A Goddess Appears

To celebrate what would have been my mother's eighty-ninth birthday last night (had she not died on February 4), went to a play. She'd certainly have approved.

The best new play I’ve seen in years: Venus in Fur. (by David Ives, a witty man.) A playwright (Wes Bentley) has made a play out of Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novel, the eponym of Sado-Masochism (which novel everyone knows about but no one seems to have read – anyway, I sure haven’t), and he’s annoyed with all the actresses who have auditioned, and at the last minute one more shows up (the divine Nina Arianda), apparently a typical ditzy New York/L.A. brainless blonde, screaming, “Fuck!” when things go wrong, wearing inappropriate (for the era) fetish clothes, not understanding his allusions.

She nonetheless insists he let her read for him, “You don’t have to tell me about sado-masochism; I work in the theater.” And she puts on a Victorian dress and suddenly, like a light-switch, she’s a self-possessed aristocratic Austro-Hungarian of the 1870s with an entirely different accent (more or less British) and entirely different manner and movements, and he falls under her spell, and then every now and then she snaps out of it, is a ditz again (with no pause, it’s hilarious just to hear her do it, the moment you hear her whiny American accent the illusion shatters and we’re back in the rehearsal room), and she leaves him utterly bewildered and gradually demolishes him, exploiting the sado-masochistic feelings he’s always denied - and turns out (possibly) to be the goddess Aphrodite come to punish him for his self-suppression and his male condescension to women - and by the end she has him eagerly playing a girl whom she, as a man, exploits and crushes - most amazing (and funniest) performance I’ve seen on any stage in years - and probably the best staging of the central confrontation of the Bacchae, though using hardly any lines from that play. A major pagan event. Absolutely riveting.

At the end, my date, Nika, said, “Did you notice?” (I hadn’t.) “While we were doubled over laughing, most of the people in the audience didn’t get it at all; they had no idea what it was about.”

One could spend a night, many nights, just watching emotions play on Arianda's by no means conventionally beautiful face. Wonderful, wonderful.

Exposing Myself

I want to expose myself but I don't want anyone to look.
No; I want everyone to look, but I don't want anyone to see.
Or perhaps peek through their fingers and then forget all about it.
Or not realize it was me, unless they think about it later. Much later.
Or I want to expose myself completely but veiled.
Or a photograph, but only the negative, so obviously not with a digital camera.
Or just from the side that doesn't look like me.
Or that people would only realize was me much later when it was too late and they weren't really sure and anyway I was gone.

A bird's a bird for a' that

We dinna hunt, we dinna trap,
A bird’s a bird, for a’ that!
Still turkey fills the honest lap –
The stomach growls for a’ that!
For a’ that, an a’ that,
Sweet potatoes, pie and a’ that,
Till the hour be late, let them pile me plate,
And I’m well content and a’ that.

Oh a quail sae wee, or a rich confit,
Of a goose or a duck or a’ that,
Or a fine roast hen – satisfying, when
Ye daily dine, for a’ that.
For a’ that, an a’ that,
It’s the middleman an a’ that,
Twixt the veg and grain and your belly’s main –
A bird’s a bird for a’ that.

Ravenna Recollected

Roma was the emperor’s cock –
His favorite bird.
A fighter (my guess).
When the servants came crying, “Roma is fallen!”
The emperor (in Ravenna) trembled.
What relief to learn they meant merely the city,
Captured by Goths.
The rooster crowed and flapped, strutted and preened,
Jutting its beak out-in-out-in on the march,
Proud and erect as any centurion of any (defeated) legion.
A Praetorian cock!
What emperor lives in Rome? I ask you?
Honorius didn’t.
That crowded, fetid, overbuilt city
Where they’d been known to murder their emperors
– persecuted in a Palatine ghetto.
He dwelt enmarshed in ramparted Ravenna
And when a Goth carried off his sister
Graciously allowed the yob to wed her.

I remember with pride the fearless day
My sixteenth year
No word of Italian
No map in my hand
I went to Ravenna, a pilgrim, alone.
I’d heard of mosaics.
I remember the buses lined up in the square
And no way to figure which one took me back.
Alone and giddy
As floating on top of the nervous wave
I found San Vitale, saw the empress and emperor
I found Dante’s tomb the body absent – risen –
(as can only be proper for Italy’s god)
I found Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo
The saints in togas, faces glum as child’s play
The palatium (thus) with its curtains gathered in arched windows
I found nothing else in that city revealed – and reviled –
And the telephones defied me
And at last I took a taxi (with the last of my lire) back.

Ah Italy!
The first step in your streets, unreeled like bolts of salable silk
The piazzas of herbs of duomos of men-at-arms
The language uncertain but half-familiar (shouldn’t this all be sung?)
The sweet ice tea in the sour cafés
The limitless vistas of aching houses gelato-colored
Swaying with history’s breezes,
And each corner turned brought (devout was my faith)
Some new angle of beauty
Some new sip some new bite some intolerant ripeness
Some mingling of senses, the ancient and modern,
Like the finer cheeses, the airier salads,
The artichoke in hot aioli.
Was it young? Or was I? (In my thirty-first year)
My shouldrs, my feet – they never complained –
My belly, my cock – insatiable both –
My eye, my nose, my tongue – who had guessed
That all this lay in wait
Attempting to sate me?

Ravenna was once the capital of the world:
Impregnable in ramparts of sea and swamp.
Rome fell – but well – there were more where that came from.
In Ravenna: mosaics!
You can see the progression from Galla’s Greek keys
To Apollinare’s toga’d saints
To the Arian baptistery, John in the dome,
The watery pattern distorts the bare body,
To Classe’s apse, the sheep and the shepherd,
To the banker’s house, where a new style entrances
To the court ablaze in San Vitale:
Justinian conquers – the toga is banished –
The story of Isaac prefigures the Other,
Then decadence sets in in San Severo –
The Exarchs were poor – the Lombards without –
And then they marched in – and the sea marched off –
Without swamps it was only a poor seaside village.
The city fell. The Franks donated. The tyrants ruled.
A chunk of Crusader mosaic thus:
No skill, no art, no elegance survives.
The city has fallen … off.

