The pills I took were a bad idea

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. T. S. Eliot The wishbone   Today I had the thought, Do not, do not, on pain of freaking death, look backward, Look backward over your shoulder at anything that you Have done or that has transpired, Because you will have one of two reactions: You will hate what you have done, who you were, all the mistakes You have made, all the chances not taken, Or else you will so love the times that were sweet blossomings, Heady gardens of the mind, That you will ache for those times and die inside, Knowing they will never return.   Today I had that knowledge, but did I absorb it? I never knew when things were crowning anyway, When moments were sublime, For they slid out from under me even as I experienced them. Far from trusting that these moments would come again, Which they would not, I tried to seize them, to keep them close, but they only changed form In some incredible miracle from solid to liquid A collapsing snow castle.   My life has been a road steadily pulled out from under me By some unseen hands And I’ve had to run to keep up with it To keep from falling on my ass Or hitting the back of my head. Run, run, fucking run.   My life has been some sort of awful conundrum, An impenetrable puzzle that the newspaper Forgot to publish the answer to, With too many gifts of the wrong sort, things I could Never share because I was never given the chance: No, not never, for I tasted of the thing I wanted most, Or thought I wanted most, Like a tongue on powdered sugar.   Births slingshot into nine-year birthday parties, And I see the infant I watched slide into the doctor’s hands Blowing out her nine candles, Looking about fourteen years old, Her hair up, her eyes knowing, Her smile splitting my heart. She looks nothing Like me or my side of the family, And the Spanish blood that lurks several Generations back is clear in her almond-eyed, Almost Castilian beauty. It can’t get any better, God won’t let it, In fact God is the reason for all this: I want to say, take me NOW so I don’t have to see any more, So that I will not be dragged to the awful breaking point, The point of disaster that I know is coming If I don’t get out of here soon.   This puppet dance amuses me, Though the first time I saw it in that odd old movie It tore me to pieces. I forgot to mention in the labels That the music is by Bartok Who knew a thing or two about horror. I could say something now about puppets and strings, But I know it would be awful.       I am in a labyrinth, somewhere in the middle so that It is possible to move in any direction And be equally lost. I hit Dead end after dead end, the board Tilted nastily so that the little silver ball Keeps on dropping through the holes.    I don’t want to read any more biographies, Don’t want to read about How lavishly gifted people Threw everything away with both hands Continually Because I don’t know what these things are Supposed to do for us anyway, Inspire us, Inspire revulsion or pity Or embarrassment or discouragement or what?   I am told to try and try. But it turns out That this is what they tell people anyway, it’s kind of Standard, A form letter of advice, And I am the only one who pays attention to it. It has become clear to me Just today,  just this minute That my efforts are an embarrassment to everyone Because they didn’t really mean I SHOULD try – It is the best way to get rid of me quickly With no sticky feelings involved Or perhaps it makes them feel better, Which is what apology is really all about, It has nothing to do with the wounded party, Who smugly assumes the person is truly contrite.   I have a certain  fascination for divination and Signs, Splintery snaps of the wishbone Dried on top of the fridge for months Yielding only the dessicated remains of a turkey or duck Knowing none of this ever comes true, That there is in fact no special protection, No amulet that holds off disaster, And the realization is strong, and inspires all sorts of Awful visions: Dancing along the edge of the Skytrain platform Feeling a little woozy As if the couple of pills I just took Might after all have been a bad idea.

Happy-face Nipples: or, how Helen Hunt's forehead died

I'll watch just about anything with Helen Hunt in it (or so I've thought up to now), and I haven't seen her in a movie in a long time. So when I heard about that new film called The Sessions, in which she plays a sexual surrogate working with a lonely, virginal quadriplegic man, I just had to see it.

It had "alternative film festival", "warm human drama" and "taboo-shattering exploration" written all over it, but I still had to see it. The "client", a paralyzed 38-year-old man in an iron lung, still has sensation all over his body but can't move his muscles at all. I cannot think of a more torturous situation, especially since he feels strong sexual attraction to women.

The quirky thing about the movie isn't the fact that an immobilized man feels desire and wants sexual contact: it's the fact that he confides all this to a Catholic priest, who at first has pretty grave misgivings about encouraging a young man to "fornicate" outside of marriage.

But after talking to his friend for a while and sensing his loneliness and longing, he begins to experience an attack of the kind of compassion that has felled the career of many a clergyman. Looking up at one of those plaster icons of Christ, he finally sighs and says, "I think he'll give you a free pass on this one."

