"I Need A Project"

Several years ago colleague of mine, a decade older and thus further along on the road to ruin, was regaling me over lunch with the story of maneuvering with his wife the Frankfurt airport terminals, being pushed in his wheelchair first by a stewardess from the airplane, then by a young lady from the express train that was to take them north to an island where he had summered since he was a boy in the late twenties.  I softly remonstrated at the enormous effort and general anguish this trip always produced to which he memorably replied in his wonderful Berliner English "What am I supposed to do?  Sit on the sofa until the stroke comes along to do me in?"  In the end, poor fellow, overcome by blindness and deafness, that's precisely what he did, raging against the emptiness and his impotence.  One of my dearest friends, at some point in her progress to her death at 97 complained to me: "I need a project."  I was amused at the time.  Although I was conscious as well that she had employed her time continuously since her official retirement turning out hand produced elegant small books of great distinction, I did not quite understand how this really rather old woman thought she had the physical strength, the necessary professional contacts, the mental acumen to do something quite so demanding.  And now, here am I.  I need a project.  When I retired from the classroom twenty years ago, I knew that enough was enough, and a semester substituting for a suddenly incapacitated professor at Tufts, lecturing on Euripidean tragedy, and (oh, horror!) reading student papers again, reinforced that decision.  I could not stand the lecturing, could not stand the students, and, really, truth to tell, bored to tears with classical antiquity or at least "professing" it.  I had amused myself in the previous two decades writing a few novels; I decided that I would take that up seriously.  But nothing I wrote passed muster with the many professionals in the publishing industry who generously agreed to offer judgement.  Then a publisher suggested writing the life of Odysseus, and a year or so of busy work ensued.  Somehow along the way enough speaking gigs and the subsequent publication of the lectures filled in the background of what seemed to be an engaged life.  Then there was the project of taking up a condo in Sarasota, and then surprise! a  publisher came with an offer to publish a memoir that I had shown him a couple decades earlier.  More time filled up with writing, and this time with some appearances at bookstores after publication.  That definitely signified that I was an author, you see.  And now we are selling the house with the garden.  No more weeding, deadheading, tending to plants.  Florida full time.  But wait.  What to do?  No talent at fiction, haven't considered researching anything from antiquity for so long that the field has long since left me behind, actually totally unmoved by dipping into Greek texts.  Cannot imagine picking up the Aeneid and trying to finish making sense of my ideas about Virgil and Apollonios, ideas twenty or thirty years old by now, for God's sake.  I need a project.  Maybe I will teach a course on ancient tragedy, on a volunteer basis, of course, to a classroom of retirees who are enrolled in an academy doing something they call lifetime learning.  Is that a project?

Where To Freshen Up

I was in Harvard Square yesterday morning drinking a coffee at Au Bon Pain and waiting until it was time to meet a friend for lunch.  It came to me that I wanted to use a toilet, and thought to myself I could go down the street to Widener Library or I could go to the Coop.  Of course the place where I was had a facility as well, but I remembered it from years ago as small and smelly, and something you had to fight your way to through a sea of tables, maybe even flag down an attendant with a key.  No, it was not that urgent.  There was a quasi public toilet in the Holyoke Center, quasi in the sense that it was private in that you had to walk through something like a subway stile (is that how you spell it?), and yet right there on the ground level and the guards seemed to let people through in a random fashion, and yet, you had a very definite feeling that if someone who looked like a homeless person would not get through. I have always said that the years of pain and humiliation going to Harvard Graduate School were worth it to be able to use Widener, and that is still true, but now more for the polished gleaming and very clean large mens room than the endless rows of book stacks.  I can remember when I bought a family membership to MoMA so there would be a clean place to take the children, not to mention myself in midtown Manhattan.  But that was before I discovered the excellent attended toilet on the sixth floor of Saks.  Having been the director of a graduate classics program consortium made up of Fordham, CUNY, and NYU has given me the benefit in my retirement of a stack pass to NYU's Bopst Library with its excellent clean toilet  facilities throughout the building, and this is on the south side of Washington Square.  And to the north there is the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural Science more or less across from each other on opposite sides of the park in the low eighties, good places to have membership cards, if only for the toilets.  So that pretty well covers things for me.  Still this morning I did not want to walk all the way back to Widener when my ultimate destination was in the opposite direction.  I would go to the Coop!  And then I discovered that their toilets on the third floor were just two rooms with a line out in the corridor.  Was it always like that? and that you could smell them from out in the hall?  Dismayed I started down to meet my friend, realizing that I would just have to wait for whatever restaurant he directed me to, and hope that it was large enough to use and clean enough to endure.  But  lo! on the floor below where I had been there was--miracle of miracles!--a sign directing the passerby to yet another toilet, empty, unclaimed, more or less from the look of it, unused.  Like finding the Hope Diamond in the sands of the Sahara!  A few minutes more I met my friend and wanted to blurt out the exciting discovery I had just made.  How strange then, that I kept silent, not willing to share this treasure even with him, all the more bizarre in that he was even then planning to leave Cambridge in another ten days, and as I knew was just that moment entering the Coop for the first and no doubt the last time.  But I will go to my grave with my  secret intact.  Of course, if anyone reads this . . . . .

