Adjusted reality

Tolling for the deaf an' blind, tolling for the mute
Tolling for the mistreated, mateless mother,
the mistitled prostitute
For the misdemeanor outlaw, chased an' cheated by pursuit
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing

A recent posting on Bob Dylan's Chimes of Freedom deliberately reserved a stanza touching upon freedom of communication, for the reason that another blog was presenting its own unanswerable claim to that right, the same day.


The character of that claim owed much to the implication that the right is an inviolable condition of the liberty of the self, leaving it to others to assert the right to access and accept the expression. Plainly, the deaf and blind and the mute possess undiminished entitlement to the full scale of that right of access and acceptance.


It is the mistitled prostitute who embodies the unanswered question of those recent postings: what is the right of acceptance, if it is not co-extensive with liberty of expression? You cannot find a single text by André Gide in the largest bookstore in the home town of Thomas Jefferson, which happens also to be the seat of his famed Ackademical Village. Nobody in Virginia troubles himself to argue against Gide; we argue quietly, against ourselves. We adjust our reality to fit the hypocrisy of our philosophy. That we invoke the young in this self-abuse is only its most repugnant excuse. 


That we are educating the young to know nothing that the community does not countenance, is only hereditary "massive resistance" to the integration of our minds with reality. (Just yesterday, an Albemarle County judge restrained the Commonwealth's sociopathic Attorney General from intimidating the University against its grants to study climate change, while all around Virginia, farmers are fundamentally adjusting crop plantings to deal with undeniable "facts on the ground").  

This portrait presents the insupportable price of our suppressions as well as any could. It has been tinted to warn of its peril, and gutted to remedy it. Of André Gide in Virginia, it is drawn from an original at a blog which flouts our "massive resistance" with as much panache of wit, sympathy, exuberance, cultivation, and taste as any other known to me within the mistitled mantle it has been willing to adopt for freedom's sake. I forbear to name it, in outrage at this mistitlement - which I decline to endure, in denial that I chafe under my shackles. Yet this evasion poisons praise of him with condescension, this complacency is a complicity, and is the real outrage.

I welcome him as an extremely dear friend, to bring his oft-quoted project into comment here, anytime, and to lay humane, hilarious waste to self-deception as only he can. Come, Rinaldo, home from fair Armida in the Cyclades, and lead our play.

Anthony Esolen, translator and editor,
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000

Please do not tell me about Castle Howard

For JDS

With great reluctance, I know, we do find ourselves returning to architectural manifestations of human aspiration and of human folly. This is because we habituate ourselves to the notion of satisfying our aspirations with our compartments. We know this is no way to look at a building or a bedroom, but we persist, even if we may think it is for no better reason than to be sociable to friends immersed in the same error. 


The conspicuously original examples of architectural approaches to satisfying these aspirations, still stir our youth in that discipline to visit them as exemplifications of their own energy at the apogee of its pathos. Beyond any question this much-exalted, much-derided work of the Century lately laid by, is of that character. Colin Rowe's Mathematics of the Ideal Villa  - comparing this architect's residential works with Palladio's - remains as proper a speculation as any, as to what we are looking for, as we edge away not from the past but from equivocation.


The difference is that between the universal, and the decorative or merely competent; perhaps in both cases it is the adherence to rules which has lapsed.


This edifice is not a success in many of the gestures offered as an excuse for its erection -- machine for living pre-eminent among them. What it is, is one of the 3 most influential houses of the century - Wright's Robie House and Mies' Farnsworth House being the others, of course - and one of the greatest revolutions in the conception of human domesticity still standing on this planet. It is very clear to the naked eye that this conception gropes for first principles, so to speak, of what could be the ideal compartment.


But that is not why we love the Villa Savoie. The things to be loved about this house are innumerable, but they center on glorious sensations of light and movement, per se, in every step throughout its enclosure and about its perimeter. These stimulating, these soothing and musical responses, need I say, describe the fundamental, stunning ecstasy of a walkabout at Monticello.


