Anti-Semitism

The European Union voted yesterday for delegates to their parliament and while it was good to see a healthy turnout, it was also disturbing to see that so many parties with official anti-Semitic policies made a healthy showing at the polls.  One would think that the horrific events of the twentieth century would have brought an end to anti-Semitism full stop.  It is of course an eye opener to review the Stalinist years in the Crimea and the Ukraine and the Nazi interventions in the latter to realize that the American present day official and commonplace horror at the Holocaust does not necessarily  translate to these places.  It was a surprise to us while visiting Budapest last year to find a very healthy hostility to Jews, alongside the equally vigorous opposition to gay persons, and of course to the Roma (which group we used to call 'gypsies.')  Russia, as I read frequently, is still a very anti-Semitic country, and as we know its President has vigorously cultivated ties with the Orthodox Christian Church which is dominate through Russia as well as publicly spoken out against any official acceptance of the validity of gay persons, gay unions, and gay identity.  The European rise of anti-Semitism is, I am sure tied up with the increase of Muslim immigrants many of whom nurse hatreds toward Israel which easily translate into more generalized hatred of Jews as it is to conservative Christian people who equate modernity with Jews as though they alone were responsible for contemporary cinema, fiction, art, and all the other features of modern culture which such people fear and resist.  Then there is the history of the Holocaust.  The late Tony Judt in his masterful history  entitled Postwar, in his last chapter of summation, talks about the remaining bonds that tie European peoples together now that the region as a whole is what one would call post-Christian, and he identifies the deep seated guilt throughout Europe for their common surrender to the murderous program of Nazi Germany, most of the other nations never having after the collapse of Germany in the Second World War, acknowledged their role in surrendering their Jewish populations to the murder camps of Eastern Europe.  It is an interesting idea, and one might identify resurgent anti-Semtism as less a protest against modernity as a means to purge this guilt by actively taking on its cause.  Whatever it is, it seems to me that one very very important element in our present day American-European world view is an active role for the Christian churches of all denominations to work actively to resist and root out this anti-Semitism.  They must acknowledge all of them their historic role in creating and favoring anti-Semitism over the centuries. It seems that active hostility toward the Jews was an essential ingredient in establishing the otherness and validity of Christians as something other, a not unusual behavior in forming new groups, but here with disastrous consequences stretching down through the millenia perverting and rotting Christianity from within.

The View

As I have said in another blog I have my mother to thank for starting me out as a young child taking a real interest in gazing at beautiful views.  Not every child has a platform built into the lower forking of a large tree with steps leading up into it and benches built on the sides where on can sit and take his ease and gaze off over the hills and dales of rural Iowa.  But then not every child is somewhat crippled from a fall and unable to engage in sports, for whom viewing became as they say a spectator sport.  So now we fast forward to this old gent at eighty four sitting in the elaborate garden he has constructed at the house which he and his husband have currently placed on the real estate market in Massachusetts.  He sits on a bench at the edge, holding his coffee, and gazing.  An hour goes by, and he has not moved, has not picked up reading materials.  No, he is simply staring.  Move the locale to Florida and there he is on the third floor of his condo out on the screened in deck gazing across the roofs, through the fronds of a giant palm at the roof of a mall department store and beyond into the blue, blue sky.  He holds his cup of coffee and stares, as maybe an hour again goes by.  I call this meditation although I realize I am not practiced in what I gather are systematic methods of meditation.  I just stare into the view that compels me out of my ego, as I like to think, away from my anxieties, off somewhere.  Not exactly an LSD trip, although slightly reminiscent of one, if I remember rightly the one and only time I participated in an experiment with lysergic acid at Boston Psychopathic Hospital, a paid guinea pig for Timothy Leary.  Looking off into space, you lose yourself.  It is a wonderful exercise for coming to grips with the inevitable delays of modern technological life, the wait on the tarmac, the failure of the signal system on the Red Line, the grid of traffic that delays your luncheon date for forty minutes, the list is endless.  The goal is to move beyond having a book to read, desirable as that is, of course, but no, one wants to surrender to nothingness, to stare into space, whatever the space, make it become blank.  The spring greenery of my garden, the rose bushes laden with impending blossoms, the poppies opening up their redness right now, have to blend into a seamless mass, ditto the sky and the roofs and the palm tree, as one is drawn seductively into the great beyond and the vast pool of serenity.  And yet . . . . and yet, there's disco.  I guess I should say dance, which for me began with the all-intoxicating, mind-obliterating boogie woogie, swing, the lindy hop, of the forties, went on into the twist and god knows what else at the beginning of the sixties and out and out disco in the seventies when I and a one of our female graduate students used to close the disco not far from Boston University night after night, when I was not out dancing at that giant disco which had been made in the space that previously held the Bunny Club, a dance hall where I first saw in a very mixed homosexual/heterosexual setting incredibly good looking males taking off their shirts when they danced with their dates and seemed to be sniffing something again and again off the back of their hands.  Disco, yes, I could have danced all night, and even now when I hear disco music I begin to vibrate all over, want to dance, want to lose myself in the rhythm, that beat, wow, even as I type I feel it.  Watching "The Normal Heart" and listening to the disco music and those gorgeous guys (were there no just plain looking males in the gay movement in Manhattan?  No wonder they could not keep their hands off each other!) I started to twitch in rhythm, much to the disgust of my husband who seriously believes that an eighty-four year old man who has trouble with his balance might move on beyond that.  Hey, I get lost in those rhythms.  It's as good as staring into space.  Just another exercise in the Dionysian.

