Time and Place

This afternoon a friend came to visit, making her way here from directions I had supplied her in an email.  Stopping at a deli to buy sandwiches for us all threw her enough off course that she called from her cell to get redirected.  Somehow I could not lift the fog of her confusion so I talked her through the directions that got her around two mistakes and to our very driveway.  We both congratulated ourselves for living in the modern world where there were cell phones.  It made me think of Odysseus as a lad when Homer describes him going over to the Peloponnesos from the island of Ithaka to visit his grandfather Autolykos where his return was a long time delayed as he lay abed recovering from being gored deeply in the leg by a wild boar.  Homer does not suggest that his father and mother grew deeply anxious at this delay; they simply waited out the days until he returned.  That was because there were no means of communication, so they had no choice.  In the 19th century my grandfather Wilhelm came to the States as a teenager and at nineteen enlisted in the Union Army. Twenty five years later he returned to Halle an der Weser, long since married, and a father of eight himself, to visit the family he had left behind all those years ago.  In the interval he had pretty much spoken English exclusively to the degree that the journal he kept of his return to the homeland is all in English. It is poignant when he remarks in this English on the day of his departure from the family home that he will probably never see his parents or his two brothers again, and he was right. Contrast that with today's immigrant into the States who can keep up with his family easily by Skype.  There is no reason for the next generation not to stay fluent in their grandparents' language. When I was eighteen I chose to go to work in New York and forego college.  My mother and I exchanged letters which contained news of our doings couched in the language and sentiments we felt to be suitable, the product of considerable thought and rewritings.  A telephone call would have been considered unseemly, a costly extravagance of money and emotion.  My friends today have daily texts, nay some have hourly ones, with their children off at college.  It would have been a ghastly intrusion if I had had to endure a cellphone call whilst I was writhing and panting in some or another forbidden and delicious passion.  When we lived in Brookline Massachusetts our children walked into the family home after school threw down their books, and disappeared with the neighborhood gang of 17 children ages ten to eighteen until it was dark and they reappeared to interrupt us at our cocktails.  We had  not really noticed their absence.  They went on extraordinary expeditions, those kids; once we learned they had gone on the city transit line to the furthest reaches of the system, a rough and tumble section, alighted, ducked under the turnstiles and come home.  One of my sons complains that his childrens' school sends daily emails to the parents detailing their childrens' every move.  After school athletics programs have every kid slotted into activities throughout the afternoon.  There is no place to escape to anymore.

Let's See If This Works Okay

For the first time I am composing a blog on my IPad rather than on my laptop, an observation that is no doubt entirely ho hum for most readers, but is meant as an apology in advance for what I anticipate will result in stilted, jerky prose.  As usual the technology terrifies me; last night when I did an experimental run, the thing died on me; its last words were a suggestion that I join a chat room where I could find other wounded warrriors in recovery.  My husband suggested in a mixture of kindliness and acid that I should look at the instructions, but I don't seem to have any, except I guess something on the screen I can bring up, but that's too hard for me.  Just as when I am cooking, I want the text in printed form, its pages flat out there beside me.  My problems have to do with hooking a keyboard on to this IPad, and finding that everything doesn't work just as it did on the lap top.  Plus these keys are so small, and my fingers, those pudgy short little arthritic stumps, weren't made for the task.  Flashback to First Grade and Miss Emma Watkins holding up cards each with a letter of the alphabet formed in perfect script, balanced on the line, with the appropriate bits above and below. We learned the Palmer Method---little Charlie was letter perfect.  Flash forward to 1964 sitting in my office late at night drunkenly moving my pen across yellow lined paper.  I was writing a book!  The pen I used was a Parker 51 given to me by my mother in 1942; when the ink ran out I switched to a Parker 51 of indeterminate vintage that I found in the grass of Harvard Yard one day in 1953 and only broke my concentration when it too needed more ink.  In the summer of 1958, desperate at having yet to begin writing the dissertation, six  years since I had entered graduate school and long after I was out there teaching, I sat down to write the thing in long hand, then typed, and sent off to my dissertation director the finished product four days before my wife gave birth to our second child in November. Once approved, the final version was typed by me because I had no money for a typist, all 350 pages with two carbon copies, the top copy of which had to be on 100% rag paper and contain no error whited out.  The first two books I wrote with my trusty Parker 51 which I then typed into a fair copy on my IBM Selectric which had some kind of spooled white out tape which could be struck over errors.  Thereafter my ex-mother-in-law, a saint, paid for typing, which was an absolute blessing except for the time that a very vague and "artistic" typist went to the mountains skiing in the middle of a job, and could not remember where she had left the manuscript.  Then in 1984, I believe it was,  a lawyer friend put me on to something called a Macintosh 128K.  It took me two weeks to master the rudiments of this new technology, crying all the while, swearing, and tipping back goblets of wine.  Now many years  later, the author of many more pages, I cannot at age 83 write more than a shaky version of my own name with the ball point pens that litter my desk drawer. All the pages are on my hard drive and if I think of it, backed up on my Flash Drive (Richard laughs at me for having referred to it as "that little wand"), and now there is something called The Cloud, but let's not go there.  I've mastered and been forced to discard several different writing systems, their idiosyncratic system of symbols for operating each program as obscure and illogical as the ancient runes; only recourse to the chat rooms created by Apple users to dissect problems and solutions are sometimes helpful.  Imagine if the automobile industry resorted to this kind of obscurantism!  Now the IPad. Oy!

