A Supplement

This is an afterthought to my post on tragedy just to say that I am going off to Canada to my granddaughter's wedding and will not be back until next Wednesday night, the24th, I believe, and Thursday morning, the 25th, I shall rise at the crack of dawn to go to my dermatologist's office to have a melanoma excised from the flesh of my back.  It is comforting to know that nothing I could have done with covering my body or wearing gobs of sunscreen would have prevented the growth of this one, since it is more or less at my belt line, on my back, a portion of my flesh I would certainly not flaunt in public, ever conscious, narcissist that I am, of how far astray I have grown from the lean elegant bodies of the glorious youths one sees about, casually stripped to the waist.  O Postume, Postume, where is Horace when I need a tragic line about that situation?

Tragic Drama In Ancient Athens

It was in Athens in the fifth century BCE that a democratic system of government seems to have been invented (I guess evolved is the better term), of course, limited as we all know, to property-owning freeborn males, thus disenfranchising all women, foreign born males, and enslaved or formerly enslaved persons.  Still, there was an assembly, and votes were taken and majorities ruled, and these entitled Athenian males could speak their mind whether rich or poor.  The other major assembly of people in that period was the amphitheater carved out of the stone of the Acropolis, the theater dedicated to the god Dionysos, sort of a parallel institution, one might say, where vital questions of the culture were presented through the medium of dramatic enactments of what seems to have been mostly family conflicts; it is not clear from the evidence if enslaved persons or women were habitually free to attend--we do know that foreign born persons were admitted.  Society, some would say, is the family writ large, so it made sense, this focus on family conflicts, and by keeping the families represented in the plays to the various royal families of myth and legend, the audience was sufficiently distanced not to become too distressed.  The action was thus a kind of abstraction--all so very different to the enactments of familial misery in the television of our times, so 'real,' so close to everybody's personal experience, palliated only on commercial television by the relentless, upbeat proclamations emanating from the advertisements ("yes, yes, there is a remedy for ring around the collar!").  Democracy as a political system expressed the people's will, if only in a sketchy way, still does here, sort of, despite the obvious inadequacies and constipation of our two parties, beholden more to special interests; slowly but surely there is some kind of evolution or revolution, change this way or that.  Alongside this democracy the great aristocratic families who lived in the countryside throughout Attica, which is the land mass where Athens is the major city, survived and in their way flourished throughout the fifth century.  Tragic drama expressed the ideology of that era, one based on the tragic sense of life.  As such it was supremely anti-democratic.  Democracy suggests a people in control--in our own time, every man and woman out at Home Depot shopping for lumber, new plumbing, remaking their situation.  An aristocrat is someone born to a social position, an aristocrat has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, not only to assure the material wealth associated with the rank, but also the status and family name.  Tragic drama rehearses again and again the narratives of persons locked into a situation for which there is no exit, horrible and sad for an Oedipus or a Medea or a Pentheus.  Democracy, on the other hand, is all about choice, change, and challenge. I mention Medea, and that was how she is presented in the current production at London's National Theater, superbly acted by all the cast.  And yet, at the end when Medea has killed her children, thus destroyed herself and her former husband, just by rendering them bereft in that impossibly desolate way of parents who lose their children, she is shown to walk off into the dark of the offstage and that is The End.  In the Euripidean text, however, her ancestor, the Sun God, sends a winged chariot that picks her up out of the tragic mess she has created and presumably will deposit her in Athens where she indeed has been offered sanctuary.  So, one is left scratching his/her head: Medea is thumbing her nose at Jason?  Medea goes on to better things?  Medea is a special kind of monster that, like a snake, hisses, bites, and kills, and wriggles off into the grass?  The text suggests something other than tragic action.  Interesting.

