Georgia On My Mind

The newspaper photographs depicting priests of the Orthodox Georgian Church physically battling with men gathered to demonstrate for the cause of male homosexuality in the country of Georgia in the city of Tiblis is yet another reminder that when the religious gain any kind of power and freedom from societal surveillance they go on the attack.  One would hope that just one time that new found freedom would result in an increasing effort to do good, spread love, honor the gospel pronouncements of the Christ for whom they exist.  But gay males always represent a threat that adherents to one of the branches of the Abrahamic religions cannot tolerate.  The religious ideas derived from that source are profoundly hostile to the idea of women's parity with men, and gay males are seen as a prime threat to the ideal of masculine superiority.  The source of women's inferiority to males derives in the very first instance from their generally inferior physical strength, augmented by their inherent physical weakness during their pregnancy and parturition plus their dependency during the early period of motherhood.  This inferiority is policed and underscored by the constant instances of male brutality visited upon the bodies of their wives, nowadays documented with precision by the worldwide press.  The Book of Genesis recounts the story of Adam's doom in his seduction by Eve in the matter of eating the apple; many scholars consider that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is rather better translated as a Knowledge of Pleasure and Pain, and thus Eve is inviting Adam to taste the joys of orgasm.  Jaweh's warning that death lies in eating the apple is another way of saying that when a couple procreates they have fulfilled their biological destiny, a milestone that leaves only death untried.  Sexual ecstasy is the one moment when a male loses control, and therefore the only time when his constant domination of women is in danger.  Gay males are in every way a threat to the heterosexual male.  He gazes at his fellow males with the look that betokens domination and invitation. He is insinuating, insisting that males are physically attractive, just as heterosexual males will not acknowledge that fact, fearful if they do that this exposes them to the same debilitating sexual interest that they impose upon women. He is not party to parenthood, so has no relationship with women that depends upon her physical weakness and his control of it.  He does not automatically assign women to the role of subordinate helper, because he will not be having a baby with her.  He looks at women as objects of parity; he destroys the hierarchy of the sexes, upon which the Abrahamic religions are built.  What is more, the very idea that gay males bring other males to orgasm, thus a male inflicting ecstatic powerlessness on his fellows, is a frightening anathema to the inherently control-mad heterosexual male.  What is more, every gay male will testify to the times in his life when he has had some mutually satisfying sexual encounter with a heterosexual (using those terms in ways that are sometimes counter intuitive) male, which is a testament to instincts most males would prefer were not acknowledged, better repressed, or, when excited, violently denied.  One can only imagine what passions were boiling in those violent Orthodox priests brutally striking out at the gay males standing before them in open acknowledgement of their sexuality.