Casting The First Stone

The well-known hostility of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia toward homosexual physical relations is always a challenge for me. He has, for instance, claimed that he cannot understand how it is permissible to take a strong moral stance against murder, but be criticized for finding homosexual relations equally morally reprehensible. I do not see that they are of the same category of behavior, the former being, an act of will, the latter of nature. In Catholic parlance the former is a sin, that is, a knowing contravention of the law of God, which I believe is the understanding of that moral category. Sin is often given an etymology that derives it from an Indo-European root of "to be," which is more obvious in the Latin forms esse, sunt, etc. In any case that would underscore the important sense that sin is a considered opposition, a positive defiance of the law of
god. One can contrast this with the well known ancient Greek word transliterated into our script as hamartia which is the noun for the verb hamartano 'to miss the mark,' referring to an arrow which the archer has aimed at a target and missed. The latter is an important word in Aristotle's Poetics often mistranslated as 'tragic flaw' in his discussion of the tragic hero's course of action. It seems clear enough that Aristotle is talking about human beings who aim for the good, but who for whatever reason mistake their aim or the nature of their action which thus ends for them in disaster. The ancient Greeks in general considered that human beings are good, strive to do the good, and 'evil' is thus not the creative force in the universe which Christians call Satan. Scalia, like so many others, must believe that gay males "choose" to have sex with other men. Obviously that is true in the particular instance, but even the merest superficial study of the subject demonstrates rather conclusively that gay males do not "choose" to be gay. Furthermore, most scientific studies, certainly incidence in twins, and in blood relations, would suggest that gay persons are innately disposed to their sexual desires, and thus cannot be judged for what is only natural. What is so disconcerting is Scalia's insistent
certainty in his thundering denunciations of gay activity. Here is where I feel impossibly tested since my instinct is to react in anger, although my rational reaction is to assign his attitude to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church of which he is a communicant, indeed a member as well of Opus Dei, the can we say band of zealots within that faith? Just as he is exhibiting nasty prejudice in his denunciation of homosexuality I can sense the temptation to surrender to the prejudice heard so often at
my mother's knee, that Catholics are slaves to dogma, that a lifetime experience of the Church and its history will turn anyone into the profoundest of hypocrites, and in fact find confirmation for my initial proposition in his alleged angry denunciation of a former colleague at the University of Chicago who claimed that his Roman Catholic beliefs
informed all his decisions.

