The Feast of the Assumption

August 15th is a big, big holiday in Italy, called Fer' Agosto, and the start of an exodus of the populations of the bigger cities for seaside resorts where whoever is so fortunate finds a place to spend the next six weeks.  Stores, pharmacies, restaurants (before the days of high tourism), everything imaginable, is closed down during this period.  It is one of my favorite moments in the calendar, and I toyed with the idea of having a dinner party at a nearby steak restaurant and inviting my favorite trainers from the gym along with my husband.  They, resolute escapees from the Roman Catholicism of their youth, were appalled and could not fathom my motive.  Well, I happen to like calendars studded with events which recall us to the great mythologies of western history.  The Christian story is such a narrative, rich in imagination and image.  It rivals the great mythologies of the Greeks and the Romans and deserves the same respect.  That does not mean belief necessarily, and since I am by conviction an atheist or agnostic I do not credit the story of the Virgin Birth and her later departure body and all into Heaven as anything bordering on reality, but nonetheless I like the story.  Some people are so literal minded alongside the most striking credulity.  I remember teaching a course to some Bronx born Hispanic girls who literally erupted in class when I brought up the notion of Zeus, the father of the Gods, as also a progenitor of many heroes of legend by virtue of his frequent love-making with the girls of the immediate human world.  If you go on Google, I pointed out, there is quite a strikingly long list.  "No," they shrieked, God cannot have sexual relations!"  "Says who?"I replied.  "It's just as likely as the Holy Spirit being able to impregnate a mortal woman.  Welcome to the world of mythology!" These offspring of Zeus are like the people who claim that their ancestors came on the Mayflower, it seems to me.  In any case, I have been to the coast of Turkey and seen the spot where Mary's corporal ascent into Heaven is said to have taken place.  I have seen the place in Delphi where the god Apollo is said to have slain the snake guarding the navel of the earth.  Few sites on earth visited by me have the natural sense of the presence of a god as Delphi has or had I should say before half the world's tourists on their fume spewing buses descended upon the place.  Once upon a time it was quiet, holy, and filled with the presence of a god, the entire town.

Town and Gown

The middle western town in which I grew up had a state university as it major employer.  My mother was a faculty widow, her late husband, my father, having been chair of a major department of the School of Medicine.  She had an onlooking outsider's vivid concern for the workings of the university and taught me from an early age about the gradations in rank from instructor to dean to college president, the last of whom was a good friend who invited her to all the major receptions to which I was often dragooned to go as her escort; she would have been a great success at the court of Louis XIV.  She also reinforced constantly the notion of the superiority of academics who did not work for profit over those in the town like store owners who worked hard to build up their business.  That made me into the snob I am as one who shudders when at social gatherings I overhear my husband asking questions about salaries or sale prices of real estate.  My mother turned my older sister, on the other hand, into a fellow traveler as they used to call persons of leftist sympathies during the forties, who disdained the idea of profit taking and personal gain as opposed to the common good. She could not bear the endless discussions of rank and hierarchy that animate academic conversations. The town was divided by a river and a novelist might have used that as the great divide between those who worked for the university for relatively modest salaries and those who labored for profits.  The latter tended to live in much grander houses and a lot of them drove Buicks, although interestingly enough, everyone seemed to agree that driving a Cadillac was pretentious and bad taste.  Mother's elitist attitude toward academics and her disdain for moneymakers made deep impressions on my psyche, and I find it comic that here in Sarasota we are sometimes invited to gatherings of donors for the very splendid Asolo Repertory Theater to which we give our characteristically tiny mite and there I am chatting it up with a real estate developer or retired financial services figure, in sum, people who used to be "in business."  My instinct to consider their life work utterly pointless is amusingly blunted by the obvious mystification and disparagement which they visit upon me when learning that I am "a retired professor."  That revelation usually ends our attempts at conversation.  A quizzical look rearranges their features that often dissolves into active repugnance or at least that is my sense of it.  But underneath it all, is perhaps the sickly kid who could not catch a ball, never was chosen early one when teams were being formed at prep school.  A little learning is a dangerous thing, I guess, but on the other hand it certainly does a job on your perceptions.  

A Mistake

I have recently published a review of a new and celebrated translation of Homer's Iliad in a small but elegant and fancy journal.  I wrote my review in some haste right after the immediate recovery from my heart surgery.  My husband read it in draft, the editor of the journal, did as well, and enthusiastically accepted it.  A short time later it was set in type and I read it again in this state, as did my husband, and I don't know who else.  I now have the published version, which is indeed very handsome to look at, which I, somewhat fixated on myself, and conscious that this piece will very likely be my last hurrah, leave out on the coffee table, not that we have that many visitors, but so that my hungry ego will be satiated on a daily basis just in the sighting.  Last night as we were leaving for the theater I received an email from a friend and I offered to send him a copy of this review.  As I was glancing over it ever so casually in yet another mental masturbatory mode my eye caught the sentence where I mention a certain conversation between Hektor and his wife Andromache as it occurs, wrote I, in the third book of the poem.  In a lightening flash it came to me that this occurred in the sixth book of the poem.  I have known that fact well oh for the past fifty or sixty years.  I never caught the error, my friends and critics did not either.  I could scarcely set off for the theater so devastated was I.  First thing this morning I consulted the Greek text, yes, there is is, for all to see: in the sixth book Homer describes Hektor speaking to Andromache.  oimoi! as the Greek tragedians would have introduced the exclamation of deep lamentation.  Too bad, Charlie, you're old, you made a mistake, you're forgetting.  The play we saw last night was the relationship between a young caregiver who is emotionally needy and an old woman keeping her at bay who is sinking into dementia.  Hard to watch at any age and for anyone, but I, as they say, really related.  I intend to spend the day whining quietly by myself. Maybe curled up in foetal position.  I will not mention my monumental error.  Thing is, they're not going to notice it.