London

A week in London.  Mercure Hotel right up next to Paddington Train Station on Praed Street with every kind of vehicular noise imaginable, yet never a sound penetrated our tiny little attic room on the top (5th) floor.  Heaven!  So much traffic, so many traffic jams, Trafalgar Square in a taxi trying to get to the Aldwych Theater, slow motion for twenty-five minutes, but never once was there the sound of a horn beeped in frustration from any cabbie, never did the cabdrivers, for that matter, depart from their genial, mannered, knowledgeable control of the cab. The streets of central London so crowded with people I was fearful, partly because they were all so young, so determinedly moving so fast, Saturday night by the fountain in Piccadilly so many wildly crazy drunken young men, soccer match just finished and much celebrating, oh, how I was fearful, and amazed to see dear old ladies looking not unlike Our Gracious Queen, same handbag, same hairdo, placidly walking along amidst the hurly burly.  Wonderful to be in a country where you do not have every other person packing a pistol.  Americans most generally remark on the marked decline in public anger, tension, hostility that marks the far more placid English scene.  It is more like the America of my childhood.  More foreign languages in central London than I have heard anywhere else including Manhattan.  The tube is crowded, the platforms are crowded, masses of people moving up and down on the escalators, racing along through the very claustrophobic tunnels that link the underground systems one to another. Trains come in rapid succession; buses move in their own dedicated lanes.  Except for traffic jams people are moved along efficiently and swiftly.  BBC Television News: reportage by persons who obviously had some training in what they were talking about, gruesome horror story news, the very staple of American TV, at a minimum and at that not repeated ad nauseam.  The debate on gay marriage in the Commons carried live in snippets interspersed with so many interesting intelligent observations by concerned parties of every stripe. It always seems so odd this fear of two persons of the same sex getting married.  What is going to happen?  What has happened?  Nothing.  But the debates were good.   Oh, Lord, how extraordinary to find intelligence and learning privileged in the public sphere!  Wonderful restaurants and oh were they expensive!  But then everything in England is expensive, and my friends tell me the salaries in no way match the cost of living.  The restaurants where the serving staff is salaried and therefore not trying to be our friend, unobtrusive, deft, and such a melange of nationalities.  Friends claim that it is hard to get native born Brits to do any work, and one must seek the immigrants.  That was what my son found when he was the executive chef in a London restaurant in the 1980's.  Lots of complaining about the ease with which layabouts can stay on the dole for decades.  The English peaches and cream complexions, boys and girls in their early teens, oh, Lord, how can people be so beautiful.  Was it Augustine who said sunt angeli isti Angli ("they are angels these English".)?  Or something like that.  I probably have the Latin wrong, but, hey, I am retired, and jet lagged, and don't give a damn, and my husband Richard is in another room (he would not tolerate such sloppiness).   Marvelous theater, the crispness of the acting remarkable, so many young persons in the audience.  Somehow I feel that persons my age can't take all the stairs, the crowds, and so stay home.  Of course, maybe I am still in Sarasota mode and expect every second person to have a walker or an oxygen cannister and tubes in the nose.  We lunched and dined with wonderful friends, always in some ways a wistful experience as time is indeed marching along very briskly, taking out one or two at every round of the calendar year.

Off To London Returning Sunday Week. Hiatus

Tallulah Bankhead ended her Sunday night radio show by singing in her husky whiskey smoker's baritone some lines of the following song, then closed off by saying "Good night, dahlings, until next week."
 
May the good Lord bless and keep you
      
Whether near or far away
              
May you find that long awaited golden day today
                        
May your troubles all be small ones
                
And your fortune ten times ten
                 
May the good Lord bless and keep you
       
Till we meet again

       
May you walk with sunlight shining
     
And a bluebird in every tree
         
May there be a silver lining
       
Back of every cloud you see

Fill your dreams with sweet tomorrows
 
Never mind what might have been

          
May the good Lord bless and keep you
 
Till we meet again

May the good Lord bless and keep you
                   
Till we meet till we meet
      
Till we meet a--gain

Will This Be On The Exam?

The affair of the Harvard students who "cheated" on their take home exam, and for which many were expelled, has continued to exercise my moral indignation whenever the subject reappears in the news, or I read about it in some on-line communication from Harvard to its alumni.  I still think the professor was entirely wrong to permit a take-home final exam, wrong to establish a course with obviously minimal standards and then express righteous indignation that the students were not rigorous in establishing their individual integrity; the president and administration seem to me way wrong in turning a deaf ear to the numbers of students who claimed that the professor encouraged some form of sharing, deciding to fail so large a cohort rather than demand that the professor offer another final exam.  Everything is done on a computer nowadays, and for better or for worse, that technology makes inadvertent copying epidemic.  I am surprised that Doris Kearns Goodwin, a professor at Harvard, did not speak out, since she herself suffered the ignominy of having it revealed that substantial portions of a book she wrote on the Kennedy's a decade or so ago, contained numerous passages taken verbatim from the writing of other authors without attribution.  I am willing to believe it was a common scholarly inadvertence, most often caught by the author in question.  Anyway, the course was a total gut, the Harvard administration knew this, and so why are they completely bent out of shape?  As a teenager I used to write term papers for students at the University of Iowa, often buying them back if they received high grades and sell them as "used" for half price.  In my innocence (?) I was startled at how indifferent the graders were to the papers in question, how the same paper would receive such a range of grades, indicating to me that the grader probably read the first page and gave the student what was "normal" for that student, especially considering the absolute stupidity of the so-called "professor's comments" in the margin.  Of course, students should do their own work, but of course the administration should create circumstances where serious performance, high standards, and integrity are foregrounded.  I remember only too well in my Harvard days asking the proctor if I could go to the toilet and a witness followed me into the men's room to ensure that I kept my hands on my dick and not on some study aid I had secreted for instant help.  As an undergraduate at the State University of Iowa in classes of thousands swelled by the arrival of the guys on the GI Bill we took true and false or multiple choice exams as the final, if you can believe it, in the courses that the social sciences offered for distribution.  What a joke; half the guys in my row figuring me a nerd with a brain were copying where I put the marks on my paper.  I learned from these experiences, however.  As a college professor myself I forced myself to read in detail every paper, forced myself to create essay questions that would be in intimate dialogue with what we had discussed and highlighted in the classroom hours, forced myself to read carefully and immediately every paper, struggling to return them within a day or two, so I could ask for rewrites immediately.  We were in the moment, as the Buddhists say.  Harvard's buildings do not collapse like the ones in Bangladesh, but the glimpse into that so-called "cheating scandal" makes you realize the degradation of the factory model as applied to higher education, Ivy League education, no less.