The Normal Heart

We watched the HBO production of Larry Kramer's autobiographical story of mostly gay males suffering at the onset of the AIDS crisis, when almost nothing was known, and continuing to face a bewildered future as the Federal Government (under President Reagan who ever so cynically and maliciously avoided the topic even though one of his closest personal friends Rock Hudson was to die of the disease) did nothing to encourage research to halt the virus as it had done under the earlier threat of polio, also a virus.  It brought back tearful memories of so many friends and students who died young, full of promise, full of life, even a few casual lovers, whose example in one particular instance of courage in dying has remained with me as an inspiration.  I went to see him in his last days, setting aside an evening when I would be in San Francisco for a son's wedding, and he had dressed himself up in a suit, feeble though he was, and we sat on the floor, he cradled in my arms leaning on my chest, and talked for hours, about death and dying, he so young, and I only middle aged at the time.  Another former student, also an occasional lover, was marvelously in control of his humor, while out of control otherwise, who raced up the stairs of the house he had designed from the dining room, as his diapers began to fill up, hilariously exclaiming against his failure of prescience for not having a bathroom on the same floor as the dining room.  And yet another--I can't seem to stop--who ended up across the street from me in Manhattan, telephoned a mutual friend in California to say that he "was sick," and she urged me to investigate.  I found him covered with the tell tale Karposi spots, half paralyzed from a stroke, but insisting to me and his helper that he was planning to return to work the following day.  Two weeks later I sat at his funeral service among the large crowd of his friends from weekends in Fire Island, all of them  young, beautiful, so gay, so elegant, and so many of them so doomed.  The film portrays the politics of gay promiscuity of that era which, of course, was very much a cause of the rapid spread of the disease.  I never was part of the gay scene, back in Boston, a married man, or a recently divorced man, who, when I was young and handsome, had furtive homosexual encounters but later on much too old, too creaky, and too buttoned up to imagine even appearing on the beach at a place like Fire Island.  I once tried group sex in a gay bath but it was like going to my first high school dance, me completely shy and withdrawn watching the noisy clamor and action across the room.  Those who disapprove of the aggressive gay promiscuity of that era need to see this film and understand that these activists had to insist that their sexual inclinations for which they had suffered paralyzing retribution from family and society since they became pubescent had to be acted out; crude as it may seem, fucking with ten different guys a night is equivalent of Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus.  That  so many of them died for it, was a supremely cruel cruel turn of fate, that a Judaeo-Christian culture can all too facilely call punishment.  I remember at a dinner party of mostly New York performers in the various arts listening to a well known opera singer catching up with an old friend across the table whom she had not seen for some time, and soon silence fell over the table as first one then the other inquired about mutual friends was told of their death, one after another, all the bright young things of the creative life of New York City.  And you had to think back now and realize that just as Germany culturally died in its tracks and has never recovered from the death of all its Jews, so New York and the United States in general has suffered a tragic loss of refinement and creativity in the death of their gays.

