Reading:

James Agee, A Death in the Family

Solzhenitsyn on the cult of novelty

There is a long-accepted truth about art that "style is the man" ("le style est l'homme). This means that every work of a skilled musician, artist or writer is shaped by an absolutely unique combination of personality traits, creative abilities and individual, as well as national, experience. And since such a combination can never be repeated, art (but I shall here speak primarily of literature) possesses infinite variety across the ages and among different peoples. The divine plan is such that there is no limit to the appearance of ever new and dazzling creative talents, none of whom, however, negate in any way the works of their outstanding predecessors, even though they may be 500 or 2,000 years removed. The unending quest for what is new and fresh is never closed to us, but this does not deprive our grateful memory of all that came before.


No new work of art comes into existence (whether consciously or unconsciously) without an organic link to what was created earlier. But it is equally true that a healthy conservatism must be flexible both in terms of creation and perception, remaining equally sensitive to the old and to the new, to venerable and worthy traditions, and to the freedom to explore, without which no future can ever be born. At the same time the artist must not forget that creative freedom can be dangerous, for the fewer artistic limitations he imposes on his own work, the less chance he has for artistic success. The loss of a responsible organizing force weakens or even ruins the structure, the meaning and the ultimate value of a work of art.


Every age and every form of creative endeavor owes much to those outstanding artists whose untiring labors brought forth new meanings and new rhythms. But in the 20th century the necessary equilibrium between tradition and the search for the new has been repeatedly upset by a falsely understood "avant-gardism" -- a raucous, impatient "avant-gardism" at any cost. Dating from before World War I, this movement undertook to destroy all commonly accepted art -- its forms, language, features and properties -- in its drive to build a kind of "superart," which would then supposedly spawn the New Life itself. It was suggested that literature should start anew "on a blank sheet of paper." (Indeed, some never went much beyond this stage.) Destruction, thus, became the apotheosis of this belligerent avant-gardism. It aimed to tear down the entire centuries-long cultural tradition, to break and disrupt the natural flow of artistic development by a sudden leap forward. This goal was to be achieved through an empty pursuit of novel forms as an end in itself, all the while lowering the standards of craftsmanship for oneself to the point of slovenliness and artistic crudity, at times combined with a meaning so obscured as to shade into unintelligibility.


This aggressive impulse might be interpreted as a mere product of personal ambition, were it not for the fact that in Russia (and I apologize to those gathered here for speaking mostly of Russia, but in our time it is impossible to bypass the harsh and extensive experience of my country), in Russia this impulse and its manifestations preceded and foretold the most physically destructive revolution of the 20th century. Before erupting on the streets of Petrograd, this cataclysmic revolution erupted on the pages of the artistic and literary journals of the capital's bohemian circles. It is there that we first heard scathing imprecations against the entire Russian and European way of life, the calls to sweep away all religions or ethical codes, to tear down, overthrow, and trample all existing traditional culture, along with the self-extolment of the desperate innovators themselves, innovators who never did succeed in producing anything of worth. Some of these appeals literally called for the destruction of the Racines, the Murillos and the Raphaels, "so that bullets would bounce off museum walls." As for the classics of Russian literature, they were to be "thrown overboard from the ship of modernity." Cultural history would have to begin anew. The cry was "Forward, forward!" -- its authors already called themselves "futurists," as though they had now stepped over and beyond the present, and were bestowing upon us what was undoubtedly the genuine art of the Future.


But no sooner did the revolution explode in the streets, than those "futurists" who only recently, in their manifesto entitled "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste," had preached an "insurmountable hatred toward the existing language" -- these same "futurists" changed their name to the "Left Front," now directly joining the revolution at its leftmost flank. It thus became clear that the earlier outbursts of this "avant-gardism" were no mere literary froth, but had very real embodiment in life. Beyond their intent to overturn the entire culture, they aimed to uproot life itself. And when the Communists gained unlimited power (their own battle cry called for tearing the existing world "down to its foundations," so as to build a new Unknown Beautiful World in its stead, with equally unlimited brutality) they not only opened wide the gates of publicity and popularity to this horde of so-called "avant-gardists," but even gave some of them, as to faithful allies, power to administrate over culture.