Her Grace Wants Your Ladyship Resting In her Room

There is a story told of Lady Randolph Churchill while on a weekend visit to a ducal country estate.  Despite the printed program given her on arrival, listing the times for every event, she found herself casually wandering in the grand gardens of an afternoon only to have a liveried servant come out to say “Begging pardon, Your  Ladyship, but Her Grace has scheduled ‘rest in the bedroom’ at this hour”. Back in the sixties of the last century I used to do a lot of lecturing thither and yon around the country.  A major discovery that changed my way of life was the number of times I would be met at the airport by an emissary of whatever institution had invited me with a printout of the schedule of events during my two or three day stay.  Arrival at airport, such and such hotel, rest in room, cocktail reception at Dean so and so’s house, dinner, talk, back to hotel. Next day breakfast meeting with such and such committee soliciting my opinion, mid morning swim at university pool [something I always demanded]. lunch with students of classics club, and so on and so forth until my listed departure. I had never before beheld my life scripted like that, and I have never looked back. It means you don’t have to think and plan while trying to be “in the present,” as they say in some group or another.  Of course, this is a no-brainer for the Queen of England and other full time celebrity vehicles, but it is surprising how well it works for the little people, too.  But the preparation is all mine, of course, and when managing the schedule is the work of a brain well along in life, it can be gruesome.  I have recently been working on a series of trips which require scheduling, and if I were not completely aware that the alternative is to wander clueless day by day, I would not be doing this.  I am flying to Manhattan in ten days, there to see a series of friends, certain art shows, and attend some theater before taking Amtrak to Boston where I join my husband who has meanwhile driven up from Florida. I will be met and we will go to a new play by someone we much admire and then home to the seashore, where a month’s interlude of gardening and doctor’s appointments will ensue until we shall be off to London.  I have just been in the process of organizing our so-called “London theater week”-- or should I spell that theatre?--, an utterly grueling experience, because like the rest of the world centers, one can go nowhere without reservations.  Obvious for hotels, of course, but to be encouraged to make restaurant reservations over a month in advance because of the demand is daunting, since at the same time you discover that the two favorite theater pieces on your agenda are long since sold out that week and you must find alternatives that are worth the airfare to London.  Then there are four or five dear friends whose schedules you work to mesh with your own so that you can enjoy either a meal together or a theater evening together or a walk through, say, the British Museum.  Turns out that this last has almost no tickets left for the Pompeii Herulaneum show in morning hours and i won’t go after lunch. As I am in my dotage, I don’t think I would choose to be present at the Second Coming over a good nap after lunch. Still and all, the entire process is an exhilarating exercise in fighting off dementia as one balances days of the week, hours of the day, a mental image of the map of central London, a complete list of friends that are “must be seen.”  And now I have started on the birthday present for my husband’s seventieth--a ten day sojourn in Budapest--where we will stay on a dreamy island in the middle of the Danube, and go into the city center, when we can bring ourselves to leave the swimming pool, massage tables, exercise rooms, and shady walks and vistas.  Downtown Budapest has been restored since the end of the Soviet Era, and the advantage is that nothing was done to repair the ravages of war torn Budapest in that earlier period, so the glorious Art Deco and Art Nouveau architecture remained intact, just waiting to be spruced up.  Heaven!  Now all I have left is to plan the trip to Kentucky for my grandson’s wedding.