Thucydides

Reading Mary Beard's new book, which in fact is not really new in the sense that it is a collection of reviews and articles written over time, and thus long since available to the attentive reader, is a wonderful review of what I once knew and taught. I have been reading what she has to say about Thucydides. He is an interesting specimen of ancient Greek prose, his work always contrasted with his predecessor, Herodotos, who as they always say, more or less invented history,  with his chattier more dramatic account of the events of the Persian invasion of Greece.  It's the first historical research we have, as he goes along telling what he has learned ("Solon said this, Creosus said that, the one of the Persians claimed . . . .").  Thucydides came along later in the same century, but now the big event was the Spartan military conflict with the Athenians, which Thucydides addressed in the context of the political career of Pericles and Cleon, and a few others, and gives a bravura crescendo describing the invasion of Sicily and the collapse of Athens  (although since the text does not seem to have a natural ending--broke off? or he died?) perhaps these events are misread as crescendo and finale.  Beard's review is focused on the writings of contemporary ancient historians, one of whom seems to want to find an implicit endorsement of the contemporary invasion of Iraq in Thucydides' treatment of Pericles failure to act early on.  I bring this up only because it is fascinating to me that historians invest so much into the text of this seeming witness to events all those millenia ago.  Yes, of course, Thucydides is talking about the events we know from other sources, and yes, he was a general, although a failed one and banished from the city, so he no doubt knew lots about the situation.  But there are certain items that I, as a literary critic and not a historian, find baffling and telling when I try to think of Thucydides as simply telling us the facts.  First, he announces to his reader in the first book that he was not able to be present and record all the speech making that went on in the period under his review, so he has taken upon himself to fashion what people might have said, from what he learned about their remarks after the fact.  Now, there is no way that one can understand the speeches in Thucydides' narrative as anything other than a fiction, and in searching around for the motive for making what on the basis of our understanding of the nature of historiography is entirely suspect, one thinks of the speeches in Homeric epic, a narrative very obviously true in one sense of the word and fiction in another.  It gives no problem because the hearer understands that he/she is witness to persons speaking in a narrative that is entirely the creation of the poet or what it was that inspired him--the oral tradition or whatever.  Thucydides advances his narrative on the same vehicle, that is, speeches from one or another person of this historical moment, and we read them as offering the motives for so much of the action described, and yet as we must know, they are a creation flying above the factual line, an evocation of the "meaning" of the moment, but in no way, the tissue of the moment.  That is artistry, creation, positioning, it is not the recital of facts. The question is whether one will liken these speeches to paragraphs in contemporary historians where they move from the facts they have been offering to a synthetic interpretation of them; perhaps that is the intellectual analogue, although that Thucydides puts his interpretations into the mouths of agents of the events destroys the distance the reader should have with the material.  But perhaps because it is the manner of epic narrative poetry it did not strike his readers as so peculiar.   Likewise when the Athenians hold their fateful parley with the Melians at which the fate of the latter is determined, ultimately their slaughter, an event momentous for the Athenians, as Thucydides make clear, in terms of their integrity as a culture and a people, the historian casts the facts of this event in the form of a dialogue, the one and only time in his narrative he does so.  There is no way that any rational person can read this as other than an extreme example of deliberate artifice, a determination on the part of the  writer to rise far, far above any claim to historical truth as he puts on what is essentially the essence of ancient tragic drama, that is the dialogue.  This is not history writing as we understand it, and what is more, Thucydides forces his reader to make this adjustment to something other than simple "reality," for whatever reason.  So I never quite understand what modern day historians are thinking when they consider Thucydides as simply a record of those ancient times.  That is hardly his first consideration, as he forces his reader into these adventurous engagements with reportage.  And because of this, I am far more sympathetic to the view long ago established by Cornford that the overall thrust of the narrative, its movement to Athenians so over estimating their power as to invade Sicily and thus to their defeat is almost consciously, but certainly unconsciously borrowed from the common development of action in tragic drama where hubris, or pride, is so pivotal in the oncoming destruction, rather than a neutral recital of fact.