Friends, Protectors, Lovers

I have been reading the biography of Siegfried Sassoon for the simple reason that the book cover caught my eye--he was a very handsome young man--and his name is one you are always reading about in studies of the period of the First World War and after, mainly for his poetry that was precise in its depiction of the physical horrors of trench warfare, and for his eventual stance against the war.  A curious fellow torn between the life of a country gentleman who lived for fox hunting and cricket and a London man, a poet, aesthete, and friend to so many of the great names who made the cultural history of that period from Thomas Hardy to Lady Ottiline Morrell.  He was attracted to his own sex, but for the longest time too shy to act upon it.  When he finally had physical relations they were always with handsome, very young, and usually very needy guys.  Eventually he married but that was another matter altogether.  He brought to mind the sexual history of a dear old friend of mine whom I met in graduate school, who even at that time came across as a elderly, pompous scholar to those who had no real notion of him.  Which is not to say that the persona was untrue; there was just a delightful witty sentimental kid underneath.  When he finally revealed to me his sexual interest in males, he also disclosed that he limited himself to paid sex, arguing that he was so physically unattractive, so already as a youth creaky, pompous, and pathetically shy in matters sexual that a clear cut financial bargain before bed was clearly the best.  Over the years I knew him as a sexually active male, I often met the gentlemen whom he paid to consort with him.  A great number of them were handsome, very young, and obviously needy, most often college students, or in the first stages of their serious preparation for life.  It sort of sounded like Sassoon all over again.  I once was introduced to a stunningly handsome and clearly charming gentleman of maybe fifty who I was told thereafter had shared his charms for a fee over his beautiful years with Roy Cohn and Cardinal Spellman.  I know that it is impossible to discern the sexual proclivities of persons from social encounters, but offhand I would say that the majority of young men clustered around my friend were not probably seriously homosexual. And of course we all remember the long time relationship of the very straight Leonide Massine with Diaghilev.  These thoughts came to me this morning when reading in the Boston Globe the initiative to arrest johns rather than prostitutes with the headline saying something about "buying and selling lives."  I would be the first to attack the men who kidnap and drug young women and force them into prostitution, and seriously fault the men who buy the services of these girls.  But I think that it is possible to understand sexual intercourse as a service, and that those who engage in it can have a variety of motives, and many different ones honorable in different ways.  I remember the woman who had a small apartment in Athens, a woman somewhere in her thirties, she accepted male visitors, walk-ins to use the parlance of modern commerce, vetted by a fierce older woman at the appointment desk who would not hesitate to call the police if any guys were threatening, a career that ended when she became a somewhat stout forty five year old, at which time she took her lifetime earnings and opened a dress shop on the ground floor and continued to be a solid and respected part of that street's business community.