Granted, neither the ragings of this pseudo-"avant-garde" nor its power over culture lasted long; there followed a general coma of all culture. We in the U.S.S.R. began to trudge, downcast, through a 70-year-long ice age, under whose heavy glacial cover one could barely discern the secret heartbeat of a handful of great poets and writers. These were almost entirely unknown to their own country, not to mention the rest of the world, until much later. With the ossification of the totalitarian Soviet regime, its inflated pseudoculture ossified as well, turning into the loathsome ceremonial forms of so-called "socialist realism." Some individuals have been eager to devote numerous critical analyses to the essence and significance of this phenomenon. I would not have written a single one, for it is outside the bounds of art altogether: the object of study, the style of "socialist realism," never existed. One does not need to be an expert to see that it consisted of nothing more than servility, a style defined by "What would you care for?" or "Write whatever the Party commands." What scholarly discussion can possibly take place here?


And now, having lived through these 70 lethal years inside Communism's iron shell, we are crawling out, though barely alive. A new age has clearly begun, both for Russia and for the whole world. Russia lies utterly ravaged and poisoned; its people are in a state of unprecedented humiliation, and are on the brink of perishing physically, perhaps even biologically. Given the current conditions of national life, and the sudden exposure and ulceration of the wounds amassed over the years, it is only natural that literature should experience a pause. The voices that bring forth the nation's literature need time before they can begin to sound once again.


HOWEVER, some writers have emerged who appreciate the removal of censorship and the new, unlimited artistic freedom mostly in one sense: for allowing uninhibited "self-expression." The point is to express one's own perception of one's surroundings, often with no sensitivity toward today's ills and scars, and with a visible emptiness of heart; to express the personality of an author, whether it is significant or not; to express it with no sense of responsibility toward the morals of the public, and especially of the young; and at times thickly lacing the language with obscenities which for hundreds of years were considered unthinkable to put in print, but now seem to be almost in vogue.









The confusion of minds after 70 years of total oppression is more than understandable. The artistic perception of the younger generations finds itself in shock, humiliation, resentment, amnesia. Unable to find in themselves the strength fully to withstand and refute Soviet dogma in the past, many young writers have now given in to the more accessible path of pessimistic relativism. Yes, they say, Communist doctrines were a great lie; but then again, absolute truths do not exist anyhow, and trying to find them is pointless. Nor is it worth the trouble to strive for some kind of higher meaning.


And in one sweeping gesture of vexation, classical Russian literature -- which never disdained reality and sought the truth -- is dismissed as next to worthless. Denigrating the past is deemed to be the key to progress. And so it has once again become fashionable in Russia to ridicule, debunk, and toss overboard the great Russian literature, steeped as it is in love and compassion toward all human beings, and especially toward those who suffer. And in order to facilitate this operation of discarding, it is announced that the lifeless and servile "socialist realism" had in fact been an organic continuation of full-blooded Russian literature.


Thus we witness, through history's various thresholds, a recurrence of one and the same perilous anti-cultural phenomenon, with its rejection of and contempt for all foregoing tradition, and with its mandatory hostility toward whatever is universally accepted. Before, it burst in upon us with the fanfares and gaudy flags of "futurism"; today the term "post-modernism" is applied. (Whatever the meaning intended for this term, its lexical makeup involves an incongruity: the seeming claim that a person can think and experience after the period in which he is destined to live.)


FOR a post-modernist, the world does not possess values that have reality. He even has an expression for this: "the world as text," as something secondary, as the text of an author's work, wherein the primary object of interest is the author himself in his relationship to the work, his own introspection. Culture, in this view, ought to be directed inward at itself (which is why these works are so full of reminiscences, to the point of tastelessness); it alone is valuable and real. For this reason the concept of play acquires a heightened importance -- not the Mozartian playfulness of a Universe overflowing with joy, but a forced playing upon the strings of emptiness, where an author need have no responsibility to anyone. A denial of any and all ideals is considered courageous. And in this voluntary self-delusion, "post-modernism" sees itself as the crowning achievement of all previous culture, the final link in its chain. (A rash hope, for already there is talk of the birth of "conceptualism," a term that has yet to be convincingly defined in terms of its relationship to art, though no doubt this too will duly be attempted. And then there is already post-avant-gardism; and it would be no surprise if we were to witness the appearance of a "post-post-modernism," or of a "post-futurism.") We could have sympathy for this constant searching, but only as we have sympathy for the suffering of a sick man. The search is doomed by its theoretical premises to forever remaining a secondary or ternary exercise, devoid of life or of a future.