Classics

I was startled to read in the latest issue of the English journal Prospect that in a poll of their readers asked to rank the fifty most significant intellectuals of the year 2014 Mary Beard a professor of classics at Cambridge and a frequent contributor to The New York Review, the TLS, and so on was ranked number 7!  To say I was startled is understatement until I reflected that the readership of Prospect is a pretty exalted bunch.  Beard recently came out with a collection of her reviews, lectures and essays entitled Confronting the Classics which, indeed, I have not done in a long time, being almost twenty years retired, so I got the book and dipped in.  The first piece Do Classics Have A Future? was intriguing if for no other reason that "classics" is a singular noun in American English because it means the whole business of Greek and Roman antiquity seen through their artifacts from literature to artistic representation whereas I guess for Professor Beard it means the very items themselves rather than the study of them.  I will always remember the high toned secretary at Harvard answering her phone with "The Department of the Classics."  For a little guy from Iowa that was about as good as it gets at Harvard hearing that!  the Classics, and don't you forget it.  Do Classics Have a Future is intriguing for a thousand and one reasons, not the least being that Beard has been spending too much time with the intellectual elite so that she actually believes there is a large audience out there who cares about the future of the knowledge of Latin and Greek and their contexts, a large group who desperately care that the allusions to antiquity to be found throughout art and literature since the Renaissance are there for all to catch and understand whereas the truth of the matter is that most people, certainly in the United States,  cannot even identify the number, names, or location of most of the fifty states, have absolutely minimal understanding of the Constitution and the intellectual habits and beliefs of the Founding Fathers (otherwise why would so many people go on and on about how those gentlemen wanted this to be a Christian nation? Ridiculous!).  Beard talks at some length about the nineteenth century preoccupation with classical studies at school and university as a source for the definition of a gentleman, and talks as though that had somehow changed.  Yes, indeed it has, in that now not even so-called gentlemen are encouraged to study the Latin and Greek languages and their literatures.  When I taught at Yale in the late fifties they were still pedaling the notion that a classics major would get you a job in the state department, but there were certainly very few takers for that proposition.  Can you imagine G.W. Bush dipping into Latin and Greek?  A deep knowledge of classical antiquity was once upon a time a very healthy antidote to the pervasive Christian view of things with which the western world is so dramatically tinged; it gave a framework for life, and explanation of its meaning, a solid foundation in tragic uncertainty in place of a simplistic reflex surrender to happy thoughts and amelioration through good works and prayer.  But very few persons have a considered view of the Christian truth of things anymore, so the pagan alternative does not have the same resonance.  As a male student of Latin and Greek literature in my late teens and early twenties I was never bothered all that much by the extraordinary subordination of the female in those cultures, by the constant emphasis upon the existential problems of the powerful oppressor class, by the natural resort to violence and the suppression of the underclass.  It all seemed so natural.  I will always treasure the ancient view of things; a tragic sense of life seems absolutely right to me.  But I do know that not enough of the comic sense of life survives from antiquity, like making babies, raising children, eating feasts, fondling breasts, fingering erections, laughing, lying on blankets eating grapes, and all the rest.

A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever

In order to make our house presentable as an object for sale we have followed the realtor's instructions and removed everything that "personalized" its rooms, and this meant among other things, the removal of the works of art on the walls.  It always seems pretentious to talk of having a collection; we are not the late Paul Mellon or any other grandee whose loans and gifts grace the walls of our country's museums.  Over time, however, I have been given, or bought, mostly easel painting from friends sometimes from strangers.  I happen to like the pieces, beginning with an oil very reminiscent of Max Beckman painted by my then twenty something year old brother in law who had recently finished studying at the Art Students League in New York City; this was somewhere around 1945.  I bought this for $45 in 1947 when I was living in the city.  It depicted two gaunt looking clowns or acrobats one of them holding a small hoop up to his face.  Later after my mother died in 1954 I acquired another by him,  an oil supposedly of my sister, a gift they had given her, or rather more likely imposed upon her, just as when they came to visit in Iowa they cooked us a meal of something they called "pasta" with lots of garlic in the tomato sauce.  This painting very much like a Roualt or maybe a Beckman, with some very nice blues in it.  I had a high school chum who went on to a career as professional artist and university professor of art from whom I received a marvelous painting he did when he was nineteen with lots of bottles, sort of a still life done as an abstraction (maybe influenced by Morandi?), although the placement of one of the bottles actually suggests (at least to my perfervid mind)  a flaccid penis with scrotum.  Later on I bought from him a very large drawing done after Giorgione's Fete Champetre, and . . .  Well, the list goes on and on.  The point is that over time I acquired enough pieces to fill the walls of a fifteen room house in Cambridge (not to mention the stuff I had to give to my wife when we were divorcing which I can see on the walls of my daughters).  I had to practice a certain amount of triage when my husband and I left that place and moved to the seashore.  Now they will all be going on to the walls of the condo in Sarasota and I am determined to put them up salon style, simply because I want to display all of them.  I tell friends that I will achieve the effect of the Palazzo Doria Pamphili in Rome, except of course that there the rooms are immense and the walls are tall and the pieces covering them are mostly masterpieces.  What I like about the arrangements of my walls are the juxtapositions, the arrangements of color, the suggestions of shape from picture to another.  In this respect I am a big fan of Dr. Barnes and so happy that the arrangements of paintings and other objects he achieved in the rooms built for his collection in Merion have been preserved in the new building housing the collection in Philadelphia.  Roberta Smith, I think it was, has made the suggestion that when the Metropolitan Museum takes over the Marcel Breuer building about to be emptied of the holdings of the Whitney Museum, the curators should plan something more adventurous than an obvious curated tour of their modern and contemporary holdings.  Since they cannot in any way compete with MoMA they might be more adventurous, for instance, hauling Baroque and Renaissance stuff out of the warehouse and putting up on walls against the contemporary works.  I wish that the directors of the Ringling Museum in Sarasota would once in awhile do the same with a gallery or two.  Their holdings are essentially what John Ringling bought from Mrs. Vanderbilt, I think it was, when she was going through a divorce, and she got it as a package she purchased from a French dealer. You can't escape the feeling of sameness.  It is a very good but not great collection, and if you live in Sarasota and it is pretty much the only game in town, the arrangement tires one.  I have a good friend who is a retired curator from the Met, to whom I posed this idea not long ago, over drinks one evening, and was surprised to discover how she was not amused, as though I had suggested disco at St. Patrick's or something similar.  I guess she thought it would not be a hang, but interior decoration.