And yet it is within its spare enclosure that we hold the succinctest cognisance of drawing breath. I don't think one ever adapts to Le Corbusier's villa -- and I think he knew that. One is always in flux there. When he wrote, at his most Cartesian moment, "I occupy space, therefore I am," he could not have thought he was sitting down. Colin Rowe crystallised where our appreciation comes from, in assimilating the seeming radicalism of the architect's consistent residential vision:


Corbusier selects the irrelevant and the particular, the fortuitously picturesque and the incidentally significant forms of mechanics, as the objects of his virtuosity. They retain their original implications of classical landscape, mechanical precision, rococo intimacy; one is able to cease hold of them as known objects, and sometimes as basic shapes; but they become only transiently provocative. Unlike Palladio’s forms there is nothing final about their relationship: their rapprochement would seem to be affected by the artificial emptying of the cube, when the senses are confounded by the apparent arbitrariness, and the intellect more than convinced by the intuitive knowledge, that here in spite of all to the contrary, there is order and there are rules.


The anonymous friend who gave us our glimpses of Notre Dame du Haut is accountable for this interior "shot." It is typical and exemplary, and it is definitive. This is one's life within this vision. It may be too little, it may be too much. But it gives a very fine impression of being a mold not of oneself, but for one's own completion. More than for the jubilance of its youthful vigor, I love this house for its reminders of, but also for its leniency toward my incorrigibility. I truly do adore my imagined life in its contours, and I leave it as a blank slate to my heirs.

Stair photograph lent by an anonymous friend

the seduction of boys

A recent photo of a model exhibiting Curia red in Summer weight has unaccountably turned one's thoughts to the problem of the seduction of boys, or rather, of persons gendered eligibly as recruits of Church or State. Boys, then, may be adopted as a term of art in the mode of discussing a corps de ballet: a traditional, rather than a sentimental expression. This distinction, like that of the Oxford English Dictionary's acute line between aesthetic and erotic feeling, is central to our comprehension not merely of "pornography," but of the rest of art, as well. It seems it isn't nice to fool Mother Nature.


With what relief it must come to Church and State, then, that tradition grants them surrogacy for the succour of Mother Nature. A motion picture much adored for its verisimilitude - that euphemism for tolerable thrill in war movies - Restrepo is based on a text by that great journalist-adventurer, Sebastian Junger. Mr Junger has been quoted in Sue Halprin's paean in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books on the incomparable exhilaration to a boy of 19 to be operating a 50mm instrument of death under the delicious excitement of overweening combat. Here, you see, any cause for the pretense of aesthetics dissolves by virtue of right. The youth is excited, the military knows it, and the military counts on it. The same, need one say, is true of uniforms and their ornaments.

Here's an ornament to stir a boy. The trident, anchor and musket are the least of the toys these lads are invited, by immaculate dispensation, to manipulate for the nation's honour as SEALs. Their privileges are quite more than mythic.


A great and useful literature has grown up around this extraordinary "unit," and you may consult it at your leisure in any American supermarket, between the periodicals on domestic automatic weapons and superaspirated stock cars, amidst racks stuffed with texts exulting in carnage constrained by no law whatsoever.


But I stray. This is about contenting boys with themselves, that first of all pornograhic objectives, to inspire them to participate in conduct important to their seducer. To pursue the matter, we naturally return to the page whence this medallion was plucked, the Official U.S. Navy SEAL Information Website, a publication of the Naval Special Warfare Command.

There, the last veil of distinction between Church and State dissolves in the incantatory text of the SEAL Creed. It is aimed quite squarely at the slightest susceptibility of the figure shown right here: the Navy of the United States wants this lad for itself, and it has perfected its techniques of getting him, with all the inflammatory modes of conventional pornography, apotheosised in its Nietzschian Creed.


He is fellated as a "special breed," Aryan or not. He is "that man" who is so singular as to be "beyond reproach." He is thrilled to be "physically harder and mentally stronger." He craves "discipline," and he will be "swift and violent." The deaths of his forbears and the fear they induced are his constant pride.