The fact that the priest, played to craggy, earnest perfection by William H. Macy (a character actor who can play just about any sort of character, from meek to fierce) is by far the best part of this movie, tells us that there are going to be some serious problems. The priest is the best part, in a movie about sex?

But - that's another problem. The movie isn't really about sex. Not sexuality, anyway, not that messy, magnificent sprawl of experience and sensation that expresses itself, whether we will or no, across a huge and riotous canvas all through the course of our lives. In other words, no fucky-wucky here.

The polio survivor who must spend 20 hours a day in an iron lung is played with almost squeaky cuteness by John Hawkes, who does not convey any of the torment of passively watching life go by while trying to write and operate the phone with a stick in his mouth. This isn't a man so much as an overgrown Boy Scout who just happens to have a mobility problem. His constant good-natured quipping to prove how OK he is with everything renders the overly-jokey script kind of tedious. One longs for a little My Left Foot with Daniel Day-Lewis flailing around in rage and despair.

But when the sexual surrogate, played by Helen Hunt, enters his unimagineably isolated life, our expectations rise. Will there be some action - some sparks - something kinky, or just something approaching real erotic awakening?

I remembered Helen Hunt's true-as-blood performance in As Good as it Gets, the authenticity that burned through any kind of stereotype, and I was hoping for more of the same. But it didn't pan out that way. Though Hunt whips off her clothing several times in the course of the movie, even revealing (gasp, shock, horror!) her nipples, and though her nearly-50-year-old body is in enviable shape, something is definitely missing.

What's missing is juice, heat, scents and groans, that which makes sex - sex. What's missing also is the humanity that changes sexuality from the clinical/mechanical, the "insert tab (a) into slot (b)", into something - more. I'm not saying every sexual encounter has to be a supreme act of love between a man and a woman. Hell, I'm not even saying it has to be between a man and a woman (though it would help if they were both the same species.)

But one hopes, at the least, that partners will have the courage to take off their psychic armour along with their clothes and open themselves up to real contact, which can only happen through a kind of mutual vulnerability. But though that is supposed to happen here, I didn't see it.

For one thing, the poor guy keeps ejaculating as soon as he sees her, prompting her to teach him the kind of advanced techniques I haven't seen since How to Really Swing by Tiger Woods.

The ultimate goal of all this, of course, is penetration and "full sexual intercourse". I kept thinking all the way through this: why? Didn't the script-writers realize there's more than one way to skin a cat? The conservatism of staying within the "decent" bounds of a sort of reverse missionary position stultifies the whole enterprise. They aren't having sex: they're rubbing parts of themselves together, and it might as well be their elbows. Nevertheless, this full intercourse bit is held up as the ultimate prize, kind of like winning the U. S. Open (pardon the pun). In fact, he won't really lose his virginity until it happens.

It has to go in; it has to go off. Those are the rules, folks. I guess that means lesbian women must all be permanent virgins, a strange thought indeed.

At one point, a particularly excruciating one, he asks her to have an orgasm. She dutifully complies, though I kept waiting for it to happen. I guess squinching your eyes shut and sighing "ohhhh" passes for an orgasm. Hey, I'm about a million years old and so far past menopause that periods are but a distant nightmare, and even *I* can do better than that. In a heartbeat. That is why my pillow is covered with teeth marks.

(By the way. A movie from a few years ago called Get Him to the Greek features the most convincing orgasm in all of film history. Elisabeth Moss of Mad Men fame is responsible for it and should have won an Oscar. Made me wonder if she sneaked her vibrator on-set.) 

Even artificial/clinical sex is better than no sex at all, I guess, and disability activists are calling the movie earthshaking because it implies that disabled people MIGHT even be sexual beings (though we still secretly hope they're not). The story, based on real people and events, took place in 1988, making one wonder why it took this long to reach the screen. My suspicion is that it squicked out potential backers too much, visions of disability-related kinks dancing in their freaked-out little heads.



Sex is risky business, always, even between people who've known each other forever. It has interconnecting rootlets that snag so many aspects of ourselves, our pride, our shame, our joy, excruciating pleasure, jealous rage, and horrible despair. It's the thing that makes babies and keeps the human race moving forward, for good or for ill. So how can it possibly be as bland as this -this "Now I will rub your penis against my", etc.?

But that isn't even the worst of it.  The worst of it is

. . . is. . . Helen Hunt's forehead!