What A Friend We Have In Jesus

I recently read Does Jesus Really Love Me? by Jeff Chu,  an American-Chinese descended from ministers of the Southern Baptist faith back in China, himself a home grown Southern Baptist, a reporter, and very importantly, gay.  Chu claims that he is a relatively conservative person, and of course his faith is vital, if problematic.  The book is the result of a tour of the entire country, interviewing as many persons as he could about either their gayness, or their attitudes toward gay people from a Christian perspective.  I have some understanding of this stuff, raised in the Episcopal Church, and seriously devout, although I left the faith when our minister and I collided over the revelation that I was gay. It’s all described in the portion excerpted in the October issue of Out, (pp 45ff.) taken from my memoir, My Husband and My Wives.  Still I retain an instinctive regard for Christianity, plus, as a classicist I have the professional knowledge I have acquired about the great Abrahamic religions which I have needed to set into the historical context of the religions and cults of the Greco-Roman culture, which forms a considerable basis for Christian thought. And, of course, I am gay.  So I have been reading the book with far more interest than I would have imagined. My immediate response is one of horror. Protestant Christians are all liable to their founder Luther’s belief that he was unworthy, which can only encourage a gay Christian’s belief that his sexual preference is corrupt.  I find it extraordinary that parents can shut gay children out of their lives, for instance, because they have a stronger belief in the validity of a few sentences in a traditional book, I refer to what is often called, Scripture, which seem to doom gay persons to eternal damnation.  Or that there are people who confronting the myriad miseries in the world will expend all their energies into trying to ostracize and degrade gay persons and the dignity of their lives.  I know this is probably naive, but I cannot understand anything other than if there is such a thing as a loving god, or there is a god who is omnipotent, then either way he made persons gay and it must be okay.  Of course, ever since my late teens I have considered that anyone who lived through the time of the Holocaust would be quite right to repudiate the idea of a caring god of any sort.  Later as a classicist I much preferred the notion of an indifferent universe in which human suffering is at best the result of divine inadvertence or malice.
Recently my husband and I watched a Canadian film Incendies about the misfortunes of a woman caught up in the nightmare of clashing faiths, civil war, and warring males in an unnamed country--a stand in for Lebanon, which was torn apart by the civil war between its Christian and Muslim populations a few decades ago. Designed to make the brutality of war fired by the ardor of religious faith come home to the viewer, no ghastly detail is omitted, and for a wuss like myself it was a very difficult evening (and for quite other reasons it grated on my highly impatient husband who cannot stand the predilection of European-style films for lingering over the visuals of every detail and mood as the plot very, very lazily advances, and sometimes just disappears).  The early scene of the brothers of the main character as they shoot point blank their sister’s Muslim lover, and hesitate over whether they should administer the same “justice” to her sets the tone for confronting the fundamental brutalities of the Christians in Lebanon.  Later we watch as Christian militants set fire to a bus filled with half dead Muslim passengers, many of them women and children, and shoot to death a child who had escaped the bus.  The film is a meditation on the hatreds of the middle east that are born in religious affiliation and ethnic identification, and one’s first reaction is to thank whoever that we live in the United States.  And then I turned to Chu’s book.  It seemed to me that all the potentials are there for something like this in the USA, the same inflexibilities, the irrational faith in the irrational, the same angers that inflexibility encourages in the human breast.

Tonight We Love

I don’t think I had heard Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto for nearly seventy years before listening on Sunday when the Sarasota Symphony Orchestra offered it.  For me it is a virtue of the Orchestra’s programming that they play a lot of old chestnuts throughout the season, simply because in my obsession with being trendy once I left Iowa City at 22, I devoted myself to music I did not know.  So now it is a shock to hear Beethoven, Brahms, and in this case Tchaikovsky almost as though it were new music.  I remember that this piece was some of the emotional porn to which I turned as my teens began, to throb and sob at the dance hall version "Tonight We Love," with intimations of longing and ecstasy, or as I imagined them to be. Watching Casablanca did the same for me, or hearing Vera Lynn sing “We’ll Meet Again,” which itself brought forth freshets of tears in my mother’s eyes, as she compressed the events of the war in which we were then engaged with the one twenty five years earlier when she had lost her first husband.  At eighteen I watched mesmerized by grief and erotics as the gorgeous young Gerard Philipe played the teenaged lover of a married woman (Micheline Presle) with a soldier husband at the front in Le Diable au Corps, a desperate and doomed love affair, emotions that I reprised years and years later watching Vittorio De Sica and Danielle Darrieux in the waltz sequence of Max Ophuls’ The Earings of Madame de . . ., seduced by my love of Edwardian repression and hypocrisy in the minuet of manners with which these beautiful people act out their passion.(I agree with Andrew Sarris that this is the most beautiful film ever made.)  But Sunday as we came away from the concert, I realized first of all, that listening to this piece in a concert hall, the acoustics of which elicited the subtlest textures and tones in the pianist’s solo parts, made it something quite other than the source of swelling emotion in a teenager’s heart.  And let’s face it, at eighty three I am not a teenager. I suddenly stopped to realize that nowadays when I need to dip into the maudlin, I go in quite another direction. For instance, as the great mass of tired males at the end of the day light up their computers and hopefully their lives with scenes of naked women in orgy, I turn on yet again the YouTube presentation of Susan Boyle winning the singing contest with “I Dreamed A Dream.” It always makes me cry, as that dowdy middle aged woman, slightly daft enough or courageous enough to offer herself up to the condescension that poured out into her face, opens her mouth and produces such solid, authoritative singing, and she wins! she wins! she wins! And the song is by turns so sad and so hopeful, and such a statement of her own predicament.  Oh, the lump in my throat every time.  As the tears start up, I am so happy!  But wait, that’s not all.  I often also turn to, you won’t believe this, the Antwerp Train Station Flash Mob.  Why?  Because as I watch those crowds forming into rhythmic patterning, all of them looking like they are having so much fun, I suddenly can believe that there are no snipers, rapists, pick-pockets, mortgage brokers, investment firms, militias, and all the other desperadoes and betrayals that The New York Times,for instance, offers up each morning for our spiritual breakfast.  Ditto "Puttin’ On The Ritz," the Moscow Flash Mob, scenes again of precision dancing, some of it with real wit,  everyone smiling and laughing, beautiful young people, nobody frowning, nobody drunk.  Just to hear a Russian crowd singing “. . .rich as Rockefeller . . .” well, that’s another form of tearing down the Wall, when you come to think of it.  And if you want to play at being an academic and do heavy duty analysis, you can start with teasing out the meaning in the iteration of the Russian leader’s name in "Puttin’ On The Ritz."