Anonymity Is A Bad Thing

The newspapers these days are filled with stories that make one ponder the family.  There are the parents who have killed all their infant children; there are married couples where the husband or sometimes still the boyfriend has beaten his partner viciously and repeatedly and often she has come back for more; there are religious groups who actively disown their children who confess to being gay.  To my mind much of this stems from a climate in which the family is no longer a constellation of importance, where America's absurd emphasis upon individualism leaves everyone without the emotional and psychological support of a group.  Young people have sex, girls become pregnant, the impending event is not planned, most often not welcomed, by a circle of family, an automatic coterie of caregivers that traditionally cushioned the inevitable burden of new parenthood.  I well remember the early years of my marriage to my second wife, the mother of the four children who constituted my claim to being a family man.  My parents were dead, her parents were retired and living in rural New England, her siblings were on the East Coast, mine were scattered about the country.  By the time we had both attended college, we no longer were particularly close to any one of these people, and indeed did not live nearby any family.  Each of the four pregnancies was a surprise; we thought we were practicing the best available birth control, but we were stupidly misusing it.  It was difficult, especially for my wife, giving birth to four children in five years, with a miscarriage in the middle year. We were afraid of the psychological fallout of abortion and had no one to counsel.  We both felt alone, ignorant, put upon, with no one to turn to except each other, she drawn away from an architectural career she had planned, I harassed by the demands of the profession I was trying to enter. Those were years of intense and in some ways tragic struggle; it did the marriage no good. Several years later when we had moved back East to Boston our Brookline landlady once called us to report that she had seen our eldest child misbehaving (from her point of view) in public near Harvard Square on his way home from a private school in Cambridge.  It is the one and only time I remember in all the years of parenthood where a member of my extended community took the kind of interest in a child of mine that once would have been the norm and still is in a traditional society.  Yes, it takes a village to raise a child, and nobody pays any attention.  America's individualism is a dreadful trap and snare.  We are husband wife, father mother, daughter son sister brother, teacher student aunt uncle grandfather grandmother neighbor friend priest rabbi minister local grocer bartender and so on and so forth.  No man is an island.  Gossip is good.  Places where people walk by on the street are a better place to live than where they zoom by in their car. The ancient Greeks laid the ground work for the rich context of urban life with their city states, small entities centered on a public square where everyone created part of their identities.  Anonymity is a bad thing.

The Disco Beat Of Life

I love nothing more, used to love, than disco where I would quickly be so lost in the beat that I was definitely in that place they used to call "gay abandon," which nowadays would make the hearer laugh at the double entendre, which remains nonetheless true in both sensea, no doubt that the rhythm and rapid movement lets me leave the self which is prey to all the anxieties societal and others that being me engender.  The same out of body sense comes over me when I travel, nowhere more so than on the deliriously free moment when one is walking down the gateway to the waiting plane and one is no longer with the world of the airport and what came before that nor yet at the destination site.  Another mind out of body experience is moving one's household which allows one to sit in increasingly empty rooms, more and more devoid of the personality that decorated them, and go to new rooms empty of any character imposed as yet whatsoever.  Well, I have participated in the summer long undertaking of emptying and moving a household, I have traveled to a new location and set it up.  Weeks later I have gone with my husband to relax, first in London and then in Germany's spas, and now I am starting to pack again to go to the furthermost reaches of eastern Nova Scotia for a week of activities surrounding my granddaughter's wedding.  I will come back via Manhattan for a couple of days, then back down to Sarasota, where I will as they say pull my nerves together and shortly thereafter pack up again for a ten day trip with three dear friends to Athens.  I have wanted to see Greece one more time in my life, and have planned this trip off and on for a couple of years and now it has fallen into place.  Apart from the egotistical thrill that comes to an eighty four year old when he realizes that he can pretty much keep up the pace walking--in London we took our usual walk from the Paddington area down down through Kensington Park to Marble Arch--it is exhilarating to know that I keep my marbles--there are lots of ticket details, reservation details, money transactions, passport matters to keep in mind.  There won't be a grand let-down when I return from Greece toward the end of October, because late November we have tickets for a trip to friends in upper Vermon, followed by a visit to my daughter's house in rural New Hampshire for one of her celebrated family Thanksgiving dinners which we have truly missed from this distance.  Then comes December and we settle down, the theater, symphony, opera, chamber music seasons begin, and we are back to the gym three mornings a week.  So, party on, you old fool, fun, fun, fun.

Professional Sports, Just Not My World

Competitive sports are pretty much a mystery to me.  Crippled as a child, I never engaged in any.  Already instinct told me that my life was to be spend with the nancy boys and not the muscled testosterone fueled powerhouses lunging around playing fields.  I never understood competition; once a friend brought me to front row seats at Madison Square Garden where I applauded a spectacular basket made by a member of the visiting rival team--much to my friend''s embarrassment--because I thought it was marvelous and beautiful.  And team spirit, well, that has never been part of my psychic repertoire.  But what I really repulses me is the ubiquitous accounts of the violence of male athletes against their women, that and the continuous determination to overlook it, as though it were embedded in the successful male athlete's psyche.  Violence and aggression, I can understand their part in athletic competition, but it repels me, frightens me really, the idea that I as a male may have that dormant as part of my baggage.  It's like the students chosen for their athletic prowess in so many institutions of higher learning.  It certainly clears the air if they are finally allowed to organize and perhaps collect some of the profits that flow from their performance; certainly they are not going to shine in the classroom or most of them are not, and an ugly percentage are to my mind cruelly abused of their hopes and expectations simply by being in an academic situation without any of the obligations, skills, or determination that should excite.  But what do I know?  It is a world apart, has been from the git go.  I remember taking my family to a Red Sox game with a friend who was retiring from my academic department as a farewell celebration since she was such a Sox fan, and falling asleep early into the evening.  I had seen dull before, but this beat all.  At the gym where I work out I am always dumbfounded by my fellow males there who of whatever age talk of nothing but the performance of teams across the country, the particular successes and failures of athletes known to them all.  Their obsessive identification with athletes and their game is all consuming, and half of these old duffers couldn't any longer throw a ball across the gym.  Same thing when I used to ride up on the elevator every day in the Grace Building in Manhattan to my office on the 42nd floor with all the suits going to their high powered careers.  Day in and day out elevator talk was on professional or college athletic performance.  And it has always been amusing to me that the white males who so eagerly follow the success or failure of these handsome black giants would more than likely tighten up in anxiety or horror if one of them and his wife moved into the neighborhood or was invited to a dinner party.  No, I just don't understand.