There are those who have said Helen Hunt hasn't aged well. I've seen mean internet pictures of her in which her mouth turns down and her neck looks kind of stringy. As the possessor of a stringy neck myself - and a jowly one at that - I can sympathize. If you live so long, it happens.

But what she has done to deal with it makes me quail. She has gone on record to say her face is totally natural, that she hasn't done anything to bugger it up and Joan-Riverize it, to turn it into a House of Wax relic of arrested youth that eventually caves in like the sagging edges of a spent candle. 

  

Her body, which we saw an awful lot of, was fine, though I don't see how you could tamper much with a body anyway. Her breasts looked like normal middle-aged breasts, refreshingly unperky. The lower part of her face did show some signs of wear and tear, the curse of the slender woman who loses the layer of subcutaneous fat in her face by mid-life.

But I kept wondering what was wrong with her looks. Was she clinically depressed or something? For one thing, her eyes looked so dead. In As Good as it Gets (and even in Mad About You and St. Elsewhere) she was so expressive, so full of quirky passion. But all that was gone now. Her brows were such a straight line that you could have set a ruler along them and joined them up.

Then I realized, to my horror: aaaggghhhhh! It was her forehead!

It had been Botoxed out of all existence. It had died. It was as smooth as the dome of a cathedral, motionless as a statue. Not one line existed on it to prove she had been alive more than 40 years: lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow. All erased. Someone had frozen it solid, so solid that it did not look "young" but merely petrified, maybe even mummified. Then I realized that the strange sense of detachment I felt all through this movie may have had something to do with the total lack of emotion in Helen Hunt's eyes.

If you can't move the upper part of your face, at all, can you show emotion? If you can't show emotion, for fuck's sake, how can you be an actress? Why destroy yourself like that (and lie about it to boot)?

When Botox first burst on the scene, to many people's horror (including my own: botulism toxin injected into your face??), it was pushed very hard at women as the solution to the living nightmare of ageing: wrinkles, sags and other signs of putrid decay. It would prevent the obsolescence that immediately follows the expiration date on the "product" at around age 40. That expiration date has been sneaking up, getting younger and younger by degrees, with the ultimate horrific result: Lindsay Lohan, face frozen stiff, lips blubbed out grotesquely (and I won't get into WHY women want fat, blubbery lips and think that they are at all sexy or desirable. Do men want to kiss a bratwurst?).

I remember hearing some women protest against all this early on, before they all caved in and threw themselves over the cliff like lemmings. I recall some Botox expert going on a daytime talk show and reassuring everyone that it was all good. "But I won't be able to raise my eyebrows!" one woman wailed. The expert looked at her, incredulous, as if she'd said something obscene. "Why would you want to do that? If you want to raise your eyebrows,  just use your fingers."

Maybe Helen Hunt should have used her fingers for something besides the therapeutic grasping of "tab (a)".  She could have raised one eyebrow for shock. The other for arousal. Both of them for revelation. Or maybe when she's having an orgasm? At least then we'd know.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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The waiting list for the waiting list (or: I have a drug for that)

I don’t remember where I heard this – maybe in Moscow on the Hudson, one of Robin Williams’ earlier films, where he had not yet calcified into the parody of himself he is now. But it was a reference to being “in the lineup to wait for the lineup”. Do we think this only applies to the fucked-up Soviet system of inefficient callousness?

Substitute “medical” for “Soviet”, and you’re almost there.

I’ve been waiting to hear back from my doctor. I went in three weeks ago to address some alarming symptoms, the kind of thing that medical articles and TV doctors say you should follow up on immediately. I need a certain nasty-sounding test. It’s an up-the-ass sort of test that I don’t look forward to, a Roto-Rooter boring into my colon. I bailed on one of these tests a year or so ago, just couldn’t make it. This time there’s a serious reason for taking it, and I’m hearing nothing.

Maybe three weeks on the waiting list for the waiting list isn’t long, who knows. I have phoned twice to check up on it, and both times was hand-pattingly gotten rid of. In the nicest, we-know-who-you-are-you-hypochondriacal-old-bat way.

I didn’t think I had quite reached old-battitude yet, but I guess it’s a matter of degree. I don’t think of myself as a hypochondriac, but I once was told I was a “psycho-chondriac” because I dared to complain about clinical depression. Nowadays, they’d get down my neck if I didn’t complain. Don’t you know that’s a serious condition? Don’t you care about your health?