But let us shift our attention to the more complex flow of this process. Even though the 20th century has seen the more bitter and disheartening lot fall to the peoples under Communist domination, our whole world is living through a century of spiritual illness, which could not but give rise to a similar ubiquitous illness in art. Although for other reasons, a similar "post-modernist" sense of confusion about the world has also arisen in the West.


Alas, at a time of an unprecedented rise in the material benefits of civilization and ever-improving standards of living, the West, too, has been undergoing an erosion and obscuring of high moral and ethical ideals. The spiritual axis of life has grown dim, and to some lost artists the world has now appeared in seeming senselessness, as an absurd conglomeration of debris.


Yes, world culture today is of course in crisis, a crisis of great severity. The newest directions in art seek to outpace this crisis on the wooden horse of clever strategems -- on the assumption that if one invents deft, resourceful new methods, it will be as though the crisis never was. Vain hopes. Nothing worthy can be built on a neglect of higher meanings and on a relativistic view of concepts and culture as a whole. Indeed, something greater than a phenomenon confined to art can be discerned shimmering here beneath the surface -- shimmering not with light but with an ominous crimson glow.





Looking intently, we can see that behind these ubiquitous and seemingly innocent experiments of rejecting "antiquated" tradition there lies a deep-seated hostility toward any spirituality. This relentless cult of novelty, with


its assertion that art need not be good or pure, just so long as it is new, newer, and newer still, conceals an unyielding and long-sustained attempt to undermine, ridicule and uproot all moral precepts. There is no God, there is no truth, the universe is chaotic, all is relative, "the world as text," a text any post-modernist is willing to compose. How clamorous it all is, but also -- how helpless.


For several decades now, world literature, music, painting and sculpture have exhibited a stubborn tendency to grow not higher but to the side, not toward the highest achievements of craftsmanship and of the human spirit but toward their disintegration into a frantic and insidious "novelty." To decorate public spaces we put up sculptures that estheticize pure ugliness -- but we no longer register surprise. And if visitors from outer space were to pick up our music over the airwaves, how could they ever guess that earthlings once had a Bach, a Beethoven and a Schubert, now abandoned as out of date and obsolete?


If we, the creators of art, will obediently submit to this downward slide, if we cease to hold dear the great cultural tradition of the foregoing centuries together with the spiritual foundations from which it grew -- we will be contributing to a highly dangerous fall of the human spirit on earth, to a degeneration of mankind into some kind of lower state, closer to the animal world.


And yet, it is hard to believe that we will allow this to occur. Even in Russia, so terribly ill right now, we wait and hope that after the coma and a period of silence, we shall feel the breath of a reawakening Russian literature, and that we shall witness the arrival of fresh new forces of our younger brothers.

Stephen Tennant

the bio reviewed by John Waters
"Cherish me and introduce me to the glories of New York," Tennant telephoned a startled friend, David Herbert, as he crossed the Atlantic on the Berengaria. Herbert met Tennant at the boat and was embarrassed to see him walking down the gangway " 'Marcelled' and painted . . . delicately holding a spray of cattleya orchids."

"Pin 'em on!" shouted a tough customs officer in homophobic disgust.

"Oh, have you got a pin?" exclaimed Tennant in complete disregard for the reaction of others. "You kind, kind creature."

To confuse things further, Tennant's idol and great friend was Willa Cather(!). It is hard to imagine the notoriously no-fun author of "O Pioneers!" hanging out with a man whose beauty tips included "an absolute ban on facial grimacing or harsh, wrinkle-forming laughter," but Cather, Tennant's "surrogate mother/nanny figure," always encouraged him to write, even though "Lascar," the novel that obsessed him for the last 50 years of his life, remained unfinished at his death.

