@ bebop-o

Look at them real firm and eagle-eye like...

You have a distinct butterfly effect. You “flap your wings” and on a summer evening in a rivertown loft space far away now is the night one blue dew...

I hope all is well with you.
Your friend,
j. m. greysky

Clairvoyance

Noted on the morning of 10 October 2008.

Sketchy fragments of dream. Am at Grand Central Station. Buy ticket to go to Stamford on 6 pm train. Lights flash, which I take to be the signal to board – but it turns out to mean that the train is pulling out of the station. No matter, I’ll wait for another one and do some shopping in the meantime. I shop, forget about the train entirely – and miss it. Talk to station agent about whether I can use the ticket for a later train. (Also there is a woman who fills out an IOU to get a ticket and sticks it on a [where you impale papers? Name of object?]. I’m not sure I ever do get on the train to Stamford.

Also, am in a beachfront house. I have missed the presidential debate, I think because of this train fiasco thing. There’s a man on the beach with a caravan (a bus), lots of goods. He’s here to give me presents, consolation prizes. I’m thinking it’s J., but I think actually it’s the 12534 guy. Quite an imaginative set of presents – I only remember a few – pencils, a book of Whistler paintings – I wish I remembered more, they were all a delight, tailor-made to delight me. What I wish from J., I suppose, but don’t get...

Proust, Proust's Double, and Me, Part 2

On August 12, 2008 I wrote:

"I was reading about Proust yesterday, quite by chance, prompted by an article linked to by the 12534, in which a line amused me, “The previous owner loved period houses but was too tall to live in them.” How tragic! Not really. “Previous owner” is rich – “so he set about creating a house that was spacious and comfortable while still evoking an earlier era.” (God the Times is ridiculous.) This reminded me of Prof. Stambolian describing Proust’s exquisite neurasthenia. Proust was allergic to most everything, including flowers, which he loved but could only behold in tormented fashion from behind glass because inhaling their fragrance might trigger a suffocating asthmatic attack and literally be the death of him.

In musing about this I discovered an article that discussed how Proust treasured photographs, something I hadn’t known or had forgotten."

…Proust stored his personal photographs out of sight in the bedroom’s rosewood chest of drawers. The only collection Proust ever permitted himself, this cache of images included photographs of actresses, friends, and family… Each photograph was, for Proust, a keepsake, a souvenir, a fetish. Photographs were also, importantly, incitements to writing… Proust’s private photograph collection functioned as “a prodigious reservoir he could draw from to compose his characters.” Yet Proust was careful not to look too long or too closely… he explains, “my memory, fatigued by drugs, is so faulty that photographs are very precious to me. I keep them as reinforcements and do not look at them too often so as not to exhaust their powers.

[Diana Fuss, The Sense of an Interior, p. 199]

Proust, Proust's Double, and Me, Part 1

A search of my computerized documents yielded the following excerpts of a letter I wrote on 8 August 2008. That month I made a project of going very meticulously through my old journals and letters to try to make sense of aspects of my past.

8/19/85 journal entry: Watching Brideshead. Guest on the QEII tries to prevent the melting of the ice swan, a futile act. A metaphor for the entire novel/series - a brilliant theme, period. My own Brideshead is, of course, the H____'s, the air of poetic ecstasy - such moments as biking at the S____ Museum and running into J. and his father driving in the VW white car, or J. and I on our first date, star-gazing.

Felicity [J's mother] to Belle. Undated (“Tuesday.”) [30 April 1986]

“… We had a marvellous Christmas. J and L were here and G and K most evenings so we had dinner party after dinner party and it was tremendous. One night had the headmaster from King and that was really wild. Lots of guests so that the table was out full length most of the holiday…. Naturally we had fires every night. Both my daughters[-in-law] are pyromaniacs.”

"My favorite professor at Wellesley - hands down, no competition - was a brilliant man by the name of George Stambolian. He was a professor of French literature. I took a course with him on Proust and Flaubert (in translation), as well as another one my senior year on theatre since 1945. Along with being brilliant, he was a caring professor, a great wit, and very attuned to nuance. He was a figure in the gay literary scene in New York, as well. It is a cliché, but he loved life and was both tremendously engaged and engaging. He died prematurely, an early casualty of the AIDS epidemic. I still miss him.

Anyway, I noted in one of my journals that he had once mentioned, “nothing obsesses me more than the notion of outside/inside.” That is something that has also very much been a recurring theme in my life.