You don’t dare listen to medical specialists, especially not on TV where the more ludicrous the claim the better, because it “makes good television”. Soon the theory will be completely discarded, and of course anyone who goes to their doctor to have it checked out (as the medical “expert” never fails to insist that you should do) is looked at with that blank, incredulous, “what-the-fuck-are-you-talking-about-anyway” look.

And doctors also say “whatever you do, DON’T go on the internet about this.” I can see why, I really can. Lots of internet sites about health verge on black magic. Wave a dead cat over your head at midnight, and you’ll never have a heart attack again. Eat certain things, ingest herbs, roots, whatever they have for sale at an outrageous price, and your cancer will vanish and never come back.

But why can’t we get some basic information in this information age? Are the doctors, overloaded and harried and eager to install a revolving door in the office so they can yell “NEXT” every five minutes or so, any more useful for our enlightenment? Especially since they all have different philosophies and insist that theirs is the One True Religion.

I’ve noticed something else. My husband collapsed on the floor about a year and a half ago, and no one knew why. It was alarming to see him surrounded by police and ambulance attendants and paramedics. I had to stand back, way back, while they worked on my grey-looking life partner. Then came the barrage of tests. I don’t know how many tests, but he had to see many specialists, each of whom took a different part of the body and studied it.

Reminds me of that old story about the blind men and the elephant. It's a big piece of leather. No, it’s a thing like a hunk of rope. No, it’s a big chunk of ivory. No, it’s a – look out! It’s about to charge!

. . . PHHHHHHHHHHHHHHT!!

I do have a point. None of these specialists ever talk to each other or even send reports to one another. It is as if Bill had a separate heart, nervous system, brain, bladder, prostate, etc., component parts that were assembled like Lego or an old Meccano set. They weren’t parts of a person because these specialists are not concerned with a “person”. They are concerned with a piece of tissue, a hunk of organ. Never is the circulatory system connected to the heart, that’s insane! Nor is brain function tied to the nervous system. How absurd. They’re separate systems.

Frightening, is what it is. There is no consultation between experts, just conclusions, usually that everything is just fine and the patient is full of shit and whining for nothing.

Sometimes I want to bring back the days of the family doctor, like the wheezing old guy who carried a black bag into our house when I had the measles or the whooping cough. For a while after my first grandchild was born, there were three generations of my family seeing one physician. I’d had my doctor for nearly 15 years and recommended her to my daughter, who took her on, then started taking her infant daughter in to see her. It was an interesting throwback to a different time that is now completely obsolete.

Then she retired, and that was over and done. A child nowadays would have to go to a “pediatric specialist”, and if she was acting up a bit and stamping her foot and not paying much attention to parental commands, she’d be diagnosed autistic. ADD is now old-fashioned and has been pretty much phased out, like personality disorders in adults. The autism “spectrum” is the thing now, you see.  And by the way: I have a drug for that.

Oh, don’t get me going on psychiatric stuff, the way fads and fashions seem to dictate everything. Depressed women used to be given Valium, a highly addictive tranquillizer, which was about as sensible as taking a crowbar to someone with a concussion. Gay men were sick. They couldn’t help it, they were “immature” and their mothers were too dominant and their fathers were too weak. If they tried really hard, they might pass for hetero. But for the most part homosexuality was seen as a permanent mental illness, a serious one that disrupted the chance for a “normal” life.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Simple physics. So now gay people – especially gay men in drag – prance around in pride parades, flaunting their “outness”. And we all smile, some of us a bit tightly, not daring to say we find the whole thing a bit silly, if not extreme. “Why aren’t there any heterosexual pride parades?” one unfortunate local politician once muttered, only to have so many bricks thrown at her that she never spoke again.

I’m not for going back to the barbaric model of “diagnosing” sexual orientation. But I don’t see psychiatric patients prancing around in parades celebrating the fact that they’re “out”.  They’re afraid, that’s why. Their condition is still very much medicalized, marginalized and stigmatized. There is no flexibility here, no individual definition of “normal”. You’re either a fuckup or you’re not. And if you’re not readily diagnosable, if you don’t fit any of the known (or should I say current/trendy) psychiatric categories, there will be hell to pay. You may even be told you’re untreatable and your condition is hopeless.

Do I sound a bit cynical about medicine? I wouldn’t go back to the days when no one even spoke the word cancer, or people in psychiatric distress were “put away”, often for life. (By the way, are you wondering now why I even mention psychiatric illness, when it obviously has nothing to do with “real” illness, “physical” illness that takes place in the body? Psychiatric illness takes place three feet above your head in a little white cloud with a nasty little man in it who spits on you every so often.)  I wouldn’t go back, but I couldn’t anyway, could I? There is no going back.