Does a simple crying of "Foul" against an indecent intervention with boys compel one, then, to recite a loyalty oath against pederasty? Not on such a McCarthyite witness stand, it does not. I commend the attention of every honest swimming coach in this country to the existence of a profoundly cynical and predatory assault, upon the vulnerability of healthily competitive boys.

"I thought we might be able to talk, you and I"

You see, it is not enough to accuse
yourself in order to clear yourself...

One must accuse oneself in a certain way, which it took me considerable time to perfect. I did not discover it until
I fell into the most utterly forlorn
state.






Moreover, we cannot assert the innocence
of anyone, whereas we can state with
certainty the guilt of all. Every man
testifies to the crime of all the others.

Albert Camus, The Fall, 1956
Monochrome, Hedi Slimane

boulevardier steps out

CUP POEM I

What kind of spring is this,

Where there are no flowers and

The air is filled with a miserable smell?

Shaikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost

A Pakistani poet and essayist, arrested in 2001, he was confined at Guantánamo until April 2005. Upon publication of his prison memoir he was arrested by Pakistan's ISI in 2006, at whose request nobody knows. No one knows where he is.

Poems from Guantánamo

Marc Falkoff, editor

University of Iowa Press, 2007

A dutiful sabbath observance

I had posted in this space, as some may have seen, a nifty little musicale on foes in general and Yalies especially, but I took it down until this year's game, lest it be thought RMBL is only about cutting and pasting pictures to decorate other people's lyrics or prose. On the contrary, here a pretty lyric is proposed in the way people listen to recordings during cocktails, as balsam evoking an underlying jolt of lubricity. You, too, may actually think you like Cole Porter, but have you ever entertained his genius without a supplemental sheet or two to the wind? He's bright, but transparently a Yalie in the light of day.




At the same time, there one was again, back in Leo's dread of fainting dead away in Sabbath observances, when it occurred to me that his terror of more than 50 verses to recite in a Psalm resembled a young artist's reasonable unease with sabbath visitations to a museum. "Oh, hey, darling, you paint. Let's go look at Great Art."


I had a young friend (didn't we all?) who was hauled along to the Getty one dutiful Sunday on a summer's holiday in Malibu, in an exercise of this very reasoning. How very like one duty is another, when its point is to imbibe the good? But remember what Leo does, summering with his friends:


Again I was lucky with the Psalms; the Sunday before there had been 44 verses; this Sunday there were 43, seven below the danger line. Truly providence was on my side. Also I knew we should not have the Litany, as we had had it last Sunday; this also was a great gain. Less than ever was I in a mood to repent of my sins or to feel that other people should repent of theirs. I could not find a flaw in the universe and was impatient with Christianity for bringing imperfection to my notice...


Quite properly, Leo exploits the occasion of worship to allow his mind "to wander" in speculation on the family whose crest clutters the windows of the transept, and discovers a question whose pursuit will direct the narrative and implicitly change his life. Who can say, then, what marvels of obeisance were given short shrift, for my painter friend's contemplation of Richard Meier's fountain in the sunshine, instead? How quite vastly above any canonical question of perfection, is the proliferation of refracting eddies flouting a current in a streambed Heraclitus could have laid, to stir a soul on Sunday? 

Photo Anonymous Gift

"And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom, flashing"

Far between the finished sundown 
an' midnight's broken toll


We ducked inside the doorway, as
thunder went crashing


As majestic bells of bolts
struck shadows in the sounds


Seeming to be the chimes of freedom
flashing

  Flashing for the warriors
  whose strength is not to fight
  
  Flashing for the refugees
  on the unarmed road of flight


  And for each and every underdog
  soldier in the night


  And we gazed upon the chimes
  of freedom flashing

Through the city's melting furnace,
unexpectedly we watched


With faces hidden as the walls
were tightening

As the echo of the wedding bells
before the blowin' rain


Dissolved into the bells of the lightning


Tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake
Tolling for the luckless, abandoned and forsake'


Tolling for the outcast burnin' constantly at stake


And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing


Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail 
The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder 
That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the night 
Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder

Striking for the gentle,
striking for the kind
Striking for the guardians and
protectors of the mind
And the poet and the painter
who lights up his rightful time


And we gazed upon the chimes
of freedom flashing


In the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales
For the disrobed faceless forms of no position
Tolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts
All down in taken for granted situations

Tolling for the searching ones
on their speechless seeking trail


For the lonesome hearted lovers
with too personal a tale


And for each unharmful, gentle soul
misplaced inside a jail


And we gazed upon the chimes
of freedom flashing

Starry-eyed and laughing,

as I recall when we were caught

Trapped by no track of hours

for they hang suspended

As we listened one last time

and we watched with one last look

Spellbound and swallowed

till the tolling ended . . 

And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom

flashing

Lyric, Bob Dylan and many good carilloneurs

A tower of tandem pursuit

Observation Tower River Mur, Austria

Approaching an entire month (can you stand it) of existence, a blog may lay aside pangs of guilt for weeks of play, to get one thing right for the sake of the children. Not, of course, one’s known readers. Rather, those inquiring, hypothetical relic-sifters of our stalwartly busy generation, mediating between themselves and context, their entitlement.

Naturally, on short notice one turns to another blog, where an announcement was lately made of a new edition of Scott Fitzgerald, which was met with a convivial conversation. Here, one title is reproduced for anyone’s enticement, who can accept metric emphasis on precisely the wrong term in both phrases, that least Fitzgeraldian of gestures. But the quality of the news in this case is that fine literature is restored in fine new editions, not that the Scribners ever let their writer or their reader down. 

To anyone attached to the relevance of metre in American prose, as in Hawthorne, Melville, or Capote, the emergence of Scott Fitzgerald did not come 90 years ago or last week, it came yesterday as an unstoppable current, it came today, and it will come tomorrow. Fitzgerald is to prose as the sommelier's insight is to wine: it doesn’t matter how it tastes, what matters is how it behaves. Fitzgerald is our master of metric currents and cross-currents, and The Beautiful and Damned (1922) is a triumph of that flux.

Famously a novel on the pursuit of fortune, precariously including love, the story is structured as two pursuits, Gloria’s and Anthony’s, in awkward juxtaposition. To Anthony’s is given Fitzgerald’s gaudiest laments, to Gloria’s his most austere, and their interplay in dialogue, internal monologue, and in separated sections of the text makes for a tower of extravagant risk on each side, and of course for great dramatic interest in its resolution. Repeatedly, Fitzgerald allows these pursuits to loose themselves under their own power. I’d wager there isn’t a child born within a hundred years of this text who will not remember Anthony’s rush to Gloria at the Astor ballroom, or hers to the rail bridge on a rainy night.

Now we are given the daring structure of this literary tour de force in a physical construction elsewhere, and the world of design has taken abundant notice. Several happier allusions can be drawn from this tower than its resemblance to a forceps, but if its recollection of good writing is unintended, it can’t be dismissed as undeserved. This is not one's Granny’s circular staircase; this is 2 staircases illuminating each other and not entirely without stimulating dissonance of pace and tendency at any given moment, yet plainly fated to seek reconciliation.

For the reader of The Beautiful and Damned it is as if almost every stanza of the staircases evokes one of the book's hottest passages of pursuit - one Anthony’s, the other Gloria’s. Nobody will be able to feel he has climbed these 27-some metres until he’s climbed to the top, both ways; and nothing could be more plain than the treasuring of each stanza of progression as a work in itself. There is F. Scott Fitzgerald. This is not about gossip of friends in the luggage trade, of hacking in Hollywood, of sanitorium, and early death, any more than this Observation Tower is about the cabbage in the lunch of its builders. This is writing for the young.

Shall we hear what they will hear?

First, Gloria in the rain, Book II, Chapter 2: Symposium

"Gloria!”