I believe the letter I excerpted above was the last one I ever received from your mother. It’s undated but I believe it belongs with an envelope that’s postmarked 30 Apr 1986. I am sure it cut me to the bone when I first read it. The import for me (however unintended I believe it was on your mother’s part) was that I was forever outside the magic circle, and could have no hope or illusions otherwise. I don’t believe I ever wrote back. I think there ceased to be a point.

Ah, no matter now. Unbeknownst to me, it was a watershed moment. One door shut for good. But another immediately opened. On May 1, 1986, D. and I got together for the first time, on a whim, walking home over the Brooklyn Bridge to celebrate a glorious spring day."

Proust's Double

Hauled out that decrepit box again, in search of archived scraps relating to my handsdown favorite professor at college.

Perusing old journals.

Stambolian.
George Stambolian.
I love that name.

That's it?

The next line reads, I feel bursting with things to say.

Maybe, but at that moment evidently not about that wonderful man. I have exhausted the box and so am now cast adrift on memories.

On this day I think of him, as of the sublime.

Notes of a Panic Attack

Only connect. – E.M. Forster
The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed the source of all anxiety. Being separate means being cut off, without any capacity to use my human powers.– Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

Seeing patterns, playing with combinations – usually great fun for me, rapturous even. But over the weekend signs suddenly shifted character, became portentous, collectively bad omens. I became frightened and upset. I am alright now, but have learned that sometimes the frequencies can be too much.

Wednesday (or is it Thanksgiving Day?). Along the westerly path a robin. It is so insistent and close by I think it might be someone hiding, playing tricks on me. The trill is unmistakeable - seemingly pointed - four distinct notes. I instantly recognize the Mendelssohn. My thoughts are an incoherent muddle of disbelief. No way, stop it, get out of town.

I keep wondering if I'm reading too much into things.

(May 2005, from my abandoned blog, Hidden Clapboard. Outside the birds - robins, I think - are singing... Sometimes the first few notes of Beethoven's Fifth, only in a higher key (C-C-C-A flat!!!!!!), other times a variation of the Imperial Margarine commercial I remember from childhood (F-F-F-F-F-F-F-high C!!!!!!). The final notes are prestissimo trills that I can't begin to approximate.)

Am I reading too much into things? Yet those were the notes.

Friday, late afternoon. I set out for my walk. Vast winged migration swarms overhead. Too cliched to think of Hitchcock – more Tim Burton. Also, The Omen: it's quiet by the church. The starlings have stopped short of it.

Birds swirl in a din as I walk. I’m not frightened – I refuse to go there, too silly - but am overawed to bear witness – moreover, to be in the very midst of it.

What wicked wind this way comes?

The Voice of Robert Desnos.
... tornadoes revolve in my mouth...

28 November. What a wind last night, like a freight train. In advance of it, in late afternoon on my walk along the road where I live, clouds of starlings appeared, thousands of them in massive swirling parabolas. The air was filled with their cacaphony. Hundreds of them alighted on one bare-branched tree after another, momentarily leafing each out in black.

An elderly woman at the hairdressers this morning was the very image of Queen Elizabeth II. Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

(p.m.)

The Voice of Robert Desnos.
... The one I love does not answer...

Not like him.
Have a little faith in me...

29 November. I alternate between joy & despair. I think something terrible has happened and that I’ve been ignoring/dismissing/denying all the signs. I feel that I will not be able to bear it.

A single young brilliant red cardinal waits for me, greets me near the approach to the picnic table grove. That better not be you, I sternly admonish. It’s too much. The bird flies off.

I am upset. I continue on my way circling around the fields. I start down the grass path that bisects the park. Two rifle shots fire, too close. Echo. Oh wouldn’t that just be the final irony if I’m shot like a deer. My voice will echo in the mountains forever.

I turn around and don’t take that path.

Where are you? Worried. Tweet.

I drive into Hudson, walk up and down Warren. In a shop window winged Eros flies over an ancient house; an antique birdcage is in another.

I stop at Mignorelli’s. Apples and pears, but no peaches. Comfort me with apples. No, I really need a peach.

That evening, while vacuuming the aerie, the image of Giovanni DiMola’s il primo capitolo appears of its own accord on the computer screen. You’re not visiting me this way are you? Please don’t let that be you. Maybe I opened it by accident when I moved the baby picture into my blog folder. The photo of the vampire’s freshest victim had similarly “revealed” itself to me.

All this time, the wrong John. (How Jane Austen.)

Plus: my jeans belt finally breaks.

I am unhinged.

30 November. Worried, erased.

Thank you.

Magic Jacket

Claire and Rafe.

It's true. Something about the big letter on the chest makes girls get all swoony and crushy. I saw it all the time in school. And you couldn't just pin any old felt letter to your coat and get play- not that I tried.