So I wait. If I do have cancer, which is extremely unlikely, then it is bubbling and festering away inside me even as we speak. It may be half a year before they can even tell, because I am waiting to see how long I will be waiting.

I’d like to see a horse doctor, please. If a horse has colic, they shove a big rubber hose into its rectum and blow a stream of warm water in it until the obstruction pops out. Sounds like a good idea to me.

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Land of the Dead: or, why I liked English class

I have a horrible confession to make. I liked English class. I liked it so much I had to hide it. I never said anything, never contributed a single comment to any discussion, though my mind was teeming with ideas about everything we studied.

It was decades later, when I was an adult and went back to school, that I found the courage to say the things I felt and saw. By this time my perceptions had shifted, of course. Even the most familiar poem wasn't the same; someone had gone in there and changed it, in every textbook in all the world.

I guess Auden's As I Walked Out One Evening is my favorite poem because it makes me want to scream that I ever dared to write poetry and try to get it published. I DID get a dozen or so of my poems published in small literary mags, but maybe seven people bothered to read them, mostly the contributors. Sometimes I wondered if the editor had bothered to read them at all.

Example. I wrote a poem called Lightning - God must've been punishing me for writing a poem called Lightning, because in the final printed version it came out Lightening.

"Well, it's only one letter different," squawked the 19-year-old assistant editor who had neatly inserted an error where there was none before. She must have thought I had made a spelling mistake.

So now my poem, which HAD been about childhood sexual abuse and doing hard time in a mental institution, was suddenly about a much more powerful subject: Coffee Mate "lightener", guaranteed to replace cream with a metallic-tasting petroleum-based powder which would never go sour.

So much for MY adventures. In my last post I decided to illustrate that favorite poem from high school (written by that dry, craggy desert of a man, W. H. Auden), and in doing so, some of that English class stuff came back to me.

My teacher in high school, Mr. Griffin  (probably dead by now, I realize with a shock) read this one out loud one day, and I was riveted. Maybe it was the way he read it.
The class called this teacher Griffy Baby (though not to his face), and he was given to telling tales out of school, recommending we watch a literary-based movie called Carry On Up the Jungle. Sometimes when he was tired of teaching he told funny stories about his kids, one of whom resembled a baby Dylan Thomas. Then there was the day he showed us a home movie of a tawdry drama he had filmed with his drunken friends.

Griffy Baby was partial to giving me As, but was curious as to why I never said anything in class. My soul was so crushed with social isolation and constant, relentless bullying that I didn't dare open my mouth. But I was grateful for that magnificent poem, and I never forgot it.

So to make up for my silence in class, I want to do a blow-by-blow analysis here and now, which is maybe appropriate given Auden's legendary sexual orientation. (He also wrote an infamous poem called The Platonic Blow which I don't think I will post here, but I do encourage you, even urge you to look it up. It'll make your literary hair stand on end, or something else if you're gay. Short of out-and-out porn, it's the most sexually-explicit writing I have ever seen.)

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

When the poem opens, the scene is just so. . . normal. The poet is out for a nice little stroll. Just walking down the street. Then he sees crowds upon the pavement. . . not other people strolling along, but crowds. Assembled for what? And these crowds, which sound about as friendly as the spectators at a Roman coliseum, are fields of harvest wheat. I mean, they don't look like wheat or sound like wheat or smell like wheat or taste like wheat. This is no synonym, folks, it is that deadliest of things: a metaphor! And speaking of deadly, isn't it just a little obvious that these wheaten folk seem all ready for the scythe of the Grim Reaper? "Harvest" wheat, indeed.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.

Arch of the railway. This is why I included in my last post's illustrations quite a few images from a superb movie called Notes from a Scandal, with Cate Blanchett playing a 40-year-old teacher having an affair with a 15-year-old student. Having to meet in such a drippy place smells of the illicit, or at least of the damned uncomfortable. And that brimming river: hey, that's assonance, folks! He says it three times, too, which makes it magical. Brimming like tears, like a cup about to run over. But that nasty cup appears later on.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

Here he seems to be introducing silly mythical images which would be highly inappropriate if it weren't for the sing-songy, nursery-rhyme-esque form of the poem, with its strict rhyme and meter. Personally I wonder why he spends so much time on these innocent-sounding pronouncements, when I always thought the dank, furtive image of the arch of the railway implied meeting up with a prostitute, male or female.