Discrimination

I have been following for the last few years the vigorous efforts on the part of a few businesses owned by Christians to acquire the legal right to deny their services to persons whom they believe to be, I guess you would have to say, sinners.  One such situation involved a wedding catering group which argued that their firmly held Christian beliefs prohibited them from involving themselves in a gay marriage celebration.  This seems to me stupefyingly un-American in that we are a mongrel country, a people of enormously different and divergent belief systems, united by our belief in the supreme value of liberty with a constitution that specifically prohibits a state religion; ergo all beliefs are private and those involved in publicly sanctioned commerce cannot discriminate.  Historically we have come together as a society that accepted difference. My indignation is enormous, and fueled in large part by what I have had to endure through the years of my teaching career by students who arrogantly wanted to impose their belief systems upon my teaching and the classroom experience.  I think, for instance, what I have encountered so very frequently.  The class will be studying Sophocles' Oedipus the King and a number of students will insist that "he is punished for his sins."  First of all, I will insist that he is not "punished."  His abdication as king and his self-mutilation are his own attempts to impose upon himself some sense of personal responsibility for what he has done.  This is a noble act by a human being, actually supremely arrogant in its way, to wrest from fate the responsibility where it truly belongs.  Oedipus really "did" nothing.  He went out of his way to leave Corinth just to avoid what the oracle had foretold; he was blameless in that ancient culture for his attack on the man who barred his progress at the crossroads; as any heroic figure newly arrived into a state he would be the natural spouse for the reigning monarch (every legend suggests this), and as such he marries the widowed queen.  Fate "acted" upon him, he "did" nothing.  But many Christian students will have none of it.  He  is a parricide who commits incest: these are "sins."  There is no way to get them to understand that sin is the knowing transgression of the laws of god, and that the ancient Greeks had no such moral or religious system. "The Bible says so, God says so." Whatever these tiresome mindless children learned in their Bible classes must trump investigation, discussion, the acceptance of alternative value systems.  There they sit in their know-nothing splendor braying at the top of their lungs about things they know nothing about.  If the catering service can deny the gays, why have I not had the right to keep such knee jerk Christians out of my classes?

Oh, Once Upon A Time

I wallow in nostalgia, looking at the Youtube video of stills of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan while the music of "Diamonds and Rust" is sung and the lyrics printed across the screen.  They seem to in love, so young, so happy, having such a creative good time; it is painful, and I think of me and my first wife, Mary, and how much we talked together and experienced new things in life, we were so young.  Just coming to Boston and buying our groceries at Haymarket on Saturday.  Who in Iowa had ever heard of artichokes?  Bob and Joan look so deeply complicated into each other's psyche and life, and I think back to Mary and me, and her smile while she was teaching me what I did not know, God, what an idiot I was!  So naive, so uninformed, and so odd that she died at 26 and I went on to write books and articles, and so somehow it seemed that I was the learned one.  You had to know her, is all I have to say.  It wasn't diamonds and rust, but it was a kind of heartache.  And then I married again, and Penny, well, she really wasn't ready for all that, and I hear her when I go again to Youtube to a performance of Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette, and medley of the latter's songs.  It makes me think of the sorrow and tension of our marriage--"I Don't Want To Play House" "Divorce" oh, so many more all chronicling the pain and misery of marriage as it was lived by ordinary people, bored with each other, stupified by parenthood, yearning to get out, knowing that they had obligations.  All those years that the children suffered with us as parents.  I shudder as Fathers Day approaches.   Oh, Lord, how those country western songs nailed that impossible situation.  Was it really all better back when complete repression ruled the household?  But did it ever, or was the prevailing hypocrisy better able to mask the truth.  Funny how the music of Nashville, or the lyrics at least of those songs, takes it for granted that promiscuity, adultery, heartache, and sorrow are the ingredients of any marriage.  All so complicated and difficult.  In my third marriage I cannot think of any music that defines the relationship I have with my husband.  Without children in the home there is not that claustrophobic, hothouse of emotions, so many people bouncing off one another.  It is often remarked that the narrative in ancient tragic drama derives from the family.  Country western lyrics reflect this, although there is nothing do desperate.  Old age, they say all passion spent, yes, and in a good sense.  If you can make the increasing frailty and impending death part of your vision of a fulfilled successful life, then yes, indeed.

