-song, lumbers off to join his mother at the yard, on the Abbé's suggestion; there are a few simple jobs he can do there, though not for long at a time.






















Eleanor Clark
The Oysters of Locmariaquer
  Chapter Six
ibid.

Whit to return, chacun à son tartan

The English cocker spaniel with whom I live, Whit was away at his spa in our nearby academical village for the past 7 days, as his master underwent an angioplasty for an imploded arterial bypass, débridement and lecture series on domestic vascular management. In his latest seduction of governesses he, for his part, was scheduled to indulge a bath and merry pastoral sport, so that in anticipating his return today a sorting out of our naptime tartan throws has been occupying the greater part of one's residual intellectual resources. Shameful as it is, to boast of the elations of life with this spirited and birdy social class, today's confession cites only a minor ripple of energy to be released upon reconstitution of our feudal order.

Texture and loft, brilliance and expanse are indistinguishable between Whit's dress Malcolm and my hunting Stewart. What's really pertinent, as you would suppose, is their implicit hierarchy of placement in naptime space, with the camel, periwinkle, black and red of Whit's tartan enjoying a much greater latitude of portability than the one for one's own bed or reading chair. I don't mind what this reveals of the circumscriptions in one's reading or romantic habits, when the sovereign expansiveness of Whit's dozing domain is demarked with such agreeable blur.

Not that the drill of Whit's review and inspection of one's deployments is ever unduly strict on the occasion of his returns to household, it can certainly be assumed that permanence is no more than provisional. We have long since dispensed with a biscuit tray, for example, given the ubiquitous recurrence of his appetites, in which rapidity of solace is much more important than any furnishing of space. Whit welcomes service essentially anywhere, and is wholly unembarrassed by redundancy. In the same way, any rarity or relative fragility in the movement of one of us, now, is more than compensated by spontaneity and vigor in the other's.

Whit attained the age of 11 while we were apart this week; he was born on D-Day, and I learned only yesterday from his breeder, that he has lately lost a sister, who had remained in Santa Barbara to redeem in showing what he had squandered in coming here. It's mostly viticulture, play and dozing, here; not much in the way of saucers or slipcovers. Hence this foray into guyblankets and circulation patterns, by way of mitigation. The other night, Whit did manage to dash to the floor a Limoges dessert plate I'd always rather liked from Frey, in the gonesses pattern reminiscent of Watteau, but ordinarily our porcelain side is also rather wan. We shall have to shape up for Summer.

    For today, however, there are the     many  uncanine trespasses of an       entire week to set right in the       garden, re-marking paths and         copses as unmistakably off-limits     to the unwashed and lesser deer,     and an evening whisky to regale       with the contentments of a lang-     uid stretch of the forepaws on a     tartan of one's own. With any         luck the night will bring the         stars to settle gently on the         swirls of silk that stir above       the snores of a settled English       dog, that there could be some         sense of that upon this page, to     show the house is full that is       his home.

You knew very well, there would be a quiz

     This was the great nuisance 

     of the Iliad, was it not,

     as all these heroes saw

     each other drain into the 

     sand. One was supposed to

     remember whose son they

     were, where the sun stood

     at the time, who - can you

     believe it - was responsible.

     What is that romance reserved

     for sleep, that sometimes can

     seem not to pertain to waking?

     

     

  

     

Missing play

Back soon, we'll laugh. L

Style as we know it: going as the fish course

I don't know who is responsible for this, but if I were to allow my educated guess - the raglan shoulder and its easy collar, the neck-line and subtleties of the T, the sandals - to narrow it down, I'd be changing my subject, which is what an enviably comfy and hearten-ingly pretty way this is to dress, for checking into a hospital on a gorgeous Spring weekend, for an i-v drip and a raft of ultrasounds. One always likes, I think, not to carry paradox so far as to be construed as mocking; but where blithe and lovely, in particular, are to be under pressure, a little private reservation of panache can be indulged to nobody's affront. I don't think I could see dressing this way for a garden lunch, for fear of risking competi-tion with the host setting, if not the sea bass, itself; and yet, I suppose this is the idea. Spring fashion strikes me as one of those cases, where congruency commonly verges upon the incongruous: infelicitous, tautological, but prevalent, of course.

Gérard, who knows his way around a conundrum

Of all the associates who have enlisted in the sustenance of rmbl as the Reform Club lark that it is - from this position - certainly Gérard has shown himself to lack none of Dickie Hakluyt's gall, Naughty Witt's cheek, Hercule and Auguste's obliviousness, and dear Thorny's genius for the strategic doze so much as he, and in this observation we include his plodding little editor. You can imagine with what relief, then, we greeted his solution to our recuperation's tiresome insomnia, tricky leg and spiking pain, which is to take an hour every day in his Maserati Infamnia, as revenge. It had been wasted on his present proving ground anyway, his uncle's breakwater.