She shut her lips tightly to keep from screaming, and increased her gait. Before she had gone another hundred yards the woods disappeared, rolling back like a dark stocking from the leg of the road. Three minutes’ walk ahead of her, suspended in the now high and limitless air, she saw a thin interlacing of attenuated gleams and glitters, centred in a regular undulation on some one invisible point. Abruptly she knew where she would go. That was the great cascade of wires that rose high over the river, like the legs of a gigantic spider...

“Gloria! Gloria!” ...

The siren soared again, closer at hand, and then, with no anticipatory roar and clamor, a dark and sinuous body curved into view against the shadows far down the high-banked track, and with no sound but the rush of the cleft wind and the clocklike tick of the rails, moved toward the bridge - it was an electric train. Above the engine two vivid blurs of blue light formed incessantly a radiant crackling bar between them, which, like a spluttering flame in a lamp beside a corpse, lit for an instant the successive rows of trees... The light was tepid, the temperature of warm blood.... The clicking blended suddenly with itself in a rush of even sound, and then, elongating in sombre elasticity, the thing roared blindly by her and thundered onto the bridge, racing the lurid shaft of fire it cast into the solemn river alongside....

Silence crept down again over the wet country; the faint dripping resumed, and suddenly a great shower of drops tumbled upon Gloria.... She ran swiftly down a descending level to the bank and began climbing the iron stairway to the bridge, remembering that it was something she had always wanted to do...

There! This was better. She was at the top now and could see the lands about her as successive sweeps of open country, cold under the moon, coarsely patched and seamed with thin rows and heavy clumps of trees. To her right, half a mile down the river, which trailed away behind the light like the shiny, slimy path of a snail, winked the scattered lights of Marietta.... The oppression was lifted now -- the treetops below her were rocking the young starlight to a haunted doze. She stretched out her arms with a gesture of freedom. This was what she had wanted, to stand alone where it was high and cool.”

“Gloria!”

Now, Anthony in the maelstrom, Book III: A Matter of Civilization

“Where’s the Armistice Ball?”

“At the Astor.”

“Thanks.”

Anthony hung up sharply and rose. Who was Mr. Crawford? And who was it that was taking her to the ball? How long had this been going on? All these questions asked and answered themselves a dozen times, a dozen ways. His very proximity to her drove him half frantic.... Then he found something that made him stop suddenly and sit down on one of the twin beds, the corners of his mouth drooping as though he were about to weep. There in a corner of her drawer, tied with a frail blue ribbon, were all the letters and telegrams he had written her during the year past. He was suffused with happy and sentimental shame....

In the Astor lobby he was engulfed immediately in a crowd so thick as to make progress almost impossible. He asked the direction of the ballroom from half a dozen people before he could get a sober and intelligible answer. Eventually, after a last long wait, he checked his military overcoat in the hall.

It was only nine but the dance was in full blast. The panorama was incredible. Women, women everywhere - girls gay with wine singing shrilly above the clamor the dazzling confetti-covered throng; girls set off by the uniforms of a dozen nations; fat females collapsing with dignity upon the floor and retaining self-respect by shouting “Hurraw for the Allies!”; three women with white hair dancing hand in hand around a sailor, who revolved in a dizzying spin upon the floor, clasping to his heart an empty bottle of champagne.

Breathlessly Anthony scanned the dancers, scanned the muddled lines trailing in single file in and out among the tables, scanned the horn-blowing, kissing, coughing, laughing, drinking parties under the great full-bosomed flags which leaned in glowing color over the pageantry and sound.

Then he saw Gloria. She was sitting at a table for two directly across the room. Her dress was black, and above it her animated face, tinted with the most glamourous rose, made, he thought, a spot of poignant beauty on the room. His heart leaped as though to a new music. He jostled his way toward her and called her name just as the gray eyes looked up and found him. For that instant as their bodies met and melted, the world, the revel, the tumbling whimper of the music faded to an ecstatic monotone hushed as a song of bees.

“Oh, my Gloria!” he cried.

Her kiss was a cool rill flowing from her heart.

Tower Photographs: Abitare & Dezeen

Dust Jacket: The Diary of a Wandering Eye