When at last I returned (it was just forty years)
Nothing returned to my memory there.
I might be an exarch – an emperor – a Goth –
For all the recall of that teenage discovery.
I walked and I walked and I walked – but my feet hurt –
Took the bus down to Classe – and back – for the train.
And Italy forgot –
The wonder – the place without limits – had limits –
It’s beauties accessible, impudent, knowing.

I no longer get lost in sweet Italy now.
I have reached that age: I no longer get lost.
I walk into a town and it’s all familiar –
Though I’ve never seen it I know every byway.
(Well: try Naples before you put money on that one.)

Even Rome is comprehensible now
When no one has eyes for all of its treasures
I no longer have feet for the treasures I knew
And the churches as distant as comets are set
In a knowable matrix.
They have ceased to have children, and soon
They’ll lack ancestors too.
Each piazza belongs to the others – from boot toe to heel –
Each new dom, each palazzo, fits into the pale
And that giddiness, novelty, no more avails
Through the water I clearly perceive the bottom
On which I could walk if I were but taller.

Where is the land in whose beauty I drowned,
The land where mosaics were music?
The water’s dried up –
The coming tsunami
Will sweep me away.
Could I live now in Rome – imperially –
I would sit on a balcony –
With a hen called Ravenna –
Awaiting the Goths.

Will Obama go the way of LBJ?

I have yet to get a clear sense from anyone in Washington what "victory" in Afghanistan would look like. No Taliban? Won't happen. A government with control over its people? Never yet. Half a million American troops killing ever more millions of innocent civilians out of sheer frustration while at home the Democratic party refuses to renominate the donkey-headed president? I wouldn't be surprised. If we're not out of Afghanistan soon, I'll be marching against him and I won't vote for him in '12.

America should not make wars unless it is attacked by another nation. No nation is stupid enough to attack us - it's only happened once in our history - that was in 1941. The Japanese were gambling, and knew it. They regret it now. America cannot win wars if they last longer than three hours with commercials - the American people won't fight them unless they are under threat. They are not being threatened by the Taliban. They weren't being threatened by Saddam either. These wars weren't just crimes, they were blunders - but the men who made them only wanted to get Bush elected; they had no other ambition, and they achieved it. Can we go home now?

We can't win a war in Afghanistan. No one else has since Babur, and he started in Uzbekistan and had Muslim sentiment on his side. Will the U.S.A. go the way of the U.S.S.R.? Breaking the bank for no purpose but making the military-industrial complex even richer, while we die for lack of health care at home?

If Obama could describe a rational, honest objective to this war, I might have some faith in it. He can't. It's not a war he'd ever have made given the opportunity. Is he really going to let every earthly ambition of his life and being go down because of someone else's foreign policy blunder? Yes, the Republicans will shriek bloody murder and traitor and everything else, scrounging votes, if he pulls out - but the answer to that is to denounce their treachery in declaring a war they couldn't win in the first place, committing America to a debt they never intended to pay. The answer is to stop being Obama and fight dirty. Or just resign and let Joe Biden handle it.

Once again, I'm not sure Obama is the man for this job. He gives every sign of wanting to be president to deal with problems he hasn't been able to get to - because of all the problems he'd rather not deal with that have piled up on his desk. Too bad. You don't get the term you'd like; you get the term you were elected to. Deal with this. It's a rough call, and the sooner we're out, the better.

Withdrawal from the war should come as soon as possible after health care goes one way or the other. And a bitter attack on Republicans should fit in there somewhere.

Self-diagnosis

The latest mysterious ailment:

A rash, my right upper back and neck ... hardly noticeable but skin sensitive to tight-necked shirts, to certain salves ... a waxiness also about the right ear ... a fungus? a leprosy? a melanoma? very mysterious.

Until yesterday, for some reason, when it occurred to me that the sun slants in from the window to the left of the bed ... and I never pull the shade, hoping (uselessly) the light will wake me early ... and came at last to the proper conclusion:

Sunburn! I've been getting a steady morning right-shoulderblade sunburn!

Covered it with aloe goo, and already it feels much better.

The solitary life, unaccessoried by an interested (and often entertained) second party, leads to many a fractured conclusion.

Jigsaw Puzzle

There’s no box
Well, there’s a box in my head
And I study it there
How it’s supposed to look finished
Right down to the foxed edges of a well-read first edition

But I have the pieces out on the table
And found the corners, and all the bits of edge
And set out the frame
And the colors are vivid in places, so I’ve written those chapters
But there are acres where the pieces do not fit, have not fit
And the color is wry and deceptive

It’s less easy when you must craft each piece yourself
When the color is clear but does not match the pieces around it
When the shape, the hook, the duck’s head could go here – or there
It’s a puzzle

And perhaps this piece, this ambition of pieces,
This lingering glen, this wormwood
Would look better there (and the box is no guide)
Or belongs there – or how could I be so blind?
It’s a puzzle

And the whole elegantly pieced section over there turns out
To belong to some other picture
Or has already been done better before
Or there are two, just as good, and they must be collated,
And you must learn to discard what you’ve already done
It’s a puzzle

It’s less easy when you must mold each piece yourself
Tear the flesh of the story out of your body
Mold according to cells extracted from the skull without anesthetic
Ignored the blood and guts streaming and starting to smell
To create life, new life, your own story
It’s a puzzle