After World War II, Tennant became, in the words of Osbert Sitwell, "the last professional beauty." From then on, it was time to hit the sack big time. Sleeping Beauty forever. He had inspired enough fiction (Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited," Cedric Hampton in Nancy Mitford's "Love in a Cold Climate"), met enough celebrities (everyone from Tallulah and Garbo to Cocteau and Jean Genet) and traveled the globe with Barbara Hutton and other rich dames for long enough; it was society's turn to come visit him.

"Reeking of perfume," "covered with foundation," with ribbons hanging from his dyed comb-over hairdo, he rested "non-stop" for the next 17 years in "decorative reclusion." Unconcerned about his grossly overweight figure (" 'But I'm beautiful,' he would reason, 'and the more of me there is the better I like it!' "), he lay in bed surrounded by his jewelry, drawings and Elvis Presley postcards while, as Mr. Hoare puts it, his "decorative fantasies were running amok" (the pink and gold statues in the

overgrown garden, the fishnets and seashells everywhere, the tiny uncaged pet lizards, the bursting pipes and rotting carpets, the mice still in the traps). Happily re-creating the "perfervid environment" of his youth, Tennant calmly painted the tops of his legs with pancake makeup and proudly showed his "suntan" to astonished visitors like Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia. David Bailey, Christopher Isherwood, David Hockney, even Kenneth Anger all made pilgrimages and, though they may have laughed good-naturedly afterward, none laughed as hard as Tennant himself, who, after all, was in on the joke from the beginning. "To call Stephen affected," the artist Michael Wishart recalled, "would be like calling an acrobat a show-off, or a golden pheasant vulgar."

In his later years, as the antiques dealers circled outside his estate like vultures, waiting for the end, Tennant would sometimes stop traffic in nearby country towns by going shopping wearing tight pink shorts or a tablecloth as a skirt. His family had given up on him long before, exhibiting only "bemused resignation," a wonderful English trait sorely missing in America today. V. S. Naipaul may have described Tennant best when he noticed "the shyness that wasn't so much a wish not to be seen as a wish to be applauded on sight."

Penelope Fitzgerald on FMF

Ford Madox Ford's bio reviewed by PF in the NYTBR in 1991





Most people first come to be interested in Ford Madox Ford through reading his novel "The Good Soldier." This must be one of the most carefully organized fictions ever written. Ford himself, however, was almost as disorganized as a human being can be. Ezra Pound told him that even if he were placed naked and alone in a room without furniture he would reduce it, in an hour's time, to total confusion.


Ford was the grandson of a fine old Pre-Raphaelite painter, Ford Madox Brown, so there was that to be lived up to, or got away from. He was tall, blond and vacuous-looking in his youth, and as the years passed and he drank more he became very stout. He was compared to a white whale, a behemoth, an English squire, Falstaff, Lord Plushbottom.


His father was a German musicologist. Ford was educated partly in France and Germany, and he always thought out his novels in French. All his family lived for music, painting and language. Whatever the disappointments, nothing else could be truly worth the doing. During his whole life Ford worked unremittingly to support himself and others by writing, but he was not a person who could ever make money. In a sense, he scarcely needed it. It was there to be lent, or borrowed, as fate decided. Ford needed luxury (good wine, food and conversation), but not comfort. In the shabbiest lodgings he could maintain his grand manner.




Ford married in 1894, when he was only 20 years old, and it was in those early penniless days that he met Joseph Conrad, whose ideas stayed with him for the rest of his life. In 1908 he was editor of the influential English Review. In 1909 he left his wife, Elsie, and their two daughters. He was ordered to pay them a weekly maintenance, refused on principle and spent eight days in Brixton jail. From 1911 onward he lived with the sharp-tongued literary hostess Violet Hunt. She desired to marry him, and he extricated himself with difficulty. When World War I broke out he joined the army (he was over 40), and came back from the battle of the Somme shellshocked. In 1918 he was lucky enough to meet an Australian painter, Stella Bowen, who was prepared to live with him in a remote, rat-infested cottage in Sussex and to bear him a third daughter. In the 1920's they decamped to Paris, where Ford edited The Transatlantic Review, getting contributions from Conrad, Pound, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Joyce, Paul Valery and William Carlos Williams.