Idealism, maybe? Or is this guy or girl, or guys or girls, just incredibly stupid, given to ludicrous hyperbole? In any case, all these blatherings seem sum-up-able in one word: "Forever." I will love you, dear, I'll love you. . . for all eternity.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'

The years run like rabbits, as if to say, my, how time flies when you're having fun! Or is it something else? They may be running away, but it has nothing to do with us chasing after them. Some day, such as NOW, we may fervently wish those rabbits would slow down.  Rabbits also imply a sort of dumb, embarrassing fertility, not to mention the rabbit being pulled out of a hat ("Nothing up my sleeve!") and Alice's white rabbit, who is somehow always running "late". (And note the double meaning of late!)

And just what does "rabbiting on" mean? That you talk too much?

And that "first love of the world" cannot be anyone but Eve, the first woman. Hmmm, I wonder what she charges?

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

I like this. I love this. I love the "device" of Time speaking to us, of all the clocks in the city starting to protest the bullshit of the lovers writhing under the arch. The audacity, too, of allowing Time to address us, as if God Himself decided to step up to the plate (which He does, all the time, in the Old Testament).

 

And already we have our warning: my teacher read this in a slightly smug tone. "You cannot conquer time."

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

This is one of those ravishing verses of poetry that you don't want to touch because it's just so fucking magnificent. I wanted to write that on my term paper - "fucking magnificent" - but I didn't, and still got an A.

But he's doing the same thing here, capitolizing and I suppose personifying the Nightmare, Justice, etc. Justice being not blind, but naked. Pull down the blinds, please. And how about that little cough, ahem. Excuse me. Do you know who's in charge here?

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

Nobody wants to read this because it makes them groan inwardly, especially those first two lines. It's so bloody true, even in the most goal-directed, achievement-stuffed life. And Time, that wonderful personified Wizard of eternity, will have his "fancy", much as a rich man might pick out a particularly tasty prostitute from the lineup. Fancy is a silly, ephemeral, frou-frou sort of thing, the opposite of plain: fancy this, fancy that. And it also means fantasy. The "tomorrow or today" is sort of like setting up a delivery time for a parcel: "oh, I'll be here tomorrow, I think, you can bring it round then. Or, wait a minute, I'll be home today."

'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

I had a little trouble with this until I stole an interpretation from someone else. Green valleys are very British, of course - how green is my valley, and all that -  but why is the snow (grey hair, old age) so "appalling"? It casts a pall over the valley, even obscures it completely so that the green life beneath it does not show. It might as well not be there at all. The next two lines are all shivery and liquidescent. I don't know what a threaded dance is, but I think the diver is Cupid. Once more, eroticism is shattered by that dirty old man, Mortality.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

This is among Auden's most famous lines, for some reason almost always misquoted (like Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle) as "stare, stare in the mirror". The mirror does come, but a few verses later, and in a much more disturbing manner. This one is effective, I think, because of understatement. Or: is the subject just washing his hands of the whole thing? (Didn't Pilate do the same thing? And Lady Macbeth? Oh, I'm going overboard here.)

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

Probably my favorite verse, because it makes me want to scream and never write again. Glacier, desert, crack in the tea-cup, land of the dead, where we all end up, unless you believe in Heaven, which Auden obviously does not. The safe comfort of the everyday and the brutal fact of mortality are so closely juxtaposed that we no longer take any notice. It's as close as the skin on your face.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

This is a weird one, and I suppose it echoes the nursery-rhyme quality of some of these verses. The Giant must be a reference to Jack and the Beanstalk, but what does it mean that he's "enchanting to"? I hope not what I think. Most Americans won't know this, but the Lily-white Boy (also a strange image) is a character in an English folk song called Green Grow the Rushes-o. Jill goes down on her back, well. . . innocence begins to prostitute itself. This is the Land of the Dead, which is beginning to resemble Hieronymus Bosch's vision of hell.

'O look, look in the mirror
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

Yes. THIS is the verse with the mirror in it, and it has that "o look, look -", that sense of shock, almost of horror at the inevitable, strenuously-denied passage of time. I don't want to look, but I must look! And those ironic lines - life remains a blessing, but we're about to die so why is a blessing even relevant? And the stinging self-contempt of "YOU cannot bless", as if you have somehow, and mysteriously, lost all your power.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'

There was a crooked man, who walked a crooked mile. . . and the whole human condition is drawn in slanted lines.

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

And thus, the soft, gentle benediction, as we lie howling and writhing in the face of eternal Hell.