Many Are Called, Few Are Chosen

My older daughter was here visiting.  Saturday night we will attend the ceremony marking her graduation from divinity school, as she prepares in middle age to take up the calling of a Christian ministry.  Despite my reservations about the existence of god and hence the validity of the foundations of the Christian Church I am deeply happy for her, since she has certainly blossomed into a calling in the years since she discovered the desire for this vocation.  We, as you can imagine, are talking a good deal about various ideas of god which I truly enjoy, having both started out life as a very devout, believing Episcopalian and having taught the subject of religion many times over the years.  She has the habit of attributing various and sundry attitudes, practices, and choices to the deity who now presides over her life, whilst I want to put all my chips down on the gambling table of life on the square played by reason or chance, or when I am feeling melodramatic, destiny.  My husband who sits nearby can only shake his head, being as he is a refugee from the years of irrationalities, mysticism and as he says nonsense that was the standard Catholic upbringing of his era.  He doesn't like to hear any conversation which allows for the premise that there may be a deity of any sort directing events.  My habit of mind is not so rational as his; I am an illogical and imagistic thinker, and so I have retained the story telling manner of exposition which accommodates less precise formulations that will seem "true" in another sense.  But as Pontius Pilate asked of the Christ "What is Truth?" when He announced that he had come as a sign of the truth.  I said to my daughter that the one text that is basic to me when I ever enter into any  discussion of what or what not may be true of the works and intentions of any god figure is Verse 38 from the Book of Job where Jaweh is said to thunder out at Job and Elihu as they try to parse the meaning of the misfortunes that have come to Job.
     "Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:
      "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?"
and proceeds to ask a majestic set of questions about the origins of the universe that in our perspective take us back before the Big Bang and into the Utter Unknowability of Things.  A great retort by god to those who would presume to understand the workings of the universe, and also what I always say to any tiresome religious zealot who determines to impose one or another ideas of behavior, values, or thought as being "God's Will."  I mean who are you to say so?  And that goes for the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and every one of those ministers of mega churches that dot the landscape of this country.