Ford was less lucky in meeting the waiflike Jean Rhys, whose talent he encouraged (he was a great encourager). She described their affair, without forgiveness, in her novel "Quartet." As Alan Judd shows in "Ford Madox Ford," at all times he was surrounded by friends, who sometimes became enemies, and always he found ways to be hospitable. At 56 he found, or was found by, his last lover, the American Janice Biala. He had always been more appreciated in America than elsewhere and lived for years in the United States. But eventually he took his new wife back to Europe. He had been driven, he said, by an overwhelming nostalgia for French cooking. But time had run out. His health declined rapidly on the voyage to France, and he died on June 26, 1939, in a clinic in Deauville at the age of 65.


Ford conducted his life unwisely. To explain him is exceptionally difficult because he was a shape-shifter, giving a series of contradictory versions of himself to anyone who would listen. For mere facts, he said, he had a profound contempt. "What he is really," said H. G. Wells, "or if he is really, nobody knows . . . and he least of all." At heart he saw himself as the gallantly uncomplaining English gentleman of his finest novels, the victim of ruinous women or of some guileless-seeming manipulator, like the narrator of "The Good Soldier." Yet Ford was overcome by little worries; he was prone to nervous collapse; he wept on the shoulders of others. Often he was not taken seriously. His devotion to literature was absolute, but he was, perhaps, a holy fool on a large scale.


The standard biography up till now -- though not the only one -- has been "The Saddest Story" by Arthur Mizener (1971). Mr. Judd acknowledges Mizener's work and follows his chronology, but doesn't agree with what he calls Mizener's negative interpretation of Ford. In fact, Mr. Judd's fiercely energetic, absorbing book is in part a defense of Ford against Mizener. It starts unexpectedly with the words "There are also the rich in spirit." Although he can hardly claim that Ford was a happy man, he refuses to consider him a failure: "The point, surely, is that he was a writer. It doesn't matter what else he was or pretended to be -- pig farmer, country gentleman, cook, man-about-town, editor, man of letters, soldier, cricket enthusiast. . . . If anyone was ever sent into the world to be something, Ford was; and he achieved it."


Ford started by collaborating with Conrad, then turned to light novels and historical fiction. "The Good Soldier" came out in 1915. After the war came the brilliant "Parade's End" tetralogy, then reminiscences, essays, criticism, "A History of Our Own Times." Mr. Judd covers as much of this as he can, and quotes rather too much of Ford's tepid poetry.









He seems, in fact, prepared to defend almost everything Ford wrote but settles, as he is bound to, for the novels. Between 1906 and 1908 Ford brought out a trilogy, "The Fifth Queen," based on the marriage of Catherine Howard and the aging King Henry VIII. To Mr. Judd this is one of the best historical novels in the language. But "The Fifth Queen" could not hope to compete with best sellers by people like Rider Haggard or Robert Louis Stevenson, who had said that historical romance should appeal to our "nameless longings" and provide the adult version of child's play.


That was not at all the sort of thing Ford could do. Conrad and he had agreed that the general effect of fiction must be "the effect life has on mankind." This Ford believed could be achieved not by either romance or realism but by re-creating states of mind. These, of course, can be deceptive, as they are in "The Good Soldier," a story of two married couples and a young girl -- well-off, respectable and supposed to be good friends. Only gradually does it show itself to be what Ford first wanted to call it, "The Saddest Story," a frightening pattern of love and death. Those who have "heart" are perhaps better human beings, but they are liable to grotesque disasters. A good deal is asked of the reader, who is led through dazzling shifts of time and viewpoint, without hope of finding a final solution, since Ford believed that "there is in life nothing final."