Oh, What A Lovely Day

The exclamation is true enough in some ways, even if the temperature is very high and the humidity stifling, and one of the news items in the local paper this morning describes a motorist shooting dead another fellow who attacked him in rage who as it turns out had just been released from prison for a road rage shooting.  Riding in cars is not for the faint of heart in Florida where the rate of pedestrian deaths and fatalities in automobile accidents is second in the nation.  No, best to stay inside, and stay cool, and think pretty thoughts, as I am who at the moment is contemplating my journey to Canada next week where I will have the thrill of meeting my one month old great grandson.  A month or so ago we journeyed south of here to celebrate the first birthday of his cousin,  my great granddaughter.  Such a bubbly sweet child who warmed my heart who am not by nature drawn to very small children preferring to carry on conversation rather than making faces, squeezing rubber balls, and saying "goo-goo."  The trip to Canada will provide me with a visit as well with my granddaughter, her charming husband, both as pleasing and attractive as the parents of the great granddaughter south of us here in Florida.  And an added bonus will be my companions on this trip my two daughters who will join me after my lay-over at Logan airport in Boston, in fact one will come out to the airport upon my arrival to help me get my suitcase off the baggage carousel.  I don't think my seriously impaired balance could manage it alone.  So I will have a pleasant intimate evening at the hotel first in the restaurant and then sleeping over with one daughter and in Canada whilst that lady turns to helping out the new mother, the other daughter and I will tour some museums and other sites which will only glanced at on a previous visit.  On Friday week the big treat will be that my son the twice over grandfather will be on hand so that we can celebrate his 59th birthday.  He rarely surfaces in my life so this will definitely be a great treat.  We are staying in a hotel which promises that every room has a view of the ocean so that in turn will make the trip delightful.  One daughter warns that the temperature will fall into the sixties at night which is winter weather for us down here in Florida, so I must remember to bring garments in which I can "bundle up."  I must stop to ask rhetorically once again "who ever thought that  Charlie Beye, the class wit and dance queen of Iowa City High School, would end up not only a retired professor with a pompous title and a string of publications but a father of four, grandfather of six, and now great grandfather of two (and it's just the beginning!)?"  It's one of those days that as I look back on my association with my four children I glow with pleasure, remembering the good times and the so so times and reflecting that my wife and I were lucky that our four children were fundamentally good and noble persons who never brought on the bad times which we are always hearing about from the press and in novels.  I am fundamentally a pessimistic person so perhaps I should not end even  facetiously "God's in Heaven, all's right with the world," especially as that is such a cruel irony and so untrue when one contemplates world affairs today.

Helen Gurley Brown again

As I wrote the other day Helen Gurley Brown described in one of her books how to give a good blow job.  That set me to thinking, to reminiscing. In my youth I don't think that young ladies, girls, or women, take your favorite appellation, for the most part were given to performing fellatio--to be polite about it--on their gentlemen friends.  Certainly not in Iowa City, certainly not the girls of Iowa City Public High School.  I would have heard of it somehow.  After all it was I who was consecrated as the great blow job artist, and although they probably joked about it enough in their locker rooms, the town jocks who were eager for my ministrations did not address the matter publicly, and certainly not to their girl friends.  Or so I have always imagined.  I remember once double dating with a local stud whose girl friend was best friends with my date for the evening, hardly a "girl friend."  We had deposited my date at her home and now sitting out front of the other girl's house, I sat in the car watching the guy plaster himself against his date up by the front door, grinding into her really, in a decorous Eisenhower era way, although I guess this was back when Truman was president.  In any case, eventually he tore himself away, jumped into the car, and we sped off.  Moments later as we were passing the city park, he shouted: "Turn in here," and within minutes he was unzipping his pants and urgently breathlessly saying. "You gotta help me out!"  He was a star athlete, a senior, I scarcely knew him, but there he was, a glittering prize, all for me.  Helen Gurley Brown's advice to her female readership in this matter comes from her consummate desire to furnish women with every device conceivable to make males accessible, especially for good sex, a far more important objective than the traditional Kinder, Kirche, und Küche that was still being peddled at the time.  I of course have a different take on this, being a gay male, for whom the experience engenders the highest sexual excitement; I wasn't doing it "to help some guy out," or to make myself more attractive.  Since I am a male I can participate sympathetically in every nuance of the heightening sensual arousal.  Because I am attracted to the males I can appreciate their strength, their largeness, their normal every day macho dominance, their total masculine command, and thus can also derive the maximum pseudo sexual sadistic pleasure in experiencing their physical surrender in an orgasm of which I was the impresario. My high school years were great fun, oh, for the obvious reasons, for instance, like I was a great dancer and all the girls wanted me for a partner--the boys as a rule, were so shy and clumsy--, but no one can ever take away the memory of those guys from my high school with me in the back seat of a car, one on one, a real relationships of a very special sort.  I wish I could have had a discussion with Helen Gurley Brown about it all, because I am sure she would have got a kick out of it.