Guardian Angel

I remember when I married my first wife her descriptions of living with her mother and father.  She was an only child, born to older parents with whom she had a kind of peer relationship in the sense of the three of them thinking of themselves as a team of three confronting the world.  It made her secure in a way it took me a long time to decipher; she was never worried about directives from on high, inexplicable mood changes from which she was so distant that they came as a complete surprise.  I was one of six living in a house of many rooms, peopled with not only my siblings but nannies and maids, cooks and cleaning persons supplemented by those who came in by the day.  Somewhere in the front of the house in the bedroom that had been my father's resided my mother, the nerve center of the entire operation, to whom these people reported, to whom we were brought daily in the afternoon for a salutation.  She occupied my father's bedroom because he was gone, killed in an automobile accident; his bedroom, his throne, there she was, the widow.  It was a household in which one could get overlooked; one of my older sisters attributes her good nature, her easy going manner, to the fact that, as she describes it, being "lost in the crowd."  As one of the youngest I was easy to dismiss and forget, and yet I was the second born male, if the fifth child, born to parents who valorized men as the makers and shakers for an audience of women.  Soon enough Daddy was gone, and I doubt that mother knew what to do with me.  Certainly no one threw the ball with me, no one took him fishing or horseback riding as my father was said to have done for my brother seven year older than I.  It wasn't much of a stretch for me to turn into a precious little sissy fruitcake.  They say I was darling, already at that tender age, witty and bright.  Seen from a different angle I could have been labeled obnoxious, and looking back I can see that this indeed was no doubt the verdict of several parents of children with whom mother approved my playing.  But I had a grown up friend and supporter.  As I spend my days now packing up this Massachusetts household for the move to Florida I have been organizing my things to put in boxes and come up with such treasured memorabilia.  They were all gifts of a woman named Lois Blanche Corder.  She  had been my father's surgical nurse, and as he advanced to the Head of Surgery at the University Hospital she became Dean of the Nursing School.  She lived in an apartment in the University complex to which she often invited me for dinner all by myself, picking me up and driving to her place, when I was perhaps in the range of nine to twelve years of age.  Unlike our house which, although grand enough, had the well worn look of a place through which so many passed on a daily basis, her rooms were elegant, smart, every object in them a well thought out aesthetic pleasure, the table linens fresh and crisp, the table service impeccable.  That is how she surrounded me on my visits to her dinner table; we did not talk of books and ideas at table; we talked of fine things, their provenance, their workmanship.  And she gave me gifts that seventy years later I still possess, which turning over in my hands now, makes me remember her, a small pewter letter opener, shaped like a Florentine dagger, with a stylized plume as the element grasped by the hand, a small leather box somewhere between red and brown, tooled with gold leaf, lined in brown silk, into which I was to place my "valuables"--I can remember her telling me this.  It still holds a number of my father's cuff links for evening dress, and the studs, and then from the sixties some sets of earrings for pierced ears only one of which I wore.  In addition she gave me a small metal serving dish, again pewter with a gold rim, with an elaborate Ottoman design.  What was a child to do with this?  I set it on a table, always on display, empty and useless other than providing the pleasure that good looking objects always inspire.  That I have no doubt was exactly what she wanted--that I have these objects of beauty at hand, that my inherent preciosity be nurtured and encouraged.  God bless her, I hope that she can handle that I have used the Ottoman serving dish in my kitchen as the place for heads of fresh garlic.  And thus I think of her every day, have done so for the past seven decades.