When Mr. Judd tells us that "it is better to read and re-read 'Parade's End' rather than read about it," it is clear that he himself is something much more genial than a literary critic. He is, in fact, a novelist himself and, on the evidence of this book, a tolerant man, sympathetic to human passions and dilemmas and to commonplace human embarrassments. Accordingly, he is particularly good on the subject of "Ford's women" (they were known as that). Ford was successful with women, Mr. Judd thinks (in a way that astonished James Joyce), because he liked them, and needed to talk to them. They didn't expect him to provide, but knew he would give. Did he enjoy sex? "It may be that what he most sought was the emotional intensity, intimacy and dependence engendered by sexual relationships rather than sex itself." The keynote of Ford's character, as Mr. Judd sees him, is generosity. For this all his shortcomings, even his disregard for truth, must be forgiven.


Mr. Judd provides his book with few notes and no references, telling us that Ford cared nothing for such things. This, I think, was a mistake, but in every other way he is the reader's good friend, persuading, lecturing a little and bringing his subject unforgettably to life. "Not," he says, "that complete understanding is possible; the point is to get as near to it as we can, to know all that can be known in order to stand, if only for a moment, at the edge of what cannot." 'HE DID A LOT OF DAFT THINGS'





LONDON -- For Alan Judd, writing Ford Madox Ford's biography was like a "love affair." Mr. Judd, a 44-year-old British novelist and civil servant, said that just as Ford believed subjects chose novelists -- rather than the reverse -- he felt he did not fully choose to write a biography of Ford. "Something about his temperament appealed to me very strongly," he said in an interview here. "I also felt very defensive of him, because I think he's gotten some very unfair press." Admittedly, Ford "wasn't his own best friend. He did a lot of daft things. But underlying all of that was an extraordinary generosity and understanding and warmth, which I felt weren't sufficiently appreciated." Mr. Judd's commitment to his subject superseded concerns about the biography's commercial appeal: "In a sense, I wrote it for Ford. And if it didn't sell, well, that would have been true to Fordian form."


Working on the book inspired him to write a novella that will be published in Britain this June. Titled "The Devil's Own Work," it is, he said, a "tale of literary possession" that adopts the tone, though not the structure, of what is perhaps Ford's best-known novel, "The Good Soldier."


Ford, who did not trust biography as a means of capturing the truth about someone's life, probably would have preferred that Mr. Judd stick to fiction. Mr. Judd himself believes biographers can only point readers in the general direction of truth. "I suspect," he said, "that if Ford turned up now and joined us for tea, he would say, 'My boy, very nice book, but you got it wrong.' And he'd be right, of course." -- SUZANNE CASSIDY

Before they burn

From the saved articles:

Richard Rodriguez' Late Victorians from Harpers:

The age-old description of homosexuality is of a sin against nature. Moralistic society has always judged emotion literally, The homosexual was sinful because he had no kosher place to stick it. In attempting to drape the architecture of Sodom with art, homosexuals have lived for thousands of years against the expectations of nature. Barren as Shakers, and interestingly, as concerned with the small effect, homosexuals have made a covenant against nature. Homosexuals survival lay in artifice, in plumage, in lampshades, sonnets, musical comedy, couture, syntax, religious ceremony, opera, lacquer, irony.

and

I am preoccupied by the fussing of a man sitting in the pew directly In front of me- in his seventies. frail. his iodine-colored hair combed forward and pasted upon his forehead. Fingers of porcelain clutch the pearly beads of what must have been his mother's rosary. He is not the sort of man any gay man would have chosen to become m the 1970s. He is probably not what he himself expected to become. Something of the old dear about him wizened butterfly, powdered old pouf. Certainly he is what I fear becoming. And then he rises, this old monkey, with the most beatific dignity, in answer to the microphone, and he strides to the sanctuary to take his place in the company of the blessed

So this is it- this, what looks like a Christmas party in an insurance office and not as in Renaissance paintings. and not as we had always thought, not some flower-strewn, some sequined curtain call of grease-painted heroes gesturing to the stalls. A lady with a plastic candy cane pinned to her lapel. A Castro clone with a red bandanna exploding from his hip pocket. A perfume-counter lady with an Hermés scarf mantled upon her left shoulder. A black man in a checkered sports coat. The pinkhaired punkess with a jewel in her nose. Here, too, is the gay couple in middle age, wearing interchangeable plaid shirts and corduroy pants. Blood and shit and Mr. Happy Face. These know the weight of bodies.

Bill died.

. . . Passed on to heaven.