Eat Your Spinach

In my dotage I discover that I have acquired somewhat of an aversion to vegetables.  Parenthetically, I was interested to read in Mary Roach's new book Gulp, which contains everything you always wanted and also did not want to know about the digestive system, that vegetables are much harder to digest than meats.  In any case, last summer the husband of a youngish couple visiting us replied to my negative remarks about vegetables: "Charlie, you're in your eighties, you don't have to eat anything you don't want to eat ever again."  It seemed so liberating as he said it.  But a year has passed and I am still digging into my greens, my carrots, oh, all those things, because why?  because I am supposed to eat vegetables every day.  When we rise from dinner or any other meal, we tend to take the dishes to the sink, and any food worthy saving to the refrigerator.  When I get up in the morning, I go to the kitchen which is adjacent to my bedroom to turn on the coffee machine, and then return to make my bed.  That's what you're supposed to do.  I do not salt my food, I try to drink five or six glasses of water a day.  I brush my teeth carefully twice and day, and use a feathered toothpick on them all the time.  Why can't I leave the dishes on the table until way later in the evening, or even until the next morning?  I had a friend in a high level administrative position at a university and when I visited, his wife threw an elaborate dinner party for me, and after we ate she announced there would be coffee and liquers around the fire, and after ushering the crowd from the room shut the door, saying quietly to me: "Those dishes can just sit where they are until tomorrow."  We are getting ready for a trip to London on Sunday, for which I have been trying to organize us in the last two months.  I can tell you now the hour and the place of every lunch and dinner date; I have the printout receipts of every theatrical event we've booked into with notations of time and place, ditto for the museum exhibitions which required timed admission tickets.  There is a list of every telephone number we might need whilst in the United Kingdom.  We are dining before going on to the theater with a woman who is my coeval, and as a recent widow will deserve our meeting at her home and accompanying her into downtown.  The logistics are, if not formidable, at least certainly present in my mind, from the car and driver we will need to book beforehand to the two buses we will take to get her and us back to her house afterward (children of the Great Depression like us would have a very difficult time using black cabs both directions), and so far I have not worked out how to get us two back to our hotel, just hoping that the bus going in that direction from her place is still running late in the evening.  I can't tell if this oh so much tighter and grimmer attempt to take a firm grip on life derives from the increasing nervousness that the vulnerability of old age excites, or is it that I really don't drink that much anymore, and thus for the first time in my life am far, far more conscious of the hurdles or ditches one must jump than I used to be in the halcyon days of the extended cocktail hour once or twice a day or whenever, when we all were certainly not drunk, but certainly feeling no pain, and really not running a to-do list endlessly through our brains.

Memories Are Made Of This

Yesterday I started working out on our new exercise machine.  It is a very complicated affair with so many bells and whistles that it will take me some time to work my way through the instructions and demonstrations on the accompanying chart we have hung on the wall.  But I will master it, of that I am sure.  Still I needed to email the company with a question about the detail of some one thing, and walking from the gym shed to my office to type out my question I forgot the two terms that I had read on the chart to which I would be referring.  So yet again I was paralyzed by the realization that I cannot carry such data in my head from the backyard to a room in the front of the ground  floor, maybe thirty or forty feet, and the passage of five or less minutes.  And yet without hesitation I can say 5729, the telephone number in the house where I lived the first sixteen years of my life, or I easily recall the Italian for the number of the telephone of the Roman apartment we lived in back in 1963-64.  More bizarre still is the name that sometimes pops into my head, Fuficius Fango, a common Roman soldier whom Caesar raised to the rank of senator and whom Octavian, his great nephew, made prefect of Numidia.  And Roman history is not even my field! Surprisingly enough, although I remember quite well indeed masses of detail and theories of ancient Greek literature and culture, I cannot bear to read books on the subject and recently signed off from every reviewing anything having to do with it again.  I loved it; I am what came from deep immersion, but, no, that's over.  On the other hand it surprises me how strong are the erotic memories I carry in my head, and I was amused by a friend several years ago who called me blessed for the delicious thoughts I could entertain when I was in the nursing home. And indeed I felt blessed as I was writing my memoir since they were so integral a part of the story of my life.  My husband is a patient man, but he cannot bear it when I reminisce about my childhood and siblings, having heard it all too many times in twenty five years.  He has put his past away forever.  Indeed, I find it painful, shocking, and heartbreaking that I cannot honestly recall the voice of my first wife, and only traces of her face will appear in my mind's eye.  The dearest male friend I have ever made, wonderful Ted, father, priest, uncle, everything to me, died over forty five years ago, and I have no recollection of him at all, although I strive so hard to place myself once more in those wonderful afternoons I recollect as an intellectual truth when we boozed together and laughed, and laughed, and laughed.  But I can remember the songs from those days, the lyrics and tunes of songs from the Beatles, the Supremes, the Mamas and the Poppas; I can still hear Joan Baez leading us in the front of a protest demonstration in San Francisco.  And, yes, if I try real hard I can sort of hear the band from Nick's in the Village.  It was 1944 and my sister snuck me in, a fourteen year old, and I remember their signature tune as they stood when it was time to take a break, playing their hearts out marching between the tables and out the front door.