Gilgamesh and Enkidu

Funny, with all this talk for and against gay marriage at the moment, and the frequent allusion to Adam and Eve, which often prompts the corollary observation “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” few seem to know of western civilization’s first couple, Enkidu and Gilgamesh. There seems to have been a historical king named Gilgamesh who lived around 2800 BC around whose name stories collected, and these were gathered together later on, and still later in the seventeenth century BCE they were made into a continuous narrative. [Naturally, I can’t stress strongly enough reading the final chapter of C.R.Beye Ancient Epic Poetry with a chapter on the Gilgamesh Poems  available from Amazon)  The Book of Genesis must be dated later, so, let’s say Adam and Eve are the second couple; who would have thought that the first affective twosome would be male?  I am not saying, however, that we have definitive proof that they enjoyed each other carnally.  We know this about the Genesis duo, because they went on to have Cain and Abel, at least you have to imagine that the First Children or First Siblings were spawned by maybe the Second (okay, maybe First) Couple.  Yet the story of Enkidu and Gilgamesh is worth knowing whatever your take on same-sex relationships, just because it is so unusual, and thus important in the constellation of archtypal depictions of humans together.
This King Gilgamesh rules Uruk brutishly, it seems, since the narrator declares no woman was safe from him. The goddess Aruru fashions a mannikin out of clay, calls it Enkidu who is sent to be the people’s liberator, he meets Gilgamesh, they wrestle, become inseparable friends. They go on a buddy traveling trip where their adventures include killing a giant,  Enkidu puts himself at risk when the goddess Ishtar’s sexual invitation to Gilgamesh is spurned and in her angry attack Enkidu mocks her and hurls a thigh bone at her head. That puts paid to his chances of survival, and the rest of the narrative deals with his death and Gilgamesh’s grief and desolation.  Never mind, there are other details but these are the basics. The interesting thing is the transformation of Enkidu.  Early on he is described as the animals’ friend, a hairy brute, a child of nature. Because he protects them, the hunters hate him.  Out of the blue the narrator says a father appears to a hunter to advise him to get Enkidu to the animals’ watering hole and set him up with a prostitute. Who knows where she comes from?  But we have to understand that she was probably a temple prostitute and not the equivalent of some addict in hot pants waving at johns on the Interstate; sex with her seems to produce a major spiritual and psychic change in Enkidu. The narrator insists upon the details, that Enkidu has incredible energy, he keeps an erection for seven days of serious fornication.  And then he abandons the animals to the hunters, goes to the city, takes up eating bread and wine, gets a hair cut, wears perfume--all this the narrator insists upon telling--sets out to do combat with the sexual bully of a king, then there is the wrestling, the friendship, spurning the goddess.  As Enkidu lies dying he curses the prostitute for taking away his life, as though spelling out the biological truth that once a male achieves orgasm he no longer has a function.  The two men are described as relentless cocksmen, but once they wrestle there is only that friendship, the sex goddess’s invitation, that is, sex with a woman, is spurned.  The two men become inseparables, leading a life of adventure. It’s sort of a Sumerian version of “Brokeback Mountain.”