. . . Turning over in his bed one night and then gone. 

These learned to love what is corruptible, while I , barren skeptic, reader of St. Augustine, curator of the earthly paradise, inheritor of the empty mirror, I shift m tailbone on the cold hard pew.

and

In the 1970s like a lot of men and women in this city, I joined a gym. My club, I’ve even caught myself calling It.

In the gay city of the 1970s. bodybuilding became an architectural preoccupation of the upper middle class. Bodybuilding is a parody of labor. a useless accumulation of the laborer’s bulk and strength. No useful task is accomplished. And yet there is something businesslike about the habitués, and the gym is filled with the punch-clock logic of the workplace. Machines clank and hum. Needles on gauges toll spent calories.

The gym ls at once a closet of privacy and an exhibition gallery. All four walls are mirrored.

I study my body in the mirror. Physical revelation -nakedness- is no longer possible, cannot be desired, for the body Is shrouded in meat and wears itself.

The intent is some merciless press of body against a standard perfect mold. Bodies are “cut" or “pumped" or "buffed” as on an assembly line in Turin. A body becomes so many extrovert parts. Delts, pecs, lats.

I harness myself In a Nautilus cage.

Lats become wings. For the gym Is nothing if not the occasion for transcendence. From
homosexual to autosexual. . .

I lift weights over my head, baring my teeth like an animal with the strain.

...to nonsexual. The effect of the overdeveloped body Is the miniaturization of the sexual organs of no function beyond wit. Behold the ape become Blakean angel, revolving in an empyrean of mirrors.

O

The nineteenth century mirror over the fireplace in my bedroom was purchased by a decorator from the estate of a man who died last year of AIDS. It Is a top-heavy piece, confusing styles. Two ebony-painted columns support a frieze of painted glass above the mirror. The frieze depicts three bourgeois Graces and a couple of free-range cherubs. The lake of the mirror has formed a cataract and at its edges it is beginning to corrode. Thus the mirror that now draws upon my room owns some bright curse, maybe some memory not mine. As I regard this mirror, I imagine St. Augustine’s meditation sIowly hardening Into syllogism, passing down through centuries to confound us: Evil is the absence of good.

We have become accustomed to figures disappearing from our landscape. Does this not Iead us to interrogate the landscape?

With reason do we invest mirrors With the superstition of memory, for they, though glass, though Iiquid captured in a bay, are so often less fragile than we are. They- bright ovals or rectangles or rounds-bump down unscathed, unspilled through centuries, whereas we . . .

Douglas Adams

from Dirk Gently:

“Ah, Patmos, I see." said Watkin, who was clearly mused by the news. “Well, what you have to understand, young lady, is that the Greeks, not content with dominating the culture of the Classical world, are also responsible for the greatest, some would say the only, work of true creative imagination produced this century as well. I refer of course to the Greek ferry timetables. A work of the sublimest fiction. Anyone who has traveled in the Aegean will confirm this. Hmm, yes. I think.”

She frowned at him.

“I found a pot,” she said.

“Probably nothing," interrupted her father hastily. “You know the way it is. Everyone who goes to Greece for the first time thinks they’ve found a pot, don’t they? Ha, ha.”

There were general nods. This was true. Irritating, but true.

“I found it in the harbor,” she said, “in the water. While we were waiting for the damn ferry.”

“Sarah! I’ve told you . . .”

“It’s just what you called it. And worse. You called it words I didn’t think you knew. Anyway, I thought that if everyone here was meant to be so clever, then someone would be able to tell me if it was a proper ancient Greek thing or not. I think it’s very old. Will you please let them see it, Daddy?" .

Her father shrugged hopelessly and started to fish about under his chair.

“Did you know, young lady,” said Watkin to her, “that the Book of Revelation was written on Patmos? It was indeed. By Saint John the Divine, as you know.

To me it shows very clear signs of having been written while waiting for a ferry. Oh, yes, I think so. It starts off, doesn't it, with that kind of dreaminess you get when you're killing time, getting bored, you know, just making things up and then gradually grows to a sort of climax of hallucinatory despair. I find that very suggestive. Perhaps you should write a paper on it.” He nodded at her.