Nudity

Part of our European vacation was to exercise the mind with something other than which kind of packing box should we fit that piece into or whether the objects unpacked should go over here or there.  London was as usual the mind and soul's distraction.  Favored with perfect temperatures and blue skies we walked hand in hand through Kensington Gardens past the Serpentine with the queen's swans, past Princess Diana's memorial fountain, a favorite spot for children gamboling in the water under the eye of their mothers lying on the adjacent grace, onto the stretch known as Rotten Row, all the way down to Marble Arch.  Ah, heaven!  The same thought was on display on the faces of all the others out for their fill of the last good days of summer.  We saw the exhibition of Virginia Woolf's literary and social life in the heady days of Bloomsbury at the National Portrait Galley; we had perfect seats for a performance of Euripides' "Medea" at the Natonal with the brilliant Helen McRory in a natural style that was at the same time transcendent as one expects from ancient tragic dramatic ladies; and we preceded that delight with a joyous encounter in the galleries of the Tate Modern, a converted industrial building with giant spaces, this time so many devoted to the cutouts of Matisse.  Taken all together in appropriately large spaces, they had never been shown to such advantage and we reveled in the colors, shapes, and coherences.  Glorious!  Then on to Wiesbaden to take long daily soaks in pools of hot thermal water at the ancient Kaiser Friederich Baths, a major resource of this beautiful and exceedingly wealthy town.  Everybody, it seems, goes to the baths.  The Germans go as much for the icy cold swimming pool, and the still colder sitting bath, and the impossibly icy plunge bath as for the heated sauna, steam room and thermal pools.  I timidly stayed in these last.  A special feature of this bathhouse is that total nudity is required when using any of the facilities, locker rooms are available to male and females old and young without distinction.  Only toilets and shower rooms are designated for a given gender.  One quickly gets used to the extraordinary variety of patches of pubic hair on display, the various shapes and sizes of breasts on the women, and the same variegation displayed in penises, the freedom with which some heavy set and elderly women bent over and allowed their ponderous breasts to hang down in ungainly fashion, the unselfconscious large males with smallish equipment, the equal aplomb of the men who were sporting erections engendered by sitting long times in the heat of the thermal pools, all available for all to see as the owners of these bodies descended and ascended the stairs coming into the pools.  No room for modesty, no room for timidity.  We all were as we were made and have grown, human creatures defined by body, not personality, not intellect, not cosmetic enhancement of physical beauty, and everyone thus had the beauty of idiosyncracy, the beauty of uniqueness.

So Long For Awhile (Wrtiten Last Week And I Forgot to Send It)

We're off to Europe later in the day, first to London, then on to Wiesbaden, in Germany.  This is a birthday present in advance from my wonderful husband, who in addition to surprising me with this treat, has so gallantly spent the last three or four weeks working endlessly at hanging pictures, shelving books, dvds, and the rest.  Two nights ago while we were at table here with a guest, he excused himself to take a pee, and evidently was so overcome with fatigue he thought to sit down for a second.  About a half hour later I looked for him, saw him stretched out on his bed asleep, closed the door, told our guest that the party was over.  Poor guy!  Well, for the next ten days he will truly rest. We'll see some theater in London, but the real destination is a spa in Wiesbaden, a repeat of last year on Margaret Island in the middle of the Danube in Budapest.  This spa will be interesting, first because it is a completely restored nineteenth century Art Nouveau masterpiece, and then because it is true to the German penchant for total nudity in mixed groups.  We read with amusement some shocked comments on one of those trip sites from Americans who I guess had never encountered such a thing.  I remember walking through Munich fifty or so years ago traversing the so-called "Englisher Garten" where shop clerks and office help stretched their totally nude bodies to the sun during the noon break while munching their sandwiches!  Ja, es ist anders in Deutschland!  This is just a long winded way to say that I shall be taking a break from my blog until probably the tenth of September.

Now it is indeed mid September, and we're back again with much to tell but too jet lagged right now.