Africa

Uganda is just one of many states in the continent of Africa which has relenltessly demonized and punished persons who admit to being homosexual or demonstrate it.  From my perspective much of the continent is a wrecked place, still evidencing the wounds of the horrible exploitative invasion of European nations.  So I cut them some slack.  But there is a limit; the aggressive attacks on homosexual persons and their pursuit of sexual and social happiness are to my mind the far greater perversion, and when coupled with the dubious and neurotic fixation on the authority of the Judaeo-Christian Bible allows a community to surrender to a false prophet of seriously sinister proportions.  I do not want these people to immigrate into my country and I make no hesitation in saying so.  It is the same with Muslims who will attack the homosexuals; I do not want them here.  I am a male, and as such I recognize that the Christian and Muslim religions in Africa are in the possession of male heterosexuals who use these religions to bind ever more closely the people of the continent who are prisoners of the males.  The Abrahamic religions have used the dictates of the Book to set women into chains and keep them there.  Women can only be free when they understand how they are slaves of their menfolk in a Judaeo-Christian-Muslim context.  If only they recognize that every rape committed essentially derives from that Book.  Heterosexual males fear homosexuals because they do not commit to the utter supremacy of the male.  Contrary to popular understanding, heterosexual males submit to the embrace of their fellow males at a statistical level which is slightly astounding.  This truth is the undoing of the quasi fascist control of heterosexual males over their females.  Any male traveler in Arab lands may enjoy carnal relations with males easily enough, in fact far more so than in, say, the American middle west.  Partly that is the lack of imagination and desire on the part of American males, but it is also a result of the curious combination of repression and restraint which evolved from the holy texts.

The Population Darkens

My trainer at the gym and I have been wasting (my) exercise time engaged in an interesting conversation about Americans.  He is from my perspective absolutely no different than I, educated, savvy about our inherited culture, articulate, but, as he insists he is Puerto Rican, brown skinned and thus inherently different than I.  True enough he grew up with a big Afro  and as a boy was already dancing on large pieces of cardboard for money.  He was a child of the Bronx and I grew up pink cheeked and clueless in the cultural wastes of the American Middle West.  Except of course not really true as ours was a university town, I was preternaturally intellectually curious and took advantage that everything the university had on offer from an early age. Mike may not have had the extensive university education I had but having lived in New York and been part of the professional theatre and dance scene, Jose Quintero as a mentor, he is no rube from the island.  So our conversation was interesting; whenever I insisted upon our likeness, he would remind me that he was always the last to be brought into a casting call--he wasn't white enough.  The statisticians say that soon the population will be minority white.  As a longtime professor of the humanities I wondered aloud with Mike how the narrative of the West--Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, etc. will now be presented.  It is essentially a story of the white man's increasingly complicated and subtle definition of himself.  For many its crowning achievement was the Age of Enlightenment when the irrational bonds of religious belief were cast off and exchanged for scientific inquiry.  We both of us one a lapsed Catholic, the other a former Episcopalian, fear the new immigrant movements of peoples untouched by skepticism  and scientific inquiry.  We wondered how to encourage peoples who formerly have been excluded to participate.  I think of the students I taught at Lehman College in the Bronx once upon a time, mostly people of color, who traditionally had been excluded from the city's cultural institutions, the museums, the opera houses, who were all very reluctant or indifferent to visit.  Was this great heritage essentially a narrative of white people to be discarded?  We talked of the musical "Hamilton" where the cast is largely African American, many of Puerto Rican heritage, as is its composer.  I remember my inherent sense of disconnect even though I knew what I was going to be seeing when the  opening scene presented a group of men and women in eighteenth century dress, purporting to be friends, family and indeed some of the Founding Fathers, all them clearly identifiable as "Negroes," to use the term with which I was raised.  Down at the Public Theater where the musical originated the audience was largely white.  How do people of color see this show?  I think of my students over the years to whom I lectured on ancient Greek epic poetry.  As more and more of the class by virtue of this change in ethnicity become the descendants of the oppressed, enslaved, the dispossessed how will they identify with Achilles and Agamemnon and Odysseus, war heroes, slave owners, rapacious winners in life's game of chance, although eventually losers in terms of the ancient Greek tragic sense of life, itself at odds with the optimistic world view offered by the religions of the book which will be dominant among these new Americans.  Well, I will be dead soon enough, not to worry, Charlie.  History will sort itself out, always has, if it doesn't sink under the waves.