A Little Late This Morning

Excuse me if am brief and incoherent.  For the last couple of days I have been engaged in collecting stool samples which requires of me a certain psychic disposition for which I must prepare myself.  I have behind me rich memories of dealing with shit.  My wife and I at a certain desperate point in our early married life had three youngsters in diapers simultaneously.  This was in the good old days when diapers were cloth, and were washed to use again, from which the shit--or 'kaka,' as I think we said in front of the tots--had to be dropped out or scraped out depending on the consistency before the diaper was deposited in the pail from which as the days rolled by evil smells arose.  So now, taking the tiny weeny shovel attached to the cap of each vial supplied for fecal analysis and poking about in the material my intestines have offered up each morning allows one a certain distance based on those accumulated memories.  More recently when I was in my fifties I was a volunteer ward aide at Cambridge City Hospital where I had the pleasure of revisiting human excreta, as we say in politer circles.  Many of the patients whom I was charged with cleaning up for another day lying or sitting blankly staring at the wall--they being the more advanced daffy ones--had, I was to discover, filled their diapers during the night.  Thank God, we had moved on to disposables.  I am sure parents nowadays scarcely notice, so quickly can they remove the plastic with its treasure load, toss it all away, and move on to cleaning up the tot.  Today before I began this filling of the vials I was out in the yard digging in the earth, oh, all so symbolic, similar colors, and so on and so forth, planting petunias in a large empty bed where in years past stood tomato plants.  We hope to be gone before the tomato season, but realized that the prospective buyers touring the grounds would not be taken with the vigor of the weeds growing in the patch.  So petunias it is.  Onward and upward on another lovely sunny morning down by the seashore!

Courage and Bravery

Last week we watched a fascinating documentary describing contemporary efforts to simulate a bombing operation that took place during the Second World War when an English inventor figured out a way to get a plane loaded with a special cannister of explosives to fly extremely low over the water that was accumulated behind two of Germany's major dams, and drop them at the precise moment, speed, and altitude that would set them skipping lines stones a youngsters deploys on the lake's surface.  The cannister comes to rest right behind the dam wall sinks, detonates, and the wall is breached, water pours forth, and Germany's industrial might is severely compromised.  The point of all this description is to remark on the extraordinary daring of the young men who flew on those planes, more than just the pilots; many of them were killed by enemy fire since they  were flying low and in view, some had their planes upended by a miscalculated approach which sent up a fierce splash.  They all knew this was a possibility, saw it happen upon occasion, but they went ahead with the operation.  The survivors now in their late eighties all recalled that everyone knew the odds, none expressed anything other than the calm of knowing something that had to be done.  Last night we watched another documentary about the American special forces that went onto the island where the men who were imprisoned after the "Bataan Death March," were held, and in burst of gunfire and daring liberated the camp, and led, or dragged (many so emaciated and close to death that an exit was difficult) them off to freedom.  Again survivors both among the invaders and those saved, now in their late eighties reminisced about the event, exhibiting again the sense of what had to be done with extreme courage and daring--the men who crawled on their bellies up to the gates of the camp--and the men who struggled to survive first the march and then years of hunger and privation, now in their eighties, speaking with a calm about an extraordinary horror.  Stories like this always get to me on a personal level.  I was fifteen when the war ended, so obviously knew nothing about combat first hand, but three years later when I started college the State University of Iowa was inundated with men enrolling on the GI Bill.  There was an immensity of difference between them and me that was difficult to bridge. They were tough, gruff, direct in speaking to the teachers, often from a background that made them ignorant of the niceties of classroom decorum, or having had experiences that made them impatient with the very idea of it.  Conscious of myself as a gay male, and already having the societal idea of gay equaling feminine twisting me, I was again and again shocked to take these slightly older veteran as lovers, their bodies still marred with wounds of all kinds, their hunger and impatience and directness in bed reaffirming our culture's notion of macho male.  They didn't have any time for working out what "gay" was all about; they unafraid and indifferent and hungry.