Gérard is infallibly too polite to ask a thing to be practical, if he likes the looks of it. We, too, treasure a barometer from Hermès, of impeccable uselessness, because it's such a handsome little caricature of a ship's portal. The Infamnia pleased Gérard in his piercing days, and we set our barometer to say what we want. 

Not that this sentimental aesthetic indulgence extends to his choice of companions, all gifted in some way, for performing some thing; and it was nothing for him to flip through his rolodex under "Feet, Agile, Exemplar of," to make his remedy as elegant as it is. Lacking adult passenger legroom and headroom, the Infamnia acts as a kind of global compression bandage, not merely upon the imagination of the young, but upon the propinquity of its occupants. Driven, then, at that breakneck velocity at which even the reflexes are gulpingly obliterated, the Infamnia delivers a fearsomely accelerated massage, of which an hour seems to drain every complaint.

          

          Well, you know someone'll
          take this seriously, Hercule.
          Guys will line up for an
          Infamnia, and it doesn't 
          exist.


          Oh, I hear that it might
          very well, Auguste.

Maxwell

    The meeting in the school corridor,

    a year and a half later, I keep re-

    living in my mind, as if I were go-

    ing through a series of reincarna-

    tions that end up each time in the

    same failure. I saw that he recog-

    nized me, and there was no use in

    my hoping that I would seem not to

    have recognized him, because I

    could feel the expression of sur-

    prise on my face. He didn't speak.

    I didn't speak. We just kept on

    walking.

I remember thinking afterward, When enough time has passed he will know that I haven't told anybody. .. But I still went on worrying for fear he would think that the reason I didn't speak to him was that I didn't want to know him, after what happened. Which is, I'm afraid, what he did think. What else? ..

Sometimes I almost remember passing him in the school corridors afterward. And I think, though I am not at all sure of this, that I can remember being happy that I was keeping his secret. Which must mean that he was there, that we continued to pass each other in the halls, that he didn't move away. ..

.. I do feel guilty, even so. A little. And always will, perhaps, whenever I think about him. Whether he was spared .. Whether after a while .. Whether he had as lonely a time as I did .. And whether .. all that finally began to seem less real, more like something he dreamed, so that instead of being stuck there he could go on and by the grace of God lead his own life, undestroyed by what was not his doing.

William Maxwell

1908 - 2000

Later Novels and Stories

  (Volume 2 of 2)

  So Long, See You Tomorrow

  1979 (The New Yorker)

Christopher Carduff, editor

The Library of America, 2008©

  

Be with me

BCW

Always wonderfully impressive

to me is our hearing's genius,

evolved early enough as to seem

only sensory, for giving us the

etymology, the genealogy of a

complex sound which pleases us 

instantly with complete coher-

ency and unquestioned generosity.

A healing voice, if you like,

we trace and assimilate in one

transformative shudder. Yet,

even knowing its quality, one

may wonder how it is produced

in fact, much less where, as

we say, it may have come from.

A healing voice, than which

many say there is no greater,

makes its way from still sil-

ence to resolved completeness

in the first measure of the
widely known Cavatina from
Beethoven's Op. 130 Quartet.


When I was a college boy,
steeping myself in this music
via an ancient victrola (com-
paratively speaking), I could
very clearly understand what 
the critical fuss was about,
in awe of this invention; but
it was also clear to me, that
the music responded to a con-
dition my life had not pres-
ented to me. 

Drawing closer, in time, 
through observation and ex-
perience, to the condition 
for which the wholeness of 
this song is reserved, is 
rather to pass through an-
other veil of love. In my
hearing of the Cavatina on
this evening of isolation
and pain beyond my ability
to anticipate, I feel not
merely the mystery of that
first measure's derivation
as noise, and its swift
identification; I feel a
quality in a healing voice
which I had never imagined.


This very familiar piece of
music is justly famous for its
companionship to suffering, a
way almost of lifting it a bit
from one's shoulders. But no
one ever told me what a summons
it is, away from pain; and no
one ever told me me what a sum-
mons it is, to the unlonely com-
munion of those who undergo it.

In my way of thinking of such
things as the gifts that they 
are - that they need to be
handed along - the Cavatina's
entreaty, its acoustic path 
from the tormenting meaning-
lessness of suffering, strikes 
me as something I have to hope 
will come to the constituents 
of this page.


I am disappointed with the
presentations available via
you tube, which in any case
represent an irresponsible
way of listening. There is 
no rush in this. I would
recommend the compact disc
recording by the Alban Berg
Quartet (EMI).








